The Langoliers - that's why I remember Four Past Midnight. There are three other novellas in this collection, but The Langoliers is the one that stuck with me, some of the images burned into my mind as brightly as any of King's stories. It's not just me: lots of readers seem to single it out, not necessarily aware that it's part of a collection of novellas.
“Stephen King is a master storyteller, and you will never forget these stories,” raves the Seattle Times about Four Past Midnight. One Past Midnight: “The Langoliers” takes a red-eye flight from LA to Boston into a most unfriendly sky. Four Past Midnight (1991) About book: Four Past Midnight is a collection containing the following 'short' stories:1. The Langoliers (233 pages)2. Secret Window, Secret Garden (146 pages)3. The Library Policeman (195 pages)4. The Sun Dog (149 pages)Generally speaking, Stephen King begins with amazing concepts that are soon dragged down by poor.
Aug 12, 2011 - Four Past Midnight by Stephen King, 1991, New English Library edition, in English.
King has published a few of these collections. Different Seasons, Hearts In Atlantis, Full Dark No Stars, even the Bachman Books – each features pieces that, for many writers, would be published as individual books. Four Past Midnight is no exception: four stories that cover many different facets of King's writing, but all intrinsically tied to this stage of King's career.
Still, The Langoliers is the one. It's harrowing. The main characters are all asleep on American Pride Flight 29, a red-eye flight across America. When they wake up, they're alone. Everybody else on the flight has disappeared, leaving the plane without a crew. They land the plane – one of the surviving passengers is a pilot – and step out into the airport to discover that they're totally alone. There's nobody in the terminal, nobody else anywhere. There's something wrong with the air, and with all food and water: everything is stale and tasteless. The survivors hear static, in the distance; some crackling that they can't explain. Then, the Langoliers appear: terrifying creatures that eat lost time, swallow up the past. Somehow, the plane flew through a rift, and the characters who survived the flight are trapped in that fragment of the past, waiting for the inevitable to happen.
It's a great idea, with the execution both grounded and terrifying. Several of our natural fears are preyed upon – flying, being alone, creatures with scary teeth – but there's a great second level of terror being worked into the story: the fear of losing (or wasting) time. (The concepts of wasting time and losing control are almost the primary antagonists in this story.)
So, that was what I brought to this reread: I couldn't really remember the other stories in the book. What I took away, however, were the other three. Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Library Policeman are fine novellas, about a mentally unstable, possibly psychotic writer accused of plagiarism, and an evil being who hunts down those who have overdue library books; but it's The Sun Dog that I most loved. A Castle Rock-set prelude of sorts to the grotesquely underrated Needful Things (coming up in a few weeks' time,), it features a camera that, whenever it takes a photograph, shows an unsettling black dog (another of King's recurring themes, especially relevant in his post-addiction times) The dog comes closer and closer to the camera with each new picture, until it eventually breaks free of the camera itself. Again, it'smaterial that King had played with before, and would do again – the possession (no pun intended) that gives the user more than they ever wanted, exposing them to a terror that they push themselves to explore through their own curiosity – but it's done succinctly here, and with real control. The inevitability is what pushes the story along – we want to see the dog escape, as horrifying as we know that will be.
It's a pretty strong collection, all told; while the middle two stories are perhaps slightly weaker (surprising, given that Secret Window was deemed strong enough to be turned into a Johnny Depp film a decade ago), the two tales that bookend the book are among King's best shorter pieces. The Langoliers won't ever not scare me, simply because it chimes with so many of my own fears – I've always had a thing about static – and The Sun Dog works beautifully as another addition to those metaphorical stories about King's own personal fears.
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Next:Ka-tet assemble! For chapter 28, we will be back in the Dark Tower, for The Waste Lands.