Full dark, no stars

Review by New York Times Review

A collection of four new long stories by Stephen King returns to a favorite theme, the divided soul. "FROM the start - even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing 'The Long Walk' in his college dormitory room - I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive," Stephen King writes in a chatty afterword to "Full Dark, No Stars," his new collection of longish stories. "It gets in your face." As if we didn't know. "Full Dark, No Stars" contains, as King's earlier "Different Seasons" and "Four Past Midnight" did, a quartet of previously unpublished tales that more than satisfy their prolific author's stated criteria for good fiction. Propulsive? Check. Assaultive? Don't ask. The stories in "Full Dark, No Stars," whose lengths range from 30-some pages to well over 100, are for the most part only lightly supernatural and deal, instead, with the unlovelier aspects of merely human behavior. Serial rape and murder figure prominently in two of these stories; in another, a man kills his wife and forces his teenage son to help him; and in the only fully fantastic tale here, a man purchases - from the Devil, of course - health and happiness at the too-affordable price of the ruin of his best friend's family. It's grim stuff, but that's what readers expect of Stephen King. After all, he's been in our faces for 40 years. What's amazing, and maybe a little unsettling, about King is the consistency of his purpose and his manner over that long stretch of time. He's essentially the same grab-you-by-the-lapels literary showman he was in the pulpy, punchy horror stories he used to peddle to men's magazines and, a bit later, in his early novels "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot." Unlike most writers, he seems never to have become bored with his own peculiar gifts - to have tired of the wonderful toys left under the tree for him when he was a kid. He might, as he claims, have a tough time imagining himself as an 18-year-old composing his first novel, but it's no problem for us, his readers, because King at 63 still writes with the verve and glee and heedless ease of a very young man. He has not mellowed perceptibly. He has not put aside childish things. When you're reading the grisly tales in "Full Dark, No Stars," carried along by his rollicking, vivid prose, you think (if you're thinking at all): "God help him, this man is having fun." A writer who takes such unabashed joy in the act of storytelling is a rarity. This naked pleasure is King's secret ingredient: it makes his work - good or bad - weirdly irresistible, even addictive. And it disarms criticism, as boyish enthusiasm often does. You might feel, as I do, that "Fair Extension," the deal-with-the-Devil story in "Full Dark, No Stars," is too glib and casual to bear the moral weight it aspires to, but it seems almost rude to say so. You might also think (as I do) that the long suspense story "Big Driver," about a woman who suffers and then violently avenges a roadside rape, is a bit too easy for King: there were a couple of similar escape-and-revenge yarns in bis 2008 collection "Just After Sunset." You could think that. But you wouldn't really feel good about it. King's compulsion to entertain - both himself and the enormous public whom he now, kind of archly, addresses as "Constant Reader" - is, however helpless, a form of generosity, a gift horse not to be looked in the mouth. (His readers should know by now that it's unwise to look into anything dark and moist. Especially if there are teeth.) The sheer volume of his output protects him some, too. In the vast ocean of King fiction, the weaker stuff just sinks from memory without a trace, and without much damage to the reader's confidence in him: a sturdier vessel is always heaving into view on the horizon. And that's the case with "Full Dark, No Stars," which starts with a good story called "1922," loses its way for a while - in "Big Driver" and "Fair Extension" - and then winds up with another pretty strong one, "A Good Marriage." The two better stories even have a sort of common theme: in both, people feel themselves, at moments of crisis, somehow doubled, split in two. Darcy Anderson, the heroine of "A Good Marriage," sometimes senses the presence of another self behind the mirror: a "Darker Girl" when she was young, and later a "Darker Wife," living what she calls "the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward." Whatever the reasons for her youthful mirror fantasies, she discovers ample justification for gloomy imaginings in the 28th year of her marriage, when she happens upon clues to the secret life of her husband, Bob, a dark stranger indeed. In Bob's shadow existence, away from her, he commits terrible crimes which he attributes to the presence of another person inside himself: the malign spirit of a dead childhood friend. (It's an extremely crowded marriage.) King works the double motifs deftly and guides the narrative to a satisfyingly cathartic climax - after which he supplies a nifty denouement in the form of a dialogue between poor shattered Darcy and a sly old retired cop. "A Good Marriage" is a characteristic King performance, speedy and craftsman-like and solidly