Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

The #1 New York Times bestseller—four chilling novellas from Stephen King that will “grab you and not let go” (The Washington Post). One Past Midnight: “The Langoliers” takes a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston into a most unfriendly sky. Only eleven passengers survive, but landing in an eerily empty world makes them wish they hadn’t. Because something’s waiting for them. Two Past Midnight: “Secret Window, Secret Garden” enters the suddenly strange life of writer Mort Rainey, recently divorced, depressed, and alone on the shore of Tashmore Lake. Alone, that is, until a figure named John Shooter arrives, pointing an accusing finger. Three Past Midnight: “The Library Policeman” is set in Junction City, Iowa, an unlikely place for evil to be hiding. But for small businessman Sam Peebles, who thinks he may be losing his mind, another enemy is hiding there as well—the truth. If he can find it in time, he might stand a chance. Four Past Midnight: “The Sun Dog" is a menacing canine appearing in every Polaroid picture that fifteen-year-old Kevin Delevan takes with his new camera, beckoning him to the supernatural. Old Pop Merrill, Castle Rock’s sharpest trader, aims to exploit it for profit, but this creature that shouldn’t exist at all is a very dangerous investment.
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Different Seasons

Different Seasons

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

A "hypnotic" (The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas from Stephen King bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters. "The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is," hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons. This gripping collection begins with "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is "Apt Pupil," the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In "The Body," four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in "The Breathing Method."
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Needful Things

Needful Things

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Leland Gaunt opens a new shop in Castle Rock called Needful Things. Anyone who enters his store finds the object of his or her lifelong dreams and desires: a prized baseball card, a healing amulet. In addition to a token payment, Gaunt requests that each person perform a little "deed," usually a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from town. These practical jokes cascade out of control and soon the entire town is doing battle with itself. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn suspects that Gaunt is behind the population's increasingly violent behavior.
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Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

New to Pocket Books' Stephen King backlist--the short story collection containing the story "Dolan's Cadillac," soon to be released as a feature film starring Christian Slater and Wes Bentley.With numerous unforgettable movies based on his short stories--including Shawshank Redemption, 1408, and The Green Mile--readers will be delighted to rediscover this classic collection, also released as a television mini-series and on DVD. Featuring twenty short horror stories, a television script, an essay, and a poem, Nightmares and Dreamscapes contains unique and chilling plots including everything from dead rock star zombies to evil toys seeking murderous revenge. It will be treasured by King fans new and old.
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Christine

Christine

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Master storyteller Stephen King presents the classic #1 national bestseller of the ultimate vehicle of terror! *“This is the story of a lover’s triangle…It was bad from the start. And it got worse in a hurry.”* It’s love at first sight for high school student Arnie Cunningham when he and his best friend Dennis Guilder spot the dilapidated 1958 red-and-white Plymouth Fury for sale—dubbed “Christine” by its original cantankerous owner—rusting away on a front lawn of their suburban Pennsylvania neighborhood. Dennis knows that Arnie’s never had much luck in the looks or popularity department, or really taken an interest in owning a car . . . but Christine quickly changes all that. Arnie suddenly has the newfound confidence to stick up for himself, going as far as dating the most beautiful girl at Libertyville High—transfer student Leigh Cabot—even as a mysteriously restored Christine systematically and terrifyingly consumes every aspect of Arnie’s life. Dennis and Leigh soon realize that they must uncover the awful truth behind a car with a horrifying and murderous history. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and heaven help anyone who gets in Christine’s way…
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11/22/63

11/22/63

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away...but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke... Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten...and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.
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Firestarter

Firestarter

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Firestarter is the story of Andrew & Charlie McGee, a father-daughter pair on the run from a government agency known as The Shop. During his college years, Andy had participated in a Shop experiment dealing with lysergic acid, a trial that gifted his wife, Victoria Tomlinson, with minor telekinetic & telepathic abilities, & given him an autohypnotic mind domination ability he refers to as "the Push". Both his & Vicky's powers are physiologically limited; in his case, overuse of the Push gives him crippling headaches & minute brain hemorrhages, but Charlie had developed frightening pyrokinetic ability, with the full extent of her power unknown. After a mistake was made by Shop agents, Vicky was killed & Charlie was taken, but Andy, using the Push, managed to reclaim her & the pair have been on the run since.
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Insomnia

Insomnia

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Since his wife died, Ralph Roberts has been having trouble sleeping. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier, until he’s barely sleeping at all. During his late night walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people’s heads, two strange little men wandering around town after dark, and more. He begins to suspect that these visions are something more than hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep. There’s a definite mean streak running through this small New England city; underneath its ordinary surface awesome and terrifying forces are at work. The dying has been going on in Derry for a long, long time. Now Ralph is part of it…and lack of sleep is the least of his worries. Returning to the same Maine town where *It* took place, a town that has haunted Stephen King for decades, *Insomnia* blends King’s trademark bone-chilling realism with supernatural terror to create yet another masterpiece of suspense.
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Hearts in Atlantis

Hearts in Atlantis

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

Five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War. Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War. In Part One, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror. In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast. In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam," two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow -- and as haunted -- as their own lives. And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," this remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him. Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
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Duma Key

Duma Key

Stephen King

Horror / Mystery / Literature & Fiction

**No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page. A horizon line, maybe. But also a slot for blackness to pour through...** A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a "geographic cure," a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else. *"Edgar, does anything make you happy?" "I used to sketch." "Take it up again. You need hedges...hedges against the night."* Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth's past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating. The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural -- Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.
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