Stephen King's Trucks is a short story which was first published in the June 1973 issue of Cavalier magazine, and later collected in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.
The story takes place at a truck stop in the United States which is located off a freeway and it features a diner, a gas station, and a convenience store.
The story's narrator and a handful of strangers find themselves trapped together in the freeway truck stop diner after semi-trailers and other large vehicles are suddenly brought to independent life by an unknown force and proceed to gruesomely kill every human in sight. Cars, which remain unaltered, are swiftly battered into wreckage and pedestrians are massacred by rampaging trucks and buses. The six survivors hiding in the diner include the narrator, as well as an elderly counterman, a trucker, a young man named Jerry, his girlfriend, and a salesman named Snodgrass.
The story was been adapted into two films, the first in 1986, which was directed by Stephen King himself. In 1997, it was adapted again as the TV movie Trucks, starring Timothy Busfield, which was made on a considerably smaller budget than Maximum Overdrive but was much more faithful to the original story.
DYSARTS TRUCK STOP
DATE(S) VISITED: JULY 4, 2020
LOCATION: BANGOR, ME
On heading out on our days excursion to hit as many King locations as possible, we killed two birds with one stone by not only grabbing breakfast at Dysart's Truck Stop, but it would also be our first King location to see and experience of the day.
This truck stop served as the inspiration for King's short story Trucks, which was later adapted to screen and retitled Maximum Overdrive. The truck stop location used in that movie is in North Carolina.
