Christine

Christine
by Stephen King

While riding home from work with his friend Dennis, nerdy teen Arnold "Arnie" Cunningham spots a dilapidated red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury parked in front of a house. Arnie makes Dennis stop so he can examine the car, despite Dennis' attempts to talk Arnie out of it. The car's owner, Roland D. LeBay, an elderly gentleman wearing a back supporter, sells the car—named "Christine"—to Arnie for $250. While waiting for Arnie to finish the paperwork, Dennis sits inside Christine. He has a vision of the car and the surroundings as they were 20 years ago, when the car was new. Frightened, Dennis gets out of Christine, deciding he dislikes Arnie's new car.

Arnie brings Christine to a do-it-yourself auto repair facility run by Will Darnell, who is suspected of using the garage as a front for illicit operations. As Arnie restores the automobile he becomes withdrawn, humorless and cynical, yet more confident and self-assured. Dennis is puzzled by the changes in both his friend and Christine; the repair work proceeds haphazardly and the more extensive repairs do not appear to be done by Arnie. Arnie's appearance improves in tandem with Christine's. When LeBay dies, Dennis meets his younger brother, George, who reveals Roland's history of violent behavior. George also reveals that LeBay's small daughter choked to death on a hamburger in the back seat of the car, LeBay's wife was so traumatized that she apparently committed suicide in its front seat by carbon monoxide poisoning. As time passes, Dennis observes that Arnie is taking on many of LeBay's personality traits. He also notices that Arnie has become close to Darnell, even acting as a courier in Darnell's interstate smuggling operations.

The Body

The Body
by Stephen King

The Body is a novella by American writer Stephen King, originally published in his 1982 collection Different Seasons and adapted into the 1986 film Stand by Me. Some changes were made to the plot of the film, including changing the setting date from 1960 to 1959 and the location of Castle Rock from Maine to Oregon.

The story takes place during the summer of 1960 in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. After a boy from Chamberlain, Maine, named Ray Brower disappears and is presumed dead, Gordie Lachance and his three friends, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio set out to find his body after telling their parents they will be camping out. During the course of their journey, the boys, who all come from abusive, dysfunctional families, come to grips with some of the harsh truths of growing up in a small factory town that does not seem to offer them much in the way of a future.

In comparison to King's prior works, the narrative of The Body is complicated in that it is told in first person point of view by the now adult Gordon Lachance. Most of the story is a straight retrospective of what happened, but comments, or entire chapters that relate to the present time, are interspersed throughout. Although he is only 12 at the time of the story, Gordie's favorite diversion is writing and storytelling. During the narrative, he tells stories to his friends, and two stories are presented in the text as short stories by Gordon Lachance, complete with attribution to the magazines in which they were published.

Apt Pupil

Apt Pupil 
by Stephen King

Apt Pupil consists of 29 chapters, many of which are headed by a month. Set in a fictional suburb of southern California called "Santo Donato", the story unfolds over a period of about four years, with most of the action taking place during the first year and the last months. It is the only novella in Different Seasons to be narrated in the third person.

Kurt Dussander remembers using a "bank in the State of Maine" to purchase stocks under an assumed name. He goes on to say that the banker who bought them for Dussander went to jail for murdering his wife a year after he purchased them. He even references Andy Dufresne by name — he remembers the name because "it sounds a little like mine." Andy Dufresne is a central character in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the novella preceding Apt Pupil in Different Seasons.

When confronting Todd about his murders, Dussander mentions a serial killer named "Springheel Jack". This killer is the focus of "Strawberry Spring", a short story published in the King collection Night Shift (1978).

The guidance counselor Ed French mentions his hotel room is number 217, the same as the famous Overlook Hotel room in The Shining. Furthermore, in The Shining, Jack Torrance is working on a novel that includes a character named Denker, the same name as Dussander's alter ego. This has led some fans to speculate that Apt Pupil is Torrance's novel.[1] In the afterword to Different Seasons, King mentions having written Apt Pupil immediately after The Shining

Psycho

Psycho
by Robert Bloch

Norman Bates is a middle-aged bachelor who is dominated by his mother, a mean-tempered, puritanical old woman who forbids him to have a life outside of her. They run a small motel together in the town of Fairvale, but business has floundered since the state relocated the highway. In the middle of a heated argument between them, a customer arrives, a young woman named Mary Crane.

