by Stephen King
Everything’s Eventual (2002)
* * * * (Great) Supernatural
While fishing where the Castle Rock stream forks, Gary, at nine years old, meets the man – the man in the black suit – who would haunt his dreams all his life, and worry his waking hours in those final days, eighty years later.
The thing I find most fascinating with the work of Stephen King is its interconnectedness. After reading over a dozen different novels and multiple short stories, you begin to recognize certain characters drifting and familiar settings passing as you travel through the many worlds he creates. Oh, and don’t believe for a second that this is a startling new revelation; King’s Dark Tower series addresses this fact in amazing detail. I only bring it up because of one of his novels I’m reading at the moment, Lisey’s Story. There are some scenes in the novel that are set out in the country, on a farm, that this story’s atmosphere touched upon.
And that’s what worked for me with this story. The setting. The time period just before World War I is brilliantly evoked and the descriptions alone allowed me to travel right along side nine year old Greg, as he beat his way to the stream, dropped his line, took his catch, and came face to face with the man in the black suit.
3 comments:
can't beat the pirate stories
www.eloquentbooks.com/TheTreasuredDream.html
This was one of my favorites from Everything's Eventual. I like them all, but this one I had a hard time putting down when my lunch break ended. Nothing scarier than being chased by a man in black (unless you're the man in black and you're being chased by a Gunslinger).
The funny thing about The Man in the Black Suit is that Steven King doesn't think it's a very well written story. I enjoyed it quite a bit - and so did others: it was published in the New Yorker magazine and won the O. Henry Prize for short story writing. Go figure.
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