I've read several of Stephen King's books, I think he's a brilliant writer. Later was the story of a kid who can see recently departed ghosts and has the ability to communicate with them. This is not your typical paranormal ghost story. Of course, not! It's Stephen King! It has layers to the story that make it unique and was a thrill to read. I highly recommend it and think it would be a good book for new Stephen King readers who want to see what The King is all about.

Later, the most recent installment by Stephen King is a unique and enjoyable take on the "I See Dead People," theme. Original in it's conception, and staggeringly well crafted in its execution, this novel is sure to please fans of both hard-boiled police genres, as well as those into the supernatural and horror categories. Highly recommended.

I am a big Stephen King fan and am always eagerly awaiting his newest release. Later is the latest - and is just as good as I knew it would be!
Later is told completely from Jamie Conklin's point of view in a storytelling fashion. He takes us back to his childhood when he discovers that he sees things that no one else does. His single mother warns him to not tell anyone else, but she does let it slip to her girlfriend Liz. What does he see? Dead people. They can see Jamie as well and talk to him before they fade away. And...they cannot lie to him. The adults in his life see the potential in Jamie's gift. His mother's request is made to keep their small family afloat. But Liz.....well, she see other opportunities...

You just know there's going to be something evil amongst the dead Jamie sees and talks to. There is, and it's downright terrifying. Even more so as Jamie is just a child.

Jamie was such a fantastic lead and I loved his voice. He's an adult as he recounts his past and his voice is by turns is self deprecating, wry, frightened and more as he shares his past - and present - with the listener. King does 'young person facing incredible evil on their own' so very, very well. It's impossible to not get caught up in the tension of the plot. There's also some dark humor that I always appreciate.

I loved the cover image and the retro feel. And the title? The word later is used very effectively as foreshadowing by Jamie and is guaranteed to keep you staying up later than you should.

I have actually listened to the last few books and am now hooked on the audio versions of King's work. The narrator was Seth Numrich and he was such a great choice. His tone matched the mental image I had for an adult Jamie, but he also captured the fear, danger and uncertainty of young Jamie. The voice for Mom was spot on. And the thing's voice? Goosebumps, every time it spoke. The voice for Liz suited her actions and personality. Numrich captures the tone and tenor of King's plot so very, very well with his expressive narration. His speaking is clear, easy to understand and the pacing was just right. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I become so much more immersed in a tale when I listen to it

This thrilling, compact ghost tale is enhanced on audio by superb narrator Seth Numrich, who nails everything about embattled kid hero Jamie Conklin, including his wry sense of humor. Link to print review is attached.

The Hard Case Crime collection had its start as an attempt to pay homage to the hardboiled detective fiction of the 1930s-1950s. In these novels, the antagonists are usually “the system” of some sort, be it organized crime or corrupt policing/governmental institutions. They quickly became known for their shorter length, cynical tone, and style of cover art.

Stephen King’s third foray into the Hard Case Crime collection finally sees him hit his stride. His first contribution, The Colorado Kid, was the closest to hard-boiled crime, but it wasn’t exactly a great novel. More like a writing exercise that you’ll love or hate. Joyland strayed from the genre, introducing a vague supernatural element but not really having that element of corruption. Later finds an uneasy balance, being primarily supernatural horror but with a hardboiled storyline that includes a corrupt cop and a drug kingpin.

Young Jamie Conklin has always been able to see dead people, though “not like in that Bruce Willis movie” he’s quick to point out. Jamie sees the souls of the recently departed and can talk to them. They last for a few days, growing less and less connected to this world until they disappear altogether. In the first part of Later, King sets up the ground rules for Jamie’s ability. First, the ghosts of the departed are usually found around where they died or sometimes where they spent most of their time. Second, they must always tell him the truth.

His mother, Tia, comes to accept Jamie’s gift, but never encourages it or exploits it—until, that is, her star client at her literary firm drops dead before finishing his most anticipated novel. She rushes to the client’s house, uses her cop girlfriend’s credentials to get them inside, and has Jamie talk to the dead author to understand his plot in detail. She then uses that information to publish the novel posthumously, saving her firm.

