Full Dark, No Stars
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4.3 • 72 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Is it possible to fully know anyone? Even those we love the most? What tips someone over the edge to commit a crime?
For a Nebraska farmer, the turning point comes when his wife threatens to sell off the family homestead.
A cozy mystery writer plots a savage revenge after a brutal encounter with a stranger.
Dave Streeter gets the chance to cure himself from illness - if he agrees to impose misery on an old rival.
And Darcy Anderson discovers a box containing her husband's dark and terrifying secrets - he's not the man who keeps his nails short and collects coins. And now he's heading home . . .
Like DIFFERENT SEASONS and FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, which generated such enduring hit films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, FULL DARK, NO STARS proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eerie twists of fate drive the four longish stories in King's first collection since Just After Sunset (2008). In "1922," a farmer murders his wife to retain the family land she hopes to sell, then watches his life unravel hideously as the consequences of the killing suggest a near-supernatural revenge. "Big Driver" tells of an otherwise ordinary woman who discovers her extraordinary capacity for retribution after she is raped and left for dead. "A Good Marriage" explores the aftermath of a wife's discovery of her milquetoast husband's sinister secret life, while "Fair Extension," the book's most disturbing story, follows the relationship between a man and the best friend on whom he preternaturally shifts all his bad luck and misfortune. As in Different Seasons (1982), King takes a mostly nonfantastic approach to grim themes. Now, as then, these tales show how a skilled storyteller with a good tale to tell can make unsettling fiction compulsively readable.
Customer Reviews
Short but raw
Another one of Kings short masterpieces!
Nice
Great stories very fast to set the character hard to put down
Full Dark, No Stars
This is probably the most apt title to any Stephen King book. Darkness pervades, and what little light persists does so as a faint and ephemeral glimmer at the very furthest reach of perception. Each story feels like a full novel stripped to its barest bones, but that is not to say that is anything missing: there isn't. The narratives are populated with real people in very real, if unusual situations, and no blackened stone in the stagnant swamp of their souls is left unturned. The people are so real and so compromised that they could be you or I. Rather, King's economy of prose and efficiency of phrasing shines his stark light on the dark side of we naked apes without a single wasted word. This is King the humanist at his most incisive and uncompromising, and the "What if?" of each tale resonates within his Constant Reader with disturbing echoes of "What would I do?" Really, what would anyone do? Read it.