A Castle Rock-set prelude of sorts to the grotesquely underrated Needful Things (coming up in a few weeks' time,), it features a camera that, whenever it takes a photograph, shows an unsettling black dog (another of King's recurring themes, especially relevant in his post-addiction times) The dog comes closer and closer to the camera with each new picture, until it eventually breaks free of the camera itself. Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Library Policeman are fine novellas, about a mentally unstable, possibly psychotic writer accused of plagiarism, and an evil being who hunts down those who have overdue library books but it's The Sun Dog that I most loved. What I took away, however, were the other three. So, that was what I brought to this reread: I couldn't really remember the other stories in the book. (The concepts of wasting time and losing control are almost the primary antagonists in this story.)
Several of our natural fears are preyed upon – flying, being alone, creatures with scary teeth – but there's a great second level of terror being worked into the story: the fear of losing (or wasting) time.
It's a great idea, with the execution both grounded and terrifying. Somehow, the plane flew through a rift, and the characters who survived the flight are trapped in that fragment of the past, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Then, the Langoliers appear: terrifying creatures that eat lost time, swallow up the past. The survivors hear static, in the distance some crackling that they can't explain. There's something wrong with the air, and with all food and water: everything is stale and tasteless. There's nobody in the terminal, nobody else anywhere. They land the plane – one of the surviving passengers is a pilot – and step out into the airport to discover that they're totally alone. Everybody else on the flight has disappeared, leaving the plane without a crew. The main characters are all asleep on American Pride Flight 29, a red-eye flight across America.
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