Search Results: Stephen KIng from I Cannot Live Without Books

11/22/63 by Stephen King
In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King -- who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer -- takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.
It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away -- a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer.
Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life -- like Harry's, like America's in 1963 -- turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to… Read More

11/22/63 by Stephen King
Life can turn on a dime -- or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a divorced high school English teacher in small-town Maine. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads about such a destined moment through a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning. Fifty years earlier, Harry somehow survived his father's slaughter of the entire family. Jake is blown away, even as a more bizarre, life-altering secret comes to light when his friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession -- to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a mysterious portal in the diner's storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke. Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life, yet all turns on this treacherous road lead straight to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be… Read More

Bag of Bones by Stephen King
Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonon, who is unable to stop grieving following the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his computer.
Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares, all set at the Maine summerhouse he calls Sara Laughs. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike returns to the lakeside getaway. There he finds his beloved Yankee town held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who will do anything to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both mother and child, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here -- and what do they want of… Read More

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
Since his first collection, Night Shift, was published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection, he assembles twenty stories, some of which have never appeared in print, some of which King has revisited and revised. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.
There are thrilling connections between stories: themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers -- the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits"; the old… Read More

Billy Summers by Stephen King
Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He's a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he'll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. First, there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, and a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?
How about everything?
This spectacularly riveting novel is part war story, part love letter to small-town America and the people who live there, and it features one of the most compelling and surprising duos in King's fiction, who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. Billy Summers is about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.
You won't put this story down, and you won't forget Billy.
Scribner, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2021

Billy Summers by Stephen King
Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He's a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he'll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. First, there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, and a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?
How about everything?
This spectacularly riveting novel is part war story, part love letter to small-town America and the people who live there, and it features one of the most compelling and surprising duos in King's fiction, who set out to avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. Billy Summers is about love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.
You won't put this story down, and you won't forget Billy.
GALLERY BOOKS, SOFTCOVER, 2021, 2022

Cujo by Stephen King
Cujo used to be a big friendly dog, lovable and loyal to his trinity (THE MAN, THE WOMAN, and THE BOY) and everyone around him and always did his best to not be a BAD DOG. But that all ends on the day this nearly two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard makes the mistake of chasing a rabbit into a hidden underground cave, setting off a tragic chain of events. Now Cujo is no longer himself as he is slowly overcome by a growing sickness, one that consumes his mind even as his once affable thoughts turn uncontrollably and inexorably to hatred and murder. Cujo is about to become the center of a horrifying vortex that will inescapably draw in everyone around him -- a relentless reign of terror, fury, and madness from which no one in Castle Rock will truly be safe.
GALLERY BOOKS, SOFTCOVER, 2018

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless -- mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to the RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes "Doctor Sleep."
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan's own demons and summons him to… Read More

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Stephen King returns to the character and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.
On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Know travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless -- mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant… Read More

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
Twenty-five years ago, in their haunted hometown of Derry, Maine, four boys bravely stood together and saved a mentally challenged child from vicious local bullies. It was something that fundamentally changed them in ways they could never begin to understand. These lifelong friends -- now with separate lives and separate problems -- make it a point to reunite every year for a hunting trip deep in the snowy Maine woods. This time, though, chaos erupts when a stranger suddenly stumbles into their camp, freezing, deliriously mumbling about lights in the sky. And all too quickly, the four companions are plunged into a horrifying struggle against an otherworldly threat and the forces that oppose it, where their only chance of survival is locked into their shared past -- and the extraordinary element that bonds them all.
Gallery Books, Softcover, 2001

Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself -- and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from that shed.
Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.
SCRIBNER, SOFTCOVER, 2022

Firestarter by Stephen King
Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson were once college students looking to make some extra cash, volunteering as test subjects for an experiment orchestrated by the clandestine government organization known as the Shop. But the outcome unlocked exceptional latent psychic talents for the two of them -- manifesting in even more terrifying ways when they fell in love and had a child. Their daughter, Charlie, has been gifted with the most extraordinary and uncontrollable power ever seen -- pyrokinesis, the ability to create fire with her mind. Now the merciless agents of the Shop are in hot pursuit to apprehend this unexpected genetic anomaly for their own diabolical ends by any means necessary, including violent actions that may well ignite the entire world around them as Charlie retaliates with a fury of her own.
GALLERY BOOKS, SOFTCOVER, 2018

