While Poe sets the parameters, "Dolan's Cadillac" is very much King's own story. The final confrontation between Robinson and Dolan is chilling, one of the scariest sequences in the collection. King takes great pains to make the story feasible, infusing the somewhat fantastic tale with facts and rudimentary mathematics: without belaboring the point, King reveals in detail how and when trapping a Cadillac underground would be possible. The opening story, the brilliant "Dolan's Cadillac," is a tale of revenge inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Robinson, King's avenging main character, is drawn well - the reasoning behind his anger, and, eventually his madness, is understandable (if horrifying), bringing to mind Louis Creed's descent into insanity in Pet Sematary. While it is refreshing to witness King trying new types of writing, both in content and in style, these elements reinforce the off-kilter nature of Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Additionally, Nightmares & Dreamscapes incorporates a number of pastiches - some more successful than others - showing King experimenting and trying his hand at fiction beyond his comfort zone. The breadth of material included is interesting and exciting - in addition to short stories, King also includes a teleplay, a poem, and a long nonfiction piece, as well as a short parable that functions as an epilogue. The variety of the work showcased in Nightmares & Dreamscapes works both for and against the collection. Cohesion, then, suffers: the unevenness of the selections forces readers to view Nightmares & Dreamscapes as simply a collection of works, rather than as a single unified work, unlike Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and the later Just After Sunset. However, while this collection features some of King's strongest work - short or otherwise - it also features some of the weakest fiction he has ever written. Stephen King's third true short story collection (excepting the novella anthologies Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight and the collection/novel The Gunslinger), Nightmares & Dreamscapes is longer than either Night Shift or Skeleton Crew (approaching their combined page count), and features the same basic structure as those earlier collections: a strong, fast-paced opening selection, a reflective final selection, with like pieces paired throughout. There they turned back and watched it happen
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