Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. 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. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitely ends a good marriage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment. 'Fair Extension,' the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself. 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.

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.

'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.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King