Four Past Midnight

Rating:
Summary: He always hits the mark!
Review: What else can you say about Stephen King that has not already been said. These "novellas" are extraordinary, simply what you expect from an author of his caliber.

Rating:
Summary: My review for this book
Review: I really injoyed this book... I loved the suspence and the developement of the characters. I wouldnt reccommend this book to someone without a high level of reading becuase hey we're talking about steven king here not rohald dahl!! Steven king actually can right a book and I greatly enjoyed this book. If you like steven king this is the book for you...

Rating:
Summary: well....
Review: Ok. Everybody says how great "The Langoliers" was and all that. I thought it was ok, it had some good parts, but the characters were a little sappy to me. All but Toomey, who was sort of fun. Then there was "Secret Window, Secret Garden", which was alright,
but it just didn't grab me. The best story was "The Library Policeman", which started off innocent and sounded sort of cheap but then just exploded with some truly shocking scenes and imagery.... then there was "The Sun Dog", which was just plain boring in my opinion. All in all, a decent read, good enough to pass the time anyway. King's later works just aren't as scary as his older stuff, although I read them all anyways. Hoping "Black House" will be good.

Rating:
Summary: The book is worth the first story alone
Review: If nothing else, buy this for "The Langoliers", one of, if not the best short stories Stephen King has written. Most people believe Stephen King is a horror writer, and does not fail to meet expectations with Four Past Midnight, but he strays a little off the path with "The Langoliers", which is more of a suspense/thriller rather than horror. Any dedicated King fan absolutely must read "The Sun Dog" which sets the role of a character whose name is sure to repeat through other stories (i.e.: Needful Things). The other 2 stories, "The Library Policeman" and "Secret Window, Secret Garden", are not for the weak-minded. There is a quick mention of a location in "The Library Policeman" in Needful Things as well. And if you have seen and enjoyed the movie Fight Club, you'll love "Secret Window, Secret Garden".

Rating:
Summary: A good short novel collection!
Review: This was one of my first short novel collections by Stephen King. It is also one of my favorties by him. I read the whole book in about 4 weeks which is really fast for me. Get it, your will not regret it! Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: The Once and Future King
Review: I never thought I'd pick up a Stephen King book. The macabre is not an area which interests me; paper cuts produce enough blood to give me nightmares, thank you. However, after watching "Langoliers" on television one evening, I decided I would take a peek at the source material just to see how it compared.

I was honestly amazed. King may be hailed as the Master of the Macabre, but this man is first and foremost a *good writer*--all four of his novellas in this volume drew me in and gave me no choice but to keep turning pages to find out what happened next. It was a pleasant surprise to find so much wit and humor buried amidst the horror, and I can't help but be in awe of a man who can make you laugh out loud in a library one moment and make you hold the book out at arm's length with a mutter of, "Ew," the next.

Like so many others, I would call "Langoliers" my favorite--clever, engaging, and well-paced, it has a delightful coterie of characters and a Twilight Zone-esque plotline. Next would be a toss-up between "Secret Window, Secret Garden" and "Library Policeman." I'm not certain why so many people dislike SWSG; Mort Rainey was perhaps the most strongly drawn character of the lot. And while LP is certainly excellent, it had too much gore for sheer gore's sake to win an unchallenged second favorite slot. (Some say that LP is nothing but perversion. I would disagree. Its scenario is revolting, yes; disconcerting, yes... and entirely too plausible in real life.)

"Sun Dog" is probably the story that cost the book a star in my rating, for while chilling in its way and well-written by all accounts, it seemed the most shallow and downright absurd in retrospect. (Yes, I take the licorice from "Library Policeman" into account when I say that. At least the licorice had symbolism going for it.)

At any rate, I'd suggest that any fan of psychological horror give this book a go. I haven't been converted into a solid Stephen King fan myself, but I have a new respect for him and his talents after reading _Four Past Midnight_.

Rating:
Summary: "Never believe a writer." (from The Langoliers)
Review: This collection of four novellas (hence the title), all Horror, are quite good overall. My favorites were The Langoliers (of which I am glad the source material for the mini-series was much more entertaining and enjoyable) and The Library Policeman. The other two novellas, Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Sun Dog were both capable of producing genuine thrills and chills, just not as many as I would have liked.

The Langoliers, a what if story that boldly asked and answered the question "What happens to today when tommorrow takes its place?" was engrossing and frightening.

The Library Policeman was just plain vicious, Stephen King at his shocking best. Making a library a threatening place takes true talent.

Secret Window, Secret Garden was too much like the Dark Half for me to really enjoy.

The Sun Dog was interesting to a point, but the entire story relied on the stupidity of one man (and the damn solution to the problem was so friggin' simple!) Nevertheless, the story did take us to Castle Rock and that's one locale to which I will always gladly return.

