Full Dark No Stars by Stephen King (Audiobook Review)

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Title: Full Dark No Stars
Author: Stephen King
Narrator: Craig Wasson and Jessica Hecht
Publisher: Recorded Books
Duration: 14 hours, 56 minutes
Copyright: 2010
Genres: short fiction, horror, supernatural
Filed in: Audiobook Reviews
Review copy provided by Kearney Public Library

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922", the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.
In "Big Driver", a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.
"Fair Extension", the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.
When her husband of more than 20 years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.
Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.
©2010 Stephen King. All rights reserved. (P)2010 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved

MY TAKE ON IT: Full Dark, No Stars is Stephen King’s third collection of novellas. 1982’s Different Seasons contained four great novellas, includingRita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and The Body, while 1990’s Four Past Midnight contained four absolute duds, including The Sun Dog, and The Library Policeman. I would have to place Full Dark, No Stars somewhere in between. There’s nothing here as inspiring as Shawshank, or as heart-felt as The Body, but these four stories are much better than those contained in Four Past Midnight.
If there is a recurring theme throughout these four novellas, it would have to do with maintaining a cosmic balance, if you’ll pardon the existentialism. In each tale there are acts of unspeakable violence, and in each the author of that violence is eventually brought low. In 1922, the guilty party spends the rest of his life seeing visions of rats, which seem to mirror his own guilty conscience, gnawing away at him from the inside out. In Big Driver, and “The Good Marriage”, the murderers end up victims of a brutal crime themselves. Incidentally, whoever wrote that summary above must be some kind of sick, homicidal maniac himself if he thought “Fair Extensions” was in any way funny.
While listening to Stephen King’s afterword, it occurred to me that there was another theme in play, and that is that you can never truly know what is in a person’s heart, no matter how well you think you know them. As King himself puts it, “Even a murderer can help an old lady across the street from time to time.” We all harbor secret thoughts deep within us, even if we don’t mean to. In this collection of stories, Stephen King postulates that it might only take a small push in the right (or wrong) direction to tip the scales and bring our darker side to the fore. Scary stuff.

NARRATOR: Craig Wasson narrated the stories 1922 and “Fair Extensions.” He narrated with a lot of enthusiasm that at times reminded me of an actor on stage, delivering a dramatic soliloquy. Sometimes it felt a little bit overdone, but on the whole I enjoyed his narration. Wasson also narrated the author’s afterword.
Jessica Hecht narrated “The Good Marriage”, and “Big Driver”, and did a good job as well. In both of those stories, there is a lot of interior dialogue, thoughts going through the characters mind, and she had a certain way of changing her pitch a little so you could always tell the thoughts from the spoken lines.

FINAL WORD: “Full Dark, No Stars” has some good stories. Not King’s best work, but then I never thought short fiction was his strong point. These are definitely worth a read, though.

CHECK OUT THESE OTHER AUDIOBOOK REVIEWS:
Under the Dome by Stephen King (Audiobook review)
Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (Audiobook Review)
Everything’s Eventual, Volume 1 by Stephen King (audiobook Review)

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This audiobook review is based on the unabridged audiobook.
Audiobook review by Steven Brandt
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