Four Past Midnight

infobox Book |
name = Four Past Midnight
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = First edition cover
author = Stephen King
cover_artist = Rob Wood-Stansbury
country = USA
language = English
series =
genre = Horror
publisher = Viking Penguin
release_date = September 1990
media_type = Print (Hardcover)
pages = 804
isbn = ISBN 0-670-83538-2
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Four Past Midnight" is a collection of four novellas by Stephen King, published in 1990. The four stories are "The Langoliers"; "Secret Window, Secret Garden"; "The Library Policeman"; and "The Sun Dog".

Contents

The Langoliers

Passengers that have been sleeping on a plane wake up to find themselves alone. Everyone aboard that was awake has disappeared, leaving their clothes, dental fillings, pace makers and so on. This happened when the plane flew through a rip in time to the past. The past is a lifeless worn-out version of the present.

After landing and exploring for a time the survivors take off to return to the rip, narrowly avoiding the langoliers - creatures that eat the past, leaving only a void.

Escaping from these, the passengers fly back through the rip which takes them to the near future, a pristine fresh lifeless version of the present. Shortly the present "catches up" with them and they rejoin the normal world.

"The Langoliers" was adapted into a two part TV mini-series in 1995.

Secret Window, Secret Garden

"Secret Window, Secret Garden" is similar to King's earlier novel "The Dark Half". Both are about authors, in this case Mort Rainey, who is a thinly-veiled analogue of King himself. Mort is visited by a man who takes the name of John Shooter, with a manuscript which proves to be an almost exact copy of a story that Mort himself wrote and published some years earlier. The man claims that Mort stole it from him and demands that Mort write a story in his name as compensation or prove that he is innocent, or bad things will happen. As it turns out, the man is Mort's alter ego who manifests himself and makes Mort's life a living hell until Mort realizes it is himself performing the destructive tasks while he is asleep.

It is worth noting that King has been accused of plagiarism himself. A woman has claimed that he broke into her home and stole her manuscript for "Misery". In another incident a deranged man broke into King's home, and when discovered by King's wife, claimed that King has stolen several of his novels and that he had a bomb in the shoebox he was holding. The dud bomb was made of erasers and straightened paperclips.

This story has been adapted into a movie "Secret Window" (2004), starring Johnny Depp. The novel and the movie end very differently.

Rock band Brand New got the title for their song "Sowing Season (Yeah)" from the name of Mort Rainey's story.

The Library Policeman

"The Library Policeman" was written after King's son didn't want to go to the library as he was afraid of the library police. King felt this was a nice idea and used it. What if there were serious men in long coats that came to your house and fetched the books if you didn't return them in time? And most importantly: what happens if you lose the book you borrowed? Eventually, the main character is forced to confront a suppressed childhood memory and realizes the horrors occurring in his world have been unleashed by a shape-shifting figure who lives off of others' fears.

The Sun Dog

"The Sun Dog" is about a boy that gets just what he wants for his fifteenth birthday—a Polaroid camera. Soon though, he notices that there is something strange with the camera. It prints similar pictures all the time and never of what the camera is pointed at. As the novella continues, the boy finds that the pictures are of a terrifying dog preparing to leap at the camera. "The Sun Dog" is set in King's fictional city of Castle Rock, Maine, and is a prelude of sorts to King's 1991 novel "Needful Things".

See also

*Short fiction by Stephen King