Before he gets around to solving horrific crimes, Jamie puts his talents to work to help his mom out with a literary project. It just so happens that the lover of Jamie’s mom is a troubled NYPD detective named Liz Dutton, who knows about his gifts, though they are a secret to most of the world. Jamie’s gifts make him useful to cops trying to crack tough cases.

He can ask them questions and they must answer, though they don’t have to tell Jamie what he wants to hear. The difference here is that the dead people who interact with Jamie are, rather inexplicably, bound by certain rules. Like the corpses in that movie, the dead in Later wear whatever they had on at the time of death and the wounds that did them in are evident in all their gory hideousness. Night Shyamalan’s film as an analogue for his own experiences. Jamie matter-of-factly lets the reader know that he sees dead people, just like, you guessed it, the kid in The Sixth Sense. Later is the story of Jamie Conklin, a boy with a wry, self-deprecating manner who lives in New York with his mom, a literary agent and recovering alcoholic. The book often reads like a greatest-hits compendium, and not just of King’s own work.

But to say that Later is derivative would be an understatement. King still knows how to populate a story with engaging personae, how to keep the tale moving, and how to be funny and self-aware. Even the best writers exhaust themselves and lapse into self-parody, and some of us now are bound to ask whether the man is producing anything worth reading.īased on his new novel, Later, the answer is yes and no. But King has also unleashed a lot of dross on the world.

Some of his novels are powerful works of the macabre and certain of his early stories-think of “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” “Night Surf,” “Quitters, Inc.,” “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” “The Woman in the Room,” “Nona,” and “Survivor Type”-are resonant, shudder-inducing tales that compare favorably with anything by Salinger or Capote. King adds continually to a vast and uneven corpus of work. Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper. King publishes everything from works of supernatural horror to gritty crime stories to tales marked by Chandleresque melancholy and the social realism of a Russell Banks writing about New England’s losers and sad sacks. Does Stephen King still have it as a writer? The 73-year-old scribe churns out book after book and story after story every year, running circles around younger authors in terms of productivity, not to mention versatility.

Later book by stephen king