Skeleton crew

Skeleton crew is a collection of short fiction by the American writer Stephen King, published by Putnam in June 1985.

The book brings together twenty-two pieces: eighteen short stories, the novellas The Mist and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, and two poems. The Mist is the longest of them, and it turns a supermarket full of shoppers into the last defensible place on earth when something outside the ordinary world comes through. The remaining stories move between straightforward terror and a kind of grim comedy, and King frames the whole volume himself, with an introduction addressed directly to the reader and a set of notes at the end explaining where several of the stories came from.

A limited edition carrying one additional story appeared in the same year. That printing added The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson, a story that had first run in Rolling Stone and was afterwards folded into the novel The Tommyknockers.