TITLE: Later
AUTHOR: Stephen King
272 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781789096491 (paperback, also available in e-book and audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): SOMETIMES GROWING UP MEANS FACING YOUR DEMONS.
The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine - as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: In Later, Stephen King’s upcoming (March 2, 2021) release from Hard Case Crime, the author returns to that fertile ground he tills so well: a narrator telling us, with more than a little nostalgia, of a horror-touched childhood or adolescence. Jamie Conklin shares a lot of emotional territory with Gordie LaChance and Bill Denbrough, although the landscape of Jamie’s childhood in the not-so-distant-2000’s rather than the 1950s or 60s. Jamie still fills his story with nostalgic nods at television shows, television shows, and New York City neighborhoods. At 22 years old, Jamie is not the published, well-regarded author that LaChance and Denbrough are when we catch them reminiscing about their childhood traumas (and yes, I know, Bill Denbrough doesn’t narrate IT; we’re still closely privy to his thoughts as an adult, as memories come back to him). But even Jamie notices (and this reader did as well) that his writing improves over the course of telling his story, so there’s hope for him yet, especially as the child of a literary agent. And I don’t believe King is done with Jamie Conklin after this book, not by a long shot.
Like Gordie and Bill, Jamie’s life is altered the first time he sees a dead body. Unfortunately, unlike them, he’s only six years old at the time, and he not only sees the body but also the dead man’s mutilated ghost. This is traumatic and formative and when Jamie finally tells us the full details of the event his childhood terror, even through the tinge of reverie, is palpable. Of course, it’s not Jamie’s last encounter with ghosts. Most of the encounters are quick and benign, but it wouldn’t be a King novel if things didn’t get dangerous.
The character acknowledges how like The Sixth Sense this whole set-up is; King has never been shy about wearing his literary and cinematic antecedents on his sleeve and giving inspirational credit where it’s due. But of course, King’s take on “kid seeing dead people” is much darker than Shyamalan’s. For one thing, the ghosts Jamie sees know they are dead, and most of them don’t tend to linger among humanity more than a few days, whether they have unfinished business or not. Which is both good for Jamie and bad, when one spirit decides to stick around longer than the norm.
Unlike the childhood trials of Gordie and Bill, Jamie doesn’t have a cadre of intrepid friends to share the emotional journey and physical dangers with. Classmates are mentioned enough that Jamie isn’t painted as an awkward loner with no social life, but they’re also all off-screen and unimportant to the narrative, grace notes to the main theme. King heavily leans into the stereotype that Gen Z kids would be more likely to record their friend’s “hallucinations” and post them to social media than join in a quest to save the day under the noses of unsuspecting adults. I don’t think this is a completely accurate assessment of that generation, but it works well enough as a plot point keeping other kids off-stage and leaving Jamie only the adults in his life to rely on – adults who, as much as they love him, are unreliable at best and in one case untrustworthy as well. This is yet another thing Jamie has in common with the boys of “The Body” and the Losers’ Club. They couldn’t rely on the adults in their lives either; the key difference being that Jamie is more fully alone in his moments of crisis.
If I have any complaints about the book, they’re minor. I think King really sticks the ending of the book – but then he adds a final reveal that feels a bit tacked on and which I don’t think really adds anything to the overall story or to our understanding of Jamie’s character. I’ll be interested to see if I’m in the minority on this once I get a chance to look at other reviews (which I’ve avoided doing while writing this). I also think this book would have been a better fit with a publisher like Cemetery Dance; the supernatural element is so important and prevalent that it doesn’t really feel like a Hard Case Crime title, which normally lean more towards “regular” crime and psychological horror. This might be the most supernatural book HCC has published (feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong; I haven’t read all 100-ish HCC books yet). Interestingly, when King released his ostensibly “final” Richard Bachman book, Blaze, he said in the foreword that he’d considered placing it with Hard Case Crime but ultimately thought it wouldn’t be a good fit, whereas I think it would have been a perfect HCC title. So what do I know?
Bottom line: Later is a wonderful addition to the “kid sees ghosts, bad shit happens” oeuvre. The kid is endearing, the supernatural threat strong and scary, and the human threats even more so.
I reviewed an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.