Jesse’s Reviews > Four Past Midnight > Status Update
Jesse
is on page 583 of 960
This is a pretty well-paced mystery. We find out some great secrets with the people Sam knows and we are also now hitting on the fact that Ardelia is, uh, a ghost or something. The Library Police isn’t exactly a secret society, then, and from Dave’s reaction, she is the tip of a horrid iceberg in the town’s history. The question looms: just what happened, then?
— Aug 11, 2025 11:49AM
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Jesse
is on page 887 of 960
It’s a pretty tense thriller as we go through the remaining film shots and the phenomenon has the capacity to control the camera’s holder to do what it needs him or her to do. I said that this was sort of Twilight Zone or 50s weird fiction-ish, but the camera feels a lot like a novel based around an SCP entry, minus the dark humor or bureaucratic satire.
— Aug 12, 2025 10:21AM
Jesse
is on page 837 of 960
Where King excels in these stories is taking a short story concept and then steeping it in characters and a setting and letting it really breathe. Much of the first half of this book is “Pop” conning the Delavans. I feel that the big twist is going to be that, once he has the camera, he is going to become desperate to somehow get it back to Kevin. I don’t care if we never hear the HOW or WHY of the camera.
— Aug 12, 2025 09:39AM
Jesse
is on page 787 of 960
Beginning “The Sun Dog”. This one is more firmly planted in the sort of Twilight Zone on steroids that the other stories had, or at least where “The Library” started out before it went into a low-powered It with a VERY dark past for the MC. There’s some amusing stuff where Kevin’s 11 year old sister is just devouring horror movies from the 80s, specifically name-dropping Child’s Play.
— Aug 12, 2025 08:52AM
Jesse
is on page 735 of 960
“The Library Policeman”
This story has a brutal final 20% AS WELL AS a false finish. Sam’s recollection of his own Library Policeman is graphically brutal, but it makes for a satisfying catharsis once he confronts Ardelia with no fear, reminding me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. In some ways this treads a bit too close to the plot of It, but it isn’t terrible to read a different, focused take on It.
— Aug 12, 2025 07:47AM
This story has a brutal final 20% AS WELL AS a false finish. Sam’s recollection of his own Library Policeman is graphically brutal, but it makes for a satisfying catharsis once he confronts Ardelia with no fear, reminding me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. In some ways this treads a bit too close to the plot of It, but it isn’t terrible to read a different, focused take on It.
Jesse
is on page 683 of 960
The Dave story is a huge historic aside that is its own, though entirely related, story. It doesn’t exactly grind the story to a halt but the more we hear about Ardelia the less mystery we get. The one real mystery left—and it’s about to be resolved—is what Sam’s trauma is. I thought one thing, at first, but it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a victim of SA.
— Aug 12, 2025 06:46AM
Jesse
is on page 633 of 960
At this point we have moved beyond a shadowy secret Library Police to some sort of offshoot of It that has nested in the Proverbia library. She’s a bit more “concrete” than It because Ardelia was apparently having a LOT of sex with poor ol’ Dave and wasn’t just purely hiding on the edge of society. Maybe, like, one of It’s progeny? It’s made clear that Ardelia feeds on (prefers?) the fear of children.
— Aug 11, 2025 06:35PM
Jesse
is on page 533 of 960
Starting with “The Library Police”. A big part of the basis of this story is how something like a joke about “The Library Police” might scare children away from using the library altogether…because that’s exactly what King’s son Owen said when the library was suggested. The librarian’s retort within the story, however, is that children are fascinated with the morbid. Which, true!
— Aug 11, 2025 06:22AM
Jesse
is on page 483 of 960
“Secret Window, Secret Garden”
I don’t mean much by asking about King’s headspace. the man established a career in taking niceties of a normal life and then skewing them into something that evokes horror, as he does here, centered around his wife’s own garden. Mort’s story is a dark tale about the power of imagination fueled by a guilty conscience.
— Aug 08, 2025 09:26AM
I don’t mean much by asking about King’s headspace. the man established a career in taking niceties of a normal life and then skewing them into something that evokes horror, as he does here, centered around his wife’s own garden. Mort’s story is a dark tale about the power of imagination fueled by a guilty conscience.
Jesse
is on page 450 of 960
😬😬😬
The blurring lines between Mort and Shooter have an obvious parallel in the more involved supernatural history of Stark in The Dark Half, it’s just that Stark as the consumed Twin who gives birth to the MC’s dark side has more of a concrete, in-universe dark fantasy explanation than what’s currently going on with John Shooter.
— Aug 08, 2025 08:58AM
The blurring lines between Mort and Shooter have an obvious parallel in the more involved supernatural history of Stark in The Dark Half, it’s just that Stark as the consumed Twin who gives birth to the MC’s dark side has more of a concrete, in-universe dark fantasy explanation than what’s currently going on with John Shooter.
Jesse
is on page 400 of 960
It isn’t exactly a twist but King is one of those authors that likes to hint very strongly or outright tell you very broadly about something so that the suspense comes from the WHEN, not the WHAT. Mort’s fearful romp through his own house is one of those great thriller moments, and the climax where he smashes his own reflection ought to tell you a good portion of what is going on here.
— Aug 08, 2025 07:35AM
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Aug 11, 2025 11:57AM
The plotting for why Sam stays in the dark is great. In person, he could probably get a better response from Dave and Naomi, because Sam can’t express that he isn’t fucking with them, he’s actually met what appears to be a dead woman. Instead, he gives them their own space, deferring to the AA meeting he sees them at and doesn’t want to intrude on. It’s kind of a cop out that Ardelia is such a toxic entity that he can’t get any useful information out of the few people who appear to remember her, but we don’t really know what she was up to… unless she is the main reason that these folks are going to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
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Part of the deeper mystery is that Sam has obviously had a run in with something associated with the library in the past.
