Summary: Told by the narrator about his childhood living in New York City with his literary agent mother and his unique ability, the ability to see dead people and communicate with them, has is life put through the ringer by those who want to use his otherworldly talent for both good and bad intentions. The dead can't lie when asked questions and always disappear after a certain amount of time, so when something needs to be asked, debts to be paid, or crimes to be solved, time is of the essence. Mixed with elements of horror, crime thriller, and parental drama throughout, Later is a fun, but also rather a mediocre experience throughout its short-read time.
I came across Later at a thrift store a week ago and picked up the paperback copy for just a few bucks, so not a bad deal at all! I'm well aware Stephen King has a pedigree of horror and thriller books throughout his career, but I've always been more focused on the horror side of his collection and neglected the less-horror and more thriller side of his work. So, this is technically my first read in his thriller hard crime style of things. But this one still has horror elements to it that was creepy in some respects and seemed like a good starting point on this side of things. However, the crime aspects were definitely the major focus of the work. Which, on first impressions, wasn't a bad thing to me as I wanted a crime story from King and read what he can do. But thinking it over, I enjoyed the horror scenes/aspects more than the crime ones. As the crime scenes just didn't do anything that I haven't seen on low budget true crime shows a hundred times over with drugs, bombers, and the crooked cop angle. Only with the unique twist of having the narrator seeing dead people and using that as a layer to cover over the crime scenes, but I just felt King could've done more to make the thriller side of things stand out more. It felt, to me, like he wanted to mesh every aspect of his own tropes into the short book, but it just came off as chaotic, disjointed, tonally off, and a bit messy overall.
This also goes for the editing of the book, as through the first hundred pages of the book, I encountered at least five, maybe six, different editing errors with the wrong word used in a dialogue speech or a sentence being cut off in the middle when there is enough space to fill in the blank parts. Usually I'm not that critical of editing in works, as I'm not looking out for them, and if I do notice one or two in a five hundred page novel, or one in a small short story, I can look over it as editing and catching every error to make it perfect with no errors whatsoever, I think, would be close to impossible. Especially when printing hundreds, thousands, or a million copies. But this many errors at the first half of a two-hundred-and-fifty-page book seems a bit ridiculous and rushed to me. Really wasn't till the second half of the book was where I started to get hooked and started to see that classic Stephen King and polish come through. Just felt a bit weird and underwhelming on the first half overall.
Most of the characters are at least interesting enough, as King's biggest strengths are writing characters and making them feel real with their unique traits, flaws, and overall human drama that makes his most evil/degenerate characters come off as interesting. However, the narrator himself comes off as just a bit too generic kid going through school and surviving the ups and the downs of New York City life, it's really his unique ability that keeps him from being so generic that he's boring to read. Definitely not an overall strong narrator voice like Dolores Claiborne that's for sure.
And the ending, King's biggest weakness in almost every book I read from him still holds true as the final twist of this book was so weird and out of left field that it didn't add anything to the story and ended up getting a laugh out of me. Which I'm sure wasn't the intended reaction. It seems to have been put there just for cheap shock value, disgust, or gut punch for the reader to leave them with their mouths open which didn't come close to having any effect on me. Typically for horror, I'm okay with having a bleak revelation or a not so happy ending for a character, as its typical in the genre, but it really just added nothing of value and felt thrown in there just to either get a laugh from King himself or to shock the reader. And in any case, he failed to make the ending at least somewhat bearable or comprehensible to me and should've just not bothered with the twist. Doesn't ruin the whole book but doesn't add points to it either. Typical loveable King.
My final thoughts are very mixed. Later does the horror elements well enough, but neither these nor the crime elements are super compelling when they overlap with each other. I think the book would've been stronger if he just focused on one aspect of it instead of trying to mix both elements together and maybe the final story would've been stronger for it. I respect Stephen King as he was my first author into the more adult side of literature that I've read when I was a bit too young. But trying to read this more modern work and other works in the more modern era of King has always left me entertained enough, but a bit disappointed with the final package. I might just stick to his earlier works at this point, but maybe I'll come back around to his modern writing in the future. I'm not really sure. Later.
by TheDeadReader_