unnerving. (It's characteristic, too, in the slight gender bias King has always, gallantly, displayed: in his work, men do violence because they're bad, and women do violence only in self-defense or retaliation.) "1922" is less typical, because it's set in a fairly distant past rather than in King's usual here and now, and in the rural Midwest rather than in his native New England, where the other stories in "Full Dark, No Stars" take place. It's also the only story here told in the first person. The change of air (and voice) suits him: "1922" has a mournful gravity that the other tales mostly lack, in part perhaps because its diction is free of the bursts of baby-talk slang that have become a nasty habit of his in recent years. (Elsewhere in the book, you're brought up short by painful coinages like "Easy-as-can-beezy" and "nuzzle-bunny.") The narrator of "1922," a Nebraska farmer named Wilfred James, murders his wife because she wants to sell off part of the family farm and move to the city. Wilfred tries to tell himself, as the serial killer of "A Good Marriage" does, that someone else is the author of this awful act: "I believe," he writes, a few years after the event, "that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man," and that it was this evil double who did the deed. He can't quite persuade himself, though: the stark memory of the crime is all his, and the dire consequences are visited not on the imaginary other, but on him - and on his son, whom he has made his accomplice. KING'S rambunctious fiction doesn't often attempt a tragic tone, but "1922" does, and nearly achieves it. Although he has toyed with the idea of doubles and split personalities before (notably in "The Shining" and "The Dark Half"), there's a particularly intimate sense of horror in "1922" because the sad story is told in the voice of one of the afflicted. Not much, I'd guess, truly scares Stephen King, but in this tale his prose feels haunted, as if he had, for once, spooked himself. For a hard-charging writer like King, the thought of another self inside the self is as disquieting a night-terror as can be imagined. He has been himself - confidently, propulsively, assaultively - for so long. It's too late to come face to face with the stranger inside. One disturbed character says, 'I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man.' Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 12, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* King begins his afterword by stating, The stories in this book are harsh. The man ain't whistlin' Dixie. Returning to the novella possibly his brightest canvas King provides four raw looks at the limits of greed, revenge, and self-deception. The first, 1922, is an outright masterpiece and takes the form of the written confession of one Wilf James. Back in 1922, see, Wilf killed his wife to prevent her selling off part of the farm, but tossing her corpse down the well didn't exactly stop her. It's Poe meets Creepshow by way of Steinbeck and carries the bleak, nearly romantic doom of an old folk ballad about murderin' done wrong. A pair of the remaining tales feature female protagonists considering hiding others' crimes: Big Driver is a rape-revenge tale about a writer of cozy mysteries who ends up in the uncoziest of situations, while A Good Marriage stars a wife whose husband of 27 years turns out to be hiding an unimaginable secret. Though the shortest story by far, Fair Extension is no slouch, submitting for your approval one Mr. Elvid (get it?), who is out to shine a little light on our blackest urges. Rarely has King gone this dark, but to say there are no stars here is crazy. High-Demand Backstory: King has gone on record saying he believesthat American readers should pay more attention to the virtues of short fiction; and if anyone can get reluctant short-story and novella readers into the swing, he certainly can with this book.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

King leaves the supernatural behind to find the macabre in stories of ordinary misfortune. In each, ordinary people discover how their choices define who they are and what they can become. As usual, King's characters are multidimensional and colorful, if not necessarily sympathetic. Craig Wasson takes on two of the stories, and his raspy voice is a pleasure to listen to. The main characters in "1922" and "Fair Exchange" are not young men, and his mature gruffness and easy delivery are perfect. And while Jessica Hecht's reading of both "Big Driver" and "A Good Marriage" is pleasant and steady, her characterizations through dialogue are not very broad, and sometimes sound timid and whiny. Still, the strength of the stories keeps the listener enthralled. A Scribner hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

