"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.
In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.
"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.
When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.
Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.
My thoughts
As the title states, this book is dark and each story shows the dark side of man and how they deal with it. Stephen King is a great story teller and detailed in his descriptions. Although, he is well known for his horror tales, these stories deal with the horrific things that man does to one another. There are four stories and I liked the first one, the longest (but it was repetitive) and the last one (dramatic). The two in between were okay but didn’t stand out.
Disclosure: I borrowed this book from my local library.
2 comments:
This is first on my TBR list. I wondered how it was.
I loved this short stories collection. I loved all the stories in it, especially Good Marriage. I think they all stand out, this is one is definitely one of my favorite SK works.
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