Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story

I was all on board to give this book 5 stars until I reached the end.
What the heck !
I love King! I really love the neighborhood he created in this, I also loved the destruction and turmoil that transpired.
Ok... so why only 3 stars??
Well, you have your BIG BAD GUY... Mr Gaunt, He is so evil, he is so powerful, so mysterious, incredibly interesting, what a wonderful character!
But then.... here comes the slap to the face- spoiler alert- don't click if you haven't read it!

he is defeated by being ran off by a fucking rainbow brite bracelet? Not to mention that fucking gag gift magically transforms into a real snake without any sort of explanation as to how Alan got a random magical power that only Mr Gaunt has???? He just RUNS AWAY from show more silly gag gifts after tormenting the entire neighborhood and causing murders and a 12 year old boy to commit suicide???

Ugh, It was a not well thought out ending, or maybe it was, and King pulled another gag on his readers. The ending felt the same sort of slap in the face as did The Dome, and as Revival. You sit through a massive tomb of a story, engulfed, enjoying it, only to reach the end which is an unbelievable unrealistic sarcastic slap to the face.
The end! lol I sound bitter, I still love King novels, and will read them at least 1 or 2 times a year until I have read them all, MINUS the Tower series. I heard he jerked his readers at the end of that too! Stop taunting us!! show less

I think this might be my favourite Stephen King novel (generally speaking I find him hit and miss), pipping Desperation, Under the Dome, or 11.22.63) by a whisker. The story is a clever slow-burn which moves us along from a bit of small town mischief centred around the new antique shop in Castle Rock to absolute carnage and mass casualties.

Leland Gaunt is one of King's best villains and is brilliantly drawn. There is a huge cast of other characters, as is normal for a King tome, so you need to keep your wits about you to remember who everyone is. Young Brian Rusk who is the closest there is to another central figure is a lovely little character who is so well drawn and ultimately corrupted that the reader is pulled in by an irresistible show more force.

I've read this three times now. show less

Stephen King has been able to produce some extremely terrifying books, even to a modern reader. This isn't easy - the tradition of the Gothic began with half-revealed or suggested horrors, never fully explained, and modern audiences are used to seeing guts and blood and demons and worse broadcast onto their screens on a daily basis, so that hinted mystery doesn't scare us that much anymore, and we are somewhat inured to the gross. King has claimed that he tries to terrify, and has a fallback to the gross-out; I find that his books tend to fall at different places along the spectrum. For example, I found The Stand and The Shining to be genuinely frightening, whereas Dreamcatchers was much more about the gross. Needful Things, picked up show more on a whim at the airport, seemed like a bit of a risk - I had the suspicion that most of King's books were less terrifying and more grotesque.

Needful Things is essentially the story of ordinary people - some nice, and some not - spurred to do horrifying things to one another. There is blood and guts, especially toward the end, but to me, the most difficult parts of the book to read were the emotional damages these ordinary folks were inflicting on one another, striking at one another's deepest fears and vulnerabilities, spurring anger and hate from neighbors they otherwise coexisted peacefully with. It is a rather powerful reminder of the pettiness of evil and of humanity - there are no great personalities here, no great harms, and no great achievements - just rather quotidien, sordid dreams and nightmares. Despite that, those dreams and nightmares are gripping.

I do think that the recital of escalating anger and rage went on a bit longer than was dramatically necessary, at least for me - the book might have wound up 200 pages quicker without much harm. But I also find it difficult to read about believably ordinary people rising to fairly epic levels of cruelty and harm (wittingly or no), so that could have colored my view.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the book, and was intrigued at the way it made me think about the genre and the kinds of things that can still discomfit a modern reader. show less

This is another Uncle Stevie re-read, and another that stands the test of time. Most people know the story, either from the book or the film version - an outsider opens a curiosity shop in a small Maine town, and the bargains he strikes for each item are more costly than they appear.

Interestingly, I always thought of this book as a subtle shift on the vampire story. But this read made it clear that King sees Leland Gaunt as a demon of sorts. It's a detail I didn't recall from my earlier reads.

The characters, true to King's best, are infinitely complex and captivating, their struggles between right and wrong/good and evil playing out throughout every page. The only thing that keeps this one from 5 bones is the cutting meanness which show more takes on too sharp an edge occasionally. Perhaps it's unpalatable right now because that meanness has emerged in every day life too often these days.

4 1/2 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended show less

Ahh..."The Last Castle Rock Story"... and what a good one it is! The Devil has come to town, and he finds quite a willing group of citizenry to do his bidding! He/Stephen King then hotwires, and then cross wires the "good" folks of Castle Rock and sits back to watch the fireworks. Literally! Neighbor versus neighbor, Sherriff versus Ace, and even the Catholics against the Baptists! I really liked the way this one is set up... and then torn apart! Bye-bye Castle Rock. Rest in pieces.

