This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old...

A collection of nineteen horror stories, including "Night Surf, " "Sometimes They Come Back, " "The Lawnmower Man, " and "Children of the Corn."

Roland, the Last Gunslinger, and his companions--Eddie Dean and Susannah--cross the desert of damnation, drawing ever closer to the Dark Tower, a legion of fiendish foes, and revelations that could alter the world.

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their hometown: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw--and felt--what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing ... The adults, knowing better, knew nothing....

When Dr. Louis Creed takes a new job and moves his family to the idyllic rural town of Ludlow, Maine, this new beginning seems too good to be true. Yet despite Ludlow's tranquility, an undercurrent of danger exists here. Those trucks on the road outside the Creeds' beautiful old home travel by just a little too quickly, for one thing ... as is evidenced by the makeshift pet cemetary in the nearby woods. Then there are the warnings to Louis, both real...

Stephen King introduces each of these short stories with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are connections between stories -- themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

Jamie Conklin, a boy born with an unnatural ability to see and learn things no one else can, is enlisted to help an NYPD detective pursue a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.

Roland and his band have narrowly escaped the city of Lud and boarded Blaine, a train that will take them to, of all places, Kansas, where the ghost city of Topeka has been depopulated by a superflu and where, alongside Interstate 70, an emerald palace rises enchantingly. Before Roland and the companions of his ka-tet continue along the Path of the Bean, Roland must tell his companions the tale that defines him both as a man and hero, a long-ago romance...

In the wake of a summer storm, terror descends...David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. As the confinement takes its toll on their nerves, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody, begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God’s vengeance...

In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis' parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there's no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents -- telekinesis and telepathy -- who got to this place the same...