Full Dark, No Stars

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010. First UK edition, Second printing. Hardcover. As New/as new. Tight white pages. Mint condition in mint jacket. No Inscriptions. From the DJ blurb: ‘I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger...’ writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting murder confession that makes up ‘1922’, the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King, linked by the theme of retribution. For country-loving James, that stranger is awakened when his wife proposes selling off the family farm in isolated rural Nebraska and moving to the city of Omaha... In ‘Big Driver’, a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters a stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess draws on her skills as a crime writer to plot a revenge that will bring her face to face with another stranger: the one inside herself. In the darkly amusing ‘Fair Extension’, cancer-ridden Harry Streeter makes a deal with a man selling all sorts of extensions - mortgage extensions, loan extensions and in his case, a life extension. But for every extension there’s a price. In the final story, ‘A Good Marriage’, Stephen King poses the question: is it possible to fully know anyone, even those we love the most? When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers an object containing her husband’s dark and terrifying secrets. What would you do if the man who keeps his nails short and clean isn’t the man you think he is? And now he’s heading home. With a fascinating afterword in which Stephen King describes the inspiration behind each story, Full Dark, No Stars contains close-up portraits which bristle with intensity. Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight - which generated such enduring hit films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me - Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.