Needful Things

I LOVE THIS BOOK, Needful things make me NEED more books from Stephen King. The idea of creating a man, single handedly, turning a quiet and peaceful small town into a fiery town full of rage within a week is really blowing my imagination.

I usually don’t like stories where a third person is framing 2 people or 2 groups and makes them hate each other…but King changes my perception in this kinda story, he wrote it in a way that made me can’t stop reading it and wondering how it would end and what kind of hell Mr. Leland Gaunt had finally created.

The story took place in Castle Rock, Maine. This town is just like any other small town in America where everyone knows everyone. One day, a new shop called Needful Things caught everyone’s attention. Mr. Leland Gaunt, the proprietor, was always nice to his customer. He sells everything in low price (he didn’t really need money) and a little prank to play to other people. The prank seemed harmless to them…but soon they realized that the prank was a payment that cost too much.

Mr. Gaunt made his customer comes to him one by one so that he could poison their mind. Once they bought something from Needful Things, that thing became their most precious item in the world…so precious it made them afraid to show it to someone else or leave it at home due to paranoia of someone trying to steal it. Were those things really that precious? Or were they only an illusion played by Mr. Gaunt?

The pranks he asked them to do were meant to framing one person to another person which ended by taking life of other. The prankster soon realized their mistake and condemned to feel unbearable guilt.

There were so many characters in this book…of course, it was talking about a town after all. But there were 3 main characters in it, Mr. Leland Gaunt himself, Ms. Polly Chalmers and Sheriff Alan Pangborn. Polly was a woman with high pride and a bit different with everyone else in that town. Alan was a nice sheriff whom Gaunt thought as Tough Buyer. The moment Gaunt saw Alan he realized that he must keep away from Alan. And in the end he was right to stay away from Alan!

The town was in total chaos in the end of the week…how big of chaos it became is something you have to read for yourself.

But…for me, the part when someone killed Nettie’s pet was the hardest and saddest part of the story, why? Because I could imagine vividly how I feel if one day I come home and find my Kame lying dead not because of force of nature but because someone had put a corkscrew through her body.

As a closing…I have to say that Stephen King had never stop to amaze me with his work and he will remain as my most favorite writer ever.