The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Shirley Jackson Award 2015.
A master storyteller at his best — the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.
Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five
years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer
of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first
time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He
introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for
writing it.
There are thrilling connections between stories;
themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently
if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past.
“Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving
the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several
stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes
and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone
discovers that he has supernatural powers — the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune”
who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the
sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In
“Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after
the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact
they can win.
Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these
stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader — “I
made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them,
but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”
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Stephen King
Stephen King’s name is synonymous with horror, suspense, and the kind of storytelling that lingers long after the final page is turned. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1947, his love for the macabre began early, drawing inspiration from his small-town upbringing and the creeping unease that would define much of his work. From his first short stories published in magazines to the blockbuster novels that changed the literary landscape, King's journey from aspiring writer to a cultural phenomenon is nothing short of legendary.
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