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Nightmares and Dreamscapes
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Home Delivery-N&D
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(view spoiler)
Other King connections? (view spoiler)
The Notes (at the end of the book): (view spoiler)
This was such a great story! It was really great to have King's islanders facing an apocalyptic scenario and it all came off really well. You really felt bad for Maddie. Overall it has a kind of shlocky B movie feel that was pretty charming.
I LOVED this one. I am huge fan of zombies and King really came through on this element! I enjoyed his description of the corpses and their rotting faces!
Home Delivery is one of my favorite stories.
I love zombies and this is a really different take on that genre.
(view spoiler)[The protagonist of the story is Maddie Pace, a rather timid and indecisive young woman who lives on a small island named Gennesault (or "Jenny"), off the coast of Maine. Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a fishing-boat accident.
After a scattering of initial outbreaks, dead bodies all over the world begin to reanimate en masse and attack the living. The source of the phenomenon is eventually traced to a bizarre, presumably alien, construct in orbit high above the Earth's south pole (more precisely "above the hole in the ozone layer".) A space shuttle under joint American-Chinese authority visits the site, and promptly meets with disaster. One of the crew survives just long enough to report that the target object appears to be a giant ball of seething worms which attack and rip open the shuttle. He reports that the crew's mangled remains are still alive. "Ching-Ling Soong--or rather, Ching-Ling Soong's severed head, one means to say-- just floated past me, and her eyes were open and blinking. She appeared to recognize me, and to--" The Shuttle exploded three seconds later. Further attempts to destroy the ball fail, the zombie plague spreads, and civilization collapses.
All of this is witnessed by Maddie and the other inhabitants of Jenny. They gather up all the available firearms to prepare for their own attack, which all too soon erupts from the island's small cemetery. The island's men are forced to destroy the zombies of their dead loved ones as they crawl out of their graves. The still-moving pieces of the reanimated corpses are then burned with kerosene and the remains plowed underground by a bulldozer. Frank Daggett, the elderly man who did most of the organizing of the successful defense, suffers a fatal heart attack, and has himself blasted to pieces so he won't revive.
While she is hearing about the battle at the cemetery from her neighbor, Maddie recalls her own confrontation by the animated corpse of her husband, come back to get her from the bottom of the sea. She succeeds in singlehandedly destroying him/it, and faces the future, however grim, with renewed confidence and hope.
There are some differences between the versions published in The Book of the Dead and Nightmares and Dreamscapes, none of which are significant to the plot. Most notably, the space expedition in the original publication was US-Soviet; the change in the later publication reflecting the end of the Cold War.
Film and other media adaptations
(October2011 ) A short film adaptation of "HOME DELIVERY" Starring Actress Karita Fleming (MTV2 "Burnout the Ultimate Challenge,Middle Men and Lifetime Television Maneater) premièred on Facebook,Youtube, Comcast/ Cox Cable.Written , directed and starring Actress Karita Fleming and produced by her film company GENUS FILMS.
(September 2009 - news): The story has been optioned as a theater release and is in pre-production. No release date has been set at this time. John and Paul Buckholts of Our Thing Productions have written the screenplay and Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train, Godzilla Final Wars) is scheduled to direct.
A short, animated version of the story was screened at RiverRun International Film Festival, produced by Guillermo del Toro.
"Home Delivery" has been adapted by artist Glenn Chadbourne for the book The Secretary of Dreams, a collection of comics based on King's short fiction released by Cemetery Dance in December 2006. (hide spoiler)]