Later (Hard case crime, 147) English Edition

Big fan of the author and hadn't seen this one before. Really enjoyed it, just short but wish it had been longer. Great plot and characters.

Well written and holds the interest throughout. A boy who sees dead people - with The Sixth Sense duly referenced. Fairly low on the horror but in this case a good thing. My one criticism of this actual Kindle book is that the story is shorter than you might think because it is followed by first, an extract from another King book and then adverts for other books - 40 pages worth!

I enjoyed the writing style of this story - first-person narrative with a conversational flow. Jamie has a gift but it doesn't necessarily help him. This story is a mix of growing up and horror, where his single mother struggles to maintain a living. I liked their relationship and how they protected each other. There were, of course, the horror elements that added some tension and suspense. Overall, this was an engaging tale and worth reading.

Well this was a great surprise. I’ve been a King fan since my early teens(I’m in my mid 50s now)and this brought back all the enjoyment of reading a King novel in my youth. This is a coming of age/crime/supernatural/horror story and it’s King at his absolute best. Told from the point of view of Jamie Conklin, now 22 years old, but it starts with him at 4 years of age. Jamie lives in NY with his mother and no father. He has a gift. He sees dead people! Yes it sounds like The Sixth Sense and that is name checked in the second page of the book, but that’s where the similarities end. Jamie only sees recently dead people and they see him. He can talk to them and here’s the kicker, they have to tell him the truth. As time passes he can hear them less and less until they finally fade away. I went into this blind, bought it purely because of the author and I’d advise you to do the same if you can. It’s a short book at 250 pages and I was left wanting more, but in a good way. The book is a perfect form. King just excels when narrating a book from the perspective of a young boy. We have seen it before and it’s always been among his strongest work. It’s mad to think a man in his 70s is writing this. For me King had a sweet spot in the 80s, knocking it out of the park book after book and this book could easily belong there. He as written some great books recently as well no doubt, 11.22.63 is a masterpiece but this one just feels like old King, a book written when he was much younger and just surfaced now. I was giddy reading this. Read it in a day and had a metaphorical smile the whole way through. An utterly brilliant read.

Later is yet another horror fiction from a contemporary master of the genre, a novel that tells the story of the childhood and adolescence of Jamie Conklin, a youngster with paranormal ability to see the dead. Readers and movie fans will immediately recognise such a story as a staple of the genre, probably thinking of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, specifically referenced in King’s text (24 and 57). It may be a universal challenge for any writer to make something new of something old, but that challenge is particularly acute in the case of formulaic genre fiction where readers want both old and new together, the kind of story they recognise and like, but with enough apparent originality to maintain interest. King just about manages this in Later, though there are limitations. Focussing on a child or adolescent as the central character is a traditional choice, one that King has used before, in Carrie and The Shining, for example, also to some extent in The Green Mile with its racial stereotype of the black man as child. The focus on childhood and adolescence is particularly suited to narratives of the paranormal. Childhood and adolescence license a different relationship to the world, with boundaries not yet stabilised or fixed. There is also the idea of the special child, and Jamie is presented as something of a prodigy, excelling at mathematics, and at language, which makes him an enjoyable narrator. That he is special is suggested by his name, Jamie Conklin, with initials which code that most special of all children, Jesus Christ. King has used this device before, with John Coffee in The Green Mile, and the technique has precedents in a wider popular culture. In George Stevens’s film Shane, based on Jack Schaefer’s novel, character names—Joe, Marion and Little Joey—suggest the Holy Family. Of course, in fiction the use of character names to indicate the character’s quality or origin is a common device. The technique is not necessarily invalid but can feel hackneyed, lacking in subtlety, and a too easily available, ready-made way to suggest the character’s nature. Encountering the name Jamie Conklin on the first page of Later may provoke a feeling of déjà vu in the reader. A sense of over-familiarity is a problem for the Gothic genre in general, where cliché abounds. So, a story may be set in an isolated country house or castle, somewhere distant from the daily world, though the text may then bring that supposedly unknown into the reader’s home territory, as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Or, in an effort to avoid clichés and make the Gothic directly relevant to the reader’s own experience, the story may have a fully recognisable domestic setting from the beginning, in a modern town or city, the world of work, money problems, divorce and so on, as in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One in. Such social realism helps acceptance of the paranormal and contrasts with it, emphasising its strangeness. In Later, King wisely chooses the second option, as the first is liable to exhaustion, jaded through overuse. Throughout Later, there is a welter of references to the contemporary everyday and its consumer culture, everything from “Whoppers and fries” (50), through recent or current TV programmes such as The Wire (51) and The Big Bang Theory (75), to popular and once popular writers such as Judith Krantz and Harold Robbins (48), and the use of up-to-date technology, which has a precedent in Dracula. The technique helps the reader to accept the claims of the paranormal, but may be deliberately overdone. The cultural references are so frequent that the reader becomes aware of the technique as technique, with the device itself foregrounded. Similarly, in Later King refers constantly to the conventions of the Gothic and other popular genres. Here, he is not only a knowing writer but is addressing a knowing reader. Later then becomes like a game, reading it an activity shared by a community of fans who know all the moves. King seems to be demonstrating that culture has reached a late stage where every text is made of other texts, a condition particularly obvious in formulaic genre fiction, with readers who may not want something original. With only slight exaggeration, the technique leads to a combination of parody and homage, as in Wes Craven’s Scream movies, where the old and hackneyed are made new and fresh by the explicit recognition within the film of generic conventions, so that the film then becomes a comedy for a knowing audience in on the joke. And comedy and horror overlap, since both exploit exaggeration and mock social conventions. However, without the comedy, shared recognition of the conventions may be an enjoyable activity for horror addicts or King geeks, but may strike a less converted reader as lacking in originality, the text primarily a raking together of prefabricated bits, the mixture as before. Another way in which King tries to weave the Gothic into the everyday and the already known is by mixed genre. Later is published in the series of “Hard Case Crime” books, its cover displaying an improbably long-legged, breast-thrusting, pistol-packing female, an image more associated with, say, a Mickey Spillane novel than the horror genre. Even before the text begins, the cover is quoting a cliché. The portrait apparently represents Liz Dutton, the lesbian policewoman who is the girlfriend of Jamie’s mother, and absent or wrong fathers are another standard feature of the Gothic. As well as the paranormal, the plot includes a wife-torturing gangster with drug money and Liz’s attempt to use Jamie’s supernatural ability to get that money. There is however a potential difficulty in a mixed-genre text, where the narrative focus may be split, in Later between the realism of social and personal relations on the one hand, and the paranormal or Gothic on the other. Rooting the Gothic in the everyday and social is a good approach, but only if the two narrative types gel. In Misery, for example, personal relations and extreme events (not paranormal) are the outcome of the characters and situation. There is no straining to bring character and event together. In Later, however, there are two different narratives, the socially realistic and the paranormal, which are brought together mechanically. Overall, Later is a somewhat enjoyable read, especially for fans of the Gothic but, despite King’s undoubted mastery of the genre, the book has the feel of a minor work, recycling the known. It is most interesting as an illustration of the challenge to repackage the over-familiar as something new, a challenge it meets with only partial success.

