I started absorbing Stephen King before I was born. When she was pregnant with me, my mom distracted herself with two equally consuming tasks: stitching future-me a small quilt (despite very little knowledge or skill related to sewing) and reading the serial installments of The Green Mile, published between March and August of 1996. She spun my future with fabric squares—painstakingly arranged for comfort—and whatever textures might be taken from the echoes of chants and shaking chains on a fictional death row. Manufactured, destroyable dread was the invisible thread connecting the balloon to the toy block to the yellow background.
Now, it’s 2021 and I’m an adult who does my own grocery shopping and I see a new paperback on a display at Costco and I throw it into my cart before any food. King’s latest (aptly titled Later) is a compelling, genre-mash and in many ways, one of King’s most honest stories.
The book is a first-person narrative by Jamie Conkin, a child born with an ability to see and communicate with the dead. Jamie’s power only extends for a limited amount of time after a person dies, and, for most of the book, the ins and outs of his ability is outside his scope of understanding. The narrator version of Jamie is in his mid-twenties, looking back on a couple of decades of growing into this strange responsibility.
The book starts with an apology, a justification for the repeated use of the word later. King begins with a deep breath, and then:
“My name is Jamie Conklin, and once upon a time I drew a Thanksgiving turkey that I thought was the absolute cat’s ass. Later—and not much later—I found out it was more like the stuff that comes out of the cat’s ass. Sometimes the truth really sucks.
I think this is a horror story. Check it out.” (16)
This self conscious refrain (“I think this is a horror story”) settles in as a kind of mantra, a redirecting of the reader’s attention as the book slides between genres. There is an attention to child-like detail that rewards a reading practice similar to much quieter, slice of life books, a high-speed revealing of details reminiscent of a Dashiell Hammett tale, and a detached speculative awe we’ve come to associate with King’s younger protagonists.
Later is definitely worth reading, especially because it will take you five seconds and there is something still wonder-inspiring about the lived experience of being a contemporary of such an impactful storyteller—of being able to walk through the aisles of the grocery store and pick up a new offering from a legend who works alongside us in this moment of space-time.
Mostly, I think this book is worth reading for one element of world-building, one rule that forms the central urgency of this text within the Stephen King canon and his political evolution. No matter what, when Jamie asks the ghosts he meets a direct question, they must tell the truth. This applies to everyone: his neighbors and friends, criminals wanted by the federal government, and ruthless murderers.
Over the summer, conversations regarding the fictional depiction of police officers highlighted the degree to which television and films have shaped current discourse surrounding attitudes toward law enforcement. (If, somehow, you missed all of this, here are some places, of many, to start: this piece from Vulture on the cop-as-main-character and this interview with Rashad Robins from Color of Change.)
This conversation finds its way into the pages of Later. Jamie Conklin’s mother has a tumultuous relationship with a sexy cop named Liz Dutton. Liz and Jamie’s mom fight about police tactics, and Jamie mentions that this is “still a few years before Black Lives Matter” (80). Besides this passing reference and a general mistrust of law enforcement portrayed through Liz’s sketchiness as a lover, quasi-stepmother, and dirty officer, race disappears from Jamie’s considerations, and therefore the focus of the book that is his story.
Cultural critic Scott Woods has written and spoken at length about Stephen King’s representations of race. In 2015, he offered an analysis of King’s usage of The Magical Negro. Then, after the release of King’s 2017 book, Sleeping Beauties, he updated his critique, and most recently returned to the topic following King’s tweets regarding diversity in the Oscars.
While Woods maintained that King had never grown out of his propensity for problematic racial representations, he does address the ways that King has become more critically conscious in the last few years. As Woods writes:
“Somewhere in the last decade or so, Stephen King got woke.
To be clear, it is an awakening that comes with heavy qualifiers. As the years pass, King becomes more socially and politically aware. He is vehemently anti-Trump. His most notable instance of this was a 2016 post about Freddie Gray after the Baltimore police who killed Gray were acquitted. “Gee,” he tweeted, “looks like NOBODY killed Freddie Gray. Guess he just died of being black. Funny how that happens in this country.” Blunt, but effective. Everyone loved him that day.” (Woods)
Unlike in other books, Stephen King doesn’t include any explicitly racialized characters in Later. Instead, he includes threads of critical consciousness, found and lost like the narrator reminding the reader that what they are reading is a horror story. We are reminded that the character who lives in Jamie Conklin’s apartment on and off, who buys him sodas and makes love to his mother, is also racist. She is not a faraway boogie man. She is in his home. She watches him grow up. She stipulates as to whether or not Obama was born in the United States. She dismisses police brutality. She plays toy cars with him on the carpet.
Over the past few years, America has been asking Stephen King a direct question, and this is the true answer. Stephen King is not an oracle on race relations in this country. By virtue of his experience, he cannot be. But now, more than before, he seems more willing and able to locate his white characters in their whiteness, to investigate this space and hold it accountable for itself. This is a vulnerable book, a book that directly answers the questions a ghost would prefer to avoid, but can’t. I also think this is a horror story.
You can order Stephen King’s Later on Amazon (ad):
Lauren Gilmore is an incoming MA student in Lehigh University’s Literature and Social Justice program. She is interested in horror literature and media, digital resistance movements, and the relationship between the horrific and communicative technologies. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Outdancing the Universe, from University of Hell Press. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming from Hayden’s Ferry’s Review, Ghost City Press, Rogue Agent, and other journals. She lives with her partner and two small dogs. You can find out more about her at her website, laurengilmore.com.