King, a modern master of short fiction, offers four disturbing but unforgettable novellas that explore our capacity for retribution. Narrators Craig Wasson and Jessica Hecht bring these psychological chillers to life. (LJ 3/15/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Following an overstuffed feast of a novel (Under the Dome,2009), King returns with four comparative snacks, each of which deals in some way with the darkest recesses of the human soul.None of the narratives have previously been published, and all are apparently recent. The first, best and longest is "1922," a richly detailed ghost story about a Nebraska farmer whose wife wants to sell land she's inherited and move to the city, and how he enlists their 14-year-old son to conspire against her. He had been convinced that moving to the city would be hell, but discovers, as he tells himself, "You realize that you are in a hell of your own making, but you go on nevertheless. Because there is nothing else to do." "Big Driver" concerns an implausible plot against an author speaking to a book club, and the toll her revenge takes on her, transforming her into a different person in the process. "Fair Extension," the shortest, is a fable about a terminal cancer patient who experiences a miraculous remission following a transaction with the devilish Mr. Elvid. "A Good Marriage," is, of course, a title dripping with irony, with a wife of more than 25 years discovering devastating secretsa secret life! even a dual identity!about her boringly predictable husband. Can things somehow go on as they have before? Or does she risk ruining her own life and those of their children by exposing her husband? "Does anybody really know anybody?"asks the story (rhetorically). Explains King in his "Afterword," "From the start...I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face."A collection of page-turning narratives for those who prefer the prolific tale spinner at his pulpiest.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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- 1 - The one thing nobody asked in casual conversation, Darcy thought in the days after she found what she found in the garage, was this: How's your marriage? They asked how was your weekend and how was your trip to Florida and how's your health and how are the kids; they even asked how's life been treatin you, hon? But nobody asked how's your marriage? Good, she would have answered the question before that night. Everything's fine. She had been born Darcellen Madsen (Darcellen, a name only parents besotted with a freshly purchased book of baby names could love), in the year John F. Kennedy was elected President. She was raised in Freeport, Maine, back when it was a town instead of an adjunct to L.L.Bean, America's first superstore, and half a dozen other oversized retail operations of the sort that are called "outlets" (as if they were sewer drains rather than shopping locations). She went to Freeport High School, and then to Addison Business School, where she learned secretarial skills. She was hired by Joe Ransome Chevrolet, which by 1984, when she left the company, was the largest car dealership in Portland. She was plain, but with the help of two marginally more sophisticated girlfriends, learned enough makeup skills to make herself pretty on workdays and downright eye-catching on Friday and Saturday nights, when a bunch of them liked to go out for margaritas at The Lighthouse or Mexican Mike's (where there was live music). In 1982, Joe Ransome hired a Portland accounting firm to help him figure out his tax situation, which had become complicated ("The kind of problem you want to have," Darcy overheard him tell one of the senior salesmen). A pair of briefcase-toting men came out, one old and one young. Both wore glasses and conservative suits; both combed their short hair neatly away from their foreheads in a way that made Darcy think of the photographs in her mother's MEMORIES OF '54 senior yearbook, the one with the image of a boy cheerleader holding a megaphone to his mouth stamped on its faux-leather cover. The younger accountant was Bob Anderson. She got talking with him on their second day at the dealership, and in the course of their conversation, asked him if he had any hobbies. Yes, he said, he was a numismatist. He started to tell her what that was and she said, "I know. My father collects Lady Liberty dimes and buffalo-head nickels. He says they're his numismatical hobby-horse. Do you have a hobby-horse, Mr. Anderson?" He did: wheat pennies. His greatest hope was to some day come across a 1955 double-date, which was-- But she knew that, too. The '55 double-date was a mistake. A valuable mistake. Young Mr. Anderson, he of the thick and carefully combed brown hair, was delighted with this answer. He asked her to call him Bob. Later, during their lunch--which they took on a bench in the sunshine behind the body shop, a tuna on rye for him and a Greek salad in a Tupperware bowl for her--he asked if she would like to go with him on Saturday to a street sale in Castle Rock. He had just rented a new apartment, he said, and was looking for an armchair. Also a TV, if someone was selling a good one at a fair price. A good one at a fair price was a phrase with which she would grow comfortably familiar in the years to come. He was as plain as she was, just another guy you'd pass on the street without noticing, and would never have makeup to make him prettier… except that day on the bench, he did. His cheeks flushed when he asked her out, just enough to light him up a little and give him a glow. "No coin collections?" she teased. He smiled, revealing even teeth. Small teeth, nicely cared for, and white. It