Full Dark, No Stars

368 sidor

På English

Publicerades 1 januari 2010 av Charles Scribner's Sons.

ISBN:: 978-1-4391-9256-6
Goodreads:: 44726517

"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger..." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922." the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but …

"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger..." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922." the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitely ends a good marriage.

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form. (front flap)

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Björn recenserade Full Dark, No Stars av Stephen King

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Full review, three stars

Ah yes, Stephen King, the horror writer who supposedly has mellowed a bit in his old age and tried to become a "proper" writer who doesn't need monsters and ghosts to tell a story. And sure enough, of the four stories in Full Dark, No Stars, only one has any real supernatural element (though the narrators might beg to differ). But that doesn't mean this is King the good-natured baseball fan who wrote Stand By Me; the old guy is firmly in horror mode, though the focus is more clearly on the evil that men do.

Make no mistake, this is a violent, dark piece of work. The one story that does rely on the supernatural - "Fair Extension", a rather brilliant little twist on the old sell-your-soul-to-the-Devil plot - is the only one where King lets loose his sense of humour, and even then, it's …

Full review, three stars

Ah yes, Stephen King, the horror writer who supposedly has mellowed a bit in his old age and tried to become a "proper" writer who doesn't need monsters and ghosts to tell a story. And sure enough, of the four stories in Full Dark, No Stars, only one has any real supernatural element (though the narrators might beg to differ). But that doesn't mean this is King the good-natured baseball fan who wrote Stand By Me; the old guy is firmly in horror mode, though the focus is more clearly on the evil that men do.

Make no mistake, this is a violent, dark piece of work. The one story that does rely on the supernatural - "Fair Extension", a rather brilliant little twist on the old sell-your-soul-to-the-Devil plot - is the only one where King lets loose his sense of humour, and even then, it's just to hammer home the idea that in the early 21st century of religious fanatism, war as entertainment and celebrity worship, human souls have become so worthless that even Satan prefers cash. The rest of the stories are (to varying degrees of success) depressingly realistic; spousal abuse, rape, murder - and, saddest of all, our tendency to not want to see it. "1922" is probably the most successful story, a mixture of Steinbeck and Poe set in rural Nebraska in the years before the great depression, where a local farmer decides to murder his wife and make his son a co-conspirator. Which would have worked out fine, if not for the rats...

At the same time, despite all the despair and violence, it's not a Richard Bachman book. That's the name King uses when he just wants to get brutal. Here he has a point to make, a question he tackles from different angles in all four stories and is about as subtle about as King can be: the ripple effects of violence, the responsibilities not only of those who perpetrate it but those who let it happen - who don't see, who don't want to see, who willingly or not help to cover it up because it's just easier to live with yourself that way. The result, like I said, varies; especially "Big Driver", King's take on the rape-revenge story, ends up about as blunt and just a tiny bit too pleased with itself as most rape stories written by men. But overall it's a fine outing for the increasingly just-adequate King; a book that doesn't just say there are dark sides to humanity, but actually lets supposedly good people explore them.