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all we know now is that British intelligence is involved, Grasby is being told to cover up the murders, Deedee is another player (from another party?), and someone has just tried to murder Grasby, quite possibly Deedee! Grasby as the dude trying to torpedo the murder investigation works brilliantly as in-universe people are just as likely to believe that he merely bungled it out of incompetence.

This dude is so annoying, lol. The amount of duplicity that he goes through in order to save face is kind of funny but also not given how smug he is when he thinks that he’s got one over.

Anyway, the death of Mr. Starr really kicks things off as we are right in the middle of British Intelligence covertly informing Grasby of some of the stakes at hand. THANK GOODNESS.

Grasby is a bumbling buffoon. He is trying to ship himself with the American, Deedee, who—in spite of being 30 years old to his 38–pegs him as middle-aged. He makes an ass of himself at the pub. He constantly tries to play up the importance of his rank, superior to the local constables. Is this dude a red-headed Mr. Bean???

Anyway, Mrs. Gaunt stole the show as the weirdo elderly goth lady.

Grasby has yet to wow me. He is a bumbling detective, more at home in a British sitcom with a laugh track reacting to his internal monologue. His boss assures us that Grasby can be a great detective, but we have absolutely no proof, particularly against the laundry list of his cock-ups. His counterpart appears to be a stunningly beautiful American criminologist who happens to be at the same village he’s shipped to.

“The Beggar and the Diamond”

A short story based on a Hindu fable where the archangel Uriel is wracked with sympathy for the least fortunate man in the world (it is however this man’s job to be the biggest sufferer). He pleads with God, and God kind of relents as he humors Uriel, but God is kind of a stinker to his archangel in this one. Not mean, exactly; just a stinker.

“Brooklyn August”

A short poem that King wrote about baseball which he likes because it keeps getting selected for inclusion in anthologies and the like, as though this has transcended his reputation for horror.

“Head Down”

I was initially cool to this narrative of King’s son Owen’s last Little League season (Owen is not a major player in this story as it is a total chronicle with its own distinct characters) but boy did I get swept up in it. It might have helped that I didn’t know ahead of time how the state championship tournament was going to play out, but I think that it’s King’s storytelling that sold me.

“Umney’s Last Case”

A private detective starts out his day only to find that things are wrong. No noise from the noisy couple next door; the paperboy is quitting and hates him; his diner, Blondie’s, has shut down; his elevator operator is retiring due to cancer; and his secretary has quit. It’s been a bad day, for sure, but things only get worse for Clyde Umney from here.

“The Doctor’s Case”

John Watson solves the case! This story has a Murder on the Orient finish but also features a Sherlock Holmes who is deathly allergic to cats as well as very antagonistic banter between Holmes and Inspector Lestrade. It’s been awhile since I read Sherlock Holmes so I don’t have recent memory to compare this to, but I was caught off guard by how snippy everyone was.

“The Fifth Quarter”

This is a tough guy noir/crime story where a con hears a tale about an armed car robbery and a treasure map from his dying (murdered) buddy and goes after the haul, because 1) Barney was his friend, and 2) it’s damn near 500,000 dollars! He just has to get the pieces of map from the other three robbers. That’s a lot simpler than it sounds, of course.

“The House on Maple Street”

The BRADBURY family has something weird growing in the walls of their house. It’s something metallic. Meanwhile, the Bradbury family is suffering under their despot of a stepfather, who is slowly killing their mother with his browbeating. These two events coincide, resulting in a dazzling and miraculous escape from fear.

“Crouch End”

A young American woman tells a distressing story to two London policemen. They were on vacation, you see, with two children at the hotel while the parents went to visit one of her husband’s business contacts for dinner, only to get lost in a suburb by the name of Crouch End. Abandoned by their cab, they are left to fend for themselves against the kind of stuff madness is made of.

“The Ten O’Clock People”

Basically They Live, except instead of magic sunglasses it’s brain chemistry that comes from quitting smoking and then picking it back up again. Brandon is saved from a very public freak-out after witnessing a nightmare that appears to be wearing one of his boss’s bodies. The man who saved him, Duke, explains some of the whats, particularly what ties the people who see together.

“Sorry, Wrong Number”

This is a teleplay. What I can tell you is that removing so much of the internal prose of a Stephen King story to present it as a script makes the story about as appealing as what little King touches survive in the few deliberate details and the basic idea of the story itself. Which is, a wife and mother receives a mysterious, sobbing phone call and then tries to figure out who made it.

“My Pretty Pony”

This is a Bradbury-esque meditation on youth and growing old between a grandfather and his favorite grandson, but with decidedly less Bradbury-esque “aww, shucks” romanticism and more of King’s relatively realistic details filling the picture around Clive’s (and Grandpa’s) lives, including an alcoholic mother, an emotionally unavailable and abusive father, and whatever is with Patty.

