The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
2015
- american horror tales
- suspense
- future life
- guilt
- fiction
- short stories (single author)
- american short stories
- fiction / suspense
- fiction / short stories (single author)
- ethics
The story
"A master storyteller at his best--the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story. Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers--the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits;" the old judge in "The Dune" who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In "Morality," King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil's pact they can win. Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King's finest gifts to his constant reader--"I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth""-- "From a master of the short story, a collection that includes stories never before in print, never published in America, never collected and brand new- with the magnificent bones of interstitial autobiographical comments on when, why and how Stephen K
What it’s like
Cool, grey-blue and suburban-ordinary in the way of a late-autumn afternoon, with the dread arriving through kitchen tables, hotel rooms and quiet bedrooms rather than through spectacle. The prose is plain, conversational and unhurried, the voice of a storyteller leaning across a table, and King's short autobiographical preambles give each piece the feel of a confidence before the trapdoor opens. Pacing varies from slow-burning to abrupt; the stories are compact enough to read one at a time in a sitting. The emotional register is wry, uneasy and morally pressing, with a recurring interest in ageing, regret, and the chance to put things right, and its people are often ordinary men and women confronting their own past failings. Intensity is moderate: a fair amount of death, some grisly accidents and occasional violence, mostly implied or brief rather than lingering gore, with a steady undercurrent of menace and cruelty. It suits a late-night reader, a quiet weekend, or anyone who likes horror that works through conscience and suspense rather than shock. Best for readers who enjoy twisty, sardonic short fiction with a moral sting.
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