The Sun Dog: Four Past Midnight

In The Sun Dog, the concluding novella in Stephen King's best-selling Four Past Midnight, the source of terror is a simple Polaroid camera owned by a 15-year-old boy in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, ugly, vicious looking dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town's sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it—but the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn't exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.

From AudioFile

Stephen King stretches this short story into a novella. A young boy gets a mysterious Polaroid camera that only takes pictures of a mean dog. The magic camera is creating a portal so that the mean dog can come to Earth and eat people. The boy stops him. The end. The book is saved by narrator Tim Sample's relentless efforts to wring suspense from the many scenes that are not suspenseful, just drawn out descriptions of mundane things. Sample speaks urgently at the right times, but sometimes even that--combined with suspenseful music--isn't enough. King's novella would benefit from a brutal editor hacking away the nonessentials. It's one of his lesser works. M.S. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About the Author

STEPHEN KING is a prolific and perennially bestselling author and an recognized master of the horror genre. He was the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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