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Stephen King is not only the King of Horror, he is also a Prince of Promise.

It's never better than the first fifty pages.

Jack Torrance's interview in "Shining" or the drifting paper boat in "Es" are almost perfect beginnings of the novel.

When it comes to conclusions, things are different.

Bringing a story to an end is not King's discipline.

This is partly in the nature of the horror novel: Many monsters lose their charm when you first look under the bed.

In part, however, King's notorious final weakness simply has to do with King: He tends to get frayed and get lost in questionable explanations.

"Stuffed Animal Cemetery," for example, is only great as long as King doesn't borrow an evil spirit from America's native peoples to explain everything in some way.

It is therefore all the more interesting when King writes an entire novel about conclusions.

His new one is programmatically called “Later”.

The beginning, as always, is pure promise.

Little Jamie can see the newly deceased.

In the hall he meets the old Burkett couple, but only he sees Mrs. Burkett;

the arm, it turns out, has just suffered a fatal stroke.

But the soon fading dead speak true.

With the interest in life, they have also lost the gift of lying.

And that suits Jamie's single mother, a New York literary agent.

Because of all things the gold donkey of her agency, a cranky guy who writes a super successful, albeit super stupid fantasy saga, blesses the temporal over the all-explanatory closing volume.

Jamie and his clammy mother are suddenly faced with the typical King problem: if they want to save the literary agency, they have to finish the story.

Fortunately, Jamie can ask the dead author how to resolve it.

Epic predictions

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Other writers would have filled a novel with this story, but King is soon finished with it and begins, bang-bang, with a new one.

A book that revolves around inferences turns out to be one full of beginnings.

There is always something that happens, well, “later”, and Jamie, who tells the story about a decade apart, constantly has to determine something “later”, “understand later”, experience “later”.

"Epic Prediction" is what literary scholars call it, and King has a lot of fun with it.

For what is a preliminary interpretation if not the promise of an all-dissolving, all-satisfying end?

The dead writer is followed by a dead bomber who has to reveal the target of his last attack, and the dead bomber is followed by a fading drug lord.

And of course, not all of the dead Jamie has to interview are kind and nice.

After all, King never tires of emphasizing that "we are dealing with a horror story".

And how do you get such a horror story to a convincing end?

What do you do with the monster under the bed?

As is well known, reviewers are not allowed to reveal that.

Stephen King, the Prince of Promise, benefited from it all his life.

Stephen King: Later.

Translated from the English by Bernhard Kleinschmidt.

Heyne, 304 pp., 22 euros