New Stephen King books really are quite reliable. Once per November, and once per spring, which may or may not reliably be March-or-April, as somehow I’m less used to those and they always catch me by surprise. But not the November ones, and thusly I have consumed Full Dark, No Stars, which is a set of novellas. Unusually[1], the stories have a unifying theme. Well, three out of the four do, and the odd man out differs in shortness as well as lack of cohesiveness with its brethren and sistren. And that story was only okay, though I will say in its defense that any time King trots out an iteration of his dark-souled Monty Hall stand-in, I’ll at least enjoy those scenes.

Anyway, though, the other three stories, concerning a pre-Dust-Bowl farmer, a mystery series author, and a coin collector’s wife, each of them is dark indeed, if perhaps not always as dark as the title would indicate, and they have a lot of common threads. Not, thankfully, the prop of possibly demonic rats that I spent a little time expecting. But misogyny, the penance of confession, and bloody vengeance? Those in spades. I also want to claim justice, but that one is murkier. (Revenge is the crossover point to our odd story as well, if you were hoping there’d be something there.) As is ever the case with King, there’s not a lot to spoil, because he but rarely writes stories with twists, and quite frequently he reveals the destination in the first few paragraphs. But he’s still my hands-down favorite for documenting the winding paths that normal people, who he manages to flesh out into reality with often only a few deft strokes of the brush, will take into or back out of the valley of the shadow of death; or, most often, into and back out.

[1] It is always of course possible that there are buried themes in each such collection, and these are just closer to the surface and easier to find, or that I’ve gotten better at it in the intervening years. The former is the more likely of the two, unless I was right about it not being usual in the first place.