You Like It Darker: the Sunday Times number one bestseller (May 2024)

** With a bonus story for the paperback edition. **

‘You like it darker? Fine, so do I’ writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of stories that delve into the darker part of life – both metaphorical and literal.

Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys and mysteries; each feels iconic. In ‘Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream’, a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. ‘Rattlesnakes’, a sequel to Cujo, sees a grieving widower travel to Florida for respite and instead receive an unexpected inheritance – with major strings attached. ‘The Answer Man’ asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King writes to feel ‘the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind’ and his ability to surprise, amaze and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed.

You like it darker? You got it.

‘As classic as King’s novels are, his shorter fiction has been just as gripping over the years’ USA Today
‘One of the great storytellers of our time’ Guardian