RaveThe Guardian... in the evening of his immense career, we get Full Dark, No Stars, a final set of four novellas. (At least, it is easy to presume that this is the final set. It is also perfectly conceivable that King, 63, who talks about retiring and laying down his pen, but for whom ceasing to write seems unthinkable, will bring out another set 20 years from now) ... There is a hint of the supernatural in it, although the borderline between a haunting and madness here is a hairline fracture, and one that King exploits elegantly all the way to the end ... These are stories of retribution and complicity: of crimes that seem inevitable, of ways that we justify the world to ourselves and ourselves to the world. Powerful, and each in its own way profoundly nasty.
Kazuo Ishiguro
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn The Buried Giant, his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd ...is a melancholy book, and the mist that breathes through it is a melancholic mist. The narrative tone is dreamlike and measured. There are adventures, sword fights, betrayals, armies, cunning stratagems and monsters killed, but these things are told distantly, without the book’s pulse ever beating faster ... At the heart of the novel is a philosophical conundrum, expressed first by an old woman whose husband has gone on before her, crossing the bar, as it were, to a mystical island to which she has not been allowed ... Still, The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over.