In November 1957 — two years before Psycho was first published — Ed Gein was arrested in his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin for the murders of two women. When police searched his home, they found furniture, silverware, and even clothing made of human skin and body parts. Psychiatrists examining him theorized that he was trying to make a "woman suit" to wear so he could pretend to be his dead mother, whom neighbors described as a puritan who dominated her son.

At the time of Gein's arrest, Bloch was living 35 miles (56 km) away from Plainfield in Weyauwega. Though Bloch did not look into the details of the Gein case at that time, it gave him an idea, and he began writing with "the notion that the man next door may be a monster unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life." Bloch was surprised years later when he "discovered how closely the imaginary character I'd created resembled the real Ed Gein both in overt act and apparent motivation."

The Lower River

The Lower River
by Paul Theroux

With his new novel, Paul Theroux returns to the Africa of Dark Star Safari and his early novels; but The Lower River, the story of an American who goes back to Africa where he was once happy, is in many ways even more remarkable.

Ellis Hock is a man so out of luck that even his family name is a mistake. His Italian grandfather, who set up a tailor's shop in a small town in Massachusetts, once tried to make his name more suitably American by changing it from Falcone to Hawk. But he was misunderstood, and the family had to live with Hock for ever after. The Lower River is all about being misunderstood: madly, wildly and very nearly fatally.

The sad yet bitterly funny opening chapters are a beautifully taut portrait of a man at the end of his tether. After a lifetime on duty behind the counter of Hock's Menswear – which, like its owner, is out of tune with the times – Ellis Hock's life is one day ruined. His wife discovers a cache of love-letters on his phone and decides he is a wild philanderer, when he is really just a serial emailer. Hock's private life has been not erotic but merely electronic, and exists only in the affectionate text messages he has exchanged with kindly wives of his customers over the years.

When his wife divorces him and his daughter claims her share of his money and turns her back on him, Ellis Hock flees Boston for the only place in his life where he once knew who he was: the obscure village of Malabo, in the far south of Malawi.

Malabo, as he remembers it, in what was then Nyasaland before independence, was a desolate place: malarial, appallingly hot, poor, proud, dangerous, superstitious, and infested with snakes. Fresh out of college with a biology degree, Hock went there as a young Peace Corps teacher. He helped to build a school, learnt the Sena language and fell in love with Gala, a local woman.

Like most of Hock's dreams, it did not end well. Gala was engaged to a villager and to lose her virginity would mean that her fiancé would disown her. Yet in Malabo, Hock had been in his element. He doubled his volunteer stint from two years to four, and was renowned in the village as the man who was not afraid of snakes. His reluctant return to the States – because his father was dying – has haunted him ever since.

Theroux's account of a young man's first enchanted experience of Africa, with its evident autobiographical underpinnings, rings exactly right. It is a masterly, moving portrait of how Africa ensnares and enchants and plays merry hell with sentimentalities.

Hock, who remembers so lovingly the country of Nyasaland, is utterly unprepared for what he finds there 40 years on. What he wants is to go back to "a simpler, older world", where he was called, with respect and affection, "the mzungu at Malabo". What he gets is the new Malawi, where a disenchanted official at the American consulate tells him that "everyone wants a ticket out". And where, when he arrives in Malabo, he finds the school, the store and the spirit of the villagers wrecked beyond repair.

Cujo

Cujo
by Stephen King

Cujo's name was based on the nom de guerre of Willie Wolfe, one of the men responsible for orchestrating Patty Hearst's kidnapping and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army. Stephen King discusses Cujo in On Writing, referring to it as a novel he "barely remembers writing at all". The book was written during a period when King was drinking heavily. Somewhat wistfully, King goes on to say that he likes the book and that he wishes he could remember enjoying the good parts as he put them down on the page.

The story takes place in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, the setting of numerous King works, and revolves around two local families. The narrative is interspersed with vignettes from the seemingly mundane lives of various other residents. There are no chapter headings, but rather breaks in between passages, which indicate when the narration switches to a different point of view.

The principal characters are the Trenton and the Camber families. The middle-class Trentons have recently moved to Castle Rock from New York, bringing with them their four-year-old son, Tad. Father Vic discovers that his wife Donna has recently concluded an affair. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's fledgling advertising agency is failing, and he is forced to travel out of town, leaving Tad and Donna at home. The blue-collar Cambers are longtime residents; Joe is a shade-tree mechanic who dominates and abuses his wife Charity and their ten-year-old son Brett. Charity wins a $5,000 lottery prize, and uses the proceeds to inveigle Joe into allowing her to take Brett on a trip to visit Charity's sister, Holly, in Connecticut. Joe acquiesces, secretly planning to use the time to take a pleasure trip to Boston.

