Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story [Hardcover]

Stephen King (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1991

Leland Gaunt is a stranger in Castle Rock--and he calls his new shop Needful Things, where there is something for everyone. Mr. Gaunt takes pleasure in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires, and he knows that almost everything is for sale: love, hope, even the human soul.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the "Last Castle Rock Story" King bids a magnificent farewell to the fictional Maine town where much of his previous work has been set. Of grand proportion, the novel ranks with King's best, in both plot and characterization. A new store, Needful Things, opens in town, and its proprietor, Leland Gaunt, offers seemingly unbeatable (read: Faustian) bargains to Castle Rock's troubled citizens. Among them are Polly Chalmers, lonely seamstress whose arthritis is only one of the physical and psychic pains she must bear; Brian Rusk, the 11-year-old boy whose mother is not precisely attentive; and Alan Pangborn, the new sheriff whose wife and son have recently died. These are only three of the half-dozen or so brilliantly drawn people met in the novel's one-month time span. As the dreams of each strikingly memorable character, major and minor, inexorably turn to nightmare, individuals and soon the community are overwhelmed, while the precise nature of Gaunt's evil thrillingly stays just out of focus. King, like Leland Gaunt, knows just what his customers want. 1.5 million first printing; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The old horrormaster in top form, this time with a demonic dealer in magic and spells selling his wares to the folks of Castle Rock, scene of several King novels including The Dead Zone, Cujo--and how many others? King locates his hokey Our Town in Maine, but as ever it's really Consumerville, USA, with everyone's life festooned with brand names. The cast is huge and largely grotesque, since King--wearing a tremendous cat's-smile--means to close the book on Castle Rock and blow it off the map in one of his best climaxes since Salem's Lot. Editing here is supreme. King braids perhaps a dozen storylines--with hardly a drop of blood spilled for the first 250 or so pages--into ever briefer takes that climax in a hurtling, storm-ripped holocaust whose symphonic energies fill the novel's last third. Perhaps only five characters stand out: Leland Gaunt, a gentlemanly stranger who opens the Needful Things curiosity shop; his first customer, Brian Rusk, 11, who sells his soul for a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card; practical Polly Chalmers, who runs the You Sew `n' Sew shop, welcomes Gaunt with a devil's-food cake, and buys an amulet to relieve her arthritis; her lover, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, who buys nothing but is haunted by the driving deaths of his wife and son; and Ace Merrill, coke dealer in a bind, who becomes Gaunt's handydevil and gets to drive Gaunt's Tucker, a car that's faster than radar and uses no gas. As he has for hundreds of years, Gaunt sells citizens whatever pricks and satisfies their inmost desires. But the price dehumanizes them, and soon all the townsfolk vent their barest aggressions on each other with cleaver, knife, and gun: Gaunt even opens a sideline of automatic weapons. By novel's end, the whole town is on a hysterical, psychotic mass rampage that floods morgue and hospital with the delimbed and obliterated. Then comes the big bang. Mmmmmmmmmmmm! Leland King's glee, or Steven Gaunt's, or rather--well, the author's--as he rubs his palms over his let's-blow-'em-away superclimax is wonderfully catching. (Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for Fall) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 704 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1st edition (October 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670839531
• ISBN-13: 978-0670839537
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (219 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are the Dark Tower novels, Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything's Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Bag of Bones. His acclaimed nonfiction book, On Writing, was also a bestseller. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic Joyride, February 27, 2000

By 

Nick Musolino - See all my reviews

This review is from: Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story (Mass Market Paperback)

In tradition of 'Salem's Lot, Stephen King writes Needful Things through the view of many characters, not just one main character, and keeps the reader guessing throughout the entire novel what will happen to which character. It works so well in Needful Things that I found myself reading madly and gaping my mouth many times. Truly a gruesome and horrifying experience, in Needful Things, King creates great characters, Alan Pangborn, Norris Ridgewick, Polly Chalmers, Nettie Cobb, Hugh Priest, Ace Merrill, John LaPointe, and maybe the best villian he has ever created in Leland Gaunt. The way he makes Gaunt so low key and friendly, and evil at the same time is wonderful. He also ties in all his other novels which have taken place in Castle Rock such as Cujo, The Dead Zone, and the novella The Body, very well. Sure, you'll be flipping back to see what character did what to whom when the novel takes its turning points, but that's the fun of it. How King can write so many things in 700 pages and keep the reader hooked and interested. And of course, the ending in which evil does not fully lose. God I love that! Needful Things, one of Stephen King's most entertaining books. A must read!

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Bright Spot among SK's Later Novels, January 27, 2004

By 

Edward P. Trimnell "edwardtrimnell.com" (Cincinnati, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Needful Things (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (School & Library Binding)

Many of Stephen King's readers (including some of the author's diehard fans) agree that the author's novels lost some of their pizzazz around 1987 or so. Although King's ability to create believable characters has remained strong throughout his career, he seems to have grown tired of the horror themes that inspired his earlier works.

Needful Things is a bright spot among the post-Pet Cemetery novels. Despite the formidable length of the book, King's tale of a curio shop that caters to people's innermost desires is captivating from beginning to end. As another reviewer pointed out, the premise of the story is not exactly original--but this doesn't make Needful Things any less entertaining.

The story is set in familiar King territory: the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. SK interweaves a number of complex subplots within the dark underside of small town life. Near the climax of the tale, the story switches rapidly from one subplot to another, practically compelling you to turn the page to discover what happens next.

Although I liked Needful Things overall, there were a few points that could have been improved:

-SK once stated in an interview that he would go for the gross-out if he couldn't scare the reader outright. (I am loosely paraphrasing a very old interview here.) Many of Stephen King's earlier works contained some genuinely spooky scenes. (Who can forget the woman in the bathtub in The Shining?) However, SK's later works tend to rely increasingly on B-movie gore. Needful Things contains a few too many descriptions of blood and guts, and a couple of scatological references that could have been omitted. I'm an adult and I've read worse, so these passages don't bother me--but this isn't the kind of writing that King enthralled me with in Salem's Lot and Carrie.

-One of the key subplots of the story hinges on a conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants living in Castle Rock. At times, the intensity of the enmity between the two groups seems a bit unrealistic. However, this is a minor flaw in an otherwise well-crafted latticework of back-stories and subplots.

If you didn't like Insomnia or Dreamcatcher, then you should give Needful Things a try. You may not like this book as much as The Shining, but it stands out among SK's more recent novels.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not amazing but still underrated, January 31, 2006

By 

Babyblue Kelly (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story (Mass Market Paperback)

Not enough is said about some of Kings's books (Needful Things, Rose Madder) and people tend to cling on to his most commercial books (The Shining, It, Pet Semetary). I think that people tend to overlook some of his novels. Needful Things is a book that I enjoyed very much but I never find any else who feels the same way. Now I'm not saying it's perfect, there are other books I feel that are far more deserving of that title, but it is still a good read.

Pros: The story takes place in King's imfamous Castlerock.
King masterfully writes multiple characters and plot lines.
Mr. Gaunt is creepy, creepy, creepy.
It's easy to get lost in King's longer novels, so I always feel more involved/attached to what's going on

Cons: The ending is a little anticlimatic.
I wanted more from the "last Castlerock novel."
While compelling it might be a little unlikely that all the characters in the town would be so easily manipulated and secretive about their deeds.

But in the long run I did find Needful Things to be a book worth reading. It's not the best, it's not the worst, it's the middle of the road. But somehow King's mediocore or bad books tend to be better then some author's best.