"Home Delivery" is a short story by American writer
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", a play on his surname and a reference to his high s ...
. It was first published in the zombie anthology ''
Book of the Dead
The ''Book of the Dead'' ( egy, ๐๐ค๐๐๐๐๐ค๐๐๐๐ป๐
๐๐๐
ฑ๐ณ๐ค, ''rw n(y)w prt