With Liz’s job on the line, her link to Jamie is the last chance to salvage her career, which she believes could be rectified by solving the mystery of a recently-deceased serial bomber, referred to informally as 'Thumper'. But when his hidden power is discovered by his mother’s old lover, Liz - a wayward police officer who hides a secret of her own - Jamie’s unorthodox talent becomes less of a gift and more of a curse. Initially, Jamie’s encounters with the departed are harmless his dead neighbour pokes fun at his artistic abilities while cracking jokes about the fidelity of the living. How and why he sees dead people is unclear, though Jamie understands that his ability comes with two conditions: after a couple of hours, the deceased start to fade away, but during their time on Earth they are obliged to tell him the truth. In “Later”, the protagonist Jamie Conklin is burdened with a unique ability which sets him apart from those around him: he can see and communicate with dead people. Despite not being set in Maine (a familiar setting in many of his works), the novel plays on King’s famed penchant for portraying social outcasts, forced to grapple with whatever it is that makes them different. “Later”, King’s most recent release, follows a similar path to the one paved by its predecessors. While King has clearly mastered the art of creating terrifying villains, his ability to capture the fragility of childhood innocence is just as impressive. And in “The Institute”, an abducted team of supernatural outcasts comes to grips with a future in which the safety blanket of their parents’ guidance no longer exists. In “The Body”, a group of younglings trek through Maine looking for a dead body while discovering the challenges of growing older.

In “It”, a band of misfits known as the 'Losers’ Club' fall victim to the malevolence of Pennywise, who robs the children of their sanity and, with it, their youth. Behind the murdering clowns, lost corpses, and sadistic scientists, many of Stephen King’s classics zero in on the universality of lost innocence: the transition we undergo from child to adult, when our protective bubble of blissful ignorance disappears and the harsh realities of the outside world come creeping in.

Later by Stephen King