Nightmares and Dreamscapes: Part 2 ANNOTATION
A national bestseller, this collection of 23 short stories contains something for everyone--from classic horror stories to vampire thrillers, from gripping tales of suspense to brilliant imitations of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Also includes a Castle Rock story that serves as an epilogue to the bestselling Needful Things.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Nightmares and Dreamscapes is everything Stephen King fans expect and demand: magnificently written, heart-stoppingly suspenseful, darkly humorous, and wonderfully gruesome. This audio edition, the second in a three part series, contains several unabridged selections from the book--thrilling nightmares and chilling dreamscapes waiting to be explored by those who dare.
Stories include:
� The Doctor's Case read by Tim Curry
� The Moving Finger read by Eve Beglarian
� The End of the Whole Mess read by Matthew Broderick
� Home Delivery read by Stephen King
� Chattery Teeth read by Kathy Bates
� My Pretty Pony read by Jerry Garcia
� Sneakers read by David Cronenberg
� Dedication read by Lindsay Crouse
SYNOPSIS
Stephen King, Kathy Bates, Tim Curry, Matthew Broderick, David Cronenberg, Lindsay Crouse, Jerry Garcia, and Eve Beglarian
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This is a wonderful cornucopia of 23 Stephen King moments (including a teleplay featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, a poem about Ebbet's Field and a brilliant New Yorker piece on Little League baseball) that even the author, in his introduction, acknowledges make up ``an uneven Aladdin's cave of a book.'' There are no stories fans will want to skip, and some are superb, particularly ``You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,'' in which a husband and wife drive through a town that may literally be rock-and-roll heaven; ``The Ten O'Clock People,'' about unredeemable smokers; and ``The Moving Finger,'' which chronicles a digit's appearance in a drain. Together with Night Shift and Skeleton Crew , this volume accounts for all the stories King has written that he wishes to preserve. The introduction and illuminating notes about the derivation of each piece are invaluable autobiographical essays on his craft and his place in the literary landscape. An illusionist extraordinaire, King peoples all his fiction, long and short, with believable characters. The power of this collection lies in the amazing richness of his fevered imagination--he just can't be stopped from coming up with haunting plots. 1,500,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Sept.)
AudioFile - Paul B. Janeczko
In this short story collection Stephen King shows his versatility as a writer. This collection contains, among other things, a ghost, the undead, a finger poking out of a bathroom drain, a set of chattery teeth which run amuck, and a plan to mellow out the whole world. In other words, great fun for King fans. The actors and actresses emphasize the variety of the stories themselves, from Tim Curry�s wonderful portrayal of Holmes�s Dr. Watson, to the author�s delightful rendering of the folk who live off the coast of Maine. With few exceptions, they�re skilled readers giving fine performances. A nice feature of this set is that each story is complete on one cassette. P.B.J. �AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
King's third collection, after Night Shift (1978) and Skeleton Crew (1985), offers 23 formerly uncollected works, with King as bizarre as ever. A handful of the stories have been rewritten or dressed up for this occasion. King's introduction (a defense against the ivory tower opinions of his critics) and endnotes mentions several sources, including The New Yorker, which printed the lengthy "Heads Down"—about Little League teams up in Maine—that King calls "the best nonfiction writing of my life." Other oddities are a nostalgic baseball poem and a downbeat teleplay, "Sorry, Right Number," which appeared on Tales from the Darkside. Some pieces display King's charging, looser, richly vulgar style ("Dolan's Cadillac," a revenge tale in which the narrator gets even with a Mafia chieftain who killed the hero's wife, and buries him alive in his Caddie), while others occasionally show an unusually neat style hardly different from any other journeyman writer's, aside from the magical King touches ("The Moving Finger"—perhaps the best in the collection, about a man haunted by a live finger that keeps climbing out of the drain of his bathroom sink and finally grows to seven feet). Still others strive for human feeling ("Dedication"—about a longtime black cleaning maid in a fancy hotel who gets whammied by a voodoo lady and made pregnant by sperm on the bedsheets of a white novelist whose writing style gets passed on to her son)—and then some are just the King ticket readers expect: "The End of the Whole Mess"—about a polymathic genius who discovers the way to end man's inhumanity to man by altering his drinking water. Addicts, fear not: the King lives. (Firstprinting of 1,500,000; Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for October)
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