Just after Sunset Stephen King | ISBN : 1-4391-1530-3

Just after Sunset

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 11 November, 2008

ISBN: 9781439115305

Pages: 384

Subjects: Mystery, Horror, Psychological

Available as: Trade Cloth, 978-1-4391-1530-5 Trade Cloth, 978-1-4165-9528-1 Trade Cloth, 978-1-4165-8408-7 Trade Cloth, 978-1-4104-1060-3 Trade Paper, 978-4-16-770582-4 Trade Paper, 978-1-59413-350-3 Audio Recording Downloadable, 978-1-4416-0752-2

Description:

In Just After Sunset Stephen King delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything's Eventual six years ago. One of the longer stories in this book, "N.," recently broke ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment and brought to vibrant life through a series of twenty-five video episodes. Introduced by the author, those episodes are presented on the DVD included in this Collector's Set. A trailer for the video episodes and a special "Behind the Scenes" segment complete the DVD package available only in this special edition of the book.Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating -- and then terrifying -- journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, "The Gingerbread Girl" is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable -- and resourceful -- as Audrey Hepburn's character in Wait Until Dark. In "Ayana," a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. "N." tells the story of a psychiatrist who falls victim to the same deadly obsession as his patient-an obsession that just might save the world! Just After Sunset-- call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.

PW Publishers Weekly

Review Source: Publishers Weekly

Review Date: 2008-09-01

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