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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
One Past- The Langoliers. My favorite of this collection. It was exciting the entire way through.
Two Past- Secret Window, Secret Garden. This one was a cool concept ( I liked The Dark Half more though- kinda similar), but I found it slow and hard to finish. That might be because I had seen the movie before and had some idea about the plot.
Three Past- The Library Policeman. Creepy. Great narrator. I had an idea what was going on- but I was not prepared for THAT scene. Makes my skin crawl and stomach turn just thinking about it.
Four Past- The Sun Dog. Strange story. Good Ending. I was not expecting what happened to Pop because he is a long time character in Castle Rock.
Two Past- Secret Window, Secret Garden. This one was a cool concept ( I liked The Dark Half more though- kinda similar), but I found it slow and hard to finish. That might be because I had seen the movie before and had some idea about the plot.
Three Past- The Library Policeman. Creepy. Great narrator. I had an idea what was going on- but I was not prepared for THAT scene. Makes my skin crawl and stomach turn just thinking about it.
Four Past- The Sun Dog. Strange story. Good Ending. I was not expecting what happened to Pop because he is a long time character in Castle Rock.
I've always liked The Langoliers as a good if cheesy 90's miniseries, and it worked on the page as well. The Sun Dog was good, and Secret Window, Secret Garden was fine, but also reminded me of work Donald E. Westlake would perfect later on with The Hook. The Library Policeman started off fine, but good God is it fucked up.
The Langoliers: 4 stars
Secret Window, Secret Garden: 5 stars
The Library Policeman: 3 stars
The Sun Dog: 2 stars
Secret Window, Secret Garden: 5 stars
The Library Policeman: 3 stars
The Sun Dog: 2 stars
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Yes
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This was my first introduction to Stephen King which I read sometime in high school. Secret Window, Secret Garden was okay (and I enjoyed the ending), but it ultimately put me off of the "lost time" trope forever. I distinctly remember actively hating The Sun Dog and having to drag my way through it. I still don't understand why that kid kept taking pictures. Maybe one day I'll try it again to see if I missed something that explained that part.
hands down this is one of the best collection of stories that SK ever wrote.
Library Policeman was the best and darkest for me.
Highly recommended!
Library Policeman was the best and darkest for me.
Highly recommended!
Usually when I am reviewing collections I have some qualifying remark about how it’s weird to evaluate a selection of individual stories as one, singular, aggregate product - but to be honest, it doesn’t feel that weird in this case. The point is still true, these stories are all different and they all vary in quality, but there’s some unplaceable connection between them - something more than the fact that they all happen to be in the same collection - and I’ve been trying to figure out what it is. The closest I can get is that all the stories have to do with the blurring or disintegration of reality somehow, but that seems too vague. I’m not really sure how to explain it other than to say they all share similar ~vibes~, which is close enough for now.
Another similarity all four of these stories share is that every single one is too long. I think some are more ‘too long’ than others, but the point stands that each story here could stand to be trimmed by probably about 30%. This is easily the most glaring issue with this collection - it’s just not concise at all. It’s full of cool ideas and concepts, interesting characters, unique setpieces, intriguing premises, but in all four stories - to varying degrees - I thought that it dragged at certain points. Stephen King is obviously no stranger to ‘overwriting’, in fact, he’s kind of famous for this exact thing. The problem is that usually his long digressions and descriptions are still interesting, or at the very least endearing to me. In Four Past Midnight, it didn’t come across that way, and these lengths did not feel warranted. Anyway, I’ll talk about each of the four briefly in here, then we’ll call it a day, alright?
