You’ve only got to scan through the impressive list that is Stephen King’s bibliography to get a sense of the importance of any of his new book releases. Going all the way back to his first novel, Carrie, in 1974 and tracking forward through The Shining, It, Misery, The Green Mile and Doctor Sleep over the years, he’s had one of the greatest and most prolific careers in the history of contemporary literature. His latest compilation, The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams, will build on this back catalogue and deliver a series of short stories that are bound to be as chilling and mind bending as his previous work.
Set for release on hardback, digital download and audiobook format on the 3rd November 2015, the new collection is King’s sixth outing of short stories, following up his last batch, Just After Sunset, which hit the book shelves back in 2008. Though not all of his novels are classics – Revival didn’t quite hit the mark for us – with the collections there’s bound to be more than a few gems wrapped up in the psychologically thrilling, nerve jangling and fantastical fiction that it contains.
While a fair few of the stories have been published elsewhere, having featured in the likes of The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy and Esquire, there will also be a couple of new tales to read. There are twenty stories in total in The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams and if the title’s anything to go by there should be a fair few nightmares wrapped up in its confines.
Three of the stories are unpublished, so even the most devoted of Stephen King’s readers will have something new to look forward to, and the fact that all of the collection is being brought together in one place will make it easy for anyone that isn’t an avid Playboy reader to catch up. With a release in the run-up to the winter holidays 2015 it’s arrival will spell more than a few dark dreams for fans of his horrifying work.
The book will also include an introduction to the collection from the author, along with individual intros to each of the stories from the horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy writer. These will include autobiographical content on the origin of them and his motivation in writing them, so it will give us a big insight into the great writer’s though process, making it a must-read for any budding popular fiction writers out there.
The stories themselves include a few novellas that range from a 1950s baseball team twister to roadside horror of autotranformation proportions. There are also stories on a man that keeps reliving the same live, unable to stop making the same mistakes time and time again; apocalyptic forays into the future of humanity; and one of the most bizarre fireworks displays in fiction.
The name of the book come from King’s understanding of the nature of the collected short story genre, describing them as random and unusual delights, “laid out on a cheap blanket at a bazaar”. Some will frighten, some will disgust and others will delight in a bizarre kind of way, but they’ll all draw a certain curiosity, if only for the briefest of moments.
