From the back cover: Stephen King, the world's greatest writer of horror fiction, weaves tales of the purest terror with two of his bestselling collections in one outstanding omnibus volume.
Read these pages and you will feel the hairs on the nape of your neck rise.
RE: The Skeleton Crew Who could imagine…?
In this brilliant collection of twenty-two stories, Stephen King takes readers down paths that only he could imagine….
A supermarket becomes the place where humanity makes its last stand against unholy destruction…a trip to the attic turns into a journey to hell…a woman driver finds a very scary shortcut to paradise…an idyllic lake harbors a bottomless evil…and a desert island is the scene of the most terrifying struggle for survival ever waged.
Features the novella “The Mist”—Now a major motion picture
RE: Different Seasons From the Magical Pen of Stephen King, Four Mesmerizing Novellas…
“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” - An unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge…the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award nominee The Shawshank Redemption.
“Apt Pupil” - Todd Bowden is one of the top students in his high school class and a typical American sixteen-year-old—until he becomes obsessed about the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. The inspiration for the film Apt Pupil from Phoenix Pictures.
“The Body” - Four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. The film Stand By Me is based on this novella.
“The Breathing Method” - A disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death.
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
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Thy kingdom come. Let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind
A mighty oak tree standing firm against the storm, As sunlight scatters the shadows of night A river nourishing the land it flows through
I have read these anthology collections multiple times during the course of my life, and most recently I finished Different Seasons after re-reading Skeleton Crew. Pairing these two collections was a stroke of genius, because they naturally and organically flow.
By my 5-star rating, I don't pretend that every single story is fantastic, but every single story has merit. Whenever you have an anthology, by its very nature, every story is individual, unique, and must be judged in comparison to the others. Consequently, the stories will be uneven as they must be contrasted to the ones they follow and the ones as yet to come.
Here the steady stream of stories is not just vast, but deep. There is depth to the tales whether they are brief or whether they crossover into the length of novellas. If you have never read the stories written by this modern master, then you are in for a treat. Many of these stories have found life in a different medium as movies and TV shows. I think that these compilations are a must-own.