Review: Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Genre:  Adult fiction/suspense/horror
Publisher:  Scribner
My Copy:  Bought
My Rating: 4.5 stars
Buy the Book:  Amazon

Summary from Goodreads:

A new collection of four never-before-published stories from Stephen King.

1922
The story opens with the confession of Wilfred James to the murder of his wife, Arlette, following their move to Hemingford, Nebraska onto land willed to Arlette by her father.

Big Driver
Mystery writer, Tess, has been supplementing her writing income for years by doing speaking engagements with no problems. But following a last-minute invitation to a book club 60 miles away, she takes a shortcut home with dire consequences.

Fair Extension
Harry Streeter, who is suffering from cancer, decides to make a deal with the devil but, as always, there is a price to pay.

A Good Marriage
Darcy Anderson learns more about her husband of over twenty years than she would have liked to know when she stumbles literally upon a box under a worktable in their garage.

My review:

This is a collection of four short stories and I’ll briefly tell you my thoughts about each story and then about the collection as a whole:

1922:  The longest story and by far the most horrifying.  It is written as a confession from a man who kills his wife and how she tortures him after she’s dead.  Very reminiscent of The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe.  I think this story was the most disturbing for me because it’s told by the murderer himself, in his own point-of-view.  This story had some scary moments that made me regret reading it at night.  King really goes into the dark corners of the killer’s mind.  Definitely a story to give you nightmares.  I will say that the ending redeemed it for me.  I loved the ending.  Classic horror story.  If I were to rate this one alone, I’d give it 3.5 stars because while I expected it to be disturbing, this one was a little too graphic for me.

Big Driver:  By far my favorite story in this collection.  A tale of redemption for a mystery writer who is beaten, raped, and left for dead on a deserted country road.  Only she survives and decides to take justice into her own hands.  She goes in search of her attacker with revenge on her mind.  This story flips the previous one and takes readers into the mind of the victim and turns the story onto its head, with the victim becoming the attacker.  Loved the characters in this one and loved the story.  The end was better than I expected.  I’d easily give this story 5 stars.  It kept me totally engaged.

Fair Extension:  This one is the shortest and tells the story about a man dying from cancer who makes a deal with the devil to reverse his condition, but for a price.  He has to take his bad luck and turn it on someone else…someone he hates.  He strikes the deal and the damage is done ~ done to his best friend.  I liked this story and the surprise is the ending.  Some might say it seems incomplete, and that might be because it’s not what’s expected, but I liked it.  I’d give this particular story 4 stars.

A Good Marriage:  This story is about a woman who discovers that her husband is hiding a terrible secret.  She thought she knew him after twenty-something years of marriage, but she is surprisingly wrong ~ She doesn’t know him at all.  I thought this story was the most suspenseful of the four and really kept me flipping the pages.  Very creepy and, again, I loved the ending.  I’d give this story 5 stars.

Overall:  This is easily King’s darkest collection yet.  I am a huge fan of his and I love how he takes chances.  In my opinion, short stories/novellas are his strength.  I feel like it’s just the right length for him to really shine; he gets right down to the nitty-gritty, no messing around.  He really knows how to hook the reader and not let go.  And, I love how he almost always wraps up the story at the end; Good or bad, it creates some sort of closure for the reader.

Overall, I gave this whole collection 4.5 stars.  This book is about the human psyche and, as King says, about “ordinary people in extraordinary situations.”  It delves into the minds of murderers and victims, of the desperate and the heartbroken.  This collection is dark and intense ~ a little too dark at times perhaps, but that’s what it’s all about.  After all, “if you’re going into a very dark place…then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything.  If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all?” (Afterword, p.366)  This book lives up to its title and King really does shine a light on everything, making readers see what they don’t want to see, playing on their darkest fears.