Roger Toomey is in line with Henrietta Dodd, Margaret White, and Al Marsh: manipulative, abusive parents whose actions directly affect the often tragic outcomes of their children's lives. Here, King returns to the subject of monstrous parents that so fascinated him in his early novels. Carmody, however, we actually sympathize with Toomey a little, as King allows us into his back story that explains some of his psychoses and urgency. Carmody, we are introduced to Craig Toomey, an unbalanced man with a pathological fear of laziness. The situation is reminiscent of 'The Mist,' a connection made unmistakable by the chapter headings (King refers to these titles as 'old fashioned rococo' in the introduction to the novella). There is also a sound on the horizon - a crackling, crunching sound - hanging over the characters and the story, representing an unseen menace serving to underscore the smaller horrors before presenting itself in the climax. Gradually, they come to realize they have somehow flown into the past, and that the past is nearly used up. The sleeping passengers aboard American Pride Flight 29 awaken to find themselves in a barren, dead world that looks like ours but is fundamentally altered. 'The Langoliers' executes one of King's most ambitious science fiction concepts: the idea that time is a finite, tangible thing that must be disposed of as it passes. As with the previous collections of short work Different Seasons and Skeleton Crew (and the later Just After Sunset), the tales in Four Past Midnight are arranged in such a way that the pace and sweep resemble that of a novel. In this way, Four Past Midnight achieves cohesion unusual in short fiction collections.

While the novellas approach horror from vastly different angles - science fictional, supernatural, and psychological - they all revolve around the theme of the past in some way catching up with the present. However, though King is treading on familiar ground, Four Past Midnight remains uniquely its own entity, the majority of its novellas startling and fresh, proving once again that King has a terrific ability to derive new experiences from old ideas. Each tale echoes fiction that has gone before it, with instantly recognizable situations, making each story immediately accessible and immersive.

The story structures featured in Four Past Midnight will not seem new to Stephen King fans unlike the departure of the previous novella collection Different Seasons, the selections in Four Past Midnight are firmly rooted in the horror genre. When the window between reality and unreality shatters

Four past midnight book review