A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense.

Sometimes it shouts in your face.”Ī collection of page-turning narratives for those who prefer the prolific tale spinner at his pulpiest.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Explains King in his “Afterword,” “From the start…I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. 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). “A Good Marriage,” is, of course, a title dripping with irony, with a wife of more than 25 years discovering devastating secrets-a secret life! even a dual identity!-about her boringly predictable husband. “Fair Extension,” the shortest, is a fable about a terminal cancer patient who experiences a miraculous remission following a transaction with the devilish Mr. 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.

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. 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.

None of the narratives have previously been published, and all are apparently recent.

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.

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