Langoliers
Langoliers is the title of a book by the American writer Stephen King published by Heyne Verlag in 1991 . It contains the two novellas Langolier and The secret window, the secret garden .
The English original was published by Viking-Verlag in New York in 1990 and also contains time lapse (The Sun Dog) and The Library Policeman . The two missing novels were published on the German book market under the title “ Nachts ”. The original edition Four Past Midnight ("Four after Midnight"), which has only been available in Germany since April 2016, was awarded the Bram Stoker Award in 1990 in the "Best Collection" category.
Langoliers
The short story was filmed as a two-part feature film under the title " The Langoliers ".
action
A plane is on a night flight from Los Angeles to Boston. Some passengers fall asleep. When they wake up again, the other passengers have strangely disappeared without a trace. All that is left of them are dental fillings, bags, jewelry, and even pacemakers. Among the passengers left behind are the blind girl Dinah Bellman, the pilot Brian Engle, the teacher Laurel Stevenson, the student Albert Kaussner, the young Bethany Simms, the crime writer Bob Jenkins, Don Gaffney, Rudy Warwick, the Englishman Nick Hopewell and the stressed out Businessman Craig Toomy.
Brian tries to establish contact with the next tower, but fails due to a lack of reception. Outside everything is dark and quiet. Craig Toomy panics about missing an important business meeting. Soon it will be daylight and Brian manages to land the plane at the nearest airport in Bangor . When everyone got out, they noticed that there was no noise, smell or wind, and the airport was deserted.
Because of their hunger they get food from the snack bar, but the food and drinks have no taste. Bob Jenkins speculates how it could have come to this: You must have flown through a time hole and landed in the past, only that the past is completely empty. The rest of the people who hadn't slept were wiped out as they crossed the time hole.
Meanwhile, Craig Toomy begins to go nuts. In his head his late father calls out: “The Langoliers are coming! The Langoliers are coming! ”Since his earliest childhood he had put him under immense pressure to perform and threatened that the Langoliers would come and fetch him should he ever be lazy or fail to do his job. Even after the death of his father, he is afraid of the Langoliers.
As these actually come closer and closer, the remaining passengers ultimately manage to escape by plane and travel through the Aurora Borealis into the near future. Since they have to sleep during the passage, Nick Hopewell sacrifices himself and therefore does not arrive at the present. Craig Toomy is devoured by the Langoliers.
King's theory of time in the book
In the short story, Stephen King presents a special theory about time : Since time is strictly linear and the present is the only real thing, time travel is not possible either into the past or into the future. As a result, everything “moves” forward along an infinite timeline. According to the book, there are no more people in 1950 because everything has already passed by then, and likewise there are no people in 2309 because everything is still heading towards it.
Passengers would come across a deserted world if they were catapulted a few minutes into the past. Buildings and the landscape would still be there, but no living beings. These would have moved on through time and left the world behind. The abandoned world would later become victims of the Langoliers. These are very peculiar beings or machines, whose task it is to literally devour the world behind humanity as it moves on. If the time travelers had traveled a whole day into the past, they would have found nothing but yawning, endless emptiness, but they experience the arrival of the Langoliers and can escape by plane at the last second.
You fly back through the aurora borealis - this time a few minutes into the future. And again there is no human being; but this time because they have yet to come. You are waiting for the present, so to speak. Time travelers experience how the present catches up with them, when people appear out of nowhere and life can go on normally.
Why only sleeping people can fly through the aurora borealis remains unclear.
The secret window, the secret garden
The writer Mort Rainey is in a deep life crisis. His wife got divorced for another man, and Mort is in the middle of writer's block. He lives secluded in his wooden house on Tashmore Lake, waiting for inspiration as he slowly but surely begins to lose control of his life.
One day a mysterious man named John Shooter appears on his doorstep, accusing him of stealing one of his stories. A plagiarism allegation is the last thing Mort has been missing, but he does not take the allegation seriously. Shooter asks Mort to write a new story, put Shooter's name under it and give it to him.
Shortly afterwards, Mort's dog is brutally stabbed and his ex-wife's house, where the proof of the authorship of his story was located, is set on fire. Two men from the nearby village are also murdered. What makes the situation even more spooky: Nobody seems to have ever seen Shooter.
Mort begins to investigate and gets increasingly into the depths of his own abyss. In the end, he has to realize that he is heading for a dissociative personality disorder, that the illness has created the mysterious stranger named Shooter in him and that in reality he is responsible for what happened himself. The reader realizes that he has only seen the story from the point of view of the writer Mort Rainey. It becomes clear that the reality is different.
The short story was filmed as " The Secret Window " with Johnny Depp and John Turturro in the leading roles. However, the ending of the film is different from that of the book. In the book, while trying to kill his ex-wife with a screwdriver, Mort Rainey is shot dead by an insurance agent who was investigating the fire in the Raineys' home. In the film, Mort kills his ex-wife and her new husband and buries them in the "secret garden" where he then plants corn.
Literature and web links
- Stephen King: Langoliers. Heyne, 2000, ISBN 3453431634
- The table of contents of the novellas in KingWiki: