Four really good, but seriously dark, novellas. The third story at least has glimmers of humor, but it's mostly the kind where you laugh while wondering what's wrong with you.

OK. Novels are his forte.

Short fiction often brings out the best in King, and this is no exception. "A Good Marriage" is the highlight.

Very dark stories, but so very good.

A collection of 4 short stories about "balancing the scales" good/evil, luck/misfortune, virtue/vice. Except for one deal with the "Elvid" there are no supernatural, magical, or other worldly powers found here just the darkness that lies within the human heart.

Very disappointing. I love Stephen King's other short story collections, but these are pretty uniformly bad.

Solid novella King, where horror sits definitely in the backseat. Not mindblowing, like Different Seasons, but solid.

Good collection of King stories, until the last one, which is so fucking compelling that I started it on the plane and had to stay up and finish in my room. Premise - what if a woman discovers she's been married to a notorious serial killer - for years?

Maybe not quite a four star rating, but pretty close. These short stories are not my favourites of King's but what excellent characters and storytelling.

At the end of the book Stephen talks about how "harsh" this book is - and that's a good term for it. It's harsh. And I'm not accustomed to harsh reading anymore. Even the crime novels I read tend to gloss over the brutalities, with the victims usually dead by the time I meet them in the books. To read about the crimes from the perspective of the victim was, put simply, harsh. This is not a book I'd chose to read again, nor is it one I would recommend. But the last story of this book (which is a series of 5 short stories) is really good. Good enough to make me glad I finished the book, even though the second story was way too harsh for me.

It's crude. It's foul. And in typical King fashion, it's haunting.

I realized when reading this book that the last time I read anything like this by King, I was not a christian, nor was I a mom. I'm not sure how much those two things have changed my perspective of his books - or if the books I read (Pet Cemetery was my favorite) were just less harsh back then. It could be a combination.

His book On Writing is one of my all time favorite books.