Stephen King

Riding the Bullet

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Riding the Bullet is “a ghost story in the grand manner” from the bestselling author of Bag of Bones, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and The Green Mile — a short story about a young man who hitches a ride with a driver from the other side.
From Publishers WeeklyE-publishing takes a giant step with the release of this grandly entertaining ghost story. Not only is it the first original e-publication by a megaselling author, but it may be the most accomplished work ever to appear only in cyberspace--and it's available through an unprecedented number of vendors and platforms. The story is vintage King. Narrator Alan Parker, 21, learns that his beloved mother has had a stroke and hitchhikes through rural Maine to see her. On the way he's picked up first by a horrid old man, then by someone far more awful: a dead young man who offers him a terrible choice. The simple, potent prose skims along spurred by high suspense. The atmospherics roil like a classic nightmare: a moonlit graveyard, howling wind, rising mist; but King spins them with a wicked modern touch--the dead man drives a Mustang, and as the corpse pulls on a cigarette, Alan sees “little trickles of smoke escape from the stitched incision on his neck.” When Alan makes his choice, the story deepens as King taps horror fiction's particular ability to illuminate the terror of the human condition. Anyone concerned about King's writing abilities after his near-fatal accident can relax. This genuinely chilling, haunting tale finds his talent--and the state of e-publishing--in the pink. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalRiding the Bullet was originally published in March 2000 exclusively as an e-book and has now found its way to print and audio. It's a classic King ghost story/urban legend about a college student who hitchhikes across Maine to visit his hospitalized mother and gets more than he bargains for during his rides. Film and theater actor Josh Hamilton provides an excellent reading, with a promising command of pace and characterization. However, for many libraries, the economics of buying an audio version of a single, extremely short story may be questionable. Recommended with that reservation only.Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Quotes

  • Лика Меликсетянhas quotedlast year
    “Love you, too. Alan . . . sorry for all the times I swatted you. That was no way to be.”
    But it had been; it had been her way to be. I didn’t know how to tell her I knew that, accepted it. It was part of our family secret, something whispered along the nerve endings.
  • Лика Меликсетянhas quotedlast year
    I loved her when she hit me as much as when she kissed me. Do you understand that? Me either. And that’s all right. I don’t think you can sum up lives or explain families, and we were a family, she and I, the smallest family there is, a tight little family of two, a shared secret.
  • Лика Меликсетянhas quotedlast year
    I didn’t want to let him know I knew he was dead. He didn’t want to let me know that he knew I knew he was dead. And so I couldn’t let him know that I knew that he knew that . . .

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