Quick Summary: Just After Sunset is King's latest volume of short stories. It brings us back to King's complex, frightening, but ultimately life-affirming world with 13 delicious entries. King explores his most constant them, good and evil, as well as the choices that bring ordinary people to epitomize one or the other of these extremes. The book revisits ideas King previously explored in works such as The Stand and the Dark Tower series, though no familiar characters make an appearance.

Title: Just After Sunset

Author: King, Stephen

Imprint: Pocket Books

Date of Publication: 2008

Just After Sunset is King's latest volume of short stories. It brings us back to King's complex, frightening, but ultimately life-affirming world with 13 delicious entries. King explores his most constant theme, good and evil, as well as the choices that bring ordinary people to epitomize one or the other of these extremes. The book revisits ideas King previously explored in works such as The Stand and the Dark Tower series, though no familiar characters make an appearance.

The works in this volume are surprisingly long for short stories - indeed, more than one would qualify as a novelette, if not a full-fledged novella. Although none of the stories feels padded or too long, the length does make it a lot harder to use this volume as a "bus book" or a "beach book" and relegates it to bedtime reading. Most of the tales date from King's magazine days, though there are a few completely new entries as well.  Among the finest of the stories are "Willa", "Harvey's Dream", and "N.", though all the stories reach King's usual thoughtful heights, philosophically if not in terms of terror.

I will give a little more detail for one of these works, my favourite from the collection. "N." is rich in references to other fictional works, from Dark Tower-like references to the number 19 and the places where reality goes thin, right through to delightfully Lovecraftian eldritch abominations. The pivotal object in this story is a stone - but a stone that the main character can only see when he looks through the lens of his camera. The character seems to believe that the important part of the camera is the lens, though this isn't explored further -  I wonder what he would see if he wore glasses, or used a telescope. The genuinely creepy events which follow from the discovery of the stone I will leave for you to discover for yourself.

Originally Written: October 6, 2010

Well, at the time it was King's most recent short story collection. Since then, "Full Dark, No Stars" has also been released, as well as a number of novels.