Genial y a.su tiempo

King horror

Another great one from Stephen King. I adore pretty much everything he has ever written, so there's no surprise that I loved this one as well. Mr Kings greatest strength in storytelling (according to me) is his amazing ability to write believable and loveable characters, which really makes you want to get into the story. This one is very good, and I enjoyed every second.

... masterly written by The Kingster - Steven King himself. Which in MY eyes is an absolute must-read, not only for the FANS, but for all those who like a supernatural horror story, that is perfectly interwoven with the strangest coming-of-age tale some adolescent boy has to tell. And telling he does! He spills the bucket until even the most skeptical reader is hooked for sure! Jamie Conklin only wants to have a relatively quiet childhood and be a normal teenager, living with his single mother. Who is often struggling personally and financially. An uncle, too is to be looked after, struck by early inset Alzheimer's disease only in his early 40ies. That costs money. And Mum has lost her most valuable client in the finishing of the last book of a series of high success! Noone knows how that series will end - 'The Secrets of Roanoke'. The biggest mystery in the history of the US of A. But in steps Jamie. He has an 'ability' that is more that a psychic disturbance: He can see and speak to the Dead. Only to those who have left this world a short time ago and linger around their nearest and dearest. And the Dead talk back - and have to say the truth, the absolute truth. That comes in handy with Mom's best but late client and the world takes a better turn for Jamie, Mum and Uncle Harry. But there is Liz, Mum's ex-lover, who works for the New York Police Department. And Liz is bent, crooked, an alcoholic who deals coke, too. She is about to lose her job - so she uses Jamie's ability to solve an almost unsolvable task: To find the last bomb of the Thumper, to save many lives - and Liz' dwindling career. But with making Liz quasi a hero Jamie transforms his future life into a living hell: The Trumper wants his revenge - from beyond the grave and at every cost. And here the REAL horror show begins... and years have to go by, years of Jamie's tales of abnormalities, almost impossible to comprehend, of fights inside and outside - with all his might. Like a lonely teenager fighting against a gang of 'Hells Angels' - literally! LATER is really Stephen King at his absolutely best, a terrifying and yet touching story of a boy who has to grow up in great velocity. To learn fast to be able to decide what is right or wrong, to fight inner and outer demons in disguise and to stand up to evil in all the masks it wears. A great read, really worth MY time and money. Had to read through the night until the very end. I personally can only recommend this fantastic Rollercoaster ride.

I thought this was a graphic novel but I was wrong it is a novel! but I will still read it!