LATER

Every Body’s Talking To Jamie

- Dave Golder

RELEASED 2 MARCH 272 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook Author Stephen King Publisher Titan Books

On a number of occasions in Later, the book’s first-person narrator, Jamie Conklin, assures us “This is a horror story.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that the author is Stephen King. On the other hand, this is King’s third book for Hard Case Crime, an imprint primarily devoted to noirish crime mysteries, and his previous two contributions have either only hinted at the supernatural (2005’s The Colorado Kid) or kept it low-key (2013’s Joyland).

Later, though, feels much more like familiar King territory: it features a young boy with a supernatural gift, various ghosts, many bloody deaths, and a paranormal killer, not to mention the return of a spooky threat from a couple of previous books.

The main way Later resembles its Hard Case predecessors, rather than King’s usual doorstop output, is in its modest page count. Then again, that also means it could have quite happily fitted into King’s recent anthology If It Bleeds. But who published the book doesn’t really matter (well, apart from Hard Case, who must surely benefit from having a multimillion-selling author with a huge global fanbase slum it with them every few years – that’s worth not getting on a high horse about genre boundaries). The crucial thing for a potential reader is, is it any good? The answer, as with so many King novels, is: yes, but it does all go a bit weird at the end.