“Rainy Season”

In this creature feature, a young couple are warned out of town by the threat of a rain of toads. Do the young couple follow the townsfolk’s advice? No; they NEVER follow their advice. It goes much more poorly than I expected, I guess because I didn’t see the sentimentality for the young and very much in love husband and wife for what it was: the picture of picturesque victims.

“Home Delivery”

Zombie apocalypse with a character sketch of Maddie, who is with child and living on Little Tall Hill island in Maine. This story is at its best when it is in Maddie’s history, especially her small period of loving with Jack, and how the residents prepare for the invasion of the living dead. It is comically absurd when it details the WHY of the living dead.

“You Know They Got A Hell of a Band”

The first part: Mary and Clark are lost in the Oregon country. There is marital dischord, grounding the drama of the unfamiliar. Clark is a bit of a fragile asshole.

Then: Would it be so bad to wind up in a town that is mostly populated by dead rock and roll stars? Well, if it’s anything like Rock and Roll Heaven, then yes, yes it would be!

“Sneakers”

Tell is a recording engineer who connects with one Paul, another recording engineer, but the office that they work in has a mysterious lodger in the men’s bathroom. Tell’s conflict with this unknown presence mirrors his building understanding of Paul’s mercurial personality. A major point is people perceiving Tell as a closeted homosexual; nothing in his thoughts betrays sexuality of any kind.

“The Moving Finger”

A CPA fights first psychologically and then physically with a finger in his bathroom sink. A finger that, as it turns out, has more than two joints before it connects with the palm. Which raises some very pointed questions on Howard’s mind. Like, aren’t there five fingers per HAND? And, what could possibly be waiting at the end of such a nightmarish appendage?

“Dedication”

A story involving hoodoo where a mother tells the true tale behind her son’s literary success to her very good friend. It’s grounded in King trying to explain why some undeniably great authors turn out to be horrible people in person, something that I think we can all relate to when we think of art in general. How Martha establishes Peter’s NATURAL father is, uh, something else.

“Chattery Teeth”

Bill Hogan reluctantly buys a pair of novelty oversized chattery teeth at a truck stop. He picks up a hitchhiker at same truck stop, in the middle of a pretty bad sandstorm. Things do not go well for Bill because of one of these things, but it turns out a lot better than they could because of the other. This is a pretty fun story, but you might not think of those goofy teeth the same way.

“It Grows On You”

This is the epilogue of Castle Rock, told as the memories of the town from World War I to the stock market crash leading up to the Great Depression. I’m sad to say that the only one of these characters that I recall is Andy. The rest are like so many old men roosting in shops, with one man offering his incontrovertible testimony against the blurred facts of their commingled stories.

“Popsy”

Unsympathetic MC victim is a different class of horror story. In this case, Sheridan is a gambling addict who has taken to shoring up his bets by KIDNAPPING AND SELLING CHILDREN. What he wasn’t counting on was a vampire grandson with a vampire grandfather. Great! Great and good! The reader is practically DYING to find out what the vampire kid’s Popsy is all about!

“The Night Flier”

A novelette about a reporter named Dees who is on the trail of a plane-flying serial killer… a serial killer who may believe himself to be a vampire. The fact that Dees himself is a pilot adds a neat layer to the story, and it’s a pretty good hook. It’s clear, though, that “Dwight Renfield” has absolutely no concern about the kind of trail he leaves behind him.

“Suffer the Little Children”

Miss Sidley is a seasoned, no-nonsense third grade teacher. But one of her students seems to have her number… either Miss Sidley is starting to have psychotic break, or something is consuming the souls of her pupils.

This is a hard story. Sidley is unlikable but not evil, but events one way or another bring her to attempt to systematically murder her entire class.

“The End of the Whole Mess”

Howard’s baby brother Bobby is a genius and as he grows up, he eventually settles on finding a way to bring about world peace. Bobby finds a way, but as the opening of the story discloses, there are unforeseen repercussions—something Bobby thought he could live with up until he had to face them. The story’s fine but it’s Howard’s emotional ending that makes it.

“Dolan’s Cadillac”

About the exact moment I realized that this was a loving tribute to “The Cask of Amontillado” was the moment it went all-in on the homages. Otherwise, this is the story of a third-grade schoolteacher who gets revenge on a mobster who executed the teacher’s wife for having the resolve to testify against him in court. It’s pretty good and its MC demonstrates a lot of resolve.

tfw you realize you’re missing 3 books from your already bloated TBR list

The end of this novel isn’t exactly what I expected based on the intro. We are given the POVs of the hotel folk who are pretty far from grieving, the closest we get to catharsis being Hirst’s return from the villa, and even he is looking to merely disengage with the emotional drain of the past fortnight. We are spared the intensity of Helen’s and Terence’s grief.