Despite its early assurance to the contrary, “Later” is like that movie with Bruce Willis. King captures in dialogue and description a sense of closeness, the specialness of those key years between childhood and teens, when your mom can be not just your parent but also your best friend and hero.īut this strength is also a liability. For Tia, who works in publishing, it’s hard enough trying to make a steady living.įrom all of this, King weaves a story of adolescence with a sweetness at its heart - the touching and genuine relationship between Jamie and Tia. Surprise medical bills, shady lawyers, back taxes - here are the true horrors of life. That lawyer said we had a good case, and maybe we did, but before the case got anywhere near a courtroom, the Bayonne facility declared bankruptcy.”

He recommended another lawyer who specialized in liability and negligence suits.

“Mom talked to the lawyer who helped her with book contracts (and took a healthy bite of our agency fee for his trouble). Then Uncle Harry, troublesome Uncle Harry, still not 50 years old, tripped in the Bayonne care facility and fractured his skull. “First, Mom’s wisdom teeth went to hell and got infected. On top of all that are economic precarity and downward mobility, being one unplanned health emergency from disaster: (Another horror for Jamie: people calling him “Champ” even after he’s asked them to stop.) The unexplainable, the incomprehensible in our everyday lives. Also, less morbid though no less heavy: the loss of innocence. The loss of loved ones to disease or old age. There are hints of evil from another dimension, things from “outside the world” and “outside of time.” But mostly the horrors are familiar ones. If Jamie asks a question, the departed have no choice but to answer with the truth.Īnd the horrors are many. And most relevant for this story: The dead can’t lie. If the premise sounds familiar, don’t worry - the novel assures us that his ability is “not like in that movie with Bruce Willis.” For one thing, unlike the boy in “The Sixth Sense,” Jamie can see the deceased for only a short time after their deaths (a “week or so”). The only child of a literary agent named Tia Conklin, 8-year-old Jamie is a perceptive kid. You can feel King reaching for some Big Questions in his most recent novel, “Later.” Told from the perspective of Jamie Conklin, the narrative shuttles between the immediacy of now and the hindsight of “later” to tell a kind of coming-of-age-as-mystery story, an exploration of innocence and what’s on the other side of childhood. In his craft memoir, “On Writing,” Stephen King describes a moment in his process when he asks himself the “Big Questions.” The biggest of which are: “Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song?”

Stephen king later release date