Just After Sunset by Stephen King (2008, Hardcover)

Stephen King's latest anthology of short stories, Just After Sunset, is quietly dazzling. It is an album of snapshots of his ability to erode the membrane between light and dark, to make the reader believe that any person, given the proper circumstances, could slip into a universe that's not quite right. Weird things happen in these tales, but they are not necessarily horrifying. The characters are living, often unawares, on the edge of reality.

This latest collection of tales reminds the reader that King's characters don't always die in his short stories. Some of his unfortunates tumble into strange pockets and find themselves unable to get out. Or the opposite happens: They manage to flee against all odds and reclaim normality, or at least a tenuous substitute.

As with his previous collections, this anthology presents the feeling that there are these masses of people out there waiting to be dragged into something that will change, even end, their life as they know it. Just After Sunset does this better than his previous collections. The unsettling "Willa," set in a Wyoming railroad station, is the closest thing to an original "Twilight Zone" episode to be written in years. In "N."- one of the most unorthodox pieces in the collection- King meditates about death.

Just After Sunset stands for all that Stephen King has become to his readers: a gateway between us and them, between here and there. If you love King, you'll enjoy this eclectic bouquet of short stories that is not, in the end, about darkness itself, but twilight- that gray, uneasy land that lies between the prosaic texture of human days and the unending desolation of the night.