Different Seasons

At midnight comes the point of balance. Of danger. The instant of utter stillness when, between two beats of the heart, an alternative reality can slip through, like a blade between the ribs, and switch you into a new and terrifying world. Four Past Midnight: four heart-stopping accounts of that moment when the familiar world fractures beyond sense, the fragments spinning away from the desperate, clutching reach of sanity....

The sparrows are flying again. The idea - unbidden, inexplicable - haunts the edge of Thad Beaumont's mind. Thad should be happy. For years now it is his secret persona, George Stark, author of superviolent pulp thrillers, who has paid the family bills. But now Thad is writing seriously again under his own name, and his menacing pseudonym has been buried forever. And yet...the sparrows are flying again, and something is terribly wrong in Thad Beaumont's world.

Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm.... Unrivalled master of suspense Stephen King takes the unsuspecting listener on a fantastic journey through the dark shadows of our innermost fears.

A star-studded cast of readers presents unabridged tales of horror and suspense from master storyteller Stephen King. The Stephen King Amusement Park - an unnerving experience, with rides every which way to hell...and a few to glory. A solitary finger pokes out of a drain. Novelty teeth turn predatory. The Nevada desert swallows a Cadillac. Meanwhile, the legend of Castle Rock returns...and grows on you. What does it all mean? What else could it mean?

Everyone in the kingdom talked about the King-in-waiting, Roland's elder son, Peter. And one man thought and planned and brooded on something else: how to make sure that Roland's younger son, Thomas, should be crowned King instead. The King is dead, murdered by an unusual poison. While evidence is gathered, and the land of Delain mourns, Flagg the King's magician, unscrupulous, greedy and powerful, plots.

A collection of tales to invade and paralyse the mind as the safe light of day is infiltrated by the shadows of the night. As you listen, the clutching fingers of terror brush lightly across the nape of the neck, reach round from behind to clutch and lock themselves, white-knuckled, around the throat.This is the horror of ordinary people and everyday objects that become strangely altered; a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, where the familiar and the friendly lure and deceive.

You'll lose a lot of sleep.... Ralph does. At first he starts waking up earlier. And earlier. Then the hallucinations start - the colours, shapes and strange auras. Not to mention the bald doctors who always turn up at the scene of a death. That's when Ralph begins to lose a lot more than sleep. When he begins to understand why his hitherto mild-mannered friend, Ed, is getting out of control - dangerously so. And why his hometown is about to become the new Armageddon....

In a terrifying trip across America, young Jack Sawyer is searching for the Talisman, the only thing that can save his dying mother. His quest takes him into the menacing Territories where violence, surprise, and the titanic struggle between good and evil reach across a mythic landscape.

Misery Chastain was dead. Paul Sheldon had just killed her - with relief, with joy. Misery had made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of best sellers. And now he wanted to get on to some real writing. That's when the car accident happened, and he woke up in pain in a strange bed. But it wasn't the hospital. Annie Wilkes had pulled him from the wreck, brought him to her remote mountain home, splinted and set his mangled legs. The good news was that Annie was a nurse and had painkilling drugs. The bad news was that she was Paul's Number One Fan.

Wentworth, Ohio: a small, friendly town where the Carver children bicker over sweets in the E-Z shop and writer Johnny Marinville is the only resident who minds his own business. On Poplar Street, apart from the impending storm, it's just a normal summer's day - with Frisbees flying, lawn mowers humming and barbeques grilling. As the paperboy makes his round, he is unaware of the chrome-red van idling up the hill....

The house looked right, felt right to Dr Louis Creed. Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle, the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago. Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive threat. But behind the house and far away from the road: that was safe.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.... He was not a werewolf, a vampire, a ghoul, or an unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or snow wastes; he was only a cop.... Cujo is a huge Saint Bernard dog, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. Then one day Cujo chases a rabbit into a bolt-hole. Except it isn't a rabbit warren anymore. It is a cave inhabited by rabid bats. And Cujo falls sick. Very sick.

"You're a firestarter honey.... just one big zippo lighter." A year ago, he was an upstanding instructor of English at Harrison State College. Now Andy is on the run with his daughter, a pigtailed girl named Charlie. A girl with an unimaginably terrifying gift. A gift which could be useful to corrupt authorities. Soon Charlie will be caught up in the menace of a fateful drug experiment and a sinister government ploy….

Welcome to Desperation. Once a thriving copper-mining town in the middle of the Nevada desert, Desperation is now eerily abandoned. It's the last place that travellers like the Carver family, bound for vacation, and writer Johnny Marinville, astride his Harley, would expect to be stopped and charged. But Desperation still has a local cop - a unique regulator who patrols the wilderness highway. The secrets buried in Desperation are as terrifying as the forces summoned to encounter them.

Everything is familiar. But everything has changed. Coming back to the little community is like walking into a nightmare for Jim Gardener, poet, drunk, potential suicide. It all looks the same: the house; the furniture; Jim's friend, Bobbi; her beagle (though ageing); even the woods out at the back. But it was in the woods that Bobbi stumbled over the odd, part-buried object and felt a peculiar tingle as she brushed the soft earth away. Everything is familiar. But everything is about to change.