Four Past Midnight

... this is still an excellent read.

I first read this years ago when I simply devoured King's book like candy. I didn't think I actually absorbed the content, because the READ was all that mattered.

These many years later ... It's just as good as I remembered and yes, I absorbed the content the first time ... but this was so much more than that.

This was perfection.

Four Past Midnight By Stephen King Genre: Horror

I’m not really a fan of short story anthologies. So why buy a short story anthology? Wasn’t paying attention and bought it thinking it was one story. Don’t get me wrong. I love Stephen King. He is one of only four writers I would call my favorites. So, even after I realized my mistake, I read the book.

FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT is a collection of four short stories written by the incomparable Stephen King.

• Story number 1, THE LANGOLIERS, I’ve read before and seen the movie. It’s great! It’s a scrape-your-fingernails-along-the-arm-of-your-chair kind of story. A real white knuckler, if there ever was one. Strange rolly-poly, furry, nothing-but-teeth demon creatures are eating the world and all those left in it! I love it.

• Story number 2, SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN, is about fiction writer Mort Rainey whose wife is a cheat, whose life is a mess and whose idyllic get-away turns out to be a really bad place to be when a stranger named Shooter shows up and accuses him of plagiarism. To prove to Mort that he’s not fooling around, Shooter kills Mort’s dog with a screwdriver and then uses that same tool to make Swiss Cheese out of another man’s brain. This guy is seriously crazy and Mort’s not too far from being the same. It’s an okay story…but left me feeling kind of…sigh. Do you know what I mean? This one fell flat for me.

• Story number 3, THE LIBRARY POLICEMAN, is just…weird. Sam borrows books from the local public library (not realizing when he walked through the doors he stepped back into the 60’s and was met there by a truly demonic librarian). When the books come due, he’s confronted by the Library Policeman who brings back some horrific memories from Sam’s past and some brand-new horror to deal with. This one was more exciting for me than SECRET WINDOW… but, still, not what I would consider King’s best.

• Story number 4, THE SUN DOG, is true STEPHEN KING HORROR. Young Kevin gets a polaroid camera for his birthday. His first shot though—a family pic—doesn’t develop. What does is a picture of a dog walking by a fence. Kevin tries again, and again and again. Every picture is of the same dog. Kevin soon realizes when he takes in the scope of all the pictures together that the dog is moving along the fence and getting closer and closer to the cameraman—him! Before long, the dog will attack and the true terror begins! Some of the characters in Sun Dog will appear later in Needful Things—one of King’s most horrifying stories. I loved Sun Dog and when I was through with FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT I was still hungry for the scare… so I re-read Needful Things!

Not bad—for an anthology—after all!

I read this collection once, years ago, and I don't remember liking it much at the time. I'm doing a reread now, and wanted to go into some more depth as to why. The plan is to go through each novella as I finish it, so I guess we'll see.

The Langoliers - I think this story was the one that made me dislike this collection when I first read it. I thought it was overlong, uninteresting, and was unable to suspend my disbelief for an idea as cosmically ridiculous as tiny balls of teeth eating yesterday. I still didn't like it. 2 stars.

Secret Window, Secret Garden - I liked this one a lot more than Langoliers, but still not my favorite in this book. Admittedly I think this story suffered from a surfeit of epilogue and would've been a lot better with just the ending. Just my opinion, though. 3.5 stars.

The Library Policeman - One of my favorite King stories, ever. This is terrifying. Maybe because libraries are one of the few places I feel safe and homey, but maybe because this is just terrifying. 5 stars.

The Sun Dog - The first time I read this, I had not read any of the Castle Rock stories and so was missing some background, and I think it affected my enjoyment. That and the reminder of R.L. Stine's Say Cheese and Die! However, now that I've read The Dead Zone and Needful Things, I think it increased my appreciation for this story by quite a lot. 4 stars.

I'm glad I reread this collection, because I liked it much better this time than I did the first. It won't ever replace Skeleton Crew or Night Shift, but maybe it's because there is less variety with only four (very long) stories. A middling sort of book from King's catalogue, but still miles ahead of some.

Increasing my former rating to 4 stars.

