Review: Stephen King's ' Full Dark, No Stars', the tremors of everyday

Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King’s fourth set of short novellas in 30 years, betters its predecessors, though ‘better’ is not the sentiment the book leaves you with.

The first tale, ‘1922’, is the kind of story King tells best. Set deep in rural America 89 years ago, the story is a confession statement by Wilfred, a man who murders his wife to stop her from selling her ancestral land. You almost empathise.

Who in their right mind would like to lose their land and the peace of the surroundings to a meat factory — a sale his wife is considering, for the sake of hard cash? But in typically diabolical King twist, Wilfred convinces his teenage son to cooperate, a decision that will change the course of his life and that of the story, for retribution awaits him in a place he has neglected to guard himself from — his own mind.

In ‘Big Driver’, life is good for Tess, a writer of mild detective fiction, until one day she is waylaid, raped brutally, and left for dead. Tess surprises herself by planning vengeance. Charting the dips and curves of an unstill, traumatised mindscape, the story is every victim’s revenge fantasy.

The fine nuances of these two stories give way to broad cubist brushstrokes in the third. A middle class cancer patient, Harry Streeter, takes a walk on an isolated back road and meets a street dealer in ‘Fair Extension’. The transparently named Elvid sells Harry an extension of his life, in return for which Harry must tell him who he hates, and why. ‘I suppose I hate Tom Googhugh’, Harry says, hesitantly.

The reasons are everyday jealousies: Tom got Harry’s girl, is a millionaire, good looking, with a loving family. Harry doesn’t have any of these. Thereafter follows a straight tale — betterment, health and success for Harry, bereavement, loss, poverty for Tom. And in a flippant back story you almost miss, tsunamis, crashes and attacks for the world. 

Like in all Stephen King stories, the reader is left feeling there was something more in the book than a story well told. That, under the guise of delivering straight tales of suspense, King is actually echoing the real terrors that pervade our lives — the imagined water pollution that threatens farmer Willfred’s farm and drives him to murder, the cancer that eats at Harry Streeter until he strikes a deal with the maybe-Devil, the isolated shortcut that turns out to be a rapist’s trap.

Perhaps this intuitive feeling of sensed-but-not-really-grasped terrors is what comes out best in the last novella, a classic psychopath suspense turned inside out and retold from the point of view of the killer’s wife. A compulsively good read, King fans shouldn’t miss this.