Either a lot of critics didn't get the joke or didn't appreciate it. I told myself to keep it light and surreal that if I just kept in mind the Bakkers' doghouse, which had been equipped with heaters and running water, I would be okay. By the time I got home that night, I had decided to turn the eighties into a small-town curio shop called Needful Things and see what happened. The final items up on the block had been honor, integrity, self-respect, and innocence.

It occurred to me that in the eighties, everything had come with a price tag, that the decade quite literally was the sale of the century. I was thinking about all this one night while driving home from a basketball game, and my thoughts centered on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, of the PTL Club. It was the final corruption of the Love and Peace Generation-The Big Cop-out-and I thought it was a case of having to laugh. It was the last hurrah for cigarettes, unsafe sex, and all sorts of drugs. It was a decade in which people decided, for awhile, at least, that greed was good and that hypocrisy was simply another tool for getting along. I guess I was one of the few people in the United States who thought the eighties were really funny.

With the potent storytelling authority that millions of readers have come to prize, Stephen King delivers an Out Town with a vengeance, an inimitable farewell to a place his fiction has often and long called home. Gaunt knows, almost everything is for sale: love, hope, even the human soul. Above all, it will be a test of their ability to grasp the true nature of their enemy. Does that stop people from buying? Has it ever?įor Alan and Polly, this one week in autumn will be an awful test - a test of will, desire, and pain. And as Leland Gaunt always points out, at Needful Things, the prices are high indeed. For Leland Gaunt, the pleasure of doing business lies chiefly in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires. Gaunt's business is fairly booming, and why not? At Needful Things, there's something for everyone.Īnd, of course, there is always a price. Eleven-year-old Brain Rusk is his first customer, and Brian finds just what he wants most in all the world a '56 Sandy Koufax baseball card. Leland Gaunt is a stranger - and he calls his shop Needful Things. It's a small town, and Stephen King fans might think they know its secrets pretty well they've been here before. where Polly Chalmers runs You Sew and Sew and Sheriff Alan Pangborn is in charge of keeping the peace. With a demonic blend of malice and affection, Stephen King says goodbye to the town he put on the map - Castle Rock, Maine.

Needful things audiobook