If It Bleeds
A riveting, dark story collection featuring 'The Life of Chuck'
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4.4 • 122 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller featuring the story 'The Life of Chuck', adapted for film by Mike Flanagan, starring Tom Hiddleston and winner of the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival.
News people have a saying:
'If it bleeds, it leads'.
Following a horrific explosion at a school, Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency notices something suspicious about the TV reporter who is first on the scene. In this riveting title story, Holly sets out to discover what he is hiding in her first solo crime case.
Dancing alongside this stand-alone sequel to The Outsider are three more irresistible long stories: 'Mr Harrigan's Phone' sees young Craig introduce a curmudgeonly retired businessman to the wonders of the smartphone; 'The Life of Chuck' is a three act life-story - told in reverse order - about a man whose face appears on a billboard; and 'Rat' sees a struggling author head to a remote cabin in the woods of North Maine, where a deal-making rodent offers him a life-changing pact.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The four never-before-published novellas in this collection represent horror master King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend's cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an EC Comics vibe. In the profoundly moving "The Life of Chuck," a series of apocalyptic incidents bear out one character's claim that "when a man or a woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin." "Rat" sees a frustrated writer strike a Faustian bargain to complete his novel, and in the title story, private investigator Holly Gibney, the recurring heroine of King's Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, faces off against a ghoulish television newscaster who vampirically feeds off the anguish he provokes in his audience by covering horrific tragedies. King clearly loves his characters, and the care with which he develops their personalities draws the reader ineluctably into their deeply unsettling experiences. This excellent collection delivers exactly the kind of bravura storytelling King's readers expect.
Customer Reviews
It was more than all rat.
A brilliant gateway into the King world, the short stories in here are definitely amongst his best, they are not horror stories in the original sense but they are stories that horrify none the less - through humanity more than anything.
It seems as though King had fun writing the stories, seemingly injecting a lot of his own life into the narrative, this only added to the quality and sense of reality that his storytelling remains to provide over years of experience.
Overall a very enjoyable and somewhat easy read.
Brilliant
Three short stories that pack a punch. A great starting point for readers looking to get into Stephen King.