Just finished reading FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, a collection of four novellas that has been one of the few holdouts from the first three decades of Stephen King's career I'd never gotten around to. It ranks as decidedly average King, a fun, occasionally even thrilling, read (only a couple of King's books have been so trying as to not even rank as mildly entertaining--ROSE MADDER, I'm looking at you), but ultimately knocked down several pegs by its highly derivative nature. Everything we see in FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT we've seen done better by King before. THE LANGOLIERS, my least favorite story in the book, is a riff on his earlier novella, THE MIST, with our intrepid cast going into another dimension to face monsters instead of them breaking through into ours (and there was something "off" about King's usual voice in this one; the characters and dialogue seldom rang with King's usual impeccable sense of verisimilitude). SECRET WINDOW, SECRET GARDEN (the basis of the Johnny Depp movie SECRET WINDOW) was my favorite of the four (though it's ending was arguably weaker than the film's); however, it's still just another spin on the dark psychology of writers' minds vis-à-vis their utilization of alternate identities through pseudonyms exactly like he'd written only one year prior with THE DARK HALF. THE LIBRARY POLICEMAN was merely another play on the fear-eating, shape-changing creature from IT. And the final story, THE SUN DOG, doubled the "been here, done this" fun by marrying the fear of technology seen in CHRISTINE with the fear of wild, insane animals seen in CUJO. I was left rather disappointed in the end by a sense that King's creative engine was clearly running out of fuel at this point (though, thankfully, it wouldn't stay that way--he wrote a great DARK TOWER novel just the very next year, and one of my all-time favorites, DOLORES CLAIBORNE, only a couple after that); though it may be indelicate to say it, I think it may have had to do with the fact that, only a couple of years prior, King's family had put together a successful intervention to dissuade King from continuing the hard drinking and drugging lifestyle he'd submerged into over the prior decade (which was, interestingly, the most creatively prolific decade of his career). I think King must have been coming down from a decade-long high during the writing of FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, so the gears in his mind were becoming a bit gummy without the constant lubrication of liquor and cocaine, the engine in his wicked brain coming to an idle after ten years of being revved. King hadn't yet found his voice again in this new clean-and-clear reality of sobriety. But he would, and I'm ever thankful for it, even if that sobriety, and the attendant health and peace of mind it surely brought to Stephen King, means we'll likely never seen another THE SHINING or CHRISTINE. Now, I move on to another massive epic of his (whew! I'm still whipped from getting through IT earlier this winter!), NEEDFUL THINGS; only time will tell if it bears closer resemblance to the awkward rhythms of FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT or the perfect beats of DOLORES CLAIBORNE. Judging by most reviews for NEEDFUL THINGS, it will probably be the former, but in keeping with the final lines of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, I have hope.

Well now I can now finally say I've read the Langoliers. I picked this book up on an Amazon deal for $4.99. It was worth it of course. But none of the four novellas in here horrified me or captivated me as much as I know King has the ability to do, even in just short stories.

The four novellas are: The Langoliers, Secret Window, Secret Garden, The Library Policeman, and The Sun Dog. I started with The Sun Dog, and then went back to the beginning. All the stories were good, but I can't help but feel like a couple of them would have been better as full size novels. There was just so much more to explore in some of them. The Langoliers for example, a plane that flies into yesterday, where the world is steadily being eaten up bouncy alien balls called the Langoliers. There's a brief stint at the airport of the past, and then they're flying back to the present/future. I just felt like there could be some fun had in all this, and it was stunted by the length of the story. Then again, this is one of his more famous works so what do I know?

Secret Window, Secret Garden was pretty great. Again, I would have appreciated a slower burn here, but I think I recall seeing this as a Johnny Depp movie, and found I knew the ending the very first time it's hinted at. I don't recall the movie being all that spectacular (mostly because I think it was confusing) but I might go back and watch it now that I've read the story behind it. If you've never seen the movie, please read the story first. I think the story is better, and will be much more enjoyable if it's not spoiled for you.

The Library Policeman was kind of brilliant and also somehow meh. I haven't been to the library in ages, because I still have a book, (a crappy book at that) that I completely forgot to return and I myself have been a little afraid of the Library Police for awhile. Not this kind of Library Policeman specifically, but I love how King takes such a mundane, silly little thing and turns it into a nightmare. What slowed this down for me was the long, tedious telling of Dirty Dave's love affair with Ardelia. I could have done without most of it.

Finally The Sun Dog. This was probably my favorite of all four. It's one of the Castle Rock stories, and evokes all the spooky, chilling feelings you want to get from a good ghost story. I loved everything right up until the manifestation of the dog. I think I was hoping for the dog to get loose and for Kevin to be peeking over his shoulder for it, but that wasn't quite how it happened. Again, something that might have been rectified by a few more pages.

Strangely enough, what I loved most about Four Past Midnight, was the author's notes. There's one at the beginning, and one for each novella. It was a little insight into King's mind and how his stories come to life and what they were inspired by. His secret window in the laundry room, showing him a secret glimpse of his wife's garden. His son's irrational fear, shared by him (and a little by me), of the Library Policeman. I think Mr King is a creative genius. And all these things, these silly mundane things that most of us take for granted every day, that he is able to turn into sometimes short, sometimes sprawling epic stories, was the best part of this book. All in all, worth a read for King fans, but not my favorite.