Desperation by Stephen King

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

About the Book: "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.

First lines:
1922: My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession.
Big Driver: Tess accepted twelve compensated speaking engagements a year, if she could get them.
Fair Extension: Streeter only saw the sign because he had to pull over and puke.
A Good Marriage: The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, Darcy thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage was this: How's your Marriage?

My Thoughts: The 4 stories in this collection had this Constant Reader up late two nights in a row. They aare dark tales. I found these to be especially creepy fare because they were, for the most part, about human nature rather than monsters and the supernatural. The main characters were, as is King's want (and as he stated in his afterward) ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances, they are easy to relate to. Who hasn't been afraid of getting a flat tire on a lonely road? How awful would it be to find your spouse was keeping a DARK secret?

My least favorite of the four was the story "Fair Extension." It was the only one that had any real amount of the supernatural, the man selling his soul to the devil. Well he didn't sell his soul, he paid money. When reflecting on this I decided it was my least favorite in part because there was no good guy to come out on top. The bad guy got it all. I didn't feel for the main character at all. he was filled with hatred and greed because he was jealous......of his "best" friend.

The most heart pounding one was "A Good Marriage" which King based on the BTK serial killer. The first part of it was rather bland, what a great set up for what came next.

The one that hit home the most was "Big Driver." In this one we find Tess, an author of cozy mysteries, stuck on a back road with a flat. Raped and left for dead, she seeks revenge. The ending was predicable and satisfying. One time I had a flat in the middle of the night on a stretch of road that was deserted and unpopulated in the early 80s, a time before everyone had a cell phone. While nothing bad happened to me it was really scary.

I'm going to rate this as an A for all you Constant Readers, suspense, and horror fans. If you read true crime 3 of the the 4 may appeal to you. I'll save this one and reread it sometime.

Rating: A

Riding the Bullet by Stephen King

About the Book: Riding the Bullet, the tale of a terrible encounter near a lonely graveyard, is, as the narrator points out, the kind of ghost story told around campfires. It's no surprise that no one tells such a story as well as Stephen King. From the moment Alan, a college student, decides to hitchhike to see his mother in the hospital (his car is out of action) and further decides to avoid the main highway where police might ticket him, you can imagine what's coming, and this makes what does come more awful and delicious. Josh Hamilton can't do a Maine accent (as who can not born to it?), so it's too bad he tried; everything else about this reading is delightful.

From Wikipedia: Riding the Bullet is a novella by Stephen King. This work marks King's debut on the Internet. Simon & Schuster, with technology by SoftLock, first published Riding the Bullet in 2000 as the world's first mass-market electronic book, available for download at $2.50. In 2002, it was collected in King's collection Everything's Eventual.

First Line: I've never told anyone this story, and never thought I would -- not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed...and because it was mine.

My Thoughts: What a scary, fun read. It's pure Steven King to take an ordinary person and put them smack in the middle of a nightmare. Being short I was afraid I would feel the story was incomplete, which is my feeling with most short stories I read. However the entire story is here. It had my heart racing as I flipped pages on my Nook. But as Alan's mother was fond of saying "Fun is fun and done is done." And so it is.

Rating:

The Regulators by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

About the book: By nightfall, almost everyone in the quiet town of Wentworth, Ohio will be dead, and the survivors will be whisked away to the world of regulators--where terrifying nightmares come true. The impending carnage seems to revolve around an autistic 8-year-old; but until he speaks, the residents of Wentworth will never know why the regulators have come, what powers they possess, how far they will go, and how they can be stopped.

First line: Summer's here. Not just summer, either, not this year, but the apotheosis of summer, the avatar of summer, high green perfect central Ohio summer dead-smash in the middle of July, white sun glaring out of that fabled faded Levi's sky, the sound of kids hollering back and forth through the Bear Street Woods at the top of the hill, the tink! of Little League bats from the ballfield on the other side of the woods, the sound of power-mowers, the sound of muscle-cars out on Highway 19, the sound of Rollerblades on the cement sidewalks and smooth macadam of Poplar Street, the sound of radios - Cleveland Indian baseball (the rare day game) competing with Tina Turner belting out "Nutbush City Limits," the one that goes "Twenty-five is the speed limit, motorcycles not allowed in it" - and surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers. (That's one long sentence.)

My thoughts: I found this to be a scary fun read. It took a little to get going but when it did it didn't let up till the end. What amazed me was that this chunkster took place over the course of 2 or 3 hours one afternoon. King did his thing here placing normal, everyday people in a horrific situation. There were a lot of characters but I found them surprisingly easy to keep straight. Maybe it was that they kept getting killed off. The evil force known as "Tak" that takes over Seth is well written and I found it interesting and disconcerting that it was so evil yet loved such childish things: chocolate milk, a certain cartoon, old cowboy movies and shows etc. It (Tak) used these things it loved to decimate the neighborhood. What could be scarier than knowing you were being attacked by a cartoon character with Hoss Cartwright riding shotgun? It was rather gory in places but that is to be expected. If you are a fan of King or horror fiction you'll like this book.

Rating:

Quote: And, far back in the network of caves and tunnels and boltholes the boy had constructed 9the part of him that did not want Tak, the part that was horrified of the stranger now living in his head,) Tak caught a glimmer, a faint pulse, that it recognized.

Links:

Wikipedia article

Amazon

Goodreads

Stephen King