Later was written by Stephen King and published by Hard Case Crime in 2021.You may purchase it at Amazon.com/Kindle. Visit the author on Amazon, Facebook and Twitter.
The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine – as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave. LATER is Stephen King at his finest, a terrifying and touching story of innocence lost and the trials that test our sense of right and wrong. With echoes of King’s classic novel It, LATER is a powerful, haunting, unforgettable exploration of what it takes to stand up to evil in all the faces it wears.
The King is still at his high peak of compelling and glued on the page storytelling. Age doesn’t seem to slow him down and his style is as sharp as ever. With a bit of a steal and a twist of character, this one will remind you of the movie Sixth Sense but in this book the character continues where Sixth Sense left off. Jamie sees dead people but they tend to fade away right after death unless they become possessed by the dead light. It soon becomes important to some others in his life, who know of his abilities, to employ the young boy into talking to the dead to learn of their secrets because “Dead people don’t lie” but they will disappear if they can’t find them soon enough after death.
In this tale, we travel with Jamie through his life as a boy and the timeline progresses into adulthood. There are several other sub plots that will hold your interest as well. One of them is that Jamie has a loving mother but she struggles with a relationship with her live-in girlfriend, who is also a cop and a drug addict. This creates one of the story’s great conflicts, which Jamie will have to overcome if he ever wants anywhere close to a normal life.
Later will not disappoint. I give it a solid 5 stars.