Four Past Midnight

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instant of utter stillness when between two beats of the heart, an alternate reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and switch you into a new and terrifying world. 

Written by Stephen King, Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas that each explores the fragility of the human mind and how everything can change in that split second. The book is a delightful mixture of terrors on numerous fronts. 

Our first tale, The Langoliers, tells the story of ten passengers on board a plane that wake up to find the plane mysteriously empty of its pilot, cabin crew, and all the other passengers. The motley crew of travellers then proceed to discover with increasing horror that they have slipped through a crack in time and must get back to the present before they become the past. 

A surprising science fiction thriller, this story is one where King plays to the readers’ most primal of senses: curiosity. The writing is a little all-over-the-place and pockmarked with King’s undeniable and sometimes infuriating frankness and brutality and, to be honest nothing hugely engaging happens for the most part, but for whatever reason, be it the love for the writer or the unyielding niggle that says that something really good is going to happen, you continue to power through the book at three times the speed of sound, avidly taking in everything on the page in front of you. 

Filled with action, madness, violence, science fiction, horror, and even romance, The Langoliers is a very interesting story that opens up a lot of doors in your mind about the fragility of time; so much so that it can even be argued that it redefines what it means to time travel. It definitely throws the whole concept into a whole new light. 

Our second story is Secret Window, Secret Garden and this story tells the grizzly and terrifying tale of Mort Rainey, a divorced writer who is thrown into a violent and horrifying spiral when a man comes to his doorstep and accuses him of stealing his story. Although Mort goes to great lengths to prove his innocence the accuser, named John Shooter, proves impossible to sway and things soon become terrifyingly dangerous as Shooter’s path to revenge becomes littered with blood and dead bodies. 

My whole reason for buying this entire book was because I was desperate to read this story after I saw the movie: Secret Window, which starred Johnny Depp and John Turturro. It’s a fantastic psychological thriller with appropriate levels of suspense and gore and, not since The Shining have I been that frightened when reading! Reading the climactic part at 4 in the morning and a dog suddenly barked down the road…. I jumped, almost tumbled right out of bed! 

King has an innate talent for writing scenarios that are happening in reality and in the characters’ mind simultaneously. The writing in Secret Window, Secret Garden greatly and very clearly imprints the images in the mind of the reader and, with the violent horror and gore of the story written very bluntly and simply, it repulses and shocks you just enough to make you want to read on instead of putting the book down with a grimace and a flip of the stomach. The entire story is an intrinsic web of misdirection and deception and, filled with violence, murder, gore, and heaps of horror and suspense, it’s a story that you won’t want to put down! 

Our third story is The Library Policeman, which tells the traumatic tale of Sam Peebles, a real-estate agent who is roped into doing a speech for the Rotary Club. To liven up his speech Sam goes down to the local library, a feat in itself as he has a fear of libraries that stems from a long time ago, and here he meets Ardelia Lortz the librarian… and his troubles begin. There is something strange about Ardelia, even more so when Sam discovers that the woman has been dead for years. Yet she soon begins to start hounding Sam to return his library books, threatening him with the “Library Policeman”. Sam begins to panic when the books go missing and true terror takes hold when the dark, shadowy and menacing Library Policeman comes to his house… 

I found this story rather hard to get through as it takes an inordinate amount of twists and turns, not just of the plot, but of the genre of story as well. It begins as a sort of ghost story with Sam entering a ghost library and being served by a woman who, according to the rest of the word, died years ago. But then it escalates into a sort of alien story with Ardelia being some sort of otherworldly vampiric monster. And then finally it takes a detour down the thriller lane with Sam’s own personal tale of childhood trauma. I found that, with so many changes to the story’s style, I kept getting lost and not having a clue as to what was going on. 

Having said that though, once we get into the more climactic part of the tale, the recounting part where everything finally gets explained to the reader, then it becomes a rollercoaster of terror and fright. This is also the first King story I’ve read that features a little bit of subtle humour, sort of like that used in The Seven Year Itch, in which Stephen King uses his own name amidst some of the great horror writers that Ardelia lists for Sam. 

What I also liked about this story was that it was one in which the author could easily convey messages about reading and the general power of stories, in the case of this book: fairytales. When you get down to brass tax, fairytales, the original and un-Disneyfied ones, are really scary and not really for children at all. They were originally written to scare children into being good and that purpose serves King’s monster-mistress in this story very, very well. 

Filled with childhood trauma, violence, horror, romance, comedy, and heaps of suspense, The Library Policeman is a strange, but ultimately very engaging story that takes some time to get into, but once you’re in, there’s no hope of getting out. 

And the fourth and final story in this collection is The Sun Dog, which I have to admit I didn’t understand at all. This story tells the tale of Kevin Delevan and a camera that his parents give him for his fifteenth birthday. At first he’s very excited, it’s just what he wanted, but then the camera proves to have a fault: it takes the same picture over and over again. As if this isn’t enough the picture it takes is of a mongrel dog and what makes it more disturbing is the fact that in every picture that’s taken, the dog appears to move, getting closer and closer. With the help of his father and a seedy town crackpot, Kevin initiates an investigation into the phenomena and discovers that the dog really is moving and has one thing in mind: to escape from the Polaroid world and kill him. 

I found this story to be boring and made up of nothing but suspense. What compels you to keep turning the pages is the built-in expectation that everything nonsensical and boring that happens in the beginning and middle is only leading up to a fantastically scary and brutal climax. Unfortunately, this is not the case for this story. I just found that I couldn’t understand what the horror was and, maybe this is just a fault on my side, but I just found this story to be boring and I only read it because I hate not finishing a book. 

Having said this, I must admit that I did enjoy the horror-dog theme that King goes on in this story. We see open references to Cujo and then The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I quite enjoyed. 

Overall, Four Past Midnight is a great collection of stories that each explores the fragility of the split second and the what-if possibilities of other worlds and the human mind. 

Filled with violence, horror, romance, and a few clever bouts of comic writing, I quite enjoyed it. I’d read some of those stories again.