Books like Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

Four Past Midnight is a collection of four novellas by Stephen King, written in 1988–1989 and published in August 1990. It is his second anthology of this kind, following Different Seasons. The collection was awarded the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Best Collection and was nominated for a 1991 Locus Award. The stories vary in tone and premise. “The Langoliers” follows a group of passengers on a red‑eye flight who find themselves in an eerily empty world after an unexplained event. “Secret Window, Secret Garden” centers on writer Mort Rainey, recently divorced and isolated, when an enigmatic figure named John Shooter confronts him. “The Library Policeman” is set in Junction City, Iowa, where businessman Sam Peebles begins to suspect that something darker lurks beneath his seemingly ordinary life. The final novella, “The Sun Dog,” presents a situation in which the flat surface of a Polaroid photograph becomes an invitation to a supernatural creature, putting a 15‑year‑old boy and a local trader into peril.

First publish date: 1990