King's talent doesn't always burn at peak, of course, and there are lesser tales here, too, but none that most writers wouldn't be proud to claim, like the slight but affecting 'Luckey,' about a poor cleaning woman given a 'luckey' coin as a tip, or 'L.T.'s Theory of Pets,' which King cites as his favorite of the collection, but whose shift from humor to horror comes off as arbitrary, at least on the page (the story first appeared in audiobook form). 'Autopsy Room Four,' a black-humor horror about a man who wakes up paralyzed in a morgue and about to be autopsied, displays a mastery of craft, and '1408,' a haunted hotel-room story that first surfaced on the audio book Blood and Smoke, engenders a sense of profound unease, of dread, as surely as do the elegant work of Blackwood or Machen or, if one prefers, Baudelaire or Sartre. Together, they make up what King, in one of many author asides, calls his 'literary stories,' which he contrasts to the 'all-out screamers'-though most of the stories here seem a mix of the two, with the distinction as real as a line on a map. Tales: 'All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,' an intensely moving story of a suicidal traveling salesman who collects graffiti 'The Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French,' about a woman caught in a fatal loop of déjà vu and 'The Death of Jack Hamilton,' a gritty, witty tale of Dillinger's gang on the lam.

'The Man in the Black Suit' appears in this hefty collection, King's first since Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993), along with three other extraordinary New Yorker Henry Award for Best Short Story, confirming what King fans have known for years-that the author is not only immensely popular but immensely talented, a modern-day counterpart to Twain, Hawthorne, Dickens. Published Stephen King's 'The Man in the Black Suit,' a scorchingly atmospheric tale of a boy's encounter with the Devil in backwoods Maine.

Eyebrows arched in literary circles when, in 1995, the New Yorker

Everything's eventual 1408