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FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT

A double-double Whopper hot from the grill of "America's literary boogeyman," as he puts it in his introduction: four sizzling horror novellas sandwiched within the theme of "Time. . .and the corrosive effects it can have on the human heart." Sure, they're dripping with excess wordage and high-calorie sentiment, but cut away the fat and there's still more steak here than in any other horror book of the year. The premium cut sits on top: "The Langoliers," whose wildly original premise—that a group of airline passengers travel a few minutes into the past to encounter the entities that eat Being, leaving Nothingness—unfolds in classic King fashion, with a psychic blind girl, a demented financier, a mystery writer, and a British spy awash in mounting suspense (why is the beer "Flat! Flat as a pancake!"?; and what is that sound like "Animals at feeding time" at the place near the airport?). And if the entities turn out to be more whimsical than scary ("sort of like beachballs"), they bounce the tale into King's most upbeat ending ever, a rhapsodic celebration of life. Next comes "Secret Window, Secret Garden," the most self-conscious novella of the four, a dour and tense reworking of Misery and The Dark Half. Here, the crazed fan of the former and the animus-made-flesh of the latter meld into the avenging figure of John Shooter, a failed writer who claims that top author Mort Rainey has stolen one of his stories. Or is Rainey only dreaming Shooter, as penance for a past sin? More inventive—and the scariest of the lot—is "The Library Policeman," turbo-engined horror about a vampire of fear masquerading as a librarian; a subtext (and one graphic scene) of child sex-abuse hones the story into a modern morality tale. Last comes "The Sun Dog," more gleefully splattery horror about the terrors of childhood, wherein a boy comes to own a Polaroid camera that takes pictures only of a menacing hound from hell. King says that" 'The Sun Dog'. . .sets the stage" for a "long novel called Needful Things"—already written. The four novellas here, he confesses, were mostly written "during the two years when I was supposedly retired." Some people just don't know how to take a vacation—not that King's fans will mind: there's grand entertainment value here, reflected by the massive first printing of 1.5 million.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1991

ISBN: 0451170385

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990

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PLEASE SEE US

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.

They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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