"Is horror all you write?" is the second most frequent question
Stephen King encounters,* he tells us in the Afterword to this
superlative quartet of novels. Although he is by now a world-class grand master of the horrific, he resists entombment in that genre. That he
can transcend horror is proved triumphantly in these four works. At the
same time, nobody in search of the utterly distinctive King brand of
driving narrative, graphically rendered scene and character, and
stamp-on-the-clinging-fingers cliffhanger plot will go away unsatisfied. Consider the four:
Hope Springs Eternal
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption – the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since
The Count of Monte Cristo.
Summer of Corruption
Apt Pupil – a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose
hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual
parasitism.
Fall from Innocence
The Body – four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine
woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of
their own mortality.
A Winter's Tale
The Breathing Method – a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.
If these tales turn out to have an interlacing of nightmarish elements
after all, the reason is not the occult, but twentieth-century
humanity's apparent determination to return to the Dark Ages, a time for which Stephen King is obviously the ideal bard.
*Most frequent question: "Where do you get your ideas?"
