Foh Onn Chong

Bag of Bones
By Stephen King

Stephen King's most gripping and unforgettable novel, Bag of Bones, is a story of grief and a lost love's enduring bonds, of a new love haunted by the secrets of the past, of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire.

Set in the Maine territory King has made mythic, Bag of Bones recounts the plight of forty-year-old best-selling novelist Mike Noonan, who is unable to stop grieving even four years after the sudden death of his wife, Jo, and who can no longer bear to face the blank screen of his word processor.

Now his nights are plagued by vivid nightmares of the house by the lake. Despite these dreams, or perhaps because of them, Mike finally returns to Sara Laughs, the Noonans' isolated summer home.

He finds his beloved Yankee town familiar on its surface, but much changed underneath--held in the grip of a powerful millionaire, Max Devore, who twists the very fabric of the community to his purpose: to take his three-year-old granddaughter away from her widowed young mother. As Mike is drawn into their struggle, as he falls in love with both of them, he is also drawn into the mystery of Sara Laughs, now the site of ghostly visitations, ever-escalating nightmares, and the sudden recovery of his writing ability. What are the forces that have been unleashed here--and what do they want of Mike Noonan?

Firestarter
By Stephen King

"Andy could feel something building in the air, building up around Charlie like an electric charge. The hair on his arms suddenly began to stir and move, like kelp in an invisible tide. He looked down at her and saw her face, so small, now so strange. It's coming, he thought helplessly. It's coming, oh my God, it really is."

In 1969 Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson participate in a drug experiment run by a veiled government agency known as The Shop. One year later they marry. Two years after that their little girl, Charlie, sets her teddy bear on fire?by looking at it.

Now that Charlie is eight, she doesn't start fires anymore. Her parents have taught her to control her pyrokinesis, the ability to set anything--toys, clothes, even people--aflame.

But The Shop knows about and wants this pigtailed "ultimate weapon." Shop agents set out to hunt down Charlie and her father in a ruthless and terrifying chase that ranges from the streets of New York to the backwoods of Vermont. And once they get her they plan to use Charlie's capacity for love to force her into developing a power as horrifyingly destructive as it is seductive. What they don't take into account is that even a child can know the pleasure of the whip hand and the satisfaction of revenge.

Let the reader beware, for Firestarter is Stephen King at his most mesmerizing?and menacing.

Misery
By Stephen King

Paul Sheldon, author of a best-selling series of historical romances, wakes up one winter day in a strange place, a secluded farmhouse in Colorado. He wakes up to unspeakable pain (a dislocated pelvis, a crushed knee, two shattered legs) and to a bizarre greeting from the woman who has saved his life: "I'm your number one fan!"

Annie Wilkes is a huge ex-nurse, handy with controlled substances and other instruments of abuse, including an axe and a blowtorch. A dangerous psychotic with a Romper Room sense of good and bad, fair and unfair, Annie Wilkes may be Stephen King's most terrifying creation. It's not fair, for example, that her favorite character in the world, Misery Chastain, has been killed by her creator, as Annie discovers when Paul's latest novel comes out in paperback. And it's not good that her favorite writer has been a Don't-Bee and written a different kind of novel, a nasty novel, the novel he has always wanted to write, the only copy of which now lies in Annie's angry hands.

Because she wants Paul Sheldon to be a Do-Bee, she buys him a typewriter and a ream of paper and tells him to bring Misery back to life. Wheelchair-bound, drug-dependent, locked in his room, Paul doesn't have much of a choice. He's an entertainer held captive by his audience. A writer in serious trouble. But writers have weapons too?

Night Shift
By Stephen King

The new book of stories from the author of Carrie, The Shining, and 'Salem's Lot is a chilling collection of strange imaginings, ghoulish twists, and diabolical terror.

Stephen King, a modern master of the macabre, has brought together nineteen of his most unsettling short pieces--bizarre tales of dark doings and unthinkable acts from the twilight regions where horror and madness take on eerie, unearthly forms ? where noises in the walls and shadows by the bed are always signs of something dreadful on the prowl.

The settings are familiar and unsuspectful--a high school, a factory, a truck stop, a laundry, a field of Nebraska corn. But in Stephen King's world any place can serve as devil's ground ? if the time of night is propitious, and the forces of darkness are strong, and the victims are caught just slightly off their guard ?

--Strange presences in Jerusalem's Lot, a town abandoned for generations--and with good reason. No one who wanders there now, after the sun has set, ever comes back alive?

--And the hideous growths on the hands of a former astronaut--tiny round and yellow eyes pooping through the skin, watching him, not liking what they see?

--And the mysterious little girl lost in a fierce Maine blizzard, calling out to her rescuers in a pitiful voice. But she walks on top of the deep, drifting snow--and she leaves no tracks?

--And the grim-faced children in a Midwest town where no one seems to live past the age of nineteen?

--And the vermin in the second sub-cellar of the old mill--abandoned to darkness for a hundred years and now assuming shapes and sizes nature never intended them to take?

--And the giant folding and steam pressing machine in the Blue Ribbon Laundry--an impressive and reliable piece of equipment, until it got its first taste of human blood?

The Tommyknockers
By Stephen King

"Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door. I want to go out, don't know if I can, 'cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man."

It begins with nothing more frightening than a nursery rhyme; yet in Stephen King's hands it becomes an unforgettable parable of dread, a threat from an unimaginable darkness that drags the practical inhabitants of a New England village into a hell worse than their own most horrible nightmares?and yours.

It begins with a writer named Roberta Anderson, looking for firewood in the forest that stretches behind her house. Bobbi stumbles over three inches of metal, which unusually heavy spring runoff had left sticking out of the soil. A logger's beer can, she thinks at first, but "the metal was as solid as mother-rock."

It begins with Bobbi's discovery of the ship in the earth, a ship buried for millions of years, but still vibrating faintly, still humming with some sort of life?faint?weak?but still better left alone.

Bobbi then begins to dig--tentatively at first, then compulsively--and is joined by her old friend (and onetime lover), Jim Gardener. Aided by weirdly advanced technology, their excavation proceeds apace.

And as they uncover more and more of an artifact both familiar and so unbelievable it is almost beyond comprehension, the inhabitants of Haven start to change.

There is the new hot-water heater in Bobbi's basement--a hot-water heater that apparently runs on flashlight batteries. The vengeful housewife who learns of her husband's affair?from a picture of Jesus on top of her TV, a picture that begins to talk. Not to mention the ten-year-old magician who makes his little brother disappear?for real.

The townspeople of Haven are "becoming"--being welded into one organic, homicidal, and fearsomely brilliant entity in fatal thrall to the Tommyknockers.