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Stephen King’s, Just After Sunset, 2008, provides the
reader an excellent collection of thirteen short stories – a good number for a
horror book. It also
contains a DVD that graphically presents the short story N. The stories
cover ghosts, psychological horror, the criminally insane, as well as the
supernatural. He even includes a couple of post-9/11 stories.
The Things They Left
Behind tells the story of a survivor
of the World Trade Center attack.
Actually Mr. Staley survived because he called in sick the day of the
attack to play in Central Park. He
worked for an insurance agency on the hundred and tenth floor. In August 2002, suddenly items belong
to his dead coworkers appear in his apartment. Items, he immediately recognized as belonging to his
coworkers – a picture cube, a pair of sunglasses, a corporate baseball bat, and
a farting cushion. All the items
owned unique stories that belonged to the dead. At first I wasn’t sure I could finish the story. I think we all still have some raw
nerve endings regarding that day. But King ends the story well, and makes it
worth hanging in there. I think
you will enjoy it.
Willa reports the story of train wreck survivors, but are
they survivors or are they ghosts.
Willa and David were taking Amtrak to San Francisco only to have it run
off the tracks in Wyoming. They are stranded at the station with the other
survivors, and waiting for the next train. Willa and David are engaged. Willa
gets bored and wanders down the tracks to a Honky Tonk Saloon where Tony
Villanueva and the Derailers are playing. Will they ever get married or are
they destined to spend eternity in a Honky Tonk saloon? Read it and find out.
Stephen King spends his
winters in Sarasota, Florida, and several of the stories take place in
Florida. One of those, A Very
Tight Place, pits a developer, Tim Grunwald, and a stock investor, Curtis
Johnson against each other. At
stake is a little strip of land on Turtle Island in Charlotte County. Grunwald wants to put condos on it, and
Johnson wants it to stay natural.
Both claim to have purchased the property from a dying man, and the deed
remains locked up in court. This story takes advantage of the horror of the
grotesque, and things that make us go yuck! All I will say about it is that the story involves a
portable toilet. The plastic blue ones used on construction sites. In Stephen
King’s own words the story came to him while using one, and thinking of Edgar
Allen Poe.
I think you will enjoy these
thirteen stories of the macabre. I
did not tell you about the supernatural cat, the serial killer, or the strange
contagious case of obsessive compulsion disorder. You will need to read the book to find out about these and
more.
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