?I ?believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . .? writes
Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up
?1922,? the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen
King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes
selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a
gruesome train of murder and madness. In ?Big Driver,? a cozy-mystery writer
named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she
takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead,
Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the
one inside herself. ?Fair Extension,? the shortest of these tales, is perhaps
the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only
saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a
lifetime of resentment. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on
one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her
toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger
inside her husband. It?s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling
intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage. Like Different Seasons and
Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank
Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of
the long story form.