"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James
in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-
black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when
his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in
motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in
Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for
dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside
herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest.
Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich
recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson
looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she
discovers the stranger inside her husband. It.s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling
intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank
Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

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