Time passes, Tia breaks up with the girlfriend, and life proceeds as normal. Then, one day, the girlfriend comes to Jamie at school and asks him to help her with a case. Serial bomber Kenneth “Thumper” Therriault took his life before revealing the location of his final bomb. Jamie is able to get to the location of Therriault’s death, make his ghost divulge the location of the bomb, and save the city.

Except this one is different. Therriault doesn’t fade away. And he doesn’t stay near his place of death. He begins to haunt Jamie and seems different, demonic even. Soon, Jamie realizes that he’s dealing with the specter of a demon-possessed ghost.

King offers other twists and turns, infusing the hardboiled genre with his signature streak of horror. Constant readers will even notice a reference to one of King’s more famous books, perhaps indicating that the thing possessing Therriault is one of King’s more famous villains. Wisely, King never states this outright or makes the connections too obvious, but it’s enough to spark conversation and what a wildfire it’ll be, I’m sure.

Later is a magnificent work, finding perfect balance with the expectations of genre and the expectations of a King novel. It fits well into the King multiverse and its thematic explorations are on point. From a technical perspective, it lacks King’s typical bloatedness and finishes in a crisp 250 pages (almost a novella by King standards). From beginning to end, Later captures the reader in the story. Even in the most eye-rolling of parts—involving the connection to previous King villains—I found myself willing to let it slide because it fit the storyline. While it’s not an all-time King classic, it pulls every one of those strings to give readers something familiar but brand new.

King’s literary mastery is on full display as he plays with a coming-of-age tale interspersed with narrative hindsight. The story is told by an older Jamie in the first person, effectively making the present—the time that novel is being read—the Later the book references. You see how the past experiences affects Jamie’s perspective of the present and how he approaches the future.

There is a part at the end that people have complained about in other reviews I’ve read. I won’t mention it, but if you know, you know. It was both shocking and anticlimactic. King hadn’t foreshadowed it in any way, not even as a potential mystery to be solved. To bring it up, but then ultimately leave it unanswered made a lot of people feel like it was inserted for shock value and was unnecessary. But to me, it only furthered the point King was making and stayed true to Jamie’s character. He has the opportunity to have a major unknown answered, he gets it answered, and it leads to a whole lot more questions—questions that Jamie chooses not to ask. Because, sometimes, not knowing is better.

That’s a theme that runs throughout the book. The demon-possessed Therriault repeatedly gives Jamie false information, something that disconcerts him because up until now he’s believed that the dead can only tell the truth. These false prophecies go a long way in making Jamie realize that Therriault is actually something other. The horror of the demon is placed alongside the horror of the future—the horror of Later—and what we don’t know. You see the horror of loss and death. The horror of addiction and violence. The horror of economic instability. The supernatural horror is actually underplayed so that you can see that natural horror is often enough in and of itself.

In many ways, nothing in Later is new, but it is different. It’s the themes and characterizations that King has packaged and repackaged throughout his career, giving readers slightly different explorations and facets of the same questions. In the hands of a lesser author, it would seem repetitive and boring. In King’s hands it comes to life.

In Later, Stephen King writes about ghosts and crime. The style of writing seemed a bit different for me, having read quite a few of King's other works. We jump around a lot in out narrator, Jaimie's, life; Learning about his history of "seeing dead people" and what that means for how he moves through the world. I noticed that Jaimie was a twenty-somthing when telling his story to us the reader, and I couldn't remember King writing from that perspective, especially being a kid in the early 2000s, before. One thing that took be a bit out of the story was Jaimie constantly telling the reader that this was a horror story. It wasn't. Yes there were ghosts that haunted him with a taste of King's supernatural monster fighting; But over all this was a story of a boy and his single mother struggling to raise him with limited financial resources in NYC during the recession. Right at the end there was a bit of "crime fighting," but again I'd hardly say that was the over all point of the book. King masterfully describes his ghosts and I could vividly see the story as it was unfolding on the page in mind.

Classic Stephen King weaving an edge of your seat horror story as only the master can. A kid who sees dead people (but not like the kid in the movie we're told early on). As the best King novels do, this one left me questioning if the human monsters are scarier than the supernatural ones.

While every word and phrase is to be savored, there were a few points (random thoughts) that perhaps could have been edited out. There were also a few questionable decisions that the narrator made that seemed like big mistakes to me and they got glossed over.