Starting off with The Langoliers which I think is handily the best story in the collection. It’s about a group of people who wake up in the middle of a commercial flight across the country, only to realize that the majority of the passengers and the entire crew have simply disappeared. Luckily the protagonist, Brian Engle, is a pilot who is able to commandeer the flight and land them safely, but when they exit the plane, it seems that everyone in the world has disappeared. The airport is completely devoid of life, and on top of that, a bunch of other weird stuff starts happening. Colors, sounds, textures, tastes all begin to dull, and there are strange encroaching gnashing sounds in the distance. It turns out that the plane flew through some type of time-warp, and all the passengers have found themselves separated from time. This empty world they find themselves in is actually a version of reality that is just a few minutes in the past. They are inhabiting a world that time has already moved on from, so to speak. When the past becomes the present, the past version of the world is still just sitting there, vacant, waiting to be destroyed. And that’s where ‘The Langoliers’ come in - they are the creatures that destroy the past world once time is no longer happening there anymore. As creatures they are kind of silly, just these little balls that zip around eating reality, but in essence they are actually pretty terrifying - their sole purpose to destroy the physical dimension of the past. Conceptually, I think this story is fantastic. It’s so weird and creepy and unsettling and mysterious, and I think the answer to these riddles that Stephen King comes up with is equally compelling - the idea that every single moment exists separately from the forward progression of time, and these characters are stuck just outside of it. Super fascinating. Is it too long, still? Yeah, probably. And some of the characters are kind of goofy, and a lot of the interpersonal drama going on in between the cool concepts didn’t interest me that much, but all in all I thought this story was quite good, and easily the strongest of the collection.
The next story is Secret Window, Secret Garden. In some ways, this is a classic Stephen King story - it’s about a writer, and it contains a lot of meta-commentary on the art of writing itself. In the case of this story, it’s about a writer named Morton Rainey who, in the opening of the story, is immediately accused of plagiarism by a man named John Shooter. There is a particular short story Mort has called “Sowing Season”, and Shooter is claiming that it is a ripoff of his own, much less successful story called “Secret Window, Secret Garden”. Mort vehemently denies these allegations, and the majority of the first part of the story revolves around him trying to locate an original version of the magazine the story was first published in, in order to prove that he wrote it two years before John Shooter claims to have written his own. Unfortunately, Shooter also happens to be somewhat of a psychopath, and the following night he murders Mort’s cat and - allegedly - burns down the house of Mort’s ex-wife (where Mort also used to live), where a copy of that magazine would’ve been located. I think this first section of the story is very successfully frustrating. You can really keenly sense the feeling of injustice that King is trying to evoke with this fraudulent plagiarism accusation, and Shooter just comes off as such an annoying and hateable villain. Pretty quickly into the story, however, it transitions into something completely different. It’s slowly revealed that Shooter is actually not real. He is, instead, a split personality of Mort himself, and more or less a manifestation of this guilt Mort feels over actually plagiarizing a story when he was an undergrad in college. It was Mort who killed his own cat (as well as two other people), and it was him who burned down his own house. He was never caught when he plagiarized that story in college, and I guess the subconscious guilt broke through and eventually led to this psychological snap. This revelation is written to be a sort of ‘twist ending’, but it was so heavily foreshadowed throughout the story that I caught on relatively early, I would say, which kind of made it anticlimactic. It was just a little too slow, and a little too obvious. I thought the plagiarism angle was interesting, but the whole split personality deal was too drawn out and too similar to The Dark Half which was, hot take, a book I already didn’t like that much. I think this story is actually better than that one, to be fair. Just still not something that fully cohered into anything great.
Next up is The Library Policeman. This is probably my second favorite in the collection, but I would not bat an eye at anyone who says they hate it. It’s a very viscerally upsetting story, and while I think it earns the ability to go to the places it goes, it’s definitely walking a fine line. There is a lot going on in the plot, but the gist of it is that there’s this guy named Sam Peebles who borrows a couple of library books to help liven up a speech he has to give to his local rotary club. The library itself is strange and creepy, and so is the librarian Ardelia Lortz who is unnervingly threatening when it comes to turning the library books in on time. From here, the story essentially splits off into two separate branches. In one you have the revelation that Ardelia is some sort of malevolent vampire monster that feeds of fear (very It), and the other is the revelation that Sam has repressed the horrifying trauma of being violently raped as a child near his hometown library. There is a scene which depicts this event very vividly and very thoroughly, which many people find to be inappropriate and offensive. Personally, I thought the scene was at least justified in the sense that repressed trauma is the core theme of the story and this is the central event of the narrative, but again, I understand thinking King takes it too far here. My personal main issue with this story is that those two separate plotlines didn’t really square in my head. The Ardelia monster stuff and the Sam trauma stuff just didn’t resolve in a way that made sense to me, especially given the nearly incomprehensible ending. That said, I think the story itself is very effective. It has a very eerie, unsettling atmosphere, I think it’s complemented well by the rural Iowan backdrop, and the characters all felt very authentic to me - almost the opposite of The Langoliers where the plot and ideas were great but the characters were a little flat. Again, this story was definitely long-winded and could’ve been pared down, especially the incredibly drawn out “Dirty” Dave Duncan backstory (even though I did enjoy aspects of it), but overall very solid, if a bit over-the-top.
