If It Bleeds is a 2020 collection of novellas written by
Stephen King. They include:
- Mr. Harrigan's Phone (now adapted into a film): A teenager gives his elderly friend an iPhone. After his friend passes, he realizes that he may be communicating from the grave via his iPhone.
- The Life of Chuck: A series of disasters is linked with the death of an ordinary man named Chuck.
- If It Bleeds: Holly Gibney (of Mr. Mercedes and its sequels) investigates a reporter who seems to show up in a lot of different places in different time periods. Preceded by The Outsider (2018) and followed by Holly.
- Rat: A struggling writer is approached with a Faustian bargian via an unlikely source.
If It Bleeds contains examples of:
- Author Appeal: Stephen King has expressed that Holly Gibney is his favorite character. She is the lead of the title story.
- Berserk Button: Especially after Hodges' death in End of Watch, Holly loves Jerome and his family dearly, especially Barbara, and threatening them is a direly bad idea. The Ondowsky-thing discovers this truth of life splattered at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Holly is among the kindest, most pacifistic protagonists in the entire King mythos, but the Ondowsky-Thing attacking Jerome and Barbara spins her into such a fury that she is not only able to overpower him, but straight-up throw him to his death.
- Bittersweet Ending: In Rat the titular rat escapes after somehow causing the deaths of Al and Al's wife Nadine. This experience haunts Drew so much that he can't enjoy his novel and he knows he'll never be able to write a second book without the rat's help. However, Drew does finish his book and not only does it sell, he earns enough money from it to send all his children to college.
- Boom, Headshot!: The scene that forms the seed in Drew's mind for his novel is a young man confronting a woman that wronged him in a bar and shooting her in the head.
- Covers Always Lie: The cover shows a rat superimposed over a cat's face. There is no cat present in the story Rat or any of the other stories.
- Deal with the Devil: In Rat, after Drew saves the titular rat from a storm, it offers to help him finish his novel but with the catch that someone Drew knows must die. Drew doesn't like the deal but takes it, choosing Al to die since he's already dying from pancreatic cancer, because he thinks it's just a fever-induced hallucination that won't really affect his or Al's life. Al does eventually die, but in a car accident rather than from the cancer, and his wife dies with him.
- Disney Villain Death: In the title story, Holly hurls the Outsider posing as Chet Ondowsky down an elevator shaft to his death.
- Emotion Eater: The reporter in If It Bleeds is a psychic vampire that feeds off tragedies, with shapeshifting abilities similar to the outsider. It has lived for decades feeding off people's grief at tragic scenes like horrible accidents and shocking murders.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The Life of Chuck begins with what appears to be the end of the world, although how much of it is actually happening is called into question by the end. The world that dies is, apparently, existing in Chuck Krantz's head, as its ongoing apocalyptic destruction reflects him dying from brain cancer, with an image of him appearing in increasingly bizarre circumstances as he gets closer to the end. This reflects his being told "we contain multitudes" as a child, although he's completely unaware of this world's existence.
- The Farmer and the Viper: When Drew confronts the rat about the nasty way their deal actually concluded, the rat essentially says that Drew should've phrased everything more specifically and that he should've known what he was getting into by taking in a rat.
- Humanoid Abomination: “Chet Ondowsky” is the current alias of an inhuman shapechanger much like - though not quite the same as - the Outsider Holly encountered a few years earlier. He feeds on human suffering, has done so for at least 60 years, and much like the other Outsider there’s no indication at all of where he comes from or what he truly is.
- Humanshifting: The creature in If It Bleeds assumes the appearance of many different people over the years, but the base features don't change. Once Holly realizes this, she likens the similarities to a line of cars that change their appearance over time but are visibly from a template that's reused again and again. The creature has at least two templates, which Holly terms “Chet” and “George,” and can make small cosmetic changes to each.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Most of the stories aside from the title one approach their supernatural elements with this.
- New Technology Is Evil: Discussed. Mr. Harrigan does become enamored of his iPhone once Craig shows him how to access real-time stock market and news feeds, but he also remarks on the dangers that such access to so much information can create, along with how they can be manipulated and monetized.
- Phone Call from the Dead: Played with in Mr. Harrigan's Phone. After Harrigan's death, Craig slips his phone into his suit pocket at the funeral, and then discovers that it's somehow able to receive his calls long after it should've run out of battery (and is underground to boot). He calls Harrigan's phone occasionally when he just wants to talk, and sometimes receives garbled texts in return.
- Rags to Riches: One of Craig's lottery tickets that was given to him by Mr. Harrigan ends up winning him $3000, which is how he's able to buy himself and Mr. Harrigan new iPhones. Later on, Harrigan leaves Craig a substantial amount of money in his will.
- Retcon: In the titular story, the Ondowsky-Thing judges Holly to be 35 years old. This would make her roughly 23-25 in her first story, Mr. Mercedes, almost half the age she was described as being in that story. Presumably, this was a means of bringing the character in line with her portrayals in the TV adaptations of said story and The Outsider, where Justine Lupe and Cynthia Erivo, respectively, were substantially younger than Holly was described in the source material.
- Talking Animal: The writer in Rat is approached by a talking rat.
- Transformation Horror: The Ondowsky-thing becomes protoplasmic as it transforms. After taking Barbara prisoner, it transforms in front of her just to scare her. This works incredibly well, as she is so terrified/horrified by the sight that she loses both bladder and bowel control.
- Would Hurt a Child: The Ondowsky-thing in “If It Bleeds” sets off a bomb at a middle school, killing about two dozen children and injuring scores of others. He did this because he feeds on pain and grief and needed a meal.
