- Hardcover: 704 pages
- Publisher: Viking USA; First Edition edition (Sep 9 1991)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670839531
- ISBN-13: 978-0670839537
- Product Dimensions: 24.4 x 16 x 5.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (153 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#429,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Books on Cassette
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
With the "Last Castle Rock Story" King bids a magnificent farewell to the fictional Maine town where much of his previous work has been set. Of grand proportion, the novel ranks with King's best, in both plot and characterization. A new store, Needful Things, opens in town, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, offers seemingly unbeatable (read: Faustian) bargains to Castle Rock's troubled citizens. Among them are Polly Chalmers, lonely seamstress whose arthritis is only one of the physical and psychic pains she must bear; Brian Rusk, the 11-year-old boy whose mother is not precisely attentive; and Alan Pangborn, the new sheriff whose wife and son have recently died. These are only three of the half-dozen or so brilliantly drawn people met in the novel's one-month time span. As the dreams of each strikingly memorable character, major and minor, inexorably turn to nightmare, individuals and soon the community are overwhelmed, while the precise nature of Gaunt's evil thrillingly stays just out of focus. King, like Leland Gaunt, knows just what his customers want. 1.5 million first printing; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The old horrormaster in top form, this time with a demonic dealer in magic and spells selling his wares to the folks of Castle Rock, scene of several King novels including The Dead Zone, Cujo--and how many others? King locates his hokey Our Town in Maine, but as ever it's really Consumerville, USA, with everyone's life festooned with brand names. The cast is huge and largely grotesque, since King--wearing a tremendous cat's-smile--means to close the book on Castle Rock and blow it off the map in one of his best climaxes since Salem's Lot. Editing here is supreme. King braids perhaps a dozen storylines--with hardly a drop of blood spilled for the first 250 or so pages--into ever briefer takes that climax in a hurtling, storm-ripped holocaust whose symphonic energies fill the novel's last third. Perhaps only five characters stand out: Leland Gaunt, a gentlemanly stranger who opens the Needful Things curiosity shop; his first customer, Brian Rusk, 11, who sells his soul for a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card; practical Polly Chalmers, who runs the You Sew `n' Sew shop, welcomes Gaunt with a devil's-food cake, and buys an amulet to relieve her arthritis; her lover, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who buys nothing but is haunted by the driving deaths of his wife and son; and Ace Merrill, coke dealer in a bind, who becomes Gaunt's handydevil and gets to drive Gaunt's Tucker, a car that's faster than radar and uses no gas. As he has for hundreds of years, Gaunt sells citizens whatever pricks and satisfies their inmost desires. But the price dehumanizes them, and soon all the townsfolk vent their barest aggressions on each other with cleaver, knife, and gun: Gaunt even opens a sideline of automatic weapons. By novel's end, the whole town is on a hysterical, psychotic mass rampage that floods morgue and hospital with the delimbed and obliterated. Then comes the big bang. Mmmmmmmmmmmm! Leland King's glee, or Steven Gaunt's, or rather--well, the author's--as he rubs his palms over his let's-blow-'em-away superclimax is wonderfully catching. (Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for Fall) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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First Sentence
In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is definately a needful thing!,
By
This review is from: Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story (Mass Market Paperback)
There are no words that I can think of that can begin to describe Needful Things. This book is one of the Kings best. When it comes to books lilke this Stephan really is the King. The characters in this book walk along side each other in a way that only the King could master. All the characters sitautions intertwine with eachother to create a palm sweating experience that stays in themost dark places in our mind. And whats really freaky about it that its happening in a modern small town, much like the ones we all know about, so we realize that the same thing could happen to our town. So is this book your Needful Thing? Just ask Leland Gaunt. He'd know for sure.
5.0 out of 5 stars
You NEED to read this THING,
By barbre (Colorado) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story (Mass Market Paperback)
I've only read a few Stephen King novels, and I'm glad I read this one. It is exceptional in its story telling, and characteriszations. I consider it the second best novel I've read by this author (the best being "The Stand").
4.0 out of 5 stars
Massive, perceptive and strongly allegorical,
This review is from: Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story (Mass Market Paperback)
Leland Gaunt might be an incarnation of evil, but that doesn't make him a one-note character. The dynamic between Gaunt and Castle Rock's inhabitants is in a constant state of evolution: sometimes Gaunt is the focal point around which the other characters gravitate, a spider capturing more and more victims in its numbing, deadly web; at other moments, he is at the periphery, an active observer of his creation like an inferior demiurge who relishes in pain and mayhem - the prices he commands for the 'needful things' he sells is much more spiritual than material. The most interesting aspects of the novel are related to religion and the sacred. Gaunt takes the guise of Good as he seemingly brings wonder to people who didn't have any, and he appears to give his clients access to the sacred while violently cutting them from the profane world; but this is less a religious experience than a pernicious illusion devised by a dark magician. The book's structure is such that its length poses no problem to the reader - it is quite the opposite. King delays the inevitable Pangborn-Gaunt confrontation as much as he can, and the pace quickens in the novel's second half. 'Needful Things' lends itself to a plethora of allegorical readings, including Gaunt as the guru of a dangerous sect; as a druglord; as an author of macabre fiction (his clients need to 'believe' his stories as much as readers do and they soon become addicted to his 'work'). This is not an easy novel, but one that inquisitive readers should look for.
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