Does anybody write kids-with-strange-powers better than Stephen King? And, is there anyone on the scene who has more insider knowledge of the publishing industry? Later, King’s third Hard Case Crime installment, threads both of these into a single short novel that packs a punch ... King’s writing in “Later” is as clean, direct and evocative as it’s ever been. The short, to-the-point chapters make for quick reading, the crime-driven plot is propulsive, involving guns, drugs, bombs and kidnapping, but, more importantly, some of the lines just take your breath away. Skin 'pebbles' with goose bumps. A dead person confronting Jamie is 'like a burned log with fire still inside.' But crawling into the head and voice and life of this kid narrator is where King especially excels.
King weaves a story of adolescence with a sweetness at its heart—the touching and genuine relationship between Jamie and Tia. Therein lies the book’s strength. King captures in dialogue and description a sense of closeness, the specialness of those key years between childhood and teens, when your mom can be not just your parent but also your best friend and hero ... But this strength is also a liability. Despite its early assurance to the contrary, Later is like that movie with Bruce Willis. Beyond the superficial similarities (sensitive kid, single mother, talking to dead people), the emotional core of King’s story—in particular, the parent-child relationship at its center—is also reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s. Whereas the movie evokes depth of feeling through stillness and restraint, King’s novel is more effusive, stating things that could have remained unsaid. And while the earnestness is not necessarily unwelcome, especially given our young narrator, it has the effect of diluting the emotional power of that central relationship ... On a more granular level, King’s sentences snap into each other like Lego bricks, standardized, expertly molded pieces engineered to fit together perfectly. This is not necessarily a complaint; the prose reads easily and enjoyably. To continue the analogy, it’s a bit like seeing an accurate-to-scale roller coaster made entirely of Legos. When you step back, it’s impressive to see what he has built, even if one can’t help wondering whether it would be better if the pieces weren’t quite so fungible. And on further inspection, one sees the places where the rendering only approximates reality, where curves become right angles and true diagonals don’t exist. There’s a trade-off: more coherence, perhaps, but at the expense of making it sing ... But maybe the fungibility of the pieces is the very quality that makes them work. Later is yet another example of King’s talent in building stories out of the materials of his choosing, and like so many of his creations, it’s remarkable how well the thing holds together. The pace and ease of reading, the ratio of familiar to new. A roller coaster made of Legos is still a roller coaster, and even if I’ve been on this ride before it doesn’t make it any less fun.
What King has given us is a book that is part coming-of-age tale, part hard-boiled crime thriller and part paranormal ghost story. It’s an ambitious blend, to be sure, but one that King has long since shown capable of pulling off beautifully. His clear love of noir fiction joins forces with his horror bona fides and his still-strong ability to capture the fundamental truths about being a child, resulting in a lean and propulsive read ... Later offers the reader a chance to share a boy’s journey to young adulthood, a journey that is both typical and atypical. Yes, we get the moments of terror for which King is so rightfully well-known. And yes, we get stretches of more hard-boiled prose, elements of crime thriller. But at its heart, this is a story about how scary it is to grow up—and when King tells THOSE kinds of stories, he is at his very best ... That narrative relentlessness remains one of the very best parts of reading Stephen King. Better than any of his contemporaries, King is able to ensnare you with his stories, entangling your imagination with his own and pulling you inexorably into the tale he chooses to tell. He’s quick to land his hook, and once he does, well … just let him reel you in.
... a touching story about a boy growing up without a father, and with talents that set him apart from everyone else. It’s also thriller about the darkness that lies under the surface of everyday life. Its characters, from Jamie’s hard-drinking, curse-prone, yet affectionate mother Tia to wise-cracking, innocent, and good-hearted Jamie, brim with life, while mentions of television shows and other pop culture from the mid-2000s set a colorful atmosphere ... a satisfying tale about facing demons—both those we can see and those that lurk in the darkness.
There’s classic King here for fans. Imagine the carnage on any given day in the Big Apple and then imagine being a young man seeing the mangled dead walking around in the afterlife ... But even amid the gore and escalating tension, King finds moments to make Jamie relatable ... a thrilling whodunit.
