When King says full dark, then, King means it.Īs for the stories themselves (the book is best approached as a trio of novellas with a wee short tucked away in the middle): ‘1922’ opens the book, a historical yarn of sorts, that sees a father and son do away with an overly ambitious wife/parent only to then find guilt gnaws and drives fate much as the wishes in WW Jacobs’ ‘Monkey’s Paw’ did. Over the course of the book, we have a slapdash throat cutting, a rat biting a cow’s udder off, a man devoured, a woman beaten and raped and left for dead alongside a cache of decaying former victims, a successful family ruined, a serial killer with a proclivity to bite his victims clear down to the bone and harsh justice meted out at the bottom of a stairwell. Only one story, the shortest in the book, ‘Fair Extension’ (which clocks in at a mere 30 pages compared to the 100 page+ of the other three), finds its narrator heartily better off at the end (and the fact that he is better off is down to the fact that he has done the dirty on a friend of his who is suffering Dorian Gray-like to allow him the eponymous fair extension). If so, be assured that I found them equally hard to write in places.’Ĭertainly three of the stories feature serious damage to women who then go on, in some way or another, to wreak a terrible revenge. You may have found them hard to read in places. (Nov.It may be (I’d be willing to bet good money) that the title of Stephen King’s latest quartet (following in the footsteps of Different Seasons and Four After Midnight) can be traced to how King frames the book in the Afterword: Now, as then, these tales show how a skilled storyteller with a good tale to tell can make unsettling fiction compulsively readable. As in Different Seasons (1982), King takes a mostly nonfantastic approach to grim themes. "A Good Marriage" explores the aftermath of a wife's discovery of her milquetoast husband's sinister secret life, while "Fair Extension," the book's most disturbing story, follows the relationship between a man and the best friend on whom he preternaturally shifts all his bad luck and misfortune.
"Big Driver" tells of an otherwise ordinary woman who discovers her extraordinary capacity for retribution after she is raped and left for dead. In "1922," a farmer murders his wife to retain the family land she hopes to sell, then watches his life unravel hideously as the consequences of the killing suggest a near-supernatural revenge. Eerie twists of fate drive the four longish stories in King's first collection since Just After Sunset (2008).
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