Full Dark, No Stars

Je lis rarement des livres en anglais. En fait, je ne sais pas pourquoi je n'en lis pas plus souvent. Ayant obtenu une exemption à vie en compréhension de l'écrit lors de mes derniers tests de langue seconde par un score de 63 sur 65, je me sens assez à l'aise pour lire presque n'importe quoi (j'en ai pour preuve mon dernier travail de psychologie qui portait sur une expérience concernant l'anxiété et son impact sur la concentration). Donc, en ce moment je lis le dernier (?) Stephen King prêté par une collègue de travail. 

"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King.

For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It's a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends "A Good Marriage."

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form. (résumé tiré de ce site)