Just After Sunset: Stories

Stephen King

Nov 2008 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

A stunning collection from international bestseller Stephen King that displays his phenomenally broad readership (stories published in The New Yorker, Playboy, and McSweeney’s and including the 25,000 word story “Gingerbread Girl” published in Esquire).

Stephen King—who has written more than fifty books, dozens of number one New York Times bestsellers, and many unforgettable movies—delivers an astonishing collection of short stories, his first since Everything’s Eventual six years ago. As guest editor of the bestselling Best American Short Stories 2007, King spent over a year reading hundreds of stories. His renewed passion for the form is evident on every page of Just After Sunset. The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications.

Who but Stephen King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating—and then terrifying—journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl” is a riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable—and resourceful—as Audrey Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark. In “Ayana,” a blind girl works a miracle with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear apart at any moment. In one of the longer stories here, “N.,” which recently broke new ground when it was adapted as a graphic digital entertainment, a psychiatric patient’s irrational thinking might create an apocalyptic threat in the Maine countryside...or keep the world from falling victim to it.

Just After Sunset—call it dusk, call it twilight, it’s a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It’s the perfect time for Stephen King.

Ratings and reviews

Short stories by Stephen King. I've always shied away from collections of short stories. They are "teasers", just too short to be satisfying. I love big, thick novels in hard cover. I love the smell of a new hardback King novel, first printing, the spine cracking and anticipation at high alert. Having read every old and new King novel, many of his newly re-released work from the 70s 80s and 90s...even early 2000s, I finally capitulated and bought this book and loved it. kls

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.

Want to know what makes a wonderful short story? Read "Harvey's Dream" in this collection. In just 14 pages, this master story-teller gives us drama, builds suspense, and provides a whammy of an ending -- all of this centered on an elderly man sitting at the kitchen table in the morning and telling his wife about the dream he had the previous night.

About the author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.