Four Past Midnight
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Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas by Stephen King. The four stories are The Langoliers, Secret Window, Secret Garden, The Library Policeman, and The Sun Dog. It was published in 1990.
The Langoliers has an antiquated feel that is reminsicent of old horror films and black-and-white movies, yet it is set in the present.
The story takes place mostly on an airplane. Passengers that have been sleeping wake up and notice that they are more or less alone aboard. Everyone aboard that had been awake have disappeared, pilots and all. And it's only the persons that have vanished: they left their clocks, wallets, dental fillings and pace makers behind.
The Langoliers was adapted into a two part TV mini-series.
Secret Window, Secret Garden is similar to King's earlier novel The Dark Half. Both are about authors, in this case Mort Rainey, a badly disguised copy of Stephen King himself. Mort is visited by a person with a manuscript which proved to be an almost exact copy of a story that Mort himself wrote and published some years earlier. The man claims that Mort stole it from him and demands that Mort write a story in his name as compensation or prove that he is innocent, or bad things will happen.
It is worth noting that King has been accused of plagiarism himself. A woman has claimed that he broke into her home and stole her manuscript for Misery.
This story has been adapted into a movie Secret Window, starring Johnny Depp.
The Library Policeman was written after King's son didn't want to go to the library as he was afraid of the library police. King felt this was a nice idea and used it. What if there were serious men in long coats that came to your house and fetched the books if you didn't return them in time. And most importantly: what happens if you lose the book you borrowed?
The Sun Dog is about a boy that gets just what he wants for his fifteenth birthday - a Polaroid camera. Soon he notices that there is something strange with the camera, though. It takes similar pictures all the time, and not of what it's pointed at. "The Sun Dog" is set in King's made-up city of Castle Rock, Maine, and is a prelude of sorts to King's 1991 novel Needful Things.
See also
| Stephen King short story & novella collections |
| Night Shift - Different Seasons - Skeleton Crew - Four Past Midnight - Nightmares & Dreamscapes |
| Six Stories - Hearts in Atlantis - Blood and Smoke - Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales |