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. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. When her husband of more than 20 years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. "Fair Extension", the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. 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. 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. All the more so because it sits next to the collection's finest story."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. It's a pretty silly parable, and one that jars with the compelling fare elsewhere. It is a supernatural fable in which a man dying of cancer stops at a roadside stall run by a mysterious figure called Elvid (rearrange the letters yourself) and cuts a deal: he is miraculously cured at the expense of his more successful friend, whose luck suddenly takes a turn for the worse. Of the four stories here, "Fair Extension" is the shortest – and weakest. The description of events is unflinching but not gratuitously so, as their extreme nature is what drives Tess to seek her own very personal form of revenge.
On the advice of a local she takes a short cut home along backwater roads, where she first gets a flat tyre, then is brutally raped, beaten and left for dead by a trucker. Tessa Jean is the creator of the cosy Willow Grove Knitting Society mystery novels, a role that takes her to a book signing in small-town Massachusetts. In "Big Driver" we're in the present day and back on familiar King territory: it's a story which features a successful writer stumbling into a world of pain.
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