The giant new fiction title from Stephen King
King is the author of forty bestsellers, including MISERY and CELL. Some of his books have been turned into celebrated films including The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. He now divides his time between Maine and Florida.
'The true narrative artist is a rare creature. Storytelling - the ability to make the listener or the reader need to know, demand to know, what happens next - is a gift...Stephen King, like Charles Dickens before him, has this gift in spades.' -- The Times on CELL 'Thrilling, genuinely terrifying, beautifully textured and full of wonderful invention' -- Daily Mail on LISEY'S STORY 'He has become a fascinating paradoxical figure, still seen as ultra-commercial but, in fact, increasingly highbrow and self-conscious' -- Sunday Times on DUMA KEY 20080120
'The true narrative artist is a rare creature. Storytelling - the ability to make the listener or the reader need to know, demand to know, what happens next - is a gift...Stephen King, like Charles Dickens before him, has this gift in spades.' -- The Times on CELL 'Thrilling, genuinely terrifying, beautifully textured and full of wonderful invention' -- Daily Mail on LISEY'S STORY 'He has become a fascinating paradoxical figure, still seen as ultra-commercial but, in fact, increasingly highbrow and self-conscious' -- Sunday Times on DUMA KEY 20080120
In the introduction to his first collection of short fiction since Everything's Eventual (2002), King credits editing Best American Short Stories (2007) with reigniting his interest in the short form and inducing some of this volume's contents. Most of these 13 tales show him at the top of his game, molding the themes and set pieces of horror and suspense fiction into richly nuanced blends of fantasy and psychological realism. "The Things They Left Behind," a powerful study of survivor guilt, is one of several supernatural disaster stories that evoke the horrors of 9/11. Like the crime thrillers "The Gingerbread Girl" and "A Very Tight Place," both of which feature protagonists struggling with apparently insuperable threats to life, it is laced with moving ruminations on mortality that King attributes to his own well-publicized near-death experience. Even the smattering of genre-oriented works shows King trying out provocative new vehicles for his trademark thrills, notably "N.," a creepy character study of an obsessive-compulsive that subtly blossoms into a tale of cosmic terror in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. Culled almost entirely from leading mainstream periodicals, these stories are a testament to the literary merits of the well-told macabre tale. (Nov.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
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