Cujo, the Cambers' large, good-natured St. Bernard, chases a wild rabbit in the fields around their house and inserts his head in the entrance to a small limestone cave, where a rabid bat bites him on the nose and turns him mad. Soon after Charity and Brett leave town, Cujo attacks and kills their alcoholic neighbor, Gary Pervier. When Joe calls on Gary, Cujo also kills him.

Donna, home alone with Tad, takes their failing Ford Pinto to the Cambers' for repairs. The car breaks down in Camber's dooryard and as Donna attempts to find Joe, Cujo appears and is ready to pounce. She climbs back in the car and Cujo starts to attack. Donna and Tad are trapped in their vehicle, the interior of which becomes increasingly hot in the sun. During one escape attempt, Donna is bitten in the stomach and leg, but manages to survive and escape back into the car. She plans to run for the Cambers' home, but abandons the idea due to her fears that the door will be locked and she will be subsequently killed by Cujo, leaving her son alone.

Vic returns to Castle Rock after several failed attempts to contact Donna and learns from the police that Steve Kemp, the man with whom Donna was having an affair, is suspected of ransacking his home and possibly kidnapping Donna and Tad. In an effort to explore all leads, the state police send Castle Rock Sheriff George Bannerman out to the Cambers' house, but Cujo attacks and kills him. Donna, after witnessing the attack and realizing Tad is in danger of dying of dehydration, battles Cujo and kills him. Vic arrives on the scene with the authorities soon after, but Tad has already died from exposure. Donna is rushed to the hospital, and Cujo's head is removed for a biopsy prior to cremation of his remains.

The novel ends several months later with both the Trenton and Camber families trying to go on with their lives: Donna has completed her treatment for rabies, her marriage with Vic has survived, and Charity gives Brett a new, vaccinated puppy named Willie. A postscript reminds the reader that Cujo was a good dog who always tried to keep his owners happy, but the ravage of rabies drove him to violence.

"Guns, Gentlemen"

"Guns, Gentlemen"
by Cornell Woolrich

"Guns, Gentlemen" was first published in Argosy in the December 18 issue of 1937. According to Francis Nevins it was the last story that Woolrich published that year with Argosy. It was submitted by Woolrich to the magazine under the title "Twice-Trod Path" and was later published again in a collection of stories under a third title, "The Lamp of Memory."

The story centers around Stephen Botiller, the son of a wealthy family with a historic and heroic past. Stephen is obsessed by a portrait in his home of his great-grand uncle, who caries the same name as Stephen and died abroad under strange and mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty-five.
Now twenty-five himself and a college graduate, the current day Stephen finds himself traveling overseas and, in a strangely familiar surrounding, fighting a duel with a local nobleman over the affections of a beautiful woman.

It's a rare story where Woolrich deals with the subject of death in such a gentle, romantic manner.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America's best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He's often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Woolrich is considered the godfather of film noir and is often referred to as the Edgar Allen Poe of the 20th century, writing well over 250 works including novels, novelettes, novellas and short stories.

Roadwork

Roadwork
by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

Roadwork is a novel by Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, which is no longer in print. However, three of the four novels in that collection - Roadwork, The Long Walk, and The Running Man - have since been reprinted as standalone titles.

The story takes place in an unnamed Midwestern city in 1973–1974. Grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, a man is driven to mental instability when he learns that both his home and his workplace will be demolished to make way for an extension to an interstate highway.

The Long Walk

The Long Walk
by Stephen King (As Richard Bachman)

The Long Walk is a dystopian novel by Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, and has seen several reprints since, as both paperback and hardback. Set in a dystopian present, the plot revolves around the contestants of a grueling walking contest, held annually by a totalitarian version of the United States of America. In 2000, the American Library Association listed The Long Walk as one of the 100 best books for teenage readers published between 1966 and 2000. According to Stephen King, it is the first novel he wrote, begun eight years before his novel Carrie was published in 1974, when he was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966–1967.

