An exercise bike, a mute hitchhiker and a portable toilet each open onto something worse. Stephen King's 2008 collection includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy and other publications.

Readical Key Points

• Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for a collection (2008) and an Alex Award (2009)
• Starred review from Publishers Weekly, which also named it among its Best Books
• King's first story collection since Everything's Eventual, according to the publisher
• Content note: horror, violence and death
• Hardcover, 384 pages, Scribner, 2008

The stories run from quiet unease to full terror. In "The Gingerbread Girl" a young woman on a remote Florida key proves as resourceful as she is vulnerable; in "Ayana" a blind girl's kiss works a miracle; in "N." a psychiatric patient's fixed ideas may endanger rural Maine, or be all that stands between it and catastrophe. Elsewhere a book salesman gives a ride to the wrong passenger, and a rider's cholesterol workout on a stationary bike goes somewhere it never should.

Readers who know King through his novels will find him working at shorter length, and the Alex Award, given to adult books with appeal for teen readers, reached this one too. The title names the hour, and the stories keep to it: light still in the sky, and the dark already close.

About the Author

Stephen King has published more than sixty books. His honors include the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, and his novel Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Condition: Brand New and Readical Ready.

Readical™ is an independent bookstore and reading-products brand built around a simple idea: books matter most when what we learn leaves the page and enters our lives.

Apply the Page. Get Readical™.