First Lines: Full Dark, No Stars

Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King’s latest collection of novellas, is just what it’s title suggest: very dark, with barely a spark of light to be seen. All stories invoke a stranger, and a variety of them as well: you have the stranger inside yourself; the stranger that you meet on a deserted back road; the stranger who makes you a deal you can’t refuse; and the stranger inside someone you though you knew. These strangers put ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and we get to watch happens to them. And I think that that is where King is at his best.

I’ll freely admit that these First Lines pieces are very lousy reviews, but that was never what I intended then to be. Unless I really got something to say about the book in question, I’ll ramble out a few lines on the book, perhaps rehash some of the promotional fodder I’ve read, and then formulate a halfhearted qualification.

Why am I bringing this up? Because I really can’t think of anything useful to say about this book, what I haven’t said before.* It’s as good as most of King’s more recent work, and as such, I give it two out of two thumbs up.

Book read
Stephen King — Full Dark, No Stars
First Line
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession.

* Okay, so I could nitpick about an accountant calling Firefox a search engine, but I prefer to put that guy in the group of noobs people who think the internet is started by double-clicking a blue E on the desktop. What the hell do they know about browsers and search engines?