Blood Secrets

Blood Secrets
by Craig Jones

Half of a terrific modern gothic is better than none, so there'll be a receptive audience for this leanly promising suspense debut--which does just dandily until it has to start explaining itself, revealing, hysterically, its flimsy foundation. On page one, narrator Irene Rutledge Mattison is on trial for murder--we're not told whom she has killed--and the rest of the book is a 20-year flashback (""I'm going to tell you about the murder itself and the circumstances leading up to it""). Knowing Irene is headed for murder, we're primed to read tension into her initially low-key, crisply told story: her days as a star grad student; her attraction to tall, ugly, ""weird"" history major Frank Mattison; his obsessive reticence about the large, backwoodsy family he has cut himself off from. irene and Frank marry, despite frowns from Irene's father and friends, maintaining separate teaching careers even when baby Regina arrives--a bit of a bad seed spoiled by adored father Frank, just barely tolerated by Irene. But as Regina hits puberty, the roles change, and Frank's over-protective ways are driving Regina up the wall. likewise Irene, who worries about Frank's erratic behavior, especially when Frank's much older, estranged sister drops hints about a halfwit sister of Frank's--also named Regina--who long ago committed suicide, perhaps because of Frank's incestuous interest. Is Frank similarly inclined toward daughter Regina? Irene's in a panic, determined to protect Regina, still in love with Frank. There's a Rosemary's Baby-ish frisson when you realize before Irene does just who the danger to Regina is, but the long, feverish explanation/showdown that follows--revealing a vast incest-arama cult in Frank's family--is potboiler-silly-sensational, undermining the believability of all that has gone before. This dodo denouement doesn't come till the end, however, so chill-hungry readers can enjoy the nicely knotted domestic tension and aroma of undefined evil that first-novelist Jones fabricates so well till the moment of reckoning catches him up short.

The Stand

The Stand
by Stephen King

The Stand is a post-apocalyptic horror/fantasy novel by American author Stephen King. It expands upon the scenario of his earlier short story, "Night Surf". The novel was originally published in 1978 and was later re-released in 1990 as The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition; King restored some text originally cut for brevity, added and revised sections, changed the setting of the story from 1980 (which in turn was changed to 1984 for the original paperback release in 1980) to 1990, and updated a few pop culture references accordingly. The Stand was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1979, and was adapted into both a television miniseries for ABC and a graphic novel published by Marvel Comics. It marks the first appearance of Randall Flagg, King's recurring antagonist, whom King would bring back many times in his later writings.

"The Call of Cthulhu"

"The Call of Cthulhu"
by H.P. Lovecraft

"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928.

In the text, narrator Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his granduncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died suddenly in "the winter of 1926–27" after being "jostled by a nautical-looking negro".

The first chapter, The Horror in Clay, concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the papers, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings". The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based the work on his delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror". Wilcox frequently refers to Cthulhu and R'lyeh. Lovecraft makes Wilcox's residence in the story the real Providence structure the Fleur-de-Lys Studios.

Angell also discovers reports of "outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world (in New York City, "hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dons white robes to await a "glorious fulfillment").

The second chapter, The Tale of Inspector Legrasse, discusses the first time the Professor had heard the word "Cthulhu" and seen a similar image. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police official named John Raymond Legrasse asked the assembled antiquarians to identify a statuette composed of an unidentifiable greenish-black stone, "captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting". The idol resembles the Wilcox sculpture, and represented a "...thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters".

On November 1, 1907, Legrasse had led a party of policemen in search of several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police found the victims' "oddly marred" bodies used in a ritual in which almost 100 men—all of a "very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type"—were "braying, bellowing, and writhing" and repeatedly chanting the phrase, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn". After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogated the prisoners and learned "the central idea of their loathsome faith": "They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men...and...formed a cult which had never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.[10]

The prisoners identified the statuette as "great Cthulhu", and translated the chanted phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming". One particularly talkative cultist, known as "old Castro", named the centre of the cult as Irem, the City of Pillars, in Arabia, and referred to the Necronomicon: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die".

One of the academics present at the meeting, William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, states that on an 1860 expedition "high up on the West Greenland coast" he had encountered "a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness." Webb claimed that the Greenland cult had both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish. Thurston, the narrator, reflects that "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were.".