Lastly we have The Sun Dog which is probably my least favorite in the collection. It has some genuinely creepy moments, but overall it’s kinda boring, too long (probably should’ve been a short story), and too sparse. The plot here is very simple - Kevin Delevan gets a Polaroid Sun 660 camera for his 15th birthday, and it turns out to have some sort of supernatural defect. No matter what he points the camera at and takes a picture of in real life, the photo produced by the camera is always the same strange image of a hostile-looking black dog standing near a white picket fence. And as Kevin continues to take photos, the dog appears to slowly move closer and closer to the frame. And that’s essentially it! Like I said, the plot here is quite thin. The story’s saving grace is the inclusion of the character of Pop Merrill. This is a Castle Rock story, which is important to mention I think, because Pop, while not in other Castle Rock stories as a character, is referenced a lot throughout the broader Castle Rock multiverse and his presence and influence on the town is well documented (especially in Needful Things). Pop is the uncle of Ace Merrill, a very iconic Stephen King villain, and even though that relationship is not really explored in this story (Ace isn’t in the story at all), you can connect the dots between the two characters. He’s just a really well fleshed-out character. He can come off as very friendly and disarming, but the cold, transactional, unscrupulous way views the world and interacts with people has a certain dark tone to it that I found to be interesting. The main issue I had with this story is that, like I said earlier, it’s way too long for how sparse it is, and also the entire central concept doesn’t really make sense to me. This camera is taking pictures of an evil monster dog creature in some other reality, within the world of the photograph, but I just don’t get it. A lot of times Stephen King will over-explain his monsters - in this story it’s the opposite. I don’t understand this dog’s deal. What is the photo world it’s in, exactly? Why is it specifically mad at Kevin / whoever is taking the photos? How is it using this random camera to become “born” into the real world, and why does it want to do that in the first place? Perhaps these are irrelevant questions, and not all monsters need some explicable back story, but I just spent a lot of this novella going “wait, what?” It also doesn’t seem to be a thematic metaphor for anything. King is just saying “hey what if there was a creepy dog that was trying to escape through a photograph?” and I suppose that’s fine. It just didn’t resonate with me on any level deeper than that.
I have already written a lot here, so I think I can pretty much wrap it up at that. Four Past Midnight has a lot of really great moments, I can give it that. Each of the four stories in here have at least some redeeming qualities, and I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed all of them to some degree or another. Conversely, they all suffer from pretty much the exact same thing - overwrought and overwritten. I think all four stories in here would have benefited from some additional editing, or possibly shorter story formats in general. But when it’s good, it’s good. Stephen King really puts you to work in this collection, making you sift and dig for the worthwhile material. It is in there, I promise you, but you have to go find it.
Another similarity all four of these stories share is that every single one is too long. I think some are more ‘too long’ than others, but the point stands that each story here could stand to be trimmed by probably about 30%. This is easily the most glaring issue with this collection - it’s just not concise at all. It’s full of cool ideas and concepts, interesting characters, unique setpieces, intriguing premises, but in all four stories - to varying degrees - I thought that it dragged at certain points. Stephen King is obviously no stranger to ‘overwriting’, in fact, he’s kind of famous for this exact thing. The problem is that usually his long digressions and descriptions are still interesting, or at the very least endearing to me. In Four Past Midnight, it didn’t come across that way, and these lengths did not feel warranted. Anyway, I’ll talk about each of the four briefly in here, then we’ll call it a day, alright?
