Four Past Midnight (1990)
Four Past Midnight is a 1990 paranormal book written by Stephen King.
A red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston, and most of the passengers simply vanish while a handful sleep through it. That is the opening of The Langoliers, one of four novellas Stephen King gathered here in 1990. The others follow a writer accused of stealing his own work, a Polaroid camera that photographs something it should not, and a reader haunted by a long-overdue library book. Each runs longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, which gives King room to build dread slowly before it turns.
Quick answers
What is Four Past Midnight about?
A red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston, and most of the passengers simply vanish while a handful sleep through it. That is the opening of The Langoliers, one of four novellas Stephen King gathered here in 1990. The others follow a writer accused of stealing his own work, a Polaroid camera that photographs something it should not, and a reader haunted by a long-overdue library book. Each runs longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, which gives King room to build dread slowly before it turns.
When was Four Past Midnight published?
Four Past Midnight was published in 1990.
Who made Four Past Midnight?
Four Past Midnight was written by Stephen King.
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A few thoughts on Four Past Midnight
Midnight, Texas shares the small-scale supernatural mood, an ordinary place where something is quietly wrong and the people living there have to cope. It trades Stephen King's slow-burn novella pace for an ensemble town, but the appetite for the eerie and the everyday sitting side by side is the same.
More Stephen King when four novellas aren't enough
Four Past Midnight collects four King novellas built on slow-building dread, and his other work keeps returning to that same patient unease. Cell turns cell phones into a plague, The Dark Half gives a writer's pen name a body of its own, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon strands a child alone in the woods, and Wizard and Glass slows an entire saga down for one doomed love story.
Horror comics that turn creeping unease into cosmic dread
The dread in Four Past Midnight builds from small wrongness into something the characters can't fully explain, and these comics work the same way. Alan Moore's Providence traces a writer down a path toward Lovecraftian horror, Unspeakable Vault anthologizes cosmic terror in short bursts, Outcast follows a small town's slow realization that possession is real, and Dylan Dog investigates cases that never have a tidy explanation.
TV shows that let dread build before anything happens
Four Past Midnight spends most of its pages on the wait before the horror lands, and these shows share that patience. Millennium follows a profiler who senses evil before he can prove it, 1899 lets a ship's passengers unravel one clue at a time, Midnight, Texas hides what its town really is behind daylight, and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen earns its title by refusing to rush.
Cheap, campy creature-feature horror that's more fun than scary
The Langoliers, the most famous novella in Four Past Midnight, imagines time itself as a horde of ravenous little monsters, pulpy in a way King rarely allows himself. That same B-movie glee runs through Kaw's killer-bird rampage, Tentacles' giant sea creature attack, Triassic Attack's rampaging dinosaurs, and House of Bones' haunted-mine schlock, four films that know exactly how silly they are.