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Summary
Summary
Just After Sunset
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Guest editing the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories inspired King to write again in the form himself, he says, and all but one tale in his first collection since Everything's Eventual (2002) postdate that experience. King is a high-volume factory of novels, however, and it's no surprise here that the longer, the better. The 10- to 20-page Rest Stop, Harvey's Dream, Graduation Afternoon, The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates, Ayana, and The Cat from Hell wear their concepts on their sleeves and reek of formula. They're not bad, just predictable. If you adore the pulpish, spooky little chiller per se, they will gratify. Better are the 24- to 34-page Willa, Stationary Bike, and Mute, though King's bang-on characterization of the last as resembling an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode indicates the familiar, sentimental conventions of all three. Best are the big guys: the run-for-your-life vignette The Gingerbread Girl, despite its cardboard psycho villain; A Very Tight Place, the kind of gross-out suspense episode King is famous for; and, especially, N., which was inspired by Arthur Machen's parallel-realities horror novella The Great God Pan (on a similar premise, Machen also wrote a story entitled, sans the Kingly period, N ), indirect source of the classic horror movie Night of the Demon. OK, Steve, you've had your fun, and so have we. Now back to the big, fat freak-outs.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A new short-story collection takes Stephen King back to the form that gave him his seat-of-the-pants start. IF the prospect of a collection of stories by Stephen King isn't as inviting as a new King novel, it's not just because the writer's recent novels - "Duma Key," "Lisey's Story" and especially "Cell" and "From a Buick 8" - have been so good. It's because King continues to be dedicated to giving his readers a luxuriant experience, the basic pleasure of getting lost in a book. In his introduction to the new collection "Just After Sunset," King explains that as a young almost-poor schoolteacher trying to get a writing career started, stories, many of them published in men's magazines like Dude and Cavalier, were a way to a much needed check when the car needed a muffler or his wife's birthday was coming up. King says the stories simply came out, and he wasn't too concerned with learning what constituted good structure. "I was flying entirely by the seat of my pants," he writes, "running on nothing but intuition and a kid's self-confidence." King goes on to say that getting a chance to edit the 2007 edition of "The Best American Short Stories" gave him an excuse to read a bunch of stories. It also, he says, inspired him to try to recapture the knack for writing stories that, along the way, had given way to the more expansive pursuit of writing novels. "Just After Sunset" suggests why. It's an uneven collection, in both tone and execution, and it often reminds you of how King's writing has moved beyond its genre roots. That's not to affirm the critics who've reduced King's writing to penny dreadfuls that have no bearing on the real world. Good writing of the fantastic and the macabre is always based in recognizable emotion. Noting the detail and empathy that have long made him one of the most observant chroniclers of American middle-class life, the critic Laura Miller shrewdly observed that King should accurately be judged "a realist." In "Just After Sunset," there are only flashes of the kind of recognition that King the novelist provides, and the short-story form does not allow him the space to turn his plot devices into metaphors. For me, that was most apparent in "N." The tale has a tricky story-within-a-story structure. A woman whose psychiatrist brother has committed suicide forwards his notes to a boyhood friend who is now a television doctor. The notes tell of the shrink's sessions with a patient who has come upon an odd patch of Maine woods where something evil and powerful lurks. The story showcases King's almost unholy talent for making the natural world seem like something not of this world. But just when you're ready for whatever is lurking in those woods to fully reveal itself and the power it wields, the story ends - granted, on an unsettling and clever note. But King seems to be just warming up, and the story feels like a sketch for one of his novel-length freakouts. Other stories range from the delirious bad taste of "The Cat From Hell" to the just plain bad taste of "A Very Tight Place," from the gloppily inspirational "Ayana" to the botched brilliance of "The Things They Left Behind." I have a special fondness for "The Cat From Hell." Little furry creatures are often the victims in horror stories. King's tale is revenge for every fictional house pet ever perfunctorily slaughtered in the name of thrills. It's disgusting, and I mean that as a compliment. "The Things They Left Behind" proceeds to a tidy, too heartwarming ending. Imperfect though it is, it's also