What four novellas are in Four Past Midnight?

The collection contains: 'The Langoliers' (passengers on an overnight flight land in an empty, decaying version of America); 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' (a writer confronted by a man claiming he plagiarized a short story); 'The Library Policeman' (a man haunted by a childhood trauma involving a library); and 'The Sun Dog' (a teenage boy's Polaroid camera always photographs the same menacing dog regardless of what is in front of the lens).

Which novellas in Four Past Midnight were adapted?

'The Langoliers' was adapted as a two-part ABC television movie in 1995, starring Patricia Wettig and Tom Holland. 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' became the film Secret Window (2004) starring Johnny Depp. The Library Policeman and The Sun Dog have not been adapted.

What are the Langoliers?

The Langoliers are creatures—first heard as a terrible tearing, crunching sound—that devour the past as time moves forward. The story's passengers have been displaced one second behind the present and are watching the world be eaten around them as the Langoliers consume the dead moment they are trapped in.

Four Past Midnight

Several books Horror Thriller

Pages: 768
Published: 1990
Language: English

Synopsis

Four novellas, four separate nightmares. In the first, a red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston carries its passengers through the night, and they wake to a nearly empty cabin. The aircraft lands in a deserted, lifeless America, and something is coming for the few who remain. That story is The Langoliers.

In Secret Window, Secret Garden, Mort Rainey is a novelist, recently divorced, who has retreated to a lake house in Maine. A stranger named John Shooter turns up and accuses him of stealing his story. Mort is alone, and the visitor does not leave it there.

In The Library Policeman, Sam Peebles runs a small business in Junction City, Iowa. A library book goes overdue, and the lapse pulls him into a nightmare rooted in his childhood. The Sun Dog is set in Castle Rock, Maine. Kevin Delevan, a teenager, owns a Polaroid camera that keeps producing a photograph of a menacing black dog, and in each new picture the dog is nearer.

Stephen King wrote the stories in 1988 and 1989, and Viking published the collection in 1990. It is his second book of novellas after Different Seasons, with an introduction and a short note before each tale. It won the 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection.

The dread builds fast at this length, and each novella is short enough to finish in a sitting or two. Two have reached the screen: a 1995 miniseries of The Langoliers and the 2004 film Secret Window, with Johnny Depp.