The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Table of Contents:

Author’s note
Introduction

1. Mile 81 – Scribner e. 
2. Premium Harmony – 2009 New Yorker 
3. Batman and Robin Have an Altercation – Harpers 2012 
4. The Dune – Granta 2011 
5. Bad Little Kid – New; Serial 
6. A Death 
7. The Bone Church – poem 
8. Morality – Esquire 2009 
9. Afterlife – Tin House 2013 
10. Ur – 2009 Amazon e. 
11. Herman Wouk is Still Alive – The Atlantic 2011 
12. Under the Weather – Mass Market FDNS 
13. Blockade Billy – Scribner e. 
14. Mister Yummy – New; Serial 
15. Tommy – Playboy poetry 
16. The Little Green God of Agony – A Book of Horrors 2011 
17. That Bus is Another World - Esquire 
18. Obits – New; Serial 
19. Drunken Fireworks 
20. Summer Thunder – Cemetery Dance 2013

-----

Stephen delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of Stephen's finest gifts to the constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”

View the Cover Artwork (Large)

View the Animated Cover Artwork 

From the Flap

A master storyteller at his best—Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles twenty stories, some of which have never been published in print, some of which King has revisited and revised.  He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

   There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. “Afterlife” is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in “Obits;” the old judge in “The Dune” who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In “Morality,” King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

   Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, the stories in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader—“I made them especially for you,” says King. “Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth.”