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"Premium Harmony" | |||
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Short story by Stephen King | |||
Country | United States | ||
Language | English | ||
Genre(s) | Literary Fiction | ||
Publication | |||
Publisher | The New Yorker | ||
Media type | |||
Publication date | November 2009 | ||
Chronology | |||
Series | The Bazaar of Bad Dreams | ||
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"Premium Harmony" is a short story by American author Stephen King. It was published in the November 2009 issue of The New Yorker magazine. [1] The story is set in Castle Rock, King's famous fictitious city; in "Premium Harmony" the city is almost abandoned and run-down.
While en route to Wal-Mart for grass seed, Ray and Mary Burkett, with their dog Biznezz in the back seat, fight about the state of their lawn, his smoking, and her obesity. Mary demands they stop at a convenience store in order for her to purchase a purple kickball for their niece's birthday, and while Ray and the dog are waiting in the car, Mary suffers a heart attack in the store and immediately dies. Ray is fetched from the car by a store employee. The emergency medical technicians arrive, pronounce her dead, and remove her body. Ray remains with the store employees and customers, recounting Mary's County Fair awards for her quilting. After nearly two hours have passed, he returns to the car, where Biznezz has died from the extreme heat in the car, with the remnants of a Sno Ball Ray had fed him earlier still in his whiskers. This causes in Ray a simultaneous welling-up of "great sadness" and "amusement".
The story is written in third-person limited narrative and reveals a number of Ray's more egocentric thoughts throughout the story's events, such as being disturbed at the similarity between the manager's attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and French kissing, the thought that a bystander might give him a mercy fuck, and, as the story closes, the thought that he can now smoke whatever, whenever, and wherever he likes.
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Stephen Edwin King is an American author. Widely known for his horror novels, he has been crowned the "King of Horror". He has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy and mystery. Though known primarily for his novels, he has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections.
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Cujo is a 1981 horror novel by American writer Stephen King about a rabid Saint Bernard. The novel won the British Fantasy Award in 1982 and was made into a film in 1983. Cujo's name was based on the alias of Willie Wolfe, one of the men responsible for orchestrating Patty Hearst's kidnapping and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army. King discusses Cujo in On Writing, referring to it as a novel he "barely remembers writing at all." King wrote the book during the height of his struggle with alcohol addiction. King goes on to say he likes the book and wishes he could remember enjoying the good parts as he put them on the page.
The Mist is a science fiction psychological horror novella by American author Stephen King. First published by Viking Press in 1980 as part of the Dark Forces anthology, an edited version was subsequently included in King's 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. In the story, the small town of Bridgton, Maine is shrouded in a dense mist that conceals otherworldly creatures. The protagonist and narrator David Drayton, who has taken refuge with his young son in a supermarket, tries to survive against not only the creatures of the mist, but also fanatical aggression from other survivors. In The Mist, King addresses the themes of man-made fears and religious fundamentalism.
Castle Rock is a fictional town appearing in Stephen King's fictional Maine topography, providing the setting for a number of his novels, novellas, and short stories. Castle Rock first appeared in King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone and has since been referred to or used as the primary setting in many other works by King.
Roadwork is a thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The story takes place in an unnamed city of the Midwestern United States in 1972–1974. Grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, a man is driven to mental instability when he learns that both his home and his workplace will be demolished to make way for an extension to an interstate highway. A film adaptation of the novel was announced in August 2019, with Pablo Trapero as director and Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti as producers.
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"All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" is a short story by Stephen King. It was originally published in the January 29, 2001 issue of The New Yorker magazine. In 2002, it was included in King's collection Everything's Eventual.
Everything's Eventual is a fantasy novella by American writer Stephen King. It was originally published in the October/November 1997 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In 2000, it was included in the game Stephen King's F13, and in 2002, in King's collection of the same name.
"You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" is a 1992 horror short story by American writer Stephen King. It was first published January 1992 in the horror anthology Shock Rock and later included in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes. It concerns a young couple on a road trip in Oregon when they accidentally wander into a small town inhabited by dead rock and roll legends.
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Under the Dome is a 2009 science fiction novel by American author Stephen King. It is the 58th book published by King, and it is his 48th novel. The novel focuses on a small Maine town, and tells an intricate, multi-character, alternating perspective story of how the town's inhabitants contend with the calamity of being suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impassable, invisible glass dome-like barrier that seemingly falls out of the sky, transforming the community into a domed city.
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"Under the Weather" is a short story by Stephen King, originally published in the 2011 paperback edition of Full Dark, No Stars.