never occurred to her that the thought of those teeth could make her shudder--why would it? "If I saw a nice set of coins, of course I'd look," he said. "Especially wheat pennies?" Teasing, but just a little. "Especially those. Would you like to come, Darcy?" She came. And she came on their wedding night, too. Not terribly often after that, but now and then. Often enough to consider herself normal and fulfilled. In 1986, Bob got a promotion. He also (with Darcy's encouragement and help) started up a small mail-order business in collectible American coins. It was successful from the start, and in 1990, he added baseball trading cards and old movie memorabilia. He kept no stock of posters, one-sheets, or window cards, but when people queried him on such items, he could almost always find them. Actually it was Darcy who found them, using her overstuffed Rolodex in those pre-computer days to call collectors all over the country. The business never got big enough to become full-time, and that was all right. Neither of them wanted such a thing. They agreed on that as they did on the house they eventually bought in Pownal, and on the children when it came time to have them. They agreed. When they didn't agree, they compromised. But mostly they agreed. They saw eye-to-eye. How's your marriage? It was good. A good marriage. Donnie was born in 1986--she quit her job to have him, and except for helping with Anderson Coins & Collectibles never held another one--and Petra was born in 1988. By then, Bob Anderson's thick brown hair was thinning at the crown, and by 2002, the year Darcy's Macintosh computer finally swallowed her Rolodex whole, he had a large shiny bald spot back there. He experimented with different ways of combing what was left, which only made the bald spot more conspicuous, in her opinion. And he irritated her by trying two of the magical grow-it-all-back formulas, the kind of stuff sold by shifty-looking hucksters on high cable late at night (Bob Anderson became something of a night owl as he slipped into middle age). He didn't tell her he'd done it, but they shared a bedroom and although she wasn't tall enough to see the top shelf of the closet unaided, she sometimes used a stool to put away his "Saturday shirts," the tees he wore for puttering in the garden. And there they were: a bottle of liquid in the fall of 2004, a bottle of little green gel capsules a year later. She looked the names up on the Internet, and they weren't cheap. Of course magic never is, she remembered thinking. But, irritated or not, she had held her peace about the magic potions, and also about the used Chevy Suburban he for some reason just had to buy in the same year that gas prices really started to climb. As he had held his, she supposed (as she knew, actually), when she had insisted on good summer camps for the kids, an electric guitar for Donnie (he had played for two years, long enough to get surprisingly good, and then had simply stopped), horse rentals for Petra. A successful marriage was a balancing act--that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation--this was a thing Darcy knew. As the Stevie Winwood song said, you had to roll widdit, baby. She rolled with it. So did he. In 2004, Donnie went off to college in Pennsylvania. In 2006, Petra went to Colby, just up the road in Waterville. By then, Darcy Madsen Anderson was forty-six years old. Bob was forty-nine, and still doing Cub Scouts with Stan Morin, a construction contractor who lived half a mile down the road. She thought her balding husband looked rather amusing in the khaki shorts and long brown socks he wore for the monthly Wildlife Hikes, but never said so. His bald spot had become well entrenched; his glasses had become bifocals; his weight had spun up from one-eighty into the two-twenty range. He had become a partner in the accounting firm--Benson and Bacon was now Benson, Bacon & Anderson. They had traded the starter home in Pownal for a more expensive one in Yarmouth. Her breasts, formerly small and firm and high (her best feature, she'd always thought; she'd never wanted to look like a Hooters waitress) were now larger, not so firm, and of course they dropped down when she took off her bra at night--what else could you expect when you were closing in on the half-century mark?--but every so often Bob would still come up behind her and cup them. Every so often there was the pleasant interlude in the upstairs bedroom overlooking their peaceful two-acre patch of land, and if he was a little quick on the draw and often left her unsatisfied, often was not always, and the satisfaction of holding him afterward, feeling his warm man's body as he drowsed away next to her… that satisfaction never failed. It was, she supposed, the satisfaction of knowing they were still together when so many others were not; the satisfaction of knowing that as they approached their Silver Anniversary, the course was still steady as she goes. In 2009, twenty-five years down the road from their I-do's in a small Baptist church that no longer existed (there was now a parking lot where it had stood), Donnie and Petra threw them a surprise party at The Birches on Castle View. There were over fifty guests, champagne (the good stuff), steak tips, a four-tier