The titles include 1922 (about a man who murdered his wife), Big Driver (a drive home that went really, really bad), Fair Extension (a man makes a deal with the actual devil), and A Good Marriage (I’ll let your imagination do the guessing). It’s easier to approach shorter stories cemented in the real world, especially if you’re new to horror and sci-fi, so be prepared to go full-fledged King fanatic after this read.

Full Dark, No Stars is a compilation of four novellas that focus on the darkness of human nature and retribution.

And damn, does he know how to pack a punch in a few pages. 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.Like most authors, King started out writing short stories and novellas. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

'Fair Extension,' the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. 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. 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. 'I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger.' writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up '1922', the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King.

Stephen king no dark full stars