Book-It 'o11! Book #23
The Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one and two, just in case you're curious.) This was a secondhand find.
Title: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Details: Copyright 2010, Simon & Shuster Inc.
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "“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 - never a stranger from most people with something to lose - 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. "
Why I Wanted to Read It: I generally enjoy Stephen King's books and think his work is generally better than the "horror" dismissive it's generally given.
How I Liked It: King is almost always strong on themes, and each of the four stories is a take on the theme of the dark/other self, whether it be physically separate ("Elvid", offering the main character his most selfish and mean-spirited wants in "Fair Extension"), the villain (the narrator and main character of "1922"), or the victim-turned-avenger (the deceived at the centers of "Big Driver" and "A Good Marriage", respectively). The themes of complicity and retribution also run through each of the four. Since the book isn't a book of short stories, it's a quartet of four shortish stories, I'll review them each separately.
1922
A bit of history (and a decent job of it), King recalls the desolation of rural farming even pre-Depression era. He paints vivid scenes and manages most of the time to keep the horror poetically grim (where it is much more effective), although in this story more than the other three, he devolves into some of the over-the-top-as-to-be-almost comical gore. Still, the story evokes a quiet horror of one's own demons similiar to Poe's Telltale Heart (particularly given the ending).
Big Driver
Perhaps the most chilling of the four (although that's possibly up to personal experience), Big Driver manages to hook the fear of a serial rapist and murderer and make it all the more quietly horrific (without, it feels important to note, it being over-the-top-gory). The tricky task of transitioning his heroine from victim to vigilante is not executed (so to speak) without some rickety parts (including her impulse to rent the film The Brave One which she mistakenly calls The Courageous Woman to the rental clerk) but generally, King paces as well as documents her transition well, and it's free of the patronizing quality that frequently overwhelmed another book of his about a survivor-turned-fighter, Rose Madder.
Fair Extension
In my opinion, this is possibly the weakest of the four but not due to its length. The story is somewhat plotless aside from the initial passage of the deal (with the devil, in case you're not one for anagrams). Perhaps the repetition is a part of the bleak and dark humor of the nature of the story, but the fact the build doesn't pan out to anything (no morality stinger at the end, which is probably the final and biggest punchline) casts the story as just pointless.
A Good Marriage
I confess: I read ahead to the afterword where King talks about the basis for each story. He drew this story from the questions that arose in the wake of the capture of the serial killer BTK: how could his wife live with him for so long and not know what he was? Weren't there clues?
King gives a fleshed out "what if", and paces the dawning horror, fumble for explanations, and eventual conclusion of instinct all well. At the point in which the shock of the situation truly hits his protagonist, Darcy Anderson (which, of course, is really several points), King draws so vividly and realistically as to recall Ann Rule's memoir of a similiar, if lesser impacted, situation (discovering her co-worker and friend was the serial killer that she was investigating and the years of coming to terms with the graphic horror of what he'd done and was).
I haven't read a great deal of King's modern work, not out of any particular avoidance, but rather his older work was what was recommended and more available to me. So I can't compare this book to "modern King" as some longtime fans have been able to do. But comparing this book alone to his earlier works, I'd say it stands with his classics.
Notable: In "1922", a young pretty bank teller wears the name Rhoda Penmark, the name of the child murderess in the 1954 novel The Bad Seed.
Title: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Details: Copyright 2010, Simon & Shuster Inc.
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "“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 - never a stranger from most people with something to lose - 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. "
Why I Wanted to Read It: I generally enjoy Stephen King's books and think his work is generally better than the "horror" dismissive it's generally given.
How I Liked It: King is almost always strong on themes, and each of the four stories is a take on the theme of the dark/other self, whether it be physically separate ("Elvid", offering the main character his most selfish and mean-spirited wants in "Fair Extension"), the villain (the narrator and main character of "1922"), or the victim-turned-avenger (the deceived at the centers of "Big Driver" and "A Good Marriage", respectively). The themes of complicity and retribution also run through each of the four. Since the book isn't a book of short stories, it's a quartet of four shortish stories, I'll review them each separately.
1922
A bit of history (and a decent job of it), King recalls the desolation of rural farming even pre-Depression era. He paints vivid scenes and manages most of the time to keep the horror poetically grim (where it is much more effective), although in this story more than the other three, he devolves into some of the over-the-top-as-to-be-almost comical gore. Still, the story evokes a quiet horror of one's own demons similiar to Poe's Telltale Heart (particularly given the ending).
Big Driver
Perhaps the most chilling of the four (although that's possibly up to personal experience), Big Driver manages to hook the fear of a serial rapist and murderer and make it all the more quietly horrific (without, it feels important to note, it being over-the-top-gory). The tricky task of transitioning his heroine from victim to vigilante is not executed (so to speak) without some rickety parts (including her impulse to rent the film The Brave One which she mistakenly calls The Courageous Woman to the rental clerk) but generally, King paces as well as documents her transition well, and it's free of the patronizing quality that frequently overwhelmed another book of his about a survivor-turned-fighter, Rose Madder.
Fair Extension
In my opinion, this is possibly the weakest of the four but not due to its length. The story is somewhat plotless aside from the initial passage of the deal (with the devil, in case you're not one for anagrams). Perhaps the repetition is a part of the bleak and dark humor of the nature of the story, but the fact the build doesn't pan out to anything (no morality stinger at the end, which is probably the final and biggest punchline) casts the story as just pointless.
A Good Marriage
I confess: I read ahead to the afterword where King talks about the basis for each story. He drew this story from the questions that arose in the wake of the capture of the serial killer BTK: how could his wife live with him for so long and not know what he was? Weren't there clues?
King gives a fleshed out "what if", and paces the dawning horror, fumble for explanations, and eventual conclusion of instinct all well. At the point in which the shock of the situation truly hits his protagonist, Darcy Anderson (which, of course, is really several points), King draws so vividly and realistically as to recall Ann Rule's memoir of a similiar, if lesser impacted, situation (discovering her co-worker and friend was the serial killer that she was investigating and the years of coming to terms with the graphic horror of what he'd done and was).
I haven't read a great deal of King's modern work, not out of any particular avoidance, but rather his older work was what was recommended and more available to me. So I can't compare this book to "modern King" as some longtime fans have been able to do. But comparing this book alone to his earlier works, I'd say it stands with his classics.
Notable: In "1922", a young pretty bank teller wears the name Rhoda Penmark, the name of the child murderess in the 1954 novel The Bad Seed.