Later

This is a horror story.Is it though? Who am I to say what is and isn't horror? There was a recent kerfuffle, yeah I said kerfuffle, where it was said that there cannot be horror in space so what do I know about what defines something as being horror?So, is this a horror story?After thinking about it, yeah Uncle Stevie, or in this case our protagonist Jamie Conklin is right, there are some pretty horrific things that happen in LATER by Stephen King. Now don't get me wrong, it's not on the same level of horror as IT or PET SEMATARY or ‘SALEM’S LOT but that doesn't mean it's not horror, right? Horror can be found at any place and any time, in any shape and any size. Just because something isn't horrifying to one person doesn't mean it won't scare the bejesus out of someone else. So what have we learned after this long tangent?This is a horror story.With that out of the way let's actually talk about the book some shall we? Jamie Conklin is just a kid and he sees dead people. Now that's not a spoiler as you find that out very early on in the book. Think about that for a second. Seeing dead people. That sounds pretty horrific to me, especially as a kid. And I don't mean Jamie sees ghosts. No, he sees full on dead people exactly how they looked the moment they died. So if someone is killed by getting their head smashed in Jamie sees that in all it’s brain leaking gory goodness. It is this secret, this gift (curse?) that Jamie must come to terms with and make a decision on if he will use his ability for right or wrong, for good or evil. Someone once said “With great power comes great responsibility,” wait, that’s a different universe but you catch my meaning.I'm a Stephen King fan so am I a bit biased? Maybe. Probably. But even trying to set that aside this was a good book. A fast paced coming of age crime thriller with great characters and of course bits of the supernatural as the cherry on top. Yeah, this is a Hard Case Crime novel, but it’s also from the mind of King so having supernatural elements is something that we should come to expect by now. I really enjoyed the gritty crime aspects of LATER and the hard connection to one of King’s most popular works. I am a sucker for connected universes and this was a fun tie in that I think raised way more questions for me than it provided answers.Some may complain that King is just rehashing material from his older books, and I can see that viewpoint, but for me this was new and original enough that I didn’t mind if bits felt as if they had been borrowed and incorporated into this story. Something I did feel indifferent about was a revelation that we get about Jamie right at the end of the book. I didn’t hate it, but I also felt that it was introduced so late in the game that it didn’t have any real impact on the story one way or another.I don’t have a fancy blurb to write here at the end of the review like I usually try to do, I mean it is Stephen King for goodness sakes. If the day comes when King needs me to blurb his book I will be living the high life. Just know that I had a lot of fun with LATER and thoroughly enjoyed this quick and grimey ride into the Kingverse. Reading King for me feels like coming home, and yeah I know that sounds cheesy but that’s the best way I can describe it whenever I crack open a book by him that I have yet to read. And once again for all those in the back who may not have heard and missed it...This is a horror story.

King does it again with his magical way of crafting words into engaging tales that won’t allow you to put the novel down.

Loved it , as usual No idea where this was heading. Quick read that held my interest until the very endRespons

Interesting story, but it seemed a bit predictable. Enjoying the fact That good prevailed and evil was defeated in the end.

Later was the last of the three books and my favorite. Well written, Stephen King style, with a great plot and plenty of twists.

I love Stephen King's pulp genre books. This and Joyland have made for fast, entertaining reading, and Later definitely goes for the jump scares, and just outright bumps in the night more than Joyland but bit both have likeable characters, and strong protagonist voices.

Stephen King’s Later is his third book published under the Hard Crime imprint, following The Colorado Kid and Joyland. But while both of those books kept at least one foot in the genre (albeit with additional elements), Later never really feels like a true crime novel so much as a ghost story with a couple of crime elements. That doesn’t mean it’s any less enjoyable; it just gives it an odd fit with what your expectations might be.Regardless, Later is a perfect example of all the things that King does well – a conversational tone that draws you end, a perfect sense of pacing and escalation, a sense of when to dive into horrors and when to let the minutiae of everyday life take over the story, rich characters, a knack for young character voices, and so forth. In giving us the story of Jamie Conklin, the lone son of a single mother who also seems to have the unusual gift of seeing the newly dead, King gives us a likable hero, even if he’s one who’s forced into some unexpected actions.Like a lot of King, Later is less remarkable for its story (which doesn’t really do all that much new, apart from one very unexpected pull from an older King book that took me by surprise and then some), but works because of King’s ability to build empathy for every character – villains and heroes alike. Whether it’s Jamie’s struggling mother, who finds herself more interested in her new partner and alcohol along the way, or that partner, a cop who’s got some definite warning signs with regard to her career, King finds a way to make them sympathetic, even as they do reprehensible things. Part of that is the choice to tell things from young Jamie’s perspective, as his limited understanding of some aspects of all of this blunt the horrors of what’s happening, but King is smart enough to know his readers can see through that. It doesn’t matter, though, because through his dialogue, the characters’ actions, our sense of their motivations and struggles, you can always remember that sense that these aren’t bad people, per se – just ones who’ve made tragic mistakes.That doesn’t mean there’s not evil in this book, but even that is more complicated than expected, as King finds a way to give us a supernatural horror that’s also not your typical “murderer still on the prowl.” There are hints here of something more, something darker, and it’s to the book’s credit that King never overexplains or spells it all out. (The book is tight by King standards, running just about 300 pages, and nicely moving along without much wasted time.)Later doesn’t do anything particularly surprising or groundbreaking; it’s a solid example of what King does well, but it doesn’t find him stretching too much from his comfort zone. Give me a few years, and I’ll just remember that it was good and not much more. But it serves as a perfect reminder of all the things that drew me into King’s writing in the first place, and the reason that I keep picking up his works no matter how many he releases.

Great quick read from King. Really enjoyed the story line.

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.

Rien à redire

... 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.

Vintage Stephen King. Not a new idea, but the story through the eyes of a child through adolescence trying to come to terms with his singular ability is hold the interest and escalates smoothly and grippingly. This is why I started reading him all those years ago.

I really liked this novel.