Just After Sunset [Large Print] [Paperback]

Here is Stephen King at his best. The writing, the philosophies of mind behind the stories, and the characters are ever more refined than those in his past works.

Each story takes us away on a different and absolutely unexpected journey, so that the whole collection provides more rich entertainment and thought provoking perspectives than a novel of the same length. The adventurous endeavours, surreal twists, and startling shocks are multiplied, yes, THIRTEEN times!

Happy reading! This is a wonderful book!

At this point, King has five anthologies: Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Everything's Eventual and this one here - Just After Sunset. He also released Four Past Midnight and Different Seasons, two more books with multiple stories. Just After Sunset is, in my humble opinion, the weakest of the bunch. Having said that - the book is great. Of course it is. It's a Stephen King book.

A few years ago I had read Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales, a collection of 14 short stories by Stephen King. For years I had been a big fan of Stephen King's novels, and I had always enjoyed short stories as a genre. Therefore I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Stephen King is not only able to write book-long narrative thrillers, but was equally if not more at home with the constraints that short story imposes on the writer. I saw that King's writing style is in its own right a very compelling tool that he deftly uses to keep readers interested in the story, even there is nothing supernatural or out of this world in the narrative. This sentiment had led me to look forward to The Best American Short Stories 2007 collection for which Stephen King was a guest editor. However, this collection of short stories proved to be a complete disaster - the stories were some of the most boring and unimaginative that I have ever read in the Best American series of books. It had shaken my impression of King as someone who can truly appreciate a well-crafted short story, but I still believed that it bore no relation to his own writing ability. So when I came across this new collection of his own short stories, I was very eager to give it a try. The first red flag came in the introduction. It turns out that King was inspired to write this collection by his experience as the editor of "Best American Short Stories" collection. As I read through the stories my misgivings got confirmed. The stories, by and large, turned out to be the worst of the two worlds: they had all of the discursive, aimless rambling of some of King's longer works, and none of the shocking potency of immediacy of a short story. The characters find themselves in a variety of supernatural and otherwise strange situations, but for the most part we are not sympathetic enough to their plight to care what happens to them in the end. There were a couple of stories that I genuinely enjoyed, but overall this has been a rather disappointing reading experience. I still believe that Stephen King is a great writer of suspenseful stories that reflect on some of our deepest fears and anxieties, but this collection of short stories doesn't do justice to his talent.