{"id":3375,"date":"2010-12-05T11:49:34","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T18:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/?p=3375"},"modified":"2010-12-06T09:57:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T16:57:34","slug":"stephen-king-makes-claim-to-be-poe-of-our-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/2010\/12\/05\/stephen-king-makes-claim-to-be-poe-of-our-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen King Makes Claim to be Poe of Our Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen King is perhaps the greatest living writer of any genre working today. His \u201cHearts in Atlantis\u201d was the best the book of short stories I\u2019d read since Joyce\u2019s \u201cDubliners\u201d and now \u201c Full Dark, No Stars\u201d puts him in serious contention for being the being the Poe of our time.
\n
\n\u201cFull Dark, No Stars\u201d is four stories with various levels of horror attached but each story is so very plausible the horror elements don\u2019t seem contrived or impossible. The first story \u201c1922\u201d is a very visceral story of murder and it\u2019s after effects. You can feel every ounce of creepiness the characters are experiencing. Some of the action may make you want to shrink away from the story but King\u2018s writing makes a reader a literary addict needing the next word, sentence, paragraph, hungry to see what happens next.<\/p>\n

King wastes no elements in these stories, he explores every dark avenue of the story to it\u2019s fullest. \u201cBig Driver\u201d demonstrates this very ably. It\u2019s about a writer returning home from a book signing and is raped and left for dead after getting a flat tire. At first I thought King was going to get bogged down in every little detail of the aftermath, but it never happens, and King stays away from every clich\u00e9 of the genre (whichever genre he may be writing in) but the action leads so naturally from one action to the next you think you\u2019re witnessing it unfold in real time.<\/p>\n

King also reveals his mastery of the story not only does he show you what he wants you to see, but like any good magician he reveals things only when he\u2019s ready to reveal them, and when he does in \u201cFair Exchange\u201d you realize the clue was in front of you all the time and King just moves the curtain aside ever so slightly to reveal what you only intuited was there.<\/p>\n

Each story is loosely connected in theme that there\u2019s an unknown self in all of us that can push us over the edge into the unknown. King doubles up on this theme in his last story \u201cA Good Marriage.\u201d We see this from the point of view of a woman who discovers the darkest of secrets about her husband, and her reaction to it. It’s a story that’s going to make wives think twice about looking around their husband\u2019s workbench for spare batteries when the TV remote goes out.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to resort to the reviewers clich\u00e9 of saying the author really keeps turning the pages, but in King\u2019s case it\u2019s an addictively true statement. Each story in \u201cFull Dark, No Stars\u201d is like enjoying a full and satisfying meal and you may want a little time to digest what you\u2019ve read but you\u2019ll find yourself pulled back to find out what happens next.<\/p>\n

Jim Cherry is the author of The Last Stage, www.jymsbooks.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen King is perhaps the greatest living writer of any genre working today. His \u201cHearts in Atlantis\u201d was the best the book of short stories I\u2019d read since Joyce\u2019s \u201cDubliners\u201d and now \u201c Full Dark, No Stars\u201d puts him in serious contention for being the being the Poe of our time. \u201cFull Dark, No Stars\u201d is four stories with various […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[610,608,609,607],"class_list":["post-3375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","tag-full-dark-no-stars","tag-horror-stories","tag-short-stories","tag-stephen-king"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":509,"url":"http:\/\/reviewermag.com\/press\/2008\/09\/12\/stephen-king-talks-about-his-newest-work-n\/","url_meta":{"origin":3375,"position":0},"title":"Stephen King talks about his newest work, N","author":"admin","date":"September 12, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"NMaster storyteller Stephen King presents a revolutionary new form of entertainment: his short story \u201cN.\u201d brought to vibrant life through a series of 25 graphic video episodes available at http:\/\/www.nishere.com. 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