Summer of Stephen
Title: “Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2)”
Publishing Date: 1985 Length: 15 pages Start Date: November 18, 2018 End Date: November 18, 2018 I didn’t find this one particularly memorable, and I’m going to spoil the major plot points. So if you’re planning to read this story, skip this post. As the parenthetical part of the title would suggest, this short story is related to the events from the other Milkman story. But this time, instead of focusing on the murderous milkman, it follows two laundry workers. The two men are driving around, getting increasingly more intoxicated as the story progresses. They get into an argument with another man, who later that night kills his wife and burns down his house. While continuing to drive around, they realize they are being followed by a milk truck, driven by the milkman from the first story. One of the men confides in the other that his wife left him for the milkman, and that he suspects the milkman of being a serial killer. They start to drive faster to outrun the milk truck, leading them to crash into an oncoming car. The story ends with the implication that the milkman is also responsible for encouraging the man from earlier to kill his wife and burn down his house. While that sounds like a fairly exciting plot for a short story, it took King too long to get to that stuff. Those of you who have kept up with my Stephen King posts already know that I frequently complain that he includes way too many unnecessary details and this is no exception. The first Milkman story was so concise and jumped right into the action. I’m not sure why he changed tactics for the second story, but I think it ended up hurting the story. According to the Wikipedia page for this story, King originally wrote a whole novel about the Milkman, but that book was never published. As far as I can tell, these two stories are all that came out of that novel, unless he’s released others with the Milkman name in the title.
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