The fantastic premise that animates Later is simple...but King has not fully thought through the narrative implications of this idea ... Given these grim statistics, you would imagine that Jamie’s childhood would be spent dodging a swarm of horrid wraiths, but he only runs into two other gooshy spooks after that first incident, each time because it is convenient for the plot ... But King seems untroubled by these credibility issues, since his purpose in introducing the mad-bomber subplot is to provide Jamie with a durable nemesis ... As per usual with King’s novels, even comparatively bad ones, Later has its compelling aspects. Jamie’s narrative voice is nicely captured, as he matures into a confused and understandably depressed teenager, and the scenes with his harried, madcap mother have the homely authenticity one has come to expect of the author’s domestic scenarios ... But none of these positive qualities can overcome the structural flaws at the heart of the story, which undermine its tenability in a way that is finally fatal.
... there’s nothing all that pulpy about it. That’s not a bad thing, of course; it’s just not the grimy, scintillating read its tawdry cover suggests ... a clever spin on an old trope, and King mines morbid humor from Jamie’s own lack of interest in serving as ghost translator. But it isn’t long before we’re reminded that rules were made to be broken. There’s more in the stars than ghosts and dead people ... And there’s more in Later than its trim 260 pages might suggest. King, who tends to stretch stories out like taffy, crowds Jamie’s encounters with the undead with a mad bomber, a shady detective, and a sordid drug lord. It’s in those scenes, stuffed as they are with pills and guns and ball gags, that King attempts to hard-boil his story, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been reheated a dozen times over on cable—aside from how Jamie’s link to the dead affects everything. And while Later’s vision of the dead is plenty creepy on its own, it takes on added resonance when King weaves it in with the events of one of his most-loved novels, one familiar to even his most casual readers. It’s inessential, the twist, but plenty interesting in the larger realm of King’s oeuvre, which the author’s knotted into a literary universe all his own ... King has always had a knack for funneling the complicated inner realities of adults through the eyes of children, and some of Later’s most affecting passages find Jamie piecing together his mother’s struggles via empty wine bottles and scraps of overheard chatter.
King has been known to walk the interstitial space between genres for most of his career, and Later is proof that he does his best work when mixing elements from various genres while keeping horror at the core of his narratives ... King does many things right ... The first one is characterization. Jamie, his mother, and the NYPD detective, Liz Dutton, feel like fleshed out characters with unique lives and personalities ... Also, the dialogue is believable and carries a lot of the action in crucial moments. The one element King nails here is one we rarely talk about because it’s hard to discuss. For lack of a better word, we usually call it readability. Yes, this is a combination of good plot, dialogue, and economy of language, but it also involves the characters’ voices and the ability of an author to tell a story. King is a superb storyteller, and he shows that here. Later is gripping and easy to read. The narrative progress at an enjoyable pace and it’s easy to stay glued to the book. Also, Jamie’s voice is likeable ... Ultimately, Later succeeds because it’s a fun read.
King’s structure, which jumps back and forth a bit along the timeline, is somewhat disjointed as a result of this retrospection, but not fatally so ... when [King] chooses to use a first-person narrator, as he has here in Later, the results are sometimes rather tinny, as he attempts to mimic the voices and thoughts of young people (adolescent males in particular) without really having a good ear for it. The reader must pass through a gauntlet of fart jokes and prurient fascinations—a style unfortunately imitated by many King admirers—in order to get to the good stuff centering on their special abilities and the threat they must face ... Thankfully, Later keeps this kind of thing to a minimum ... another example of Stephen King’s special ability to tell a story that’s both simple and compelling. Entertaining and thought-provoking, it’s a must-add to your 2021 reading list.
King’s beguiling short novel is really more of a genre-bender, combining the horror with a sensitive coming-of-age tale and an old-school crime thriller. There’s also a nifty publishing subplot ... In his signature style, King keeps the narrative cantering along, mixing lots of pop culture into the flow and building Jamie into a witty and thoroughly empathetic lead (recalling the teens in King’s It and his novella The Body (on which the movie Stand by Me was based). This may be the most ingratiating mix of sweet and sour since Daniel Kraus’ genre-bender Blood Sugar (2019).
... no good deed goes unpunished in this gruesome yet mesmerizing paranormal coming-of-age story ... Gory and unnerving, this twisty chiller has sufficient sins and revelations to keep readers pursuing the action to its breathless conclusion. King fans are in for a treat.