Holly by Stephen King
Stephen King's Holly marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly's gradual transformation from a shy (but also brave and ethical) recluse in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodge's partner in Finders Keepers to a full-fledged, smart, and occasionally tough private detective in The Outsider. In King's new novel, Holly is on her own, and up against a pair of unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency, hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl's desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.
Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each… Read More

Insomnia by Stephen King
Ralph Roberts never expected to live out his remaining golden years mourning the death of his beloved wife. He also never expected to begin suffering from chronic insomnia for the first time in his life. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier until he's barely sleeping at all. During his overnight walks, he's now observing some strange things going on here in Derry, Maine -- and they're more than sleep-deprived hallucinations. There's definitely a mean streak that's always been running through this small New England city; underneath its ordinary surface, awesome and terrifying forces are at work. The dying has been going on in Derry for a long, long time, and Ralph Roberts will soon find that lack of sleep is the least of his worries.
Gallery Books, Softcover, 2018

The Institute by Stephen King
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silent murder Luke Ellis's parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at the Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there's no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents -- telekinesis and telepathy -- who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and the youngest of them, ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduate to Back Half, "like the Roach Motel," Kalisha says. "Kids check in, but they don't check out."
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don't,… Read More

The Institute by Stephen King
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis's parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at the Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there's no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents -- telekinesis and telepathy -- who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, iris, and the youngest of them, ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduate to Back Half, "like the Roach Motel," Kalisha says. "Kids check in, but they don't check out."
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go alon, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don't,… Read More

It by Stephen King
To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their home town: familiar, well ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw -- and felt -- what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes it reached up, seizing, tearing, killing....
The adults, knowing better, knew nothing. Time passed and the children grew up, moved away. The horror of It was deep-buried, wrapped in forgetfulness. Until the grown-up children were called back, once more to confront It as It stirred and coiled in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.
Frightening, epic, and brilliant, Stephen King's IT is one of the greates works of a true storytelling master.
Scribner, Hardcover, 1st Edition, Later Printing, 2017

The Langoliers by Stephen King
On a cross-country red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, ten passengers awaken in Bango, Maine, to find that the crew and most of their fellow passengers have disappeared. The airport shows no signs of life. Yet they hear "radio static" in the distance. Craig Toomy, an irritable investment banker on the verge of a breakdown, believes it is the langoliers, monsters he was afraid of as a child, who attack those who waste time. It is mystery author Bob Jenkins who first theorizes they have flown through a time-rip. Bob declares they have entered a place that forbids time travelers to observe or interfere with past events. It turns out that Craig is right, in a way. Two creatures, followed by hundreds more, emerge from the forest and head for the plane, consuming everything in their path. Can the survivors manage to fly the plane back to Los Angeles, back to the correct time, before the langoliers succeed in their deadly mission to destroy the plane and the world? Dinah… Read More

Lisey's Story by Stephen King
Lisey lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, bestselling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in the relationship, before they married, Lisey knew there was a place Scott went -- a place that both terrified and healed him, could eat him alive, or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it's Lisey's turn to face Scott's demons, to go that terrifying place known as Boo'ya Moon. What begins as a widow's effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited.
SCRIBNER, SOFTCOVER, 2021

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
In the predawn hours, in a distressed American city, hundreds of unemployed men and women line up for the opening of a job fair. They are tired and cold and desperate. Emerging from the fog, invisible until it is too late, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.
Months later, an ex-cop named bill Hodges, still haunted by the unsolved crime, contemplates suicide. When he gets a crazed letter from "the perk," claiming credit for the murders, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, fearing another even more diabolical attack and hell-bent on preventing it.
Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of eccentric and mismatched allies, can apprehend the killer… Read More