Later - Stephen King

 Jamie Conklin is a kid who sees dead people.  Not exactly original but Stephen King uses the device to very different ends - and ends up going to a level beyond that of The Sixth Sense.

I really enjoy the King novels written especially for the Hard Case Crime imprint.   They are shorter, punchier and somehow fresher than much of what might be called his mainstream output.   To be clear: King is, in my opinion, the greatest horror novelist who ever lived.   He also happens to be a great novelist.   When the two combine, as they did in Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, they sit at the pinnacle of the genre.   Later, mid-career stuff is fine and dandy but doesn't outshine the earlier (though they do remain fiendishly readable).   For a time, I admit, I kind of lost interest.   Then I came upon post-millennium novels and particularly novellas; 1922 opened my eyes to what he is now doing, and I absolutely loved it.   That led me to Joyland and The Colorado Kid and Billy Summers.   OK, King no longer frightens me (nothing will ever equal the woman getting out of the tub in The Shining) but he can still surprise and startle, and his writing is as top quality as ever.  The man's imagination and love of his craft are just astounding.

I know.  This is supposed to be a review of Later.   What can I say without giving away too many twists?   As always, King is at his best when he writes from the kid's point of view.   We get Jamie at various stages: late infancy, on the verge of his teens and fifteen.   He is telling his story from 'Later', when he is in his early twenties.   That is the touch of genius.   'Grown' Jamie can tell us things that would be beyond his younger self, but is not so old that he has lost touch with how it feels to be a kid.   Some of the horror moments are excellently gruesome.   All are splendidly diverting.

Joyland - Stephen King

 It's the summer of '73 and student Devin Jones has taken a seasonal job at an old-fashioned funfair in North Carolina.  Dev has just been dumped by his steady girlfriend and throws himself into the life of a greenhorn carny.  But the House of Horror ride was the scene of a mystery death and homes, according to those with a psychic bent, a real horror.

It must have been around the mid-70s when I picked up King's debut novel Carrie.  For the next twenty years I read pretty much every one as it came out.  But IT kind of lost me and I hated the collaboration with Peter Straub - The Talisman, was it?  I think Dolores Claiborne (1992) was the last one I bought.  But I am a real fan of Hard Case Crime publications and when I realised that the soon-to-arrive Later was the third of three written specifically for HCC, I had to get one.

Joyland (2013) is the second of the three (the first is The Colorado Kid (2005)).  I romped through it.  King's plots got a little samey back in the day but the writing never paled.  He started as a writer pushing the envelope and has matured over forty-plus years into probably the best living writer of popular fiction.  The key is, he has never become small-minded or - despite his phenomenal sales and big-budget movie adaptations - in anyway arrogant.  He sets out to intrigue and entertain and he delivers every time.

In summary, Joyland is a coming-of-age story with an overarching mystery and a couple of substantial jolts of horror.  Because it is short - and King is the absolute master of the shorter form - it bowls along merrily right to the end.  It looks like I have some catching up with King to do.  I was always going to get Later when it comes out in the UK.  Looks like I might need to tide myself over with The Colorado Kid.