On her way home she's sent on a short cut, and is brutally raped and almost murdered by the eponymous 'big driver'. Like many of his stories, it features a writer, in this case Tess, author of a series of uninspired mysteries, who has just driven to give a talk to a small-town book club.

'Big Driver', the second novella, is told in King's usual voice: it's easy, comfortable reading, deceptively so.

There is a hint of the supernatural in it, although the borderline between a haunting and madness here is a hairline fracture, and one that King exploits elegantly all the way to the end. It's compulsive reading, sometimes scary, revolting, ultimately heartbreaking and King tells it in a precise manner that's far from his usual voice. The murder of his wife and disposal of her body in a well is only the beginning: the consequences, for James, for his son and for their neighbours, are far-reaching, monstrous and inevitable. 'This is a thing I regret even more bitterly than the crime, for reasons this document will show.' And show us he does. 'I cozened him into it, playing upon his fears and beating down his quite normal objections over a period of two months,' James tells us. Inspired, King says in his afterword, by Michael Lesy's collection of clippings and photographs Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) (a book that I sometimes imagine must have inspired as many books as it has sold), it is a first-person narrative: Wilfred Leland James, a small farmer in Nebraska, murders his wife, having first talked his 14-year-old son into helping him. '1922', the opening story, is simply as good as anything he has done. King in novella form tends to avoid or to downplay the supernatural. It is also perfectly conceivable that King, 63, who talks about retiring and laying down his pen, but for whom ceasing to write seems unthinkable, will bring out another set 20 years from now.) (At least, it is easy to presume that this is the final set.

Now, in the evening of his immense career, we get Full Dark, No Stars, a final set of four novellas.

Another four stories, less remarkable (one film, Secret Window, one TV special, The Langoliers). It has been 20 years since Four Past Midnight, from King's hazy afternoon period.

Full dark no stars first edition