Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story

New York: Viking Press, 1991. First Edition, First Printing. 1/4 cloth. Near fine/very good. A near fine first edition/first printing in a very good dust jacket. Black paper boards with black quarter cloth spine. SK with sillouhette stamped on front cover and title in same orange foil stamping on spine. Red endpapers. Complete number line. Dust jacket shows a 1.5" tear on back cover. Dust jacket now protected in a clear, removable, archival cover. 690 pp. Octavo, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches tall. Reviewed by Joe QueenanSept. 29, 1991"It has happened again. In a dark, dark place, where "the night roared like a lion with a poisoned spear caught in its throat," where the bootheels of Satan leave hard-to-ignore footprints in oatmeal-colored lumps of human brains and where perky gals named Polly do battle with fiends named Beelzebub while everybody else sits around in "Star Trek" T-shirts munching Twinkies and watching reruns of "Cheers" -- you know, like the zombies in the mall scene from "Night of the Living Dead VII" -- while paragraphs like this run on and on forever, a terrifying thing has just happened.Stephen King has written another novel.Yes, the maestro of the macabre, the czar of the zany, the sultan of shock, the liege of loathsomeness, is back with another of his gruesome novels, this time bidding farewell to Castle Rock, Me., the site of so much mayhem in his previous books. As in most of Mr. King's work, the premise here is that if one scratches just below the surface of normality in small-town America, one will unearth terrifying gushers of weirdness and depravity. This seems to be particularly true in western Maine, where the veneer of normality may be extra thin at this time of year.In "Needful Things," Castle Rock is visited by a mysterious entrepreneur named Leland Gaunt, who promptly sets up an old curiosity shop and then systematically destroys the entire town. It would spoil the story to reveal Gaunt's precise identity, but it is not giving away too much to say that he is probably on intimate speaking terms with Gog and Magog and almost certainly knows Dr. Faust. Gaunt quietly begins to sell valuable items, such as Sandy Koufax's rookie baseball card and an amulet containing a cure for arthritis, for nominal fees, with the proviso that his customers do him small, seemingly harmless favors. A typical favor is scattering pedophilic magazines with names like Nude Cuties, Saucy Young Guys and Bobby's Farm World all over the high school basketball coach's office, right where cute young cheerleaders can see them.Despite Gaunt's puckish sense of humor, such pranks are not well received by Castle Rockers, and before long women start turning up with axes planted in their foreheads, men get the tops of their skulls ripped off by shotgun blasts, arthritis victims find themselves locked in death struggles with huge, furry spiders trying to jam their tentacles down their throats, and cute little doggies, who never did anything to anyone, are nailed to the floor with corkscrews jammed through their tiny, woofy hearts. In this sense, "Needful Things" is a rural Gothic version of Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho": it contains the same amount of senseless sadomasochistic violence, but the lunatics smear their bloodstained hands on duds from Sears, not Saks." - NY Times