The disturbing stories in King’s latest collection will seep into your psyche and haunt you.
A dozen tales from the master of creepiness.
Do you like your short stories on the dark side? Enjoy having eerie images and unsettling plot points turn your dreams into nightmares? Take pleasure in jumping at shadows and feeling your heart beat faster after nightfall? If so, this beefy new collection is for you. In a dozen stories—some considerably longer than others—spanning about 500 pages, King gives the reader a host of things to fear: deadly snakes, ghoulish ghosts of long-dead children, man-eating alligators, stealthy serial killers, plummeting airplanes, mad scientists, mistaken identity. Along the way, he also offers insights about, among other things, the fickleness of talent, the power and pathos of unrealized dreams, the pain and pleasure of relationships, and the meaning and meaninglessness of life and, of course, death. In “Two Talented Bastids,” the son of a famous writer seeks out the source of his father’s success as well as that of his father’s best friend, an artist—and confronts his own limitations. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a man’s dream about a dead body turns into a living nightmare of suspicion and disbelief. “The Answer Man” explores the value of knowing your future; “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to King’s bestseller Cujo (1981), the importance of reckoning with the past. And while the book is not without an occasional misstep (“Red Screen,” about a cop with a nitpicking perimenopausal wife, say), King’s conversational prose, relatable characters, and knack for knowing precisely what you are afraid of will draw you in—page by page, horror by horror—and hold you fast.
The disturbing stories in King’s latest collection will seep into your psyche and haunt you.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668037713
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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