Never.” This is, of course, an impossible instruction for a child to follow for their entire lifetime, and one that Jamie cannot possibly comply with. The conflict of the story starts to come in at around page 30 or so, when the mother says to James, “Never tell anyone about seeing dead people, James. This novel seems a bit slower paced than most of King’s novels, which typically drop-kick you right into the middle of the action. One begins to see that Jamie’s “gift” of seeing the dead can really seem like a curse when the dead are restless or unkind, or have died in some sort of violent way. The child perspective of this novel, in dealing with difficult and often troubling situations, makes the main character sympathetic. Jamie and his mother meet up with their neighbor in his apartment, who has lost his wife, and this is where it is revealed that Jamie can see dead people, just like the little boy in the film The Sixth Sense (King, aware of the reference, mentions the film when describing his character). Later is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a child named James/Jamie Conklin, whose mother is a literary agent. The novel Later is a more recently-created novel in the Hard Case Crime books. Of the Hard Case Crime series books, I’ve only read Joyland, the story of a young man’s “Indian summer,” and found it to be brilliant. So first of all, I’m biased because I love Stephen King’s novels, having read the entire Dark Tower series and written a lengthy review of the film for Terror House magazine.
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