Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [313]
So at some point I decided - first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place - that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn't just want to walk away; I wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang.
Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please -the last Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think 'out of order' is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough ... but I hope that doesn't mean that they are sober-sided or boring.
The first of these stories, The Dark Half, was published in 1989. While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in Pet Sematary), the town of Castle Rock figures in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff
Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called Needful Things, which is scheduled to be published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock.
The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's larger figures in 'The Sun Dog,' but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and Gordie LaChance's bete noire in 'The Body') Ace Merrill. 'The Sun Dog' also sets the stage for the final fireworks display ... and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about The Dark Half or Needful Things.
One other thing needs to be said: every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and 'The Sun Dog' is a story about cameras and photographs. About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. I myself take bad photos (I'm one of those guys who always manage to cut off my subjects' heads, get pictures of them with their mouths hanging open, or both), but I have a great deal of respect for those who take good ones ... and the whole process fascinates me.
In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them.
This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for almost a year. And that's enough out of me, I think. It's been great to be with all of you again, but that doesn't mean I'm letting you go home just yet.
I think we have a birthday party to attend in the little town of Castle Rock.
CHAPTER 1
September 15th was Kevin's birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun.
The Kevin in question was Kevin Delevan, the birthday was his fifteenth, and the Sun was a Sun 660, a Polaroid camera which does everything for the novice photographer except make bologna sandwiches.
There were other gifts, of course; his sister, Meg, gave him a pair of mittens she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent - as she always did - a string tie with a horrible clasp. She had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already