Starting off with The Langoliers which I think is handily the best story in the collection. It’s about a group of people who wake up in the middle of a commercial flight across the country, only to realize that the majority of the passengers and the entire crew have simply disappeared. Luckily the protagonist, Brian Engle, is a pilot who is able to commandeer the flight and land them safely, but when they exit the plane, it seems that everyone in the world has disappeared. The airport is completely devoid of life, and on top of that, a bunch of other weird stuff starts happening. Colors, sounds, textures, tastes all begin to dull, and there are strange encroaching gnashing sounds in the distance. It turns out that the plane flew through some type of time-warp, and all the passengers have found themselves separated from time. This empty world they find themselves in is actually a version of reality that is just a few minutes in the past. They are inhabiting a world that time has already moved on from, so to speak. When the past becomes the present, the past version of the world is still just sitting there, vacant, waiting to be destroyed. And that’s where ‘The Langoliers’ come in - they are the creatures that destroy the past world once time is no longer happening there anymore. As creatures they are kind of silly, just these little balls that zip around eating reality, but in essence they are actually pretty terrifying - their sole purpose to destroy the physical dimension of the past. Conceptually, I think this story is fantastic. It’s so weird and creepy and unsettling and mysterious, and I think the answer to these riddles that Stephen King comes up with is equally compelling - the idea that every single moment exists separately from the forward progression of time, and these characters are stuck just outside of it. Super fascinating. Is it too long, still? Yeah, probably. And some of the characters are kind of goofy, and a lot of the interpersonal drama going on in between the cool concepts didn’t interest me that much, but all in all I thought this story was quite good, and easily the strongest of the collection.
The next story is Secret Window, Secret Garden. In some ways, this is a classic Stephen King story - it’s about a writer, and it contains a lot of meta-commentary on the art of writing itself. In the case of this story, it’s about a writer named Morton Rainey who, in the opening of the story, is immediately accused of plagiarism by a man named John Shooter. There is a particular short story Mort has called “Sowing Season”, and Shooter is claiming that it is a ripoff of his own, much less successful story called “Secret Window, Secret Garden”. Mort vehemently denies these allegations, and the majority of the first part of the story revolves around him trying to locate an original version of the magazine the story was first published in, in order to prove that he wrote it two years before John Shooter claims to have written his own. Unfortunately, Shooter also happens to be somewhat of a psychopath, and the following night he murders Mort’s cat and - allegedly - burns down the house of Mort’s ex-wife (where Mort also used to live), where a copy of that magazine would’ve been located. I think this first section of the story is very successfully frustrating. You can really keenly sense the feeling of injustice that King is trying to evoke with this fraudulent plagiarism accusation, and Shooter just comes off as such an annoying and hateable villain. Pretty quickly into the story, however, it transitions into something completely different. It’s slowly revealed that Shooter is actually not real. He is, instead, a split personality of Mort himself, and more or less a manifestation of this guilt Mort feels over actually plagiarizing a story when he was an undergrad in college. It was Mort who killed his own cat (as well as two other people), and it was him who burned down his own house. He was never caught when he plagiarized that story in college, and I guess the subconscious guilt broke through and eventually led to this psychological snap. This revelation is written to be a sort of ‘twist ending’, but it was so heavily foreshadowed throughout the story that I caught on relatively early, I would say, which kind of made it anticlimactic. It was just a little too slow, and a little too obvious. I thought the plagiarism angle was interesting, but the whole split personality deal was too drawn out and too similar to The Dark Half which was, hot take, a book I already didn’t like that much. I think this story is actually better than that one, to be fair. Just still not something that fully cohered into anything great.
