Taking the graveyard shift is never a good idea
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Stephen King shows readers the other side of literature. With all of his stories, he pushes you to the limit of belief that someone can write in such a horrific way. “The Graveyard Shift” teaches us to realize our weaknesses, our vulnerable spots, and our inevitable death. The story starts with Hall being yelled at by Warwick, his boss at the mill, because he isn't working. All that was happening was Warwick was asking if Hall wanted to work over Fourth of July week to help clean out the basement. "We're going to clean the whole basement level. Nobody's touched it for twelve years. Helluva mess. We're going to use hoses"(2). This quote definitely shows that Warwick is a terrible procrastinator because he hasn't cleaned the basement of his mill for twelve years. He just wanted some people that had been working there for less than one year to help him with cleaning it out. So they started cleaning on Monday at eleven P.M. by stringing lights out and bringing fire hoses down to the basement. They so rats double the size of regular ones, unafraid of humans because the lack of seeing them for twelve years. At four A.M. they ate lunch and talked about how someone was bitten and had to go home. more and more of these bites happened each day because the rats got bigger and bigger the further they went into the basement. Then one day, somebody had had enough. As they walked out of the door, Warwick asked if anyone else wanted out before it was too late. No one else joined him. That Thursday, Hall and Wisconksy, Hall's good friend, found something new. In the concrete floor, they saw a wooden door. A wooden door that led to a sub-basement. When Warwick came over, Hall had come to the conclusion that the rats were breeding down there. He said that he'd need to hire twenty trained exterminators, but Warwick wasn't buying it. He told Hall and Wisconsky to pick a man and go down there themselves; therefore, they picked Warwick to investigate with them. They opened the hatch, entered the sub-basement and what they saw surprised them so much that Wisconsky fled right then and there. He ran back up the stairs while Warwick and Hall kept walking for about thirty yards. When they got to the end, they were surrounded and they faced a giant mother rat the size of twenty rats combined. They tried to escape but couldn't run fast enough. The story then explains how they didn't come back for a whole hour, so they sent three more people down there.
Why it's Horror“The Graveyard Shift” is classified as horror fiction for a few reasons. The characters in this story include humans , rats, bats, and giant, unreal rodents. In horror fiction, characters are used as objects as fear or terror. For example, the giant rats are used as a shocking sight of fear to Hall. Another element of horror used in this short story is time of day. In horror stories, most weather and time of day are related. In this one, darkness and night supports the element of terror developed in horror stories.
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Five literary terms from "THe graveyard shift"
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Connection"The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Graveyard Shift" are related in many literary elements. Their setting is basically the same because they both take place at night time the whole story. Night time in horror stories shows that there can be unknown things hiding in the dark and waiting to jump out. Another way these two stories are related is they share the element of death. In "The Graveyard Shift," death is blatantly shown at the end when the rats infest Warwick and Hall; however, in "The Cask of Amontillado," death is shown in a more subtle way by leading the reader to think about death.
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