I'm reading a Stephen King collection called Just After Sunset. And the title got me thinking about King's fascination with the night, moonlight and, sunsets. That got me started and I thought I'd go through a bit of his stories and create an article like the one you're reading.
Night
came on and the stars unrolled across the sky from east to west like a rug with
spangles in it. A half-moon rose between two peaks and sat there, casting a
sickroom glow over this stretch of the highway and the open land on both sides
of it.
Just After Sunset
(Willa)
Do
you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and
somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it
and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter
all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark,
thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down
as thick and stifling as a blanket.
The
wind held long conversations with the gutters. A rind of white spring moon rose
in the sky. Somewhere far away, in some still meadow of night or along some
pine-edged corridor of forest, a dog barked furiously and then fell silent.
The
moon peered in Tad's window like the white and slitted eye of a dead man.
Cujo
The
evening seemed to go on forever, the light bleeding slowly out of the sky as
the sun made its exit beyond the mountains on the western side of the lake, the
mountains that marched off to join the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's
chimney.
The Dark Half
The
sun went down, and what was left of the day was a white line painted on the
western horizon. It looked no thicker than the white stripe painted down the
center of the highway. That would be gone soon enough. Crickets sang in the
high grass to the right of the driveway, making a mindlessly cheerful
rickety-rickety sound.
Cujo
The
sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a
basketball that had been dipped in blood.
Cujo
The
sun had made its, exit, leaving a still but somehow crazed yellow light over
the fields. Somewhere a bird sang, stopped, then sang again.
Cujo
The
crickets sang, as they had in my dreams, and the trees huddled close on either
side of the lane, as they always did in my dreams. Overhead, the sky was a
fading strip of blue.
Bag of Bones
What's
left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward
black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your
chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of
the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.
Bag of Bones
What
comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin
there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in
every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every
turn of a step. It is here; you slip across it on a kind of breathless curve
like a skater turning for home.
Bag of Bones
At
one moment there was only the fading sky (with indigo just starting to rise up
from the edges like an infusion of ink), and at the next Venus was glowing
there, bright and steady.
Bag of Bones
The
sunset was fading to a baleful afterglow. The sky in the west looked like the
white of a bloodshot eye.
Bag of Bones
Out
there to her left, the sun was a small orange-yellow coin peering dully.
Just After Sunset (The
Gingerbread Girl)
The
sun was a deepening orange, kindling the western horizon. Soon the horizon
would catch fire.
Just After Sunset (The
Gingerbread Girl)
The
dregs of sunset faded to bitter orange over the Wind River Range.
Just After Sunset (N.)
As
if everything would stay the way it was forever, with sunset not more than
forty
minutes away and the sun sitting red over the horizon and that faded clarity in
the air.
Just After Sunset (N.)
A
brilliant white cres-cent of moon rode low in it, seeming almost to be impaled
on a sharp devil's prong of rock jutting from the east side of the China Pit.
Desperation
The
thunderheads were darker, higher, and the water looked angry and implacable
under their shadow and the reflected glow of the sunset.
Night Shift (I Am the
Doorway)
The
clouds had blottered the red remnants of the sunset, and the dunes were dark
and shadow-cast. The clouds raced and boiled above us.
Night Shift (I Am the
Doorway)
To
the left the sun was going down in bloody glory. Straight ahead and across the
water, the thunderclouds were beating their way towards us. Lightning forked at
the water.
Night Shift (I Am the
Doorway)
The
moon has risen over the sea, bloated, full, the color of blood, staining the
ocean with a noxious shade.
Night Shift (Jerusalem’s
Lot)
The
moonlight stitched inky crescent-shaped shadows and folds across everything.
Night Shift (Night Surf)
Sometimes
it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening
skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black.
Duma Key
In
that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red
light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange,
then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest
and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the
reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.
Duma Key
Akpan
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