I listened to half of the book while organizing my home office and the remainder on a long car drive. It definitely passed the time and kept me captivated. Good stuff!

A perfectly solid book from King, which is about what you expect from him in his current phase. (Although given that the best novel of his past five years was THE OUTSIDER, also a crime novel, I had slightly higher expectations for this one, which weren't quite met.)

LATER has some of King's best attributes, like a keen understanding of what it is to be a kid and a knack for making the life of someone in writing seem interesting. (Publishing in this case actually, which is an even bigger feat.) And there's some indelible nightmare imagery of the dead folks the protagonist sees. LATER also has some of King's least favorable attributes, namely his difficulties with dialogue and the intrusion of inexplicable corniness into his narrative prose. (His descriptive prose, in this late phase, is probably the best it has ever been.)

The book is likely to be catnip for King's biggest fans due to its connection to IT, which I won't explain here but was fascinating and frightening. (I am, full disclosure, a pretty big King fan.) Yet that's not the main plot; the book mostly concerns itself with Jamie using his visions of the dead to uncover the secrets of criminals, not always willingly. It works while you're reading it because King is an old pro with impeccable control of pacing and overall storytelling, but some cracks start to show in hindsight.

And that's fine. King is prolific in the extreme and had a very specific purpose for this book, which he mostly fulfilled. (It's definitely the closest to a full blown crime story of the three Hard Case books he's written.) He's written late-period classics already, like UNDER THE DOME, so he has nothing to prove, and is clearly on kind of a genre-experiment run. LATER is the continuation of that. You just can't help but wonder when he'll go back to writing stuff that's purely his voice.

I was so excited to get an early audio version of King's latest novel by Simon & Schuster!

This story is coming from Jamie's point of view. He is in his early twenties telling the story about what happened to him in his younger years.

So Jamie's mom, Tia is running a publishing company. It was started by Jamie's uncle and when he got Alzheimer's, Tia took over the company. Tia ended up getting caught up in some things which caused her and Jamie to fall on hard times. She is doing everything she can to make ends meet. The publishing company has a very popular author who is just about to release the finale to a long awaited book series. When he unexpectedly passes away Tia starts to panic. She was counting on that money to pull her out of debt. So she turns to Jamie to help with his "ability." She always told him to keep it secret and now she is going back on her word out of desperation. Jamie helps because it is his mom after all. Then that turns into a domino effect of betrayal and blackmail. It ends up making Jamie very vulnerable to things no one could see coming.
You see Jamie walk through his younger years as he figures out what is right and wrong and how to fight evil and all the faces it wears.

I really enjoyed this novel and Seth Numrich did an amazing job at narrating the story. When he spoke as the villain I was definitely creeped out so I think he did it very well. The book has It elements entwined in this book and I really enjoyed how that was done.

I wasn't a fan of the ending. It left a lot of questions up in the air. The way he ended it, it could be a series. I don't think it will be but the way it ends...I guess you would hope it would.

Jamie Conklin just wants to be an ordinary kid, but growing up the only child of a single mother, and also being able to see and talk to the recently deceased means anything but a normal childhood. When an NYPD detective he used to trust drags him into a murder investigation, the stakes may be too high, and a killer may be reaching out beyond the grave.

I finished this one up on audio post nap today, and, uh, I didn’t hate it until the end, but like many Stephen King novels, I keep trying, and really like a couple, but overall, they just have a lot of issues, usually sexual, and usually not necessary for good horror.

This one is short, so you don’t have to spend 20+ hours on it, and the basic plot is interesting, a kid who can see and talk to the recently deceased. But it’s got one of my dealbreaker plots, so I can’t recommend it.

The narration was good overall, though I didn’t like the take on Liz, a lady cop, and the “bad guy” voice was certainly disturbing,, perhaps too much so, taking me out of the story. But as we know, I am hyper sensitive, so maybe that’s an HSP thing and not an issue for most people.

Anyway, meh. It looked cool and I was lookimg forward to it, but perhaps I need a break from Uncle Stevie’s writing for a bit.

The start of the story made me think I was going in Koontz land, but as story unfolds was not the case. This has the classic King narrative, and is very compelling to the reader, or as in this case, listener. The narrator is superb, and the voice becomes second nature as the story unfolds and concludes. A fast tale that will keep you coming back for more, if you can handle it.