ROBERTSDALE, Ala. — “Full Dark, No Stars” is the latest collection of short stories from Stephen King. Read them with the lights on. Or at least with your inner light on.

King describes them in an interview on his website as “orphan stories,” too long to be short stories in a magazine, and too short to be novels.

“These stories are so dark and so nasty in some ways,” says King.

Indeed, they are. Try: A dispute about land and domestic violence. And rats. We can’t forget about the rats.

Then, a writer is on her way home from a speaking engagement. She takes an unfamiliar turn home and is beaten, raped and left for dead. There’s grisly evidence her attacker has done this before and will again. What is she going to do?

Next, a man suffering from cancer makes a deal with the Devil. And he gets to watch the deal unfold. Who says Satan does not keep his promises?

Finally, when a wife learns that her husband has been having, well, extracurricular activities with other women over the years, she takes action. The activities and what action is up to you, the reader, to find out. This was without a doubt, the best story in the collection, and should have led the book.

However, the author is a little boy at heart who loves making everybody scream. Hence the order of the stories.

Scary indeed. Don’t say you have not been warned.

King is an acquired taste for some, but readers should know that he’s toned down a number of his writer’s tics. Gone (well, mostly) are the interior monologues and parenthetical asides that make English teachers cringe.

But all the things readers go for are there — the deceptively easy prose that leads you down the other path to where the boogieman dwells, the descriptions that put you right in the action, even when you’d rather be someplace else and the sympathy you have for ordinary people trapped in extraordinary situations.

While his novels are best-sellers, King’s considerable talent shines in the short-story format.

But, as he will be the first to tell you, there is not much of a market for short stories. So he had to put out novels so the book publishers would take on his stories.

It seems a fair trade. I’ll take some of his worst to get this stew of things that bubble up behind the eyes of others.