The townsfolk share the small town mentality that oddities and peculiarities should be shared, exposed and dealt with as quickly as possible – enabling the town to come together and gossip freely over coffee, their dinners or trips to quaint curiosity shop – empowering the town to unite and shun all that is different.

Castle Rock is a small town where weird things happen and word gets around quickly.

With Elevation we are treated to another fabulous story held within the city limits of the town that will never appear on location, location, location.

Todd’s Shortcut‘ & ‘ Uncle Otto’s Truck‘, Four Past Midnight ‘ The Sun Dog‘, Nightmares and Dreamscapes ‘ It Grows on You‘, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams ‘ Premium Harmony‘ & ‘ Drunken Fireworks‘ and there are also mentions of Cujo in Pet Sematary – there are probably a lot more that I’ve missed but there are the bones of it. The more you delve into this story the more you see it for what it is – a fabulously constructed tale that has only one inevitable outcome, but as a reader you can’t help but read on.Įlevation is set in the small town of Castle Rock – fans of King will know that this place is well documented in Kings novels and short fiction and sometimes mentioned in passing in his tome of works such as – The Dead Zone, Cujo, The Dark Half, Needful Things, Gwendy’s Button Box, Bag of Bones, Different Seasons ‘ The Body‘ & ‘ Shawshank Redemption‘, Skeleton Crew ‘ Mrs. Who would blame me, King has written so much that he surely must be running out of ideas? Right? Wrong. I have to be honest when I started reading the book I was thinking that it was a re-imagining of Thinner, minus the Gypsy with his rotten nose and curses. It is though a beautifully crafted tale of weird, speculative fiction which reminded me of the tone he set in The Green Mile – restrained, deep, thoughtful and a story of someones life unravelling before them like a ball of twine, running away before them as they pull at the string in their hands, trying for all their efforts to pull it back in, but they continue to struggle in vain – as the twine rolls away and gathers momentum. It is of course written by the master of horror Stephen King, so we are already quite excited about what is on offer, but with Elevation we have King at his oh so weird and oh so pleasant.Įlevation is not a straight out horror, let me get that on the table before we start.

Elevation novella