In the third chapter, The Madness from the Sea, Thurston discovers an article dated April 18, 1925, from the Sydney Bulletin, an Australian newspaper. The article reported the discovery of a derelict ship in the Pacific Ocean with only one survivor—Norwegian sailor Gustaf Johansen, second mate on the schooner Emma, which sailed from Auckland, New Zealand. On March 22, the Emma apparently encountered a heavily armed yacht, the Alert, crewed by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" from Dunedin, New Zealand. Despite being attacked by the Alert without provocation, the crew of the Emma were able to kill the opposing crew, but lost their own ship in the battle. Commandeering the Alert, the surviving crew sailed on and the following day discovered an island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of 47°9′S 126°43′W—despite there being no charted islands in the area. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island, but Johansen was apparently "queerly reticent" about the circumstances of their death.

Thurston travels to New Zealand and then Australia, where at the Australian Museum he views a statue retrieved from the Alert with a "cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal". Travelling to Oslo, Norway, Thurston learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with a manuscript written by her late husband that reveals the final fate of the crew of the Emma.

The uncharted island was described as "a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh". The crew also struggle to comprehend the non-Euclidian geometry of the city. When the sailors accidentally open a "monstrously carven portal", they release Cthulhu: "It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight".

Johansen describes Cthulhu as "a mountain [who] walked or stumbled..." and flees with the crew, almost all of whom die. Johansen and one crewmate return to the yacht and set sail, but note with horror that Cthulhu has entered the water to pursue the vessel. Johansen turns the Alert and rams the creature's head, which bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish"- only to immediately begin reforming". The Alert escapes, with Johansen's fellow crewmate having gone insane and dying soon afterwards.

After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target, thinking, "I know too much, and the cult still lives".

The Ax

The Ax
by Donald E. Westlake

Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company when the cost-cutting ax falls, and he is laid off. Eighteen months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search -- with agonizing care, Devore finds the seven men in the surrounding area who could take the job that rightfully should be his, and systematically kills them. Transforming himself from mild-mannered middle manager to ruthless murderer, he discovers skills ne never knew ne had -- and that come to him far too easily.

'Salem's Lot

'Salem's Lot
by Stephen King

'Salem's Lot is a 1975 horror fiction novel written by the American author Stephen King. It was his second published novel. The story involves a writer named Ben Mears who returns to the town where he lived as a boy between the ages of 9 through 13 (Jerusalem's Lot, or 'Salem's Lot for short) in Maine to discover that the residents are all becoming vampires. The town would be a location that would be revisited in the short stories "Jerusalem's Lot" and "One for the Road", both from King's 1978 short story collection Night Shift. The novel was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1976. In 1987, it was nominated for the Locus Award as the All-Time Best Fantasy Novel.

The title King originally chose for his book was Second Coming, but he later decided on Jerusalem's Lot. King stated the reason being that his wife, novelist Tabitha King, thought the original title sounded too much like a "bad sex story". King's publishers then shortened it to the current title, thinking the author's choice sounded too religious. 'Salem's Lot has been adapted into a television mini-series twice, first in 1979 and then in 2004. It was also adapted by the BBC as a seven part radio play in 1995.

In two separate interviews, King said that of all his books,  '​Salem's Lot was his favorite. In his June 1983 Playboy interview, the interviewer mentioned that because it was his favorite, King was planning a sequel, but he has more recently said on his website that since The Dark Tower series already picked up the story in the novels Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah, he felt there was no longer a need for one. In 1987 he told Phil Konstantin in The Highway Patrolman magazine: "In a way it is my favorite story, mostly because of what it says about small towns. They are kind of a dying organism right now. The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"

"The Beautiful Stranger"

"The Beautiful Stranger" 
by Shirley Jackson

In “The Beautiful Stranger,” Margaret, a housewife unhappy in her marriage, retrieves her husband at the train station, despising “the sight of his hands on the wheel” as they drive home. It’s never clear what’s gone wrong between them; we know only that Margaret considered his business trip “a good time to get things straight” and to “try to get a hold of myself again.” Suddenly, though, when they get home, Margaret realizes that the man she’s picked up is not the same one she dropped off. Her husband has been replaced by a double. The two of them never raise the subject, though Margaret believes they are both in collusion about the switch, and the narrative, streamed through her narrow perspective, denies us an answer about the “stranger’s” true identity. Is Margaret suffering from Capgras delusion? Or has she simply chosen, for her own happiness, to believe her husband is someone else? Is he truly another man? Are suburban husbands really that indistinguishable?

The Shining

The Shining
by Stephen King

The Shining is a horror novel by American author Stephen King. Published in 1977, it is King's third published novel and first hardback bestseller, and the success of the book firmly established King as a preeminent author in the horror genre. The setting and characters are influenced by King's personal experiences, including both his visit to The Stanley Hotel in 1974 and his recovery from alcoholism. The novel was followed by a sequel, Doctor Sleep, published in 2013.

