Book review
Written by Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton hardback
Release date 12 November 2008

A collection of short stories reflecting the fears and passions of the world today, a very different place to that showcased in 2002’s Everything’s Eventual…

Just After Sunset is a collection of 14 (mostly) new stories from a master of the form. In this, his first collection for six years, King shows us a world haunted by ghosts – both of those we’ve lost and of the events that led to such losses. But he primarily shows us humans, no matter how flawed, and what makes them tick.

The book’s oldest story is The Cat From Hell, a traditional pulp tale of an assassin hired to kill a cat only to find that he’s bitten off far more than he can chew. Other tales include Willa, which relates how a group of people assimilate the fact that they’re dead, and The Things They Left Behind and Graduation Afternoon, both of which attempt to address the horror of 9/11 in the most personal of terms, thus bringing an enormously resonant event into the sharpest of focus.

Then there’s the deliciously nasty A Very Tight Place, where the protagonist finds himself imprisoned in a portaloo, and the newest story in the book, N, a tribute to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

All the stories in Just After Sunset have one thing in common: people. The pages of this book detail our hopes and our fears, our passions and our nightmares – both large and small. This makes for an emotive, resonant reading experience, and will inevitably result in these stories, and these people, staying with you for a long time. Marie O’Regan

VERDICT: 9/10
A collection of tales that will delight and scare in equal measure.