Four Past Midnight - Stephen King

An omnibus of four short novels, or a collection of four novellas, however you like to look at it.

Although at close to 700 pages in small hardback and 800 in tie-in paperback they are monstrously long novellas.

I'd guess this book is 300,000 words, making them 75,000 words on average. this is a novel as far as I can see. It is just short for Stephen King! :)

The Langoliers is the standout, and the final two books are only average.

Four Past Midnight : The Langoliers - Stephen King
Four Past Midnight : Secret Window Secret Garden - Stephen King
Four Past Midnight : The Library Policeman - Stephen King
Four Past Midnight : The Sun Dog - Stephen King


Time-rip reverse flight new beginning.

A red-eye 767 trip has a small group of passengers awake to find that everybody else on the flight has disappeared, leaving a few trinkets and artificial body parts behind.

They come to the realisation that they just might not be in their own world anymore.

Thanks to having a pilot, a spook, and a level headed woman and author and a strange girl among them, they try to come up with a plan as to what to do.

An atmospheric adventure of creeping horror and heroism.

4.5 out of 5


Crazy about plagiarism.


A just-divorced writer is disturbed when a man turns up at his door and claims that one of the stories that he has written is actually his. It seems that this can't be true, as the magazine publication of the work is earlier than the time the strange man claims to have written his.

Things spiral into arson, violence and further as this continues.

3.5 out of 5


Only borrow books from actual real, live, human librarians is the best strategy.


Here, a man that suddenly has to fill in at an after dinner speech at a club on short notice ends up going to the local library, somewhere he hasn't been for a long time.

He gets help to put on a successful talk, but the librarian and her hunter she calls into play to chase down the overdues are rather monstrous.

3 out of 5


Photography might just not be for me.


King talks in the introduction to this story about his Castle Rock setting, mentioning he was getting to the end of it. This story apparently has some sort of linking function for The Dark Half and Needful Things, neither of which I have read.

A young boy gets a camera that turns out to be distinctly supernatural, and the canine of the title will be just as pleasant as Cujo wasn't if it can manifest in real life, and probably worse, being a monster.

3 out of 5




3.5 out of 5