Bottom line, if you're a Stephen King fan you should check this out. Two of the stories are awesome, the other two pretty darn good.

Rating:
Summary: Lesser King.
Review: It's been a long time since I've read some King, and since I've liked most of his work I was eager to get into this anthology. As I worked my way well into it, however, disappointment began to set in.

The lead-off story is the strongest. It's an exciting story about a select group of airplane passengers who arrive in a dead and vacant world. Though the premise (like those of the other three stories as well) is derivative of old Twilight Zone episodes, King keeps it going with interest, action, and fascinating concepts. My only real bug with this story is that the "langoliers" reminded me of nothing so much as evil Pac-Men, and that took away the fear factor once they made their appearance.

"Secret Window, Secret Garden" is average. The main character defies logic by not going to the authorities when his mysterious nemesis threatens him with violence, though I suppose this could be explained by the psychology that is revealed at the end of the story. As for the twist ending, I've seen it before in later works by others, but that's not King's fault. Still, it takes the sting out.

"The Library Policeman" is essentially a shorter (but not nearly as good) rewrite of 'It.' Why bother? The villain of the piece ends up being another monster that is unexplained and her defeat is just plain silly. Come to think of it, most of this story is silly.

But "The Sun Dog" tops even that. A chilling premise (one that King would hack out again for the '999' anthology) builds to a lunatic and nonsensical climax. Again, we are offered no explanation for the phenomena the characters experience, and the ending is straight out of a cheap horror flick.

With the possible exception of the first story, all of these are overwritten and way too long. I found myself skimming passages of useless exposition. Most of this anthology is mediocre and probably wouldn't have gotten published if a big name hadn't written them (then again, Bentley Little manages to get published, so maybe anything goes after all.)

Rating:
Summary: Cracked reflections of the ghosts of horrors past
Review: "Four Past Midnight" would fall under the "slightly better than mediocre" category of King works, were it not for the first of the four novellas featured here, a fast-paced time-travel gem called "The Langoliers". It has a gang of air-travellers waking up during a cross-country jet flight to find that most of their fellow passengers and the entire flight crew have inexplicably disappeared. Fortunately, one of their number is a pilot himself, and together they must unravel what has happened to the rest of the world. King himself, through his interesting preludes that lead into each story, compares the tale to another novella-length classic of his, "The Mist", which can be found in the short-story collection "Skeleton Crew". The comparison is certainly apt, as both have the pacing of a toboggan ride down a mountain along with bullet point preview headings each chapter. They both deal with an isolated group of survivors faced with the unknown, but while Mist was enveloped by gothic themes of nature gone wild, Langoliers remains anchored in technology and time at odds, lending it more weight as a modern horror story.

Perhaps the problem with the other three are their similarities to some of King's greater works. "Secret Window, Secret Garden" is a retelling of "The Dark Half", a novel that produces a particular resonance of depression in me as it marked the start of the author's decline heading into the 90's, one that wouldn't rectify itself until the end of that decade. "The Library Policeman" is, of course, "IT" redeux, with its evil ghost/morphing fear-creature and the hero who must wield talismans from his youth to defeat it. And then, there's "The Sun Dog". Consider this the apex of King's evil-inanimate-object stories, a well-worked theme in his cannon of short stories. The saving grace here is the dynamic between the curious young hero given the full-bore wise-beyond-his-years-yet-still-naive Kingian treatment, and the old shopkeeper who embodies all that is nefarious and cruel in the guise of a harmless Maine rookster.

Of course, when you're going back to the same well that has spawned some classic reads, things aren't going to be all that bad. And that's what we have here. Ghosts of a glorious past, that still manage to rattle those chains with gusto.

Rating:
Summary: Should be just "TWO Past Midnight"
Review: The first two stories in this collection were excellent, but the final two were just plain awful. "The Langoliers" was the most viscerally exciting story I've read in years, and "Secret Window, Secret Garden" featured some astonishing characterizations I didn't believe Stephen King could muster, but, after these two bonafide gems, it all goes downhill. "The Library Policeman" started off intriguingly enough, and "The Sun Dog" featured the fascinating Pop Merrill, but in my humble opinion, the disgusting rape scene in "The Library Policeman" would have been deemed child pornography if it'd been published elsewhere (like in, say, a men's magazine), and "The Sun Dog" displays King at his most narratively inept and incompetent. Both of these pathetic stories climax with eye-rollingly laughable showdowns, one involving licorice and the other a pair of Polaroid cameras duking it out, so to speak. For crying out loud, when is Stephen King going to realize that Coke machines and Polaroid cameras are NOT terrifying?