Twenty-one titles are listed at the foot of this description, from Mile 81 to Summer Thunder, and the copy above them promises twenty-one iconic stories. A four-star reviewer who worked through the whole thing calls it a compendium of eighteen short stories and two poems. Both counts sit on the same page, unreconciled, and neither is annotated. The gap is small, and it is also a useful warning about what this twenty-hour-and-eleven-minute audiobook contains: not a novel, not a themed collection, but a drawer turned out, with Stephen King introducing every item as it comes.
Stephen King is credited as the reader as well as the author, which for this particular book is a structural fact rather than a novelty. The collection works in two layers: the stories, and an autobiographical note before each one explaining when, why, and how he came to write or rewrite it. An author reading his own explanations is doing something a hired reader cannot do. An author reading his own fiction is doing something else entirely, and the two modes press against each other for the length of the recording.
Counting is where this listing turns strange. The published list runs Mile 81, Premium Harmony, Batman and Robin Have an Altercation, The Dune, Bad Little Kid, A Death, The Bone Church, Morality, Afterlife, Ur, and onward through Obits, Drunken Fireworks, and Summer Thunder, twenty-one entries in all. TMStyles, whose review opens by addressing Constant Readers, counts eighteen stories and two poems, and adds that some are old and revised while others are new. Nothing on the page reconciles the two arithmetics, and a buyer who cares which pieces are reprints will not find out here.
Entertainment Weekly is quoted in the publisher's copy saying that what we love most are the thoughtful introductions to each tale. Myon, posting from Germany in December 2015 and awarding five stars, urgently recommends the reverse: skip the introductions, because they take away a great deal of the pleasure, and go back to them afterward. That disagreement is worth more to a buyer than either opinion on its own, and in audio it carries a practical edge, since skipping past a preface you cannot see is harder than turning a page. The publisher's chosen pull-quote and the publisher's most enthusiastic customer are recommending opposite orders for the same object.
A Forgiving Structure for Forty-Minute Listening Sessions
Castle Rock, Maine, earns a mention on the listing for the story Premium Harmony, the kind of detail a publisher includes because it means something specific to a particular buyer. The rest of the description is arranged around theme rather than plot: morality, the afterlife, guilt, and what a person might do differently given a chance to see forward or correct backward. Afterlife has a man dead of colon cancer reliving the same life and repeating the same mistakes. Obits has a columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries.
Short fiction suits audio better than almost any other form, and twenty hours of it is a different proposition from twenty hours of novel. Every piece resolves. Stopping at the end of one costs nothing, which makes this unusually forgiving for a listener who gets forty minutes at a time and no more. TMStyles notes that most of the pieces put the horrors of real life ahead of ghosts, aliens, and monsters, and that this bothered some of the other reviewers. Worth knowing before committing: the supernatural is present without being the main business. The two genre labels attached to the listing, literary fiction and mystery, thriller and suspense, are each defensible and neither one is sufficient.
Fourteen Ratings Pooled Across Four Countries
Myon's advice about the introductions deserves testing before you settle into a listening pattern. If the notes really do hand over what follows, the order in which you take them changes the book, and the recording presumably runs them in printed sequence with no way to rearrange anything short of manual skipping. Nothing on the listing describes the track structure, so a buyer cannot tell whether each introduction occupies its own chapter or runs straight into the story it precedes. That is a genuine usability question, and the listing says nothing about it in either direction.
Denny McBride's five-star review is the longest in the column and it stops mid-sentence, cut off while recounting a lifetime of King that started with a mother too frightened to read alone in the house. Several of the other responses break off the same way. What survives of them is affection rather than assessment, which is common for authors this established and worth adjusting for. Abraham Tharakan, writing from India, offers three lines and a hope that a few more are still to come. Barbara Garrett, from Brazil, prefers the short fiction to what that review calls his romances.
Fourteen ratings hold up the 4.5 at the top, which is a very thin base for a collection this size and this well known. Four of the five written responses award five stars; TMStyles awards four and writes by far the most detailed assessment of the group. The line at the head of the description announces a 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, sitting above a release date of November 2015. Somebody updated the copy five years after publication and left the date where it was, which is worth registering before the rest of the page is read as current. Four countries turn up in a column of five entries, which suggests the responses have been pooled across national storefronts rather than gathered in one place.
Entry Points for Constant Readers, Not Completists
Constant Readers, to borrow the phrase both the copy and TMStyles reach for, are the obvious audience, and the introductions are pitched at precisely that person. So is anyone who wants King in small doses: a listener who cannot face a full-length novel gets twenty-one entry points instead, each of them self-contained. TMStyles also argues the collection works as an introduction for someone new to the phenomenon, which is a fair reading given how little the pieces depend on one another.
Completists who already own the individual pieces should check the printed list against their shelves before paying for twenty hours, since the description concedes that some of the material is old and revised. Readers hoping for sustained dread across a whole book will find the form working against them, because every piece resets the clock and the mood. Newcomers should probably settle the twenty-hour question before anything else, since nothing in the collection requires prior reading, only prior patience.
- Performance: Stephen King is credited for the whole twenty hours, commentary included, which changes what those introductions are.
- What it covers: Morality and the afterlife, guilt revisited late, ordinary lives that turn out to have teeth.
- Feel: Conversational between the stories, bleak inside them.
- Our call: Twenty-one self-contained pieces plus their author's running commentary, excellent in short sessions and punishing in long ones.
