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Books : Horror : Authors : Contemporary Authors : King, Stephen : Audio Books
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Stephen King has been for so long the master of the thick blockbuster horror paperback that it is salutary to be reminded of the quieter writer of shorter, tighter stories that he also is. His new novella could hardly be simpler--a nine-year-old girl, smart and resourceful, gets herself lost in the deep woods when she strays off the path for a moment and struggles to survive with a little food, not especially sensible clothing and a Walkman. One of the threats dogging Trisha is her imagination--she is an smart enough child to know how much trouble she is in and gradually to personify the wasps, and midges and dangerous animals, as a God of the Lost. And that imagination is also her strongest resource--she has a baseball cap signed by the Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, which becomes her talisman. This is a story of almost pure sentiment and suspense; King has always had fascinating insight into the minds of children and a command of detail that makes him the ideal writer of certain sorts of shipwreck. The almost minimal material here--a single character, what she has on her, and deep woods--make this one of his most gripping and compulsive tales. --Roz Kaveney
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This novel (now complete in one volume) taps into what Stephen King does best: character-driven storytelling. The setting is the small "death house" of a Southern prison in 1932. The charming narrator is an old man looking back on the events, decades later. Maybe it's a little too cute, maybe the pathos is laid on a little thick, but it's hard to resist the colourful personalities and simple wonders of this supernatural tale. As Time magazine put it, "Like the best popular art, The Green Mile has the courage of its cornier convictions ... the palpable sense of King's sheer, unwavering belief in his tale is what makes the novel work as well as it finally does". And it's not a bad choice for giving to someone who doesn't understand the appeal of Stephen King because the one scene that is out-and-out gruesome can be easily skipped by the squeamish. The Green Mile was nominated for a 1997 Bram Stoker Award. --Amazon.com
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Bag of Bones is partly inspired by Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, but there's more than homage in this novel of horror and romance. Like du Maurier's Manderley, King's scary old place (on the shore of Maine's remote Dark Score Lake) is haunted by the late lady of the manor. There are many gory ghosts afoot though: men, women, and wailing kids. The hero, a thriller novelist, stirs up hell's angry shades while investigating his wife's death. It turns out she either had a dark secret herself or was onto some dread scandal lurking in Dark Score Lake. As in King's previous book, Wizard and Glass, the fabric of reality is thin, and nosy narrators are in peril of plunging right out of this world and into a rather hostile otherworld.Bag of Bones is a writer-haunted book, too. The spirits of Herman Melville and Ray Bradbury are deeply felt, and so are the tale's two romances (the hero muses on his marriage and falls for a young single mum with a marvellous psychic daughter). There is also good-humoured satire of the real bestseller book world--the hero complains that "the publicity process is like going to a sushi bar where you're the sushi." In its deep concerns with love, sprawling families, the writer's life, endangered children and good old-fashioned storytelling, the book resembles a John Irving novel. It is also absolutely classic Stephen King, packed with nifty turns of phrase, irreverent wit and lurid ghouls who grab you from beneath the bed while you cower under the covers. --Tim Appelo
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Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is "Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mum is impoverished and so bitter that she barely loves him. King is as good as Spielberg or Steven Millhauser at depicting an enchanted kid's-eye view of the world, and his Harwich is realistically luminous to the tiniest detail: kids bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock; a car grille "like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish"; a Wild Mouse carnival ride that makes kids "simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately."Bobby's mum takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books such as Lord of the Flies. Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men--monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. This pointedly echoes the theme of Lord of the Flies (the one book King says he wishes he'd written): war is the human condition. Ted's mind-reading powers rub off a bit on Bobby, granting nightmare glimpses of his mum's assault by her rich, vile, jaunty boss. King packs plenty into 250 pages, using the same trick Bobby discerns in the film Village of the Damned: "The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier."
Vietnam is the otherworldly horror that haunts the remaining four stories. In the title tale, set in 1966, University of Maine college kids play the card game Hearts so obsessively they risk flunking out and getting drafted. The kids discover sex, rock and politics, become war heroes and victims, and spend the '80s and '90s shell-shocked by change. The characters and stories are criss-crossed with connections that sometimes click and sometimes clunk. The most intense Hearts player, Ronnie Malenfant ("evil infant"), perpetrates a My Lai-like atrocity; a nice Harwich girl becomes a radical bomber. King's metaphor for lost '60s innocence is inspired by Donovan's "sweet and stupid" song about the sunken continent, and his stories hail the vanished Atlantis of his youth with deep sweetness and melancholy intelligence. --Tim Appelo
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