Gaunt's first customer is a boy named Brian Rusk who buys a rare baseball card featuring Mickey Mantle in exchange for 95 cents and a prank on his neighbor Wilma Wadlowski Jerzyck. Gaunt demands payment both in cash and in small 'favors', usually pranks played by his customers on their neighbors. The store sells various items of great personal worth to the residents (some of which, like a pendant that eases pain or a toy which predicts the outcome of horse races, are clearly supernatural). ( February 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī mysterious proprietor named Leland Gaunt, claiming to be from Akron, Ohio, arrives in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine in a sinister-looking black car and opens a new antique store called 'Needful Things'. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. Krolczyk is a writer living in Baltimore.This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Maybe this really is a great Stephen King book, and I'm just being too demanding. Perhaps I've just come to expect too much. If there had been a smidgen of an explanation - no matter how far-fetched - I'd have bought it. King's cliffhanging chapters that, instead of compelling the reader onward, serve only to frustrate.įinally (and this is a problem regardless of who wrote the book), at least half of the ending just doesn't make sense. Adding to the woes, the plot seems to take forever to get going, a problem exacerbated by Mr. By comparison, the events in 'Needful Things' are disappointingly mundane. King, who has written about everything from vampires to aliens to a super plague.

I have also come to expect larger-than-life plots from Mr. Had the characters been stronger, all the rest of the novel's problems could have easily been ignored.

But in 'Needful Things' he has about 20 chances to do just that, and doesn't really succeed once.

This is particularly unusual because 'Needful Things' is exactly the type novel at which he generally excels: one that depends on its characters to work.įew authors can make a character come alive like Mr. Unfortunately, it's not a very good Stephen King novel.

If 'Needful Things' had been written by almost anyone else, I would have thought it a very good novel.

Stephen king shop needful things