the most affecting and scary story here. The narrator is an office worker who, in order to savor a late-summer day, called in sick on Sept. 11. About a year later, artifacts that belonged to his murdered co-workers begin turning up in his apartment. And that's not all. At night, they begin whispering to each other, often in the voices of their dead owners. So much hand-wringing has already been expended over the question of how art should deal with 9/11. No fiction that has attempted the subject has, to my mind, been as effective (or as affecting) as King's "From a Buick 8" and "Cell." Both novels were direct and oblique, not mentioning 9/11 but addressing the question of how you retain your humanity after the unthinkable has entered your life. (In "Cell," the characters' reaction to the numbers 9-1-1 determines whether they remain human or become monsters.) There's nothing oblique in "The Things They Left Behind." King employs a simple, unnerving device to address the way the presence of the dead was palpable in the city following 9/11. Despite the disappointments of "Just After Sunset," and the sense that these stories remain, at some level, an exercise, a stopgap for the next full-fledged King project, the book also feels like the work of a writer who, even in less than top form, wouldn't dream of breaking faith with his readers. Part of what I respect about Stephen King - and I suspect it's part of what drives some of his fellow writers and some critics crazy - is the honesty of that admission, in this book's introduction, that he churned out stories for money. There's no pretense that he was "honing his craft" or "perfecting the form," no attempt to disguise the fact that any writer who is honest enough admits to doing some time on Grub Street. Which is why, in books like "The Dark Half" and "The Shining," King has been so witheringly accurate about the vanity and pettiness of writers. King's critical reputation has by now had more corrections than the Dow. He has been both Horror Hack and Underrated Littérateur. Every few years, usually in the name of what Terry Southern called the "quality lit game," somebody decides he's taken too seriously and needs to be put back in the drugstore racks where they think he belongs. And any critical defense of King is usually good for a round of claims that said critic is decrying literature or assuming that book sales equal quality. So let's be clear. King isn't good because he's popular. But any critic who puts King's popularity down to the dreadful taste of the masses (cue Harold Bloom) has failed to do the basic work of a critic, which is to understand and probe and not simply to judge. King gets to readers because he renders everyday life so exactly and because he understands it is always ready to rupture. The literary critic Leslie Fiedler, in an interview given a few weeks before he died, recalled telling a group of postmodern fiction writers, "Look, let's be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King." Anyone who claims to be interested in contemporary American literature needs to understand what he'll be remembered for. Charles Taylor is a columnist for The Newark Star-Ledger and Bloomberg News.
Guardian Review
A young man stands at a Wyoming railway halt. His train has been derailed, his girlfriend has abandoned him for the bright lights of town; the dregs of the sunset recently "faded to bitter orange" over the Wind River mountains. He is about to discover - or at any rate to admit - that he's dead. Around him on the platform the other benighted travellers huddle together like the cast of a 1940s movie: everyone is far too familar with everyone else. Assembled here by circumstances beyond their control, they jeer at one another's uncertainties while the High Plains wolves howl in the darkness and the relief train brings no relief. Images of entrapment are central to many of the 13 stories in Just After Sunset . Most of them are lovingly specific. In "The Gingerbread Girl", an obsessive jogger finds herself duct-taped to a red maple dining chair in the kitchen of a McMansion in the Florida Keys; death isn't far away, but her father always told her, "Never give up, Emmy, good things are always just round some corner or other." In "The Things They Left Behind", the belongings of the 9/11 dead - a pair of sunglasses with heart-shaped frames, a Hillerich & Bradsby baseball bat, a "ceramic mushroom (red with white spots) that came with a ceramic Alice sitting on top of it" - become embedded in the life of a guilt-addled survivor, who is in turn trapped by them. The dead are all around in these stories, listening to country music in "Willa", calling home on a mobile phone in "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates". Whatever their condition, it turns out to be transitional. It's a basic assumption of supernatural fiction that the work of the dead is to move on. Forget life. Don't hang around. It's the message of Jacob's Ladder , or TM Wright's astonishing A Manhattan Ghost Story But here the living aren't in any better circumstances. They're always just about to discover something bad. The permanent condition of their lives is