Thoughts on Stephen King's "The Breathing Method" Short Story

Finally finished the "Different Seasons" short story collection of Sai King today. Last story, novella or what ever one wants to call it was "The Breathing Method". It revolves around a man in the 1970s who is invited by his co-worker to The Club, a venue where senior folks meet to tell each other stories. Emlyn McCarrol, an eighty year old medical doctor takes it on him to tell the annual christmas story. He gives insight into a disturbing event of his professional carreer where a young single mother, at the times unheard of, was learning a special breathing method to ease the pains of giving childbirth. As she sits in a cab to the hospital to give a birth a traffic accident happens. She gets decapitated but her body nonetheless uses the breathing method to give birth and the child actually survives. A most disturbing fantasy. Remarkable was that this last short story had a link to King's opus magnum, The Dark Tower:

[...] and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not 35gh Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stoos silhouetted on a sterile horizon below which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare. [...] I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: 'Are there many more rooms upstairs?' 'Oh, yes, sir,' he said, his eyes never leaving mine. 'A great many. A man could become lost. In fact, men have become lost. Sometimes it seems to me that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors.' 'And entrances and exits?' His eyebrows went up slightly. 'Oh yes. Entrances and exits.'

I always find it most fascinating to stumble upon one of these subtle hints to the Dark Tower series in other King books. I'll also take Stephen King's advise from his afterword:

Okay. Gotta split. Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, and don't take any shit from anybody. Love and good wishes, Stephen King Januardy 4th, 1982 Bangor, Maine

We'll see each other (me and his books) again soon as I will go into some well earned holiday and vacation for the rest of the month and read some non-King-novels and academic stuff in the mean time. Then let's see where I will pick up again from as I still have some Richard Bachman and Desperation readily waiting to be read standing on my book shelf.