People, Places and Things

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People, Places and Things is an unpublished collection of short stories by the US writer Stephen King , which he self-published together with his friend Chris Chesley in 1960. It is only 18 pages long and yet it is able to give an insight into the very early work and the already exuberant imagination of the teenager King (King wrote the oldest of these stories when he was 12).
The original collection consists of eight stories by King, nine contributions by his friend, and a co-production. Today, according to King, of the original ten printed editions, only one copy remains with certainty - this is in the possession of the author.

Details of the stories

Only the titles of the short stories I'm falling (German: 'I fall') and The Dimension Warp (German: 'The chain of dimensions') have survived; nothing is known about the content.

  • Hotel at the End of the Road ( 'hotel at the end of the road')

On the run from the police, two gangsters find refuge in a hotel whose ominous hotelier doesn't even ask for money. But they are caught by a madman who paralyzes the two of them with a syringe and thus wants to add them to his personal horror cabinet.

  • I've got to get away (like: 'I have to get out of here')

A man comes to himself as if from a deep dream and finds that he has no memories, not even his name. Startled, he notices that he's in the middle of work on an assembly line and only knows one thing: He has to get out of here. But he doesn't get far when guards arrest him and reprogram him again - because the worker is a faulty robot that suddenly seems to take on human traits again and again.

  • The Thing at the Bottom of the Well ('Das Ding am Boden des Wellens')

A little boy is busy torturing small animals: he tears the wings off flies, tears up worms or punches a dog with needles. One day, however, he is lured by a strange voice from a well and descends as if hypnotized. When his body was found over a month later, his arms were severed from his body and needles were stuck in his eyes.

  • The Stranger ('The Stranger')

A thief and murderer is posed personally by the incarnate person who demands and fetches his soul.

  • The Cursed Expedition ('The Cursed Expedition')

When two astronauts land on Venus, they find a very Earth-like atmosphere and imagine they are in the Garden of Eden - there are delicious fruits, the temperature is exactly pleasant. But then one of the two is found dead, the survivor realizes too late that the planet itself - or at least its surface - is alive and eventually swallows it together with its rocket.

  • The Other Side of the Fog (' The Other Side of the Fog ')

A mysterious nebula acts as a gateway between the dimensions. Pete Jacobs involuntarily only gets into the future (the year 2007 ), finally into a world that is similar to his, but is populated by dinosaurs. He wanders helplessly from one dimension to the other, searching in vain for his world.

  • Never look behind you (like: ' Never look back')

A short story in cooperation with his friend; To put it simply, it is about a mysterious woman who commits murders in a peculiar way.

Remarks

  • Three of the short stories are preliminary stages to later works by King:
1) Like the boy in the fountain story, Patrick Hockstetter is also an animal tormentor in Es ; In this novel, the young George Denbrough is also lured by a friendly voice and dies when his arm is torn off.
2) Also in the short story Der Dünenplanet (in Der Fornit ) astronauts land on a living planet, the sand of which proves deadly intelligence.
3) The short story The Fog (in Dawn ) is a large-scale development of the story The Other Side of the Fog - even a dinosaur appears again.
  • King linked his works early on: the criminal Kelso Black dies in two of the stories: in Hotel at the End of the Road and The Stranger .
  • King's robot story borrows from the novels of Isaac Asimov , which King devoured as a teenager.

literature

Beahm, George. Stephen King from A to Z - An Encyclopedia of his Life and Work. Kansas City, 1998.