cake. The honorees danced to Kenny Loggins's "Footloose," just as they had at their wedding. The guests applauded Bob's breakaway move, one she had forgotten until she saw it again, and its still-airy execution gave her a pang. Well it should have; he had grown a paunch to go with the embarrassing bald spot (embarrassing to him, at least), but he was still extremely light on his feet for an accountant. But all of that was just history, the stuff of obituaries, and they were still too young to be thinking of those. It ignored the minutiae of marriage, and such ordinary mysteries, she believed ( firmly believed), were the stuff that validated the partnership. The time she had eaten bad shrimp and vomited all night long, sitting on the edge of the bed with her sweaty hair clinging to the nape of her neck and tears rolling down her flushed cheeks and Bob sitting beside her, patiently holding the basin and then taking it to the bathroom, where he emptied and rinsed it after each ejection--so the smell of it wouldn't make her even sicker, he said. He had been warming up the car to take her to the Emergency Room at six the next morning when the horrible nausea had finally begun to abate. He had called in sick at B, B & A; he'd also canceled a trip to White River so he could sit with her in case the sickness came back. That kind of thing worked both ways; one year's sauce for the goose was next year's sauce for the gander. She had sat with him in the waiting room at St. Stephen's--back in '94 or '95, this had been--waiting for the biopsy results after he had discovered (in the shower) a suspicious lump in his left armpit. The biopsy had been negative, the diagnosis an infected lymph node. The lump had lingered for another month or so, then went away on its own. The sight of a crossword book on his knees glimpsed through the half-open bathroom door as he sat on the commode. The smell of cologne on his cheeks, which meant that the Suburban would be gone from the driveway for a day or two and his side of the bed would be empty for a night or two because he had to straighten out someone's accounting in New Hampshire or Vermont (B, B & A now had clients in all the northern New England states). Sometimes the smell meant a trip to look at someone's coin collection at an estate sale, because not all the numismatic buying and selling that went with their side-business could be accomplished by computer, they both understood that. The sight of his old black suitcase, the one he would never give up no matter how much she nagged, in the front hall. His slippers at the end of the bed, one always tucked into the other. The glass of water on his endtable, with the orange vitamin pill next to it, on that month's issue of Coin & Currency Collecting . How he always said, "More room out than there is in" after belching and "Look out, gas attack!" after he farted. His coat on the first hook in the hall. The reflection of his toothbrush in the mirror (he would still be using the same one he'd had when they got married, Darcy believed, if she didn't regularly replace it). The way he dabbed his lips with his napkin after every second or third bite of food. The careful arrangement of camping gear (always including an extra compass) before he and Stan set out with yet another bunch of nine-year-olds on the hike up Dead Man's Trail--a dangerous and terrifying trek that took them through the woods behind the Golden Grove Mall and came out at Weinberg's Used Car City. The look of his nails, always short and clean. The taste of Dentyne on his breath when they kissed. These things and ten thousand others comprised the secret history of the marriage. She knew he must have his own history of her, everything from the cinnamon-flavored ChapStick she used on her lips in the winter to the smell of her shampoo when he nuzzled the back of her neck (that nuzzle didn't come so often now, but it still came) to the click of her computer at two in the morning on those two or three nights a month when sleep for some reason jilted her. Now it was twenty-seven years, or--she had amused herself figuring this one day using the calculator function on her computer--nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days. Almost a quarter of a million hours and over fourteen million minutes. Of course some of that time he'd been gone on business, and she'd taken a few trips herself (the saddest to be with her parents in Minneapolis after her kid sister Brandolyn had died in a freak accident), but mostly they had been together. Did she know everything about him? Of course not. No more than he knew everything about her--how she sometimes (mostly on rainy days or on those nights when the insomnia was on her) gobbled Butterfingers or Baby Ruths, for instance, eating the candybars even after she no longer wanted them, even after she felt sick to her stomach. Or how she thought the new mailman was sort of cute. There was no knowing everything, but she felt that after twenty-seven years, they knew all the important things. It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk. Until that night in the garage. © 2010 Stephen King Excerpted from Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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