Ahh..."The Last Castle Rock Story"... and what a good one it is! The Devil has come to town, and he finds quite a willing group of citizenry to do his bidding! He/Stephen King then hotwires, and then cross wires the "good" folks of Castle Rock and sits back to watch the fireworks. Literally! Neighbor versus neighbor, Sherriff versus Ace, and even the Catholics against the Baptists! I really liked the way this one is set up... and then torn apart! Bye-bye Castle Rock. Rest in pieces.

NEEDFUL THINGS is one Stephen King book that sat on my shelf far too long before I got around to reading it. It uses one of his basic tropes, that of the small community beset by an outside evil, one that worms its way into the heart of said community, and then wrecks havoc. In SALEM’S LOT, the title town met the evil that was Mr. Barlow, the vampire; in IT, the town is Derry and the villain is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, in THE TOMMYKNOCKERS, it’s the little town of Haven overrun by an alien presence let loose from a long buried spacecraft. In this book, the town in question is Castle Rock, Maine, the setting of a number of King’s previous works, and the evil, which sets up shop on Main Street, is Leland Gaunt, the proprietor of show more a new knickknack store called Needful Things. Those who enter Gaunt’s establishment find an item that is their heart’s desire, be it a Sandy Koufax baseball card, a pair of sunglasses worn by Elvis himself, a Bazun fishing rod, or a charm that miraculously cures arthritis. Once the unsuspecting lay eyes on the item they secretly lust after, they will do anything to have it, and it is their lucky day, for Mr. Gaunt doesn’t ask for payment in currency, instead asking his ensnared customers to perform a “harmless” prank on another member of the community. These pranks are anything but benign; instead they push the buttons of their victims, hitting them right in their fears, hates, and resentments. Soon, a chain reaction of escalating violence is rippling through the town of Castle Rock, building toward a bloodbath while Mr. Gaunt patiently waits inside his store for it all go down.

I liked this book a lot, it’s not THE STAND or THE SHINING, but for a plot that is a basic potboiler, King gets everything out of it that he possibly could. Maybe a more subtle writer might have done more with the story, it certainly has possibilities, but subtlety is not why I read Stephen King. My paperback copy comes in at 700+ pages, so there is space to set the table and introduce the varied citizens of Castle Rock, recognizable to any Constant Reader as his usual crew of narrow minded, covetous, foul tempered and foul mouthed small town Maine residents. One particular rotten apple has a first name of Danforth, which surely was a swipe at J. Danforth Quayle, who was Vice President at the time the book was written, and who was considered to be rather feckless by his critics. There are references to VCRs, fax machines, Princess Phones, the movie YOUNG GUNS, that does date the book to the early ‘90s, but once I was immersed in the story, I didn’t really notice. The pace in the middle section does sag a bit – Ace Merrill’s trip to Boston goes on too long – but once the story really gets going at the end of the second act, it becomes a real page turner. Alan Pangborn and Polly Chambers, the novel’s main characters, are the kind of flawed protagonists King writes well, and Leland Gaunt is the kind of antagonist familiar to King’s books, an evil that is never quite truly explained, and that’s just fine. Like the malevolent force behind the doors at the Overlook Hotel, Gaunt appears to be an entity who feeds upon human weakness, and in Castle Rock, he finds a buffet. There’s a creepy spider, and plenty of gore, but one of the more horrific aspects of the story was how well King gets into the tyranny of constant pain, as with Polly’s arthritis of the hands. There are references to earlier King books set in and around Castle Rock – CUJO, THE BODY, THE DEAD ZONE, THE SUN DOG, THE DARK HALF – that are a real treat for us Constant Readers. This being a Stephen King book, there are some heavy handed knocks at organized religion, and having one prominent town resident being a closeted homosexual comes off as a tired cliché now. In the end, if NEEDFUL THINGS (an apt description of Gaunt’s unwary victims) doesn’t quite measure up to King’s best books, it is because we have seen its premise, themes, and tropes in earlier books. Still, there’s nothing wrong with using familiar chords to play a different tune.

After this book, King washed his hands of Castle Rock, but reading this novel now, and looking back at the passage of time, I wish King in the latter part of his career might reconsider, and give us a story that tells us what happened to that town in the years since. If not, at least King should think about bringing back Leland Gaunt for another appearance in a different book, he’s a great villain. And looking back, maybe we shouldn’t have had so much fun at Dan Quayle’s expense, we’ve seen much worse than him come and go in the years since. show less