The Shining centers on the life of Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a position as the off-season caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies. His family accompanies him on this job, including his young son Danny, who possesses "the shining," an array of psychic abilities that allow Danny to see the horrific past of the hotel. Soon, after a winter storm leaves them snowbound, the supernatural forces inhabiting the hotel influence Jack's sanity, leaving his wife and son in incredible danger.

The Shining was adapted into a feature film in 1980 by director Stanley Kubrick, with a screenplay co-written with Diane Johnson, which is regarded by some as one of the greatest films of all time. King himself was disappointed with the film, stating it had abandoned several of his book's major themes. The Shining was later adapted into a television mini-series in 1997, closely monitored by King to ensure it followed the book. King wrote the series himself and was reportedly unable to criticize the Kubrick version due to his contract.

Carrie

Carrie
by Stephen King
Second Reading


Carrie is an American epistolary novel and author Stephen King's first published novel, released on April 5, 1974, with an approximate first print-run of 30,000 copies. Set in the then-future year of 1979, it revolves around the eponymous Carrietta N. "Carrie" White, a shy high school girl who uses her newly discovered telekinetic powers to exact revenge on those who torment her — in the process, causing one of the worst local disasters in American history. King has commented that he finds the work to be "raw" and "with a surprising power to hurt and horrify." It is one of the most frequently banned books in United States schools. Much of the book is written in an epistolary structure, using newspaper clippings, magazine articles, letters, and excerpts from books to tell how Carrie destroyed the fictional town of Chamberlain, Maine while exacting revenge on her bullying classmates.

Several adaptations of Carrie have been released, including a 1976 feature film, a 1988 Broadway musical, a 1999 feature film sequel, a 2002 television movie, and a 2013 feature film remake.

The book is dedicated to King's wife Tabitha: "This is for Tabby, who got me into it – and then bailed me out of it."

King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone mentions the book in connection with a fire at another high school prom.

The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone
by Stephen King

 The Dead Zone is a horror novel by Stephen King published in 1979. It concerns Johnny Smith, who is injured in an accident and enters a coma for nearly five years. When he emerges, he can see horrifying secrets but cannot identify all the details in his "dead zone", an area of his brain that suffered permanent damage as the result of his accident. Much of the novel is played out against the historical backdrop of the 1970s. The story might be based on self-proclaimed "psychic" Peter Hurkos, who received a head injury in a fall from a ladder, and afterward claimed to be able to know things about people by touching objects that belonged to them, (psychometry). The Dead Zone was nominated for the Locus Award in 1980.

The book is dedicated to King's son, Owen.

The Celtic Ring

The Celtic Ring
by Bjorn Larsson


On a dark night in the Danish harbor of Dragor, Ulf receives a log-book from a lone sailor who then disappears. The log's bizarre records lead Ulf and his friend, Torben, into a dangerous winter crossing of the North Sea toward Scotland. As they pass through the Caledonian Canal, a lock-gate bursts open, nearly killing them. Fear and paranoia begin to take hold as they come to suspect that someone wants them dead. And then they notice the black fishing boat trailing close in their wake. Before long, Ulf and Torben find themselves at odds with arms smugglers, a Druidic cult, and some of the world's most dangerous waters. First published in Sweden, Bjorn Larsson's bestselling thriller has been compared by critics to Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands. Larsson combines a mastery of detailed sailing language with an intriguing and momentous plot which culminates in a macabre denouement on an ancient Celtic site.

A Fine Dark Line

A Fine Dark Line
by Joe R. Lansdale

It is the summer of 1958 in Dewmont, Texas, a town the great American postwar boom passed by. The kids listen idly to rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like molasses... For thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchell, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of the mysterious long-ago demise of two very different young women. In his quest to unravel the truth about their tragic fates, Stanley finds a protector in Buster Lighthorse Smith, a black, retired Indian-reservation cop and a sage on the finer points of Sherlock Holmes, the blues, and life's faded dreams. But not every buried thing stays dead. And on one terrifying night of rushing creek water and thundering rain, an arcane, murderous force will rise from the past to threaten the boy in a harrowing rite of passage... Vintage Lansdale, A Fine Dark Line brims with exquisite suspense, powerful characterizations, and the vibrant evocation of a lost time.