Next up is The Library Policeman. This is probably my second favorite in the collection, but I would not bat an eye at anyone who says they hate it. It’s a very viscerally upsetting story, and while I think it earns the ability to go to the places it goes, it’s definitely walking a fine line. There is a lot going on in the plot, but the gist of it is that there’s this guy named Sam Peebles who borrows a couple of library books to help liven up a speech he has to give to his local rotary club. The library itself is strange and creepy, and so is the librarian Ardelia Lortz who is unnervingly threatening when it comes to turning the library books in on time. From here, the story essentially splits off into two separate branches. In one you have the revelation that Ardelia is some sort of malevolent vampire monster that feeds of fear (very It), and the other is the revelation that Sam has repressed the horrifying trauma of being violently raped as a child near his hometown library. There is a scene which depicts this event very vividly and very thoroughly, which many people find to be inappropriate and offensive. Personally, I thought the scene was at least justified in the sense that repressed trauma is the core theme of the story and this is the central event of the narrative, but again, I understand thinking King takes it too far here. My personal main issue with this story is that those two separate plotlines didn’t really square in my head. The Ardelia monster stuff and the Sam trauma stuff just didn’t resolve in a way that made sense to me, especially given the nearly incomprehensible ending. That said, I think the story itself is very effective. It has a very eerie, unsettling atmosphere, I think it’s complemented well by the rural Iowan backdrop, and the characters all felt very authentic to me - almost the opposite of The Langoliers where the plot and ideas were great but the characters were a little flat. Again, this story was definitely long-winded and could’ve been pared down, especially the incredibly drawn out “Dirty” Dave Duncan backstory (even though I did enjoy aspects of it), but overall very solid, if a bit over-the-top.
Lastly we have The Sun Dog which is probably my least favorite in the collection. It has some genuinely creepy moments, but overall it’s kinda boring, too long (probably should’ve been a short story), and too sparse. The plot here is very simple - Kevin Delevan gets a Polaroid Sun 660 camera for his 15th birthday, and it turns out to have some sort of supernatural defect. No matter what he points the camera at and takes a picture of in real life, the photo produced by the camera is always the same strange image of a hostile-looking black dog standing near a white picket fence. And as Kevin continues to take photos, the dog appears to slowly move closer and closer to the frame. And that’s essentially it! Like I said, the plot here is quite thin. The story’s saving grace is the inclusion of the character of Pop Merrill. This is a Castle Rock story, which is important to mention I think, because Pop, while not in other Castle Rock stories as a character, is referenced a lot throughout the broader Castle Rock multiverse and his presence and influence on the town is well documented (especially in Needful Things). Pop is the uncle of Ace Merrill, a very iconic Stephen King villain, and even though that relationship is not really explored in this story (Ace isn’t in the story at all), you can connect the dots between the two characters. He’s just a really well fleshed-out character. He can come off as very friendly and disarming, but the cold, transactional, unscrupulous way views the world and interacts with people has a certain dark tone to it that I found to be interesting. The main issue I had with this story is that, like I said earlier, it’s way too long for how sparse it is, and also the entire central concept doesn’t really make sense to me. This camera is taking pictures of an evil monster dog creature in some other reality, within the world of the photograph, but I just don’t get it. A lot of times Stephen King will over-explain his monsters - in this story it’s the opposite. I don’t understand this dog’s deal. What is the photo world it’s in, exactly? Why is it specifically mad at Kevin / whoever is taking the photos? How is it using this random camera to become “born” into the real world, and why does it want to do that in the first place? Perhaps these are irrelevant questions, and not all monsters need some explicable back story, but I just spent a lot of this novella going “wait, what?” It also doesn’t seem to be a thematic metaphor for anything. King is just saying “hey what if there was a creepy dog that was trying to escape through a photograph?” and I suppose that’s fine. It just didn’t resonate with me on any level deeper than that.
I have already written a lot here, so I think I can pretty much wrap it up at that. Four Past Midnight has a lot of really great moments, I can give it that. Each of the four stories in here have at least some redeeming qualities, and I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed all of them to some degree or another. Conversely, they all suffer from pretty much the exact same thing - overwrought and overwritten. I think all four stories in here would have benefited from some additional editing, or possibly shorter story formats in general. But when it’s good, it’s good. Stephen King really puts you to work in this collection, making you sift and dig for the worthwhile material. It is in there, I promise you, but you have to go find it.
Langoliers is too long, but pretty good.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is kinda fun but comes too quickly after The Dark Half to not feel like a ripoff.
Library Policeman was mostly an IT rehash that had some potential until there was a FAR too graphic chid rape.
Sun Dog was fine.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is kinda fun but comes too quickly after The Dark Half to not feel like a ripoff.
Library Policeman was mostly an IT rehash that had some potential until there was a FAR too graphic chid rape.
Sun Dog was fine.