After, it’s Stephen King from the start. For those accustomed to his novels, this new title is in line with his initial works, those that helped build his worldwide success: an extremely well-narrated story of fear, which calls on dark forces to embody evil. that must fight a child, symbol par excellence in his writings of innocence and purity.
Jamie is a 6 year old boy who lives in New York with his mother, a literary agent. From the first pages, he gives us this judicious warning by beginning his story: “In my opinion, what follows is a story of horror. ”
As far as he can remember, Jamie can see dead people. These usually manifest themselves to him in the form they had when they breathed their last; that is to say injured, mutilated or in a nightgown if the death occurred during their sleep. Suffice to say that it is a real horror scene that presents itself to his eyes when he sees a cyclist killed on the outskirts of Central Park. And this horrible sight will be far from the last …
But the dead also have another special characteristic that will change everything for Jamie: They are compelled to speak the truth when he asks them questions. And his mother knows about it. The only other person who will know about it is the lover of his mother, a policewoman who has the annoying habit of bending the rules to her advantage.
“Looking back, I thought my life was worthy of a Dickensian novel, the bad words to boot,” says Jamie. Because of painful and dramatic reversals, he will know a host of them during his childhood and adolescence – horror and more.
Jamie and his mother begin with a taste of the financial meltdown of 2008, before moving up the slope by appealing to the exceptional faculty of the boy, a classic figure in Stephen King’s work – gifted, sensitive and wise; in short, a pure soul who will have to fight the darkness that will haunt him later, when his gift will be misused. The “thing” that will terrorize him for much of these years is neither an evil spirit nor a ghost, but some kind of evil demon that has taken hold of the spirit of a malicious dead.
If the nightmarish descriptions appear only a short time before the second half of the novel, they never go overboard. We are indeed in a story of fear, but we will find few things that resemble gore. Sensitive souls may not therefore have to abstain …
After
Stephen king
Albin Michel
336 pages