Later
Stephen King, 2012, Hard Case Crime, 256pp.
Stephen King has gone back to his roots and written what he might call “a good old-fashioned horrorstory.” More to the point, it’s a ghost story. Specifically, a kid who can see ghosts. This is the type of story where King made his bones (so to speak), simple, linear, with an agreeable amount of foreshadowing and with an unexpected but quite plausible ending. But this IS Stephen King: the characters are fully-fleshed and real (the living ones, anyway), and he sinks his narrative hooks into the reader by the second page. Then he plays the reader like an expert fisherman bringing in a marlin on a three-pound test line. Dread and enjoyment fight for supremacy as the reader follows the story of Jamie Conklin.
Jamie is six when he sees his first ghost. A guy on a bicycle has an argument with a car, and the laws of momentum have their way. Even at age six Jamie knows that the person looking down sorrowfully at the mess on the sidewalk has no business standing there and waving at Jamie, what with his head split open and all.
As time goes on, Jamie learns that the ghosts fade away over the next week to ten days, but while they’re still reasonably fresh (ghosts in this story have a sell-by date) he can talk to them. Further, if he asks them a direct question, they cannot lie in their response. Jamie’s mother, a hard boiled New York City literary agent, slowly becomes convinced that Jamie really sees and hears these things, and when her star author dies, she prevails on Jamie to go with her to the author’s house (no, it’s not in Maine, why do you ask?) and get the rest of his unfinished novel from the ghost. Yes, this novel is going to be ghost written.
It’s not the first time someone takes advantage of Jamie to plumb lucrative secrets from the nearly departed, and the stakes become much higher than finding out where a wife hid her rings in her final hours. Along the way, Jamie encounters the worst that humans, living or dead, have to offer.
It’s a short read by King standards (256 pages in the paperback) but it isn’t lacking in suspense, action, or surprises. The title is something of a mild brick joke in the narrative.
The publisher is Hard Case Crime, and it’s available in hardback, paperback and audio.
