While he avoids certain mistakes, King isn’t trying to break ground here. The reader will think not only of Cole Sear in Shyamalan’s film but also, naturally, of Danny Torrance in King’s The Shining and Doctor Sleep. To say more would ruin what pleasures Later has to offer. In desperation, Jamie seeks out the advice of someone with highly specialized occult knowledge and puts it to use to turn the tables on his tormentor. One of them, the mad bomber who offed himself, decides to make Jamie’s life hell by showing up unexpectedly at various places and taunting him with dire predictions about his mom’s health. In Later, the dead people know they are dead, all right. Maybe King has learned from Shyamalan’s blunders. Over the course of the months following the shooting at the start of the film, there would be hundreds or thousands of occasions when he tried to interact with others, and he would quickly pick up on the fact that they cannot see or hear him. Bruce Willis’s character, Malcolm Crowe, doesn’t know that he is dead until the very end of the film, and neither do we.īut the scenes that fool the viewer into thinking Crowe is alive and engaging normally with people, who for one reason or another just don’t want to respond to him (he forgot an anniversary and his upset wife, across the table at a restaurant, is looking down his wife is upstairs and we can’t see her reaction or lack thereof when he yells at her to answer the doorbell) would not keep Crowe himself fooled.
#Later stephen king movie#
The Sixth Sense, to which Later has a rather glaring debt, is a popular movie that doesn’t many any sense if you stop and think about it for a moment. But then, after Liz’s substance abuse gets really severe and derails her affair with Jamie’s mom, her knowledge of Jamie’s secret has bad consequences indeed. Liz is instrumental in this endeavor and then in the case of a mad bomber who dies with one of his bombs still undetonated. One of her few authors to have sold well and helped keep her agency solvent has died before completing an eagerly awaited saga.įortunately, Jamie is able to track down the dead author, find out what the author planned to write in the uncompleted passages, and relay it all to his mom. Before he gets around to solving horrific crimes, Jamie puts his talents to work to help his mom out with a literary project. It just so happens that the lover of Jamie’s mom is a troubled NYPD detective named Liz Dutton, who knows about his gifts, though they are a secret to most of the world.
#Later stephen king crack#
Jamie’s gifts make him useful to cops trying to crack tough cases. He can ask them questions and they must answer, though they don’t have to tell Jamie what he wants to hear. The difference here is that the dead people who interact with Jamie are, rather inexplicably, bound by certain rules. Like the corpses in that movie, the dead in Later wear whatever they had on at the time of death and the wounds that did them in are evident in all their gory hideousness. Night Shyamalan’s film as an analogue for his own experiences. Jamie matter-of-factly lets the reader know that he sees dead people, just like, you guessed it, the kid in The Sixth Sense. Later is the story of Jamie Conklin, a boy with a wry, self-deprecating manner who lives in New York with his mom, a literary agent and recovering alcoholic. The book often reads like a greatest-hits compendium, and not just of King’s own work. But to say that Later is derivative would be an understatement.
#Later stephen king how to#
King still knows how to populate a story with engaging personae, how to keep the tale moving, and how to be funny and self-aware.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/pmn/3NC2TWY2BRFNLOVXUTGQD7IP5Y.jpg "later stephen king")
Even the best writers exhaust themselves and lapse into self-parody, and some of us now are bound to ask whether the man is producing anything worth reading.īased on his new novel, Later, the answer is yes and no.
But King has also unleashed a lot of dross on the world. Some of his novels are powerful works of the macabre and certain of his early stories-think of “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” “Night Surf,” “Quitters, Inc.,” “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” “The Woman in the Room,” “Nona,” and “Survivor Type”-are resonant, shudder-inducing tales that compare favorably with anything by Salinger or Capote. King adds continually to a vast and uneven corpus of work. Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper. King publishes everything from works of supernatural horror to gritty crime stories to tales marked by Chandleresque melancholy and the social realism of a Russell Banks writing about New England’s losers and sad sacks. Does Stephen King still have it as a writer? The 73-year-old scribe churns out book after book and story after story every year, running circles around younger authors in terms of productivity, not to mention versatility.
0 kommentar(er)
