• Author: Stephen King
• Publisher: Scribner Books / Simon and Schuster
• Publishing Year: 2025 (originally published in the collection ‘If it Bleeds’ (2020)
• Pages: 117
• Coverdesign: Neon Rated (Movie poster)
• ISBN: 978-1668208786

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Life-of-Chuck/Stephen-King/9781668208786

Review:

Dancing with Chuck

In a world that is crumbling down, internet and electricity are failing and where humanity has not long to go, Marty Anderson needs to find a way to keep going. But a strange thing is happening… everywhere a message is shown: “Charles Krantz, 39 great years. Thanks, Chuck!”. It’s on billboards, on television… literally everywhere. Marty is obsessed and wants to know where this message is coming from and more importantly, who is this Charles Krantz!?

Charles ‘Chuck’ Krantz is on his way to his job when a busker is playing some music and he stops to listen to it. And out of nowhere comes the urge to start jiving on the music. He even invites a young lady from the crowd to join him. What urges him to start dancing so publicly? What will his family say if this would go viral and they see him dancing on the streets with another woman?

As a child Chuck is forbidden to enter a locked room in a copula of the house of his grandparents. A secret hidden in a house haunted by a terrible secret. The same house his grandmother taught him how to dance, the house where his life was about to begin.

‘The Life of Chuck’ is an atypical story written by Stephen King as it is no thriller, not a horror novel but a in-depth look at a man who grows up dancing and seeing a world around him that glows, an almost perfect world that will soon be shattered by a disease with zero survival possibility. But even though this part of Chuck’s life destroys everything around and in him, there’s still a bright side as long as you keep on dancing, dancing with Chuck!

When I first read this I wasn’t a huge fan of this story. Maybe I somehow didn’t relate to the day-to-day hustle and bustle and the impending end it offered. Maybe because I read it in a time where death was all too much around us (covid) or maybe because of the way it was structured, a three part story but written in a non-chronological way. But maybe because I wanted it to be a horror story. But now that I read it the second time, in this separate print, due to the movie directed by Mike Flanagan that was released in 2025, I related to it much more and felt the true story, the message behind it. ‘The Life of Chuck’ is a much brighter story than you might expect from someone who writes dark thrillers and horror novels but it shows his ability to see beyond the darkness and beyond the bad things happening around us all. Whether it is with a little dance or maybe someone sings a song or whatever it might be… there is still good in this life!

I have not yet seen the movie adaptation, never gotten around to go check it out in the cinema, but I am very much looking forward to buying it on bluray as soon as it is available. Not only because I love Mike Flanagan’s works but Tom Hiddleston plays (and dances) in this movie as Chuck. What more could you want, right? The movies was released by Neon.

This edition has a little surprise inside (as you can see in the little video I made)

In het Nederlands verscheen de vertaling bij Boekerij / Uitgeverij Lannoo (zonder de verrassing op de pagina’s echter) als ‘Het Leven van Chuck’.