Includes the story "Premium Harmony"--set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine The masterful #1 New York Times bestselling story collection from O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King that includes twenty-one iconic stories with accompanying autobiographical comments on when, why and how he came to write (or rewrite) each one.
For more than thirty-five years, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he introduces each story with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.
As Entertainment Weekly said about this collection: "Bazaar of Bad Dreams is bursting with classic King terror, but what we love most are the thoughtful introductions he gives to each tale that explain what was going on in his life as he wrote it."
There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. In "Afterlife," a man who died of colon cancer keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Others address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers--the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits;" the old judge in "The Dune" who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, people who then died in freak accidents. In "Morality," King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil's pact they can win.
"I made these stories especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."
Stories include:
-Mile 81
-Premium Harmony
-Batman and Robin Have an Altercation
-The Dune
-Bad Little Kid
-A Death
-The Bone Church
-Morality
-Afterlife
-Ur
-Herman Wouk Is Still Alive
-Under the Weather
-Blockade Billy
-Mister Yummy
-Tommy
-The Little Green God of Agony
-Cookie Jar
-That Bus Is Another World
-Obits
-Drunken Fireworks
-Summer Thunder
Industry Reviews
"[King]has always had a wicked (in more ways than one) sense of humor, too, and it'soften on display along with the scary stuff in his new short story collection, THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS...One of the bonuses of Bazaar is that each story is preceded by a note from the author about its genesis... If you're looking for King's paranormal horror side, though, Bazaar has plenty to satisfy you...And if you want King in full funny tall-tale mode, head for Drunken Fireworks.It's the hilarious story of how its narrator, a Maine native named Alden who lives with his mother in a modest cabin on the 'town side' of Abenaki Lake, gets into an ever-escalating Fourth of July arms race with a rich guy on the other shore who's rumored to be 'connected, ' if you know what I mean. One lesson: Never buy a firework called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind."-- "Collette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times"
"BAD DREAMS packs plenty of bite into the 20 stories found here... a welcome dose of horror from the modern master. A large helping, too: Dreams weighs in at 495 pages, every one of which whips by as you plunge into one jolting tale after another... in the space of just a few pages, King can leave your nerves thoroughly jangled. As always, King conjures nightmares you don't necessarily want to wake up from."-- "Preston Jones, The Fort Worth Star Telegram"
"Outstanding...King's usual homespun style and storytelling swerves are fully evident, yet what's really neat about Bad Dreams is the scribe's introductions to each piece. Like little throwbacks to his 2000 manual/memoir On Writing, King tosses out bits of trivia and inspiration for each of his short form treats. A series of 150-mile drives in college led to Mile 81 and the most homicidal car since Christine. And a double whammy of trips to Applebee's plus observing a road-rage incident in real time sparked his impressive imagination to create Batman and Robin Have an Altercation, an excellent piece pitting a father-and-son dynamic duo against Alzheimer's and a strapping Texan. Short stories have a famous place in the King oeuvre, with the likes of The Body and RitaHayworth and Shawshank Redemption finding second lives on the big screen as Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption. So it's interesting to read how King likens himself to a midnight street vendor with these mini-tales and confesses they have given him 'a soul-deep fear thatI will be unable to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realization ofthat idea's potential.' Like all the greats, though, his ability to grip thereader's mind, body and soul with his prose makes it all look easy."-- "Brian Truitt, USA Today"
"Stephen King taps economic uncertainty and his own deep well of creativity to create 20 unsettling stories...It may be seven more years before King delivers another collection such as this one. Depending on how ordinary people continue to fare in the face of harsh reality, his topics of concern may shift in the meantime, as may those of his audience. Readers can be thankful, however, that he's still out there pitching stories with all the craft and guile he can muster."-- "Michael Berry, The Portland Press Herald"
