Just After Sunset
Stories
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Thirteen “dazzling” (Associated Press) and “wonderfully wicked” (USA TODAY) stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.
A book salesman with a grievance picks up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. An exercise routine on a stationary bicycle takes its rider on a captivating—and then terrifying—journey. A blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. A psychiatric patient’s irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside…or keep the world from falling victim to it.
These are just some of the tales to be found in the #1 bestselling collection Just After Sunset. Call it dusk or call it twilight, it’s a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, 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 master storyteller Stephen King.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
