Gone is her special spark, her quirkiness, and the connection that had entranced Leeds months before. Layla spends months recovering in a hospital, and it seems the girl Leeds fell for might be forever changed. A former girlfriend–turned-stalker wastes no time in finding and attacking Layla. A blissful courtship follows, but then Leeds makes the mistake of posting a picture of himself with Layla on social media. When Leeds approaches Layla, their connection is both instant and intense. Through the interview, readers learn that Leeds was wasting both his time and his musical talent playing backup for a small-town wedding troupe called Garrett’s Band when he spied Layla dancing her heart out to their mediocre music at a wedding. The story opens as Leeds Gabriel meets with a detective while his girlfriend, Layla, is restrained in a room one flight above them. Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Īn aimless young musician meets the girl of his dreams only to have his newfound happiness threatened by several inexplicable-and possibly supernatural-events. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms-which makes them all the scarier. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters-and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
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