It’s actually a common rapture scenario that was bandied about among some of my friends years ago.
The concept here didn’t particularly excite me, to be honest. Those who remain must figure out what has happened and how they can save themselves from a similar fate. “The Langoliers” involves an airline flight on which almost all the passengers and flight crew suddenly disappear. Each of the stories does have an intriguing premise-in my mind the weakest story had the best premise-but it’s the execution that makes all the difference. Published in 1990, Four Past Midnight is made up of four novellas: “The Langoliers” “Secret Window, Secret Garden” “The Library Policeman” and “The Sun Dog.” I found that the four varied in quality, with “The Langoliers” being my favorite and “The Library Policeman” sitting at the bottom of the heap. So I came into this collection with little experience of King’s short fiction, although I did remember Jenny’s warning that the stories are more concept heavy and scarier than his novels. Prior to reading Four Past Midnight, I had only read one of King’s story/novella collections, Hearts in Atlantis, which I read primarily for the story “Low Men in Yellow Coats” (King fans will understand why this particular story is significant). So I’m gradually working on catching up, not with a definite goal of reading all his books-he’s too prolific for me to make that a goal-but with an eye to filling in some of the gaps in my King reading. (My favorites are The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Talisman, and the remarkable seven-volume Dark Tower series.) But because I was a late convert to King, there are lots of his books that I haven’t gotten around to. It turns out that Jenny was right (no surprise there), and since reading The Dead Zone, I’ve become a King fan, gobbling up his novels one after the other.
I had avoided King before that, assuming that his books were all about terror-long on plot, short on character, theme, and linguistic excellence. It’s been well over 10 years since Jenny pressed a copy of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone into my hands, insisting that (1) it would not give me nightmares and that (2) I would really enjoy it.
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