Later

Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers of the late 20th century. King is best known as a horror writer, but his strong characterization and use of setting and mood make his work appealing to non-horror readers as well. He writes many genres, including horror, supernatural, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, often blurring the lines between them.

In Later’s case, King mixes horror and the hard-boiled detective genre. Horror often comprises the insertion of a supernatural or otherwise incomprehensible force into a realistic setting, where ordinary people must deal with it. In Later, Jamie lives in a realistic world; but for him, even seeing the dead is ordinary. King depicts most of the dead as normal-looking people with nothing frightening about them. However, something alien, the mysterious deadlight, threatens Jamie with unnamed terrors.

Horror often relies on visceral disgust, which can be invoked by common human aversions like texture-based scares (i.e., slime, tentacles, etc.). Blood and gore can also trigger disgust. For example, Kenneth Therriault’s head wound exposes his brain and distorts his face. With that said, horror easily ties into hard-boiled detective stories. Both genres explore human fears, and in the end, King combines the horror of Jamie’s potential possession by the deadlight with the hard-boiled theme of corruption.

Later is one of three novels published by Hard Case Crime, following King’s Joyland and The Colorado Kid. King considers his Mr. Mercedes series his first hard-boiled mysteries. The first two books in the series—Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers—are realistic stories, but the third—End of Watch—introduces an element of the supernatural when the antagonist from the first book recovers from head injuries that left him comatose and develops the ability to control minds and occupy the bodies of innocent people. The Colorado Kid contains no supernatural elements, and the supernatural features in Joyland are minor. Later is the first of King’s hard-boiled mysteries to fully incorporate the supernatural.

The hard-boiled detective genre is characterized by a loner detective with a cynical view of human nature—unlike more classical detectives like Sherlock Holmes. The detective is a professional, probably with a license, which the police can threaten to revoke if they feel the detective is getting in their way or withholding information they want.

King’s Mr. Mercedes series includes a disillusioned private detective, but Joyland, The Colorado Kid, and Later break from this tradition. In Joyland, protagonist Devin is far from the world-weary detective of traditional hard-boiled mysteries. He is a college student inspired by simple curiosity to investigate the murder of a young woman that took place in a park years earlier. The history of the titular Colorado Kid is recounted by a pair of seasoned newshounds to a cub reporter in the hopes of inspiring her to pursue a career as an investigative journalist.

Later introduces a cynical detective, but ultimately subverts the trope. In this case, the detective is an antagonist. The protagonist is a young man looking back on his childhood, in which a corrupt detective exposes him to a world of darkness and evil.

The hard-boiled detective genre also evokes a stark, unsentimental view of the world. Settings tend to be adult and grim, as the detective often navigates a world rife with drugs, sex, and murder. The setting, however, doesn’t have to be the real world. Other authors have blended hard-boiled crime with science fiction or fantasy settings. Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch (the 29th book in his Discworld fantasy series) features an urban setting, and the protagonist, Captain Vimes, is a cynical, disillusioned Watch Captain. Isaac Asimov wrote a trilogy of sci-fi hard-boiled mysteries featuring cynical detective Elisha Bailey and his robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. The trilogy’s settings are largely urban though futuristic. A more recent example of the hard-boiled/sci-fi hybrid is the film Blade Runner—featuring a stark urban landscape, a cynical detective, and more than one dangerous dame archetype.

Later is set in New York and leaves the city only to probe into the lives and sins of the wealthy and depraved. This feature is a significant part of what makes Later as much of a hard-boiled story as it is a horror story.

The hard-boiled detective usually has a concealed chivalry under his cynicism that compels him to see justice done, especially when he sees a woman in peril. In Later, Jamie is drawn into Liz’s corrupt world by his sense of obligation to save innocent lives. He also has a sense of sympathy for Liz despite her corrupt nature.

The woman in peril often turns out to be a dangerous dame or femme fatale whose motives are less than pure. Behind the scenes, she complicates a given crime by deceiving the detective and putting him in unseen danger, due to him being blinded by some combination of chivalry and/or lust. Liz conforms to the dangerous dame archetype in that she complicates Jamie’s situation and puts him in danger—however, she does little to conceal her nature, and unlike the typical femme fatale, she never uses sex appeal or a façade of victimhood to manipulate Jamie. Modern readers typically regard the dangerous dame as a chauvinist stereotype that objectifies and often vilifies women. In Liz, King subverts the archetype by making her a lesbian; she has no relation to men, romantic or otherwise, in the story at all.

The novel’s publisher, Hard Case Crime, looks for stories that approach the hard-boiled detective genre in new ways. In Later, King uses a mix of realism (an urban setting and direct language) and supernatural (Therriault/The Deadlight) to create a story that appeals to readers of both hard-boiled crime and horror.