Other narrators include: Cotter Smith, Will Patton, Edward Herrmann, Holter Graham, Frederick Weller, Mare Winningham, Craig Wasson, Thomas Sadoski, and Tim Sample.
A master storyteller at his best – the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.
Since his first collection, Nightshift, published 35 years ago, Stephen King has dazzled listeners with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.
There are thrilling connections between stories, including themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, and what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers he has supernatural powers: the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits”; the old judge in “The Dune”, who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw written in the sand the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality”, King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.
Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant fan. “I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”
Not his best anthology by a long shot. It is much easier to write a review of THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS than it is to assign it a numerical ranking. This is because several of the short stories in this anthology have already been released, not only in whatever periodicals they may have appeared in, but also as Kindle singles, and three of them (MILE 81, UR, and DRUNKEN FIREWORKS) are (arguably, I suppose) the best of the lot. Another couple of the stories (BLOCKADE BILLY [truly forgettable] and MORALITY,were previously released…
A Great Collection That Matches His Past Short Story Work In recent years, many devoted readers of Stephen King have made the complaint that his novels have declined in quality. While that might be true, I always reply that his short stories are (and always have been) his best works. This new collection shows that Mr. King has not last his talent at building up terror in readers of the span over forty or fifty pages. Unlike past collections, though, these stories more often reveal the monstrosity within the human soul, rather than any outside…
Short stories by Stephen King? Count me in! A strong collection of the darkness of the could-be-real A new short story collection by Stephen King is one of the few literary events I truly look forward too, and I was glad to get an early look at this new book. While I like some of his recent novels, King’s last couple collections (‘Full Dark, No Stars,’ ‘Just After Sunset’) have been more my preference.Â