Stephen King’s latest published work is Full Dark, No Stars, an anthology of novellas.

The first novella, 1922, is a highly enjoyable, chilling story of a murder. Wilfred James, a farmer from H Home, finds out that his bickering, bitter wife Arlette wishes to sell their farm and live in a nearby town. James, being obsessed with his land, decides to kill her, and persuases his fourteen years old son Henry to help him. A drunken Arlette slips crude remarks about Henry’s girlfriend, a young country girl – thus the angered Henry helps his father to murder his mother. James brutally slashes his unconscious wife’s throat and the two dumps the corpse in the well behind the barn. Later, when James and Henry decide to bury the well, they notice that rats are swarming on Arlette’s body. One rat escapes, but Henry kills it, fearing that Arlette will haunt them.
However, more and more rats turn up in the barn and in the house. Henry gets his girlfriend pregnant who is sent to a home for young unmarried Catholic girls. Henry helps her flee and the two of them run away, committing several violent crimes. James believes to see rats everywhere, and he is scared of them. He is sure that Arlette sends the rats against him, and they will devour him alive…


The second novella, Big Driver, is about a young crime author Tess who attends a meeting in a library. A nice old librarian warns her not to go near a certain road, instead she offers a shortcut. However, Tess gets flat tires on the supposedly safe and secluded route as her car rolls on pieces of wood with nails. She meets a hulky man who offers help, but soon she discovers in horror that he placed the nailed woods into her way. He ends up violently beating and raping her, then strangles her unconscious. Tess pretends to be dead to escape. When the big man throws her out and leaves, she finds herself in an abandoned place, with several female corpses around. Fearing (righteously) the scandal and the harrowing trial of a rape, she decides not to report the case. Instead, using her theoretic experience as a suspense writer, she hunts down the rapist and the ones who helped him…


Fair Extension’s protagonist is Dave Streeter who finds out he has lung cancer. He meets an odd stranger who claims he has been living throughout centuries, and offers Streeter an arrangement: Streeter may live fifteen more years if he gives a certain per cent of his salary to him, and if he is willing to give his bad luck to another person. Streeter accepts the offer, and chooses his best friend Tom whom he secretly hates: Tom is successful and confident, he even seduced Sam’s girl in high school. Tom gets painful diseases and all of his promising, intelligent children’s lives go down the wrong way, they either die at a young age or end up being mentally challenged, whilst Streeter’s family prospers…

A Good Marriage is about Darcy who accidentally discovers a sadomasochistic porn magazine amongst her husband’s belongings. She feels unnerved, and searches for other odd signs. She realises that her husband keeps strange things in a box: small objects that once belonged to females who were murdered by a serial killer nicknamed „Beadie”. Whilst her husband is away on a business trip, she finds several hits about Beadie’s heinous crimes and she realises that in the time of the murders, her husband was always dangerously close to the scenes. However, she falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she finds Bob there: he returned home earlier and noticed that she found the box and the Internet hits about Beadie…