to be temporarily out of joint; like the girl in the elegaic and old-fashioned end-of-the-world piece "Graduation Afternoon", they often discover what they've lost only in the moment of losing it. Like the dead people on the railway platform, their lives are sustained by a communal suspension of disbelief, but the moment their attention is drawn to this act, they cease to be able to perform it. Existential emptiness lurks, and behind that, inevitably, something unspeakable, as in "N", a curious collision between HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man". Here, one individual's obsessive-compulsive counting of a circle of stones - are there seven, or eight? - is the only thing that keeps humanity safe from the things it doesn't know. In the New York Times last year, the author described his preference for a short story that "comes at me full bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111." In its introduction and story notes (the latter tucked away at the back to avoid what he calls "the tiresome cries of 'spoiler', which are most commonly uttered by spoiled people"), Just After Sunset develops this premise into a promise ably fulfilled by the fiction itself - although, in "Harvey's Dream" and "Ayana", there are subtler, more meditative frissons. King, like any good pulp writer, is concerned not to let a single reader walk away puzzled. Ambivalence means failure. Sometimes this produces less a short story than a short narrative, told without compression in strict chronological order except for the odd flashback imported in the service of believable motivation, and worked out in such plain sight that it constantly second-guesses the reader's emotional intelligence and intuition. At other times - as in "The Cat from Hell" - there's a palpable 1950s feel, a schadenfreude of both form and content that reminds you of what the story notes call "the poisoned bon-bons" produced to support the insatiable appetite of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. Horror needs victims and, like Hitchcock before him, King is more than happy to provide them. In Just After Sunset , the butt of the prank is as likely to be an illustrator or a successful suspense novelist as the more commonplace salesman, lone female jogger, psychiatrist or insurance clerk. Their "ordinariness" is often depicted as having qualities of loneliness and puzzlement. They have the traditional poor fit with the world. The ones who still care about life aren't necessarily going to be rewarded for that, but the ones who don't are going to be punished and punished again. They live in a universe that went bad long ago, or maybe in one that still holds out the slightest wafer of hope - which it loses right there in front of the reader. They've done something awful; they've done nothing bad enough to deserve what happens to them. They make their confessions to priests and deaf-mutes, in letters and manuscripts and phone calls. Dead or alive, they're repeating loops, fading ghosts made out of the narrative structures of a Twilight Zone episode. They're trapped in King's monologue, and you're trapped with them. At first you don't intend to be disturbed; then you are. M John Harrison's latest novel is Nova Swing (Gollancz). To order Just After Sunset for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-king.1 Images of entrapment are central to many of the 13 stories in Just After Sunset . Most of them are lovingly specific. In "The Gingerbread Girl", an obsessive jogger finds herself duct-taped to a red maple dining chair in the kitchen of a McMansion in the Florida Keys; death isn't far away, but her father always told her, "Never give up, Emmy, good things are always just round some corner or other." In "The Things They Left Behind", the belongings of the 9/11 dead - a pair of sunglasses with heart-shaped frames, a Hillerich & Bradsby baseball bat, a "ceramic mushroom (red with white spots) that came with a ceramic Alice sitting on top of it" - become embedded in the life of a guilt-addled survivor, who is in turn trapped by them. The dead are all around in these stories, listening to country music in "Willa", calling home on a mobile phone in "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates". Here the living aren't in any better circumstances. They're always just about to discover something bad. The permanent condition of their lives is to be temporarily out of joint; like the girl in the elegaic and old-fashioned end-of-the-world piece "Graduation Afternoon", they often discover what they've lost only in the moment of losing it. Like the dead people on the railway platform, their lives are sustained by a communal suspension of disbelief, but the moment their attention is drawn to this act, they cease to be able to perform it. Existential emptiness lurks, and behind that, inevitably, something unspeakable, as in "N", a curious collision between HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man". Here, one individual's obsessive-compulsive counting of a circle of stones - are there seven, or eight? - is the only thing that keeps humanity safe from the things it doesn't know. - M John Harrison.
