Four Past Midnight Mini-review #4

Here it is! The final mini-review and the wrap up for Four Past Midnight!

Review for The Langoliers
Review for Secret Window, Secret Garden
Review for The Library Policeman

Title: Four Past Midnight
Author: Stephen King
Date Read: October 17, 2013

The Sun Dog

Summary: In The Sun Dog, the concluding novella in Stephen King's best-selling Four Past Midnight, the source of terror is a simple Polaroid camera owned by a 15-year-old boy in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, ugly, vicious looking dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town's sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it—but the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn't exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment. goodreads

Review: This was my least favorite story in the book. It may be because I was distracted by other things but it felt like it took a long time for me to get through this one. I didn't really connect with any of the (three) characters. I thought Pop's trips to the "mad hatters" were random and didn't add to the story line. A couple of times I thought to myself (and made notes of it), "I'm not scared and I don't really care what the dog ends up doing." I think that is a bad sign. Once again, this may have been more due to me being to distracted to connect with the book but overall, not my cup of tea.

You can look back through the mini reviews here, here, and here. In the end, I rated the book as a whole, a 3/5. I really enjoyed some of the stories while other left me just feeling meh (like the one above.) Like I mentioned in the first review for this book, all of these stories seem to center around reality vs. imaginary (it's all just in your head.) At some point, each of the main characters questions what reality is and whether what is happening to them can actually be happening. Unfortunately for each of the characters, it really is happening but if it wasn't it wouldn't be King now would it? I'm still a life long King fanatic but the more suspenseful/scary the story, the more I enjoy it.