Skeleton Crew is a short story collection, published in June 1985, featuring 22 works, which include 18 short stories, two novellas (The Mist and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet), and two poems (“Paranoid: A Chant” and “For Owen”).

Stories:

1. “The Mist” Dark Forces (1980) Novella
2. “Here There Be Tygers” Spring 1968 issue of Ubris
3. “The Monkey” November 1980 issue of Gallery
4. “Cain Rose Up” Spring 1968 issue of Ubris
5. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” May 1984 issue of Redbook
6. “The Jaunt” June 1981 issue of The Twilight Zone Magazine
7. “The Wedding Gig” December 1980 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
8. “Paranoid: A Chant” Previously unpublished Poem
9. “The Raft” November 1982 issue of Gallery
10. “Word Processor of the Gods” January 1983 issue of Playboy
11. “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands” Shadows 4 (1981)
12. “Beachworld” Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales
13. “The Reaper’s Image” Spring 1969 issue of Startling Mystery Stories
14. “Nona” Shadows (1978)
15. “For Owen” Previously unpublished Poem
16. “Survivor Type” Terrors (1982)
17. “Uncle Otto’s Truck” October 1983 issue of Yankee
18. “Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)” Previously unpublished
19. “Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2)” New Terrors (1980)
20. “Gramma” Spring 1984 issue of Weirdbook
21. “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” June 1984 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Novella
22. “The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson” Summer 1984 issue of Rolling Stone Featured only in the 1985 limited edition[1][3]
23. “The Reach” November 1981 issue of Yankee

Gramma

He had never been left alone with Gramma, that was what he was worried about.
Send the boy to me, Ruth. Send him over here.
No. He’s crying.
She’s more dangerous now… you know what I mean.We all lie to our children about Gramma.

I really liked this short story about a grandkid being left alone for the first time with their sick and ailing grandmother. She’s bedridden and non-verbal and chooses the only time the carer didn’t come and the grandson was scared for his sick brother and absent mother to pass (How inconvenient /s)

Gramma was dead.George realized with relief and some surprise that he could feel sorry for her now. Maybe she had been a witch. Maybe not. Maybe she had only thought she was a witch. However it had been, she was gone now. He realized with an adult’s comprehension that questions of concrete reality became not unimportant but less vital when they were examined in the mute bland face of mortal remains. He realized this with an adult’s comprehension and accepted with an adult’s relief. This was a passing footprint, the shape of a shoe, in his mind. So are all the child’s adult impressions; it is only in later years that the child realizes that he was being made; formed; shaped by random experiences; all that remains in the instant beyond the footprint is that bitter gunpowder smell which is the ignition of an idea beyond a child’s given years.

The dread or horror comes from the fact that she still moves, that a dead body is always scary and that Gramma was scary to begin with!

In the dark your thoughts had a perfect circularity, and no matter what you tried to think of — flowers or Jesus or baseball or winning the gold in the 440 at the Olympics — it somehow led back to the form in the shadows with the claws and the unblinking eyes.

And because we see everything from the eyes of a 10-year old doesn’t make it better. Stephen King has always known how to really write scary stories for children and with children (see IT) and this story, while creepy, it’s not super scary until the end when the mother returns and hears of Gramma’s passing and can see a quiet boy, traumatised. Or should we say – changed forever…