Kirkus Review
King (Duma Key, 2008, etc.) returns with his first volume of short stories in six years. The author explains in his introduction that the opportunity to edit the annual Best American Short Stories anthology reignited his interest in the form, which had supported him when the fledgling novelist submitted stories to men's magazines. His afterword provides contextual comment on each of the 13 selections, including the revelation that "The Cat from Hell"about a killer feline and the hit man hired to bump it offdates back 30 years to those pulp-fiction days. Yet most of the rest are recent, allowing King to exorcise demons (the fear of being trapped in a porta-potty in "A Very Tight Space," the ambivalence about interfering in a violent domestic quarrel in "Rest Stop") and dreams (the marital entropy of "Harvey's Dream," the mushroom cloud of "Graduation Afternoon"). Though much of this lacks the literary ambition of King's recent novels, "Stationary Bike" provides a compelling portrait of creative psychosishow a metaphor suggested by a doctor to describe an artist's high cholesterol inspires a painting that becomes the artist's realitywhile the contagious obsessive compulsive disorder in "N." ranks with King's best work (it is also the newest story here). There's also an obligatory 9/11 response ("The Things They Left Behind") and a story that blurs the distinction between the living and the dead (the opening "Willa"). Like episodes from The Twilight Zone, many of the stories hinge upon "a small but noticeable hole in the column of reality." As King writes, "[I]t's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond the world at bay." And he tells the reader, "I hope at least one of [the stories] keeps you awake for awhile after the lights are out." An uneven collection, but King has plainly had a ball writing these stories. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Inspired by his stint as guest editor of Best American Short Stories 2007, King delivers his first collection in six years. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Not a very nice man. One afternoon not long after July became August, Deke Hollis told her she had company on the island. He called it the island , never the key. Deke was a weathered fifty, or maybe seventy. He was tall and rangy and wore a battered old straw hat that looked like an inverted soup bowl. From seven in the morning until seven at night, he ran the drawbridge between Vermillion and the mainland. This was Monday to Friday. On weekends, "the kid" took over (said kid being about thirty). Some days when Em ran up to the drawbridge and saw the kid instead of Deke in the old cane chair outside the gatehouse, reading Maxim or Popular Mechanics rather than The New York Times , she was startled to realize that Saturday had come around again. This afternoon, though, it was Deke. The channel between Vermillion and the mainland -- which Deke called the thrut (throat, she assumed) -- was deserted and dark under a dark sky. A heron stood on the drawbridge's Gulf-side rail, either meditating or looking for fish. "Company?" Em said. "I don't have any company." "I didn't mean it that way. Pickering's back. At 366? Brought one of his 'nieces.'" The punctuation for nieces was provided by a roll of Deke's eyes, of a blue so faded they were nearly colorless. "I didn't see anyone," Em said. "No," he agreed. "Crossed over in that big red M'cedes of his about an hour ago, while you were probably still lacin' up your tennies." He leaned forward over his newspaper; it crackled against his flat belly. She saw he had the crossword about half completed. "Different niece every summer. Always young." He paused. "Sometimes two nieces, one in August and one in September." "I don't know him," Em said. "And I didn't see any red Mercedes." Nor did she know which house belonged to 366. She noticed the houses themselves, but rarely paid attention to the mailboxes. Except, of course, for 219. That was the one with the little line of carved birds on top of it. (The house behind it was, of course, Birdland.) "Just as well," Deke said. This time instead of rolling his eyes, he twitched down the corners of his mouth, as if he had something bad tasting in there. "He brings 'em down in the M'cedes, then takes 'em back to St. Petersburg in his boat. Big white yacht. The Playpen . Went through this morning." The corners of his mouth did that thing again. In the far distance, thunder mumbled. "So the nieces get a tour of the house, then a nice little cruise up the coast, and we don't see Pickering again until January, when it gets cold up in Chicagoland." Em thought she might have seen a moored white pleasure craft on her morning beach run but wasn't sure. "Day or two from now -- maybe a week -- he'll send out a couple of fellas, and one will drive the M'cedes back to wherever he keeps it stored away. Near the private airport in Naples, I imagine." "He must be very rich," Em said. This was the longest conversation she'd ever had with Deke, and it was interesting, but she started jogging in place just the same. Partly because she didn't want to stiffen up, mostly because her body was calling on her to run. "Rich as Scrooge McDuck, but I got an idea Pickering actually spends his. Probably in ways Uncle Scrooge never imagined. Made it off some kind of computer thing, I heard." The eye roll. "Don't they all?" "I guess," she said, still jogging in place. The thunder cleared its throat with a little more authority this time. "I know you're anxious to be off, but I'm talking to you for a reason," Deke said. He folded up his newspaper, put it beside the old cane chair, and stuck his coffee cup on top of it as a paperweight. "I don't ordinarily talk out of school about folks on the island -- a lot of 'em's rich and I wouldn't last long if I did -- but I like you, Emmy. You keep yourself to yourself, but you ain't a bit snooty. Also, I like your father. Him and me's lifted a beer, time to time." "Thanks," she said. She was touched. And as a thought occurred to her, she smiled. "Did my dad ask you to keep an eye on me?" Deke shook his head. "Never did. Never would. Not R. J.'s style. He'd tell you the same as I am, though -- Jim Pickering's not a very nice man. I'd steer clear of him. If he invites you in for a drink or even just a cup of coffee with him and his new 'niece,' I'd say no. And if he were to ask you to go cruising with him, I would definitely say no." "I have no interest in cruising anywhere," she said. What she was interested in was finishing her work on Vermillion Key. She felt it was almost done. "And I better get back before the rain starts." "Don't think it's coming until five, at least," Deke said. "Although if I'm wrong, I think you'll still be okay." She smiled again. "Me too. Contrary to popular opinion, women don't melt in the rain. I'll tell my dad you said hello." "You do that." He bent down to get his paper, then paused, looking at her from beneath that ridiculous hat. "How're you doing, anyway?" "Better," she said. "Better every day." She turned and began her road run back to the Little Grass Shack. She raised her hand as she went, and as she did, the heron that had been perched on the drawbridge rail flapped past her with a fish in its long bill. Three sixty-six turned out to be the Pillbox, and for the first time since she'd come to Vermillion, the gate was standing ajar. Or had it been ajar when she ran past it toward the bridge? She couldn't remember -- but of course she had taken up wearing a watch, a clunky thing with a big digital readout, so she could time herself. She had probably been looking at that when she went by. She almost passed without slowing -- the thunder was closer now -- but she wasn't exactly wearing a thousand-dollar suede skirt from Jill Anderson, only an ensemble from the Athletic Attic: shorts and a T-shirt with the Nike swoosh on it. Besides, what had she said to Deke? Women don't melt in the rain . So she slowed, swerved, and had a peek. It was simple curiosity. She thought the Mercedes parked in the courtyard was a 450 SL, because her father had one like it, although his was pretty old now and this one looked brand-new. It was candy-apple red, its body brilliant even under the darkening sky. The trunk was open. A sheaf of long blond hair hung from it. There was blood in the hair. Had Deke said the girl with Pickering was a blond? That was her first question, and she was so shocked, so fucking amazed , that there was no surprise in it. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable question, and the answer was Deke hadn't said. Only that she was young. And a niece. With the eye roll. Thunder rumbled. Almost directly overhead now. The courtyard was empty except for the car (and the blond in the trunk, there was her). The house looked deserted, too: buttoned up and more like a pillbox than ever. Even the palms swaying around it couldn't soften it. It was too big, too stark, too gray. It was an ugly house. Em thought she heard a moan. She ran through the gate and across the yard to the open trunk without even thinking about it. She looked in. The girl in the trunk hadn't moaned. Her eyes were open, but she had been stabbed in what looked like dozens of places, and her throat was cut ear to ear. Em stood looking in, too shocked to move, too shocked to even breathe. Then it occurred to her that this was a fake dead girl, a movie prop. Even as her rational mind was telling her that was bullshit, the part of her that specialized in rationalization was nodding frantically. Even making up a story to backstop the idea. Deke didn't like Pickering, and Pickering's choice of female companionship? Well guess what, Pickering didn't like Deke, either! This was nothing but an elaborate practical joke. Pickering would go back across the bridge with the trunk deliberately ajar, that fake blond hair fluttering, and -- But there were smells rising out of the trunk now. They were the smells of shit and blood. Em reached forward and touched the cheek below one of those staring eyes. It was cold, but it was skin. Oh God, it was human skin. There was a sound behind her. A footstep. She started to turn, and something came down on her head. There was no pain, but brilliant white seemed to leap across the world. Then the world went dark.Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen King Excerpted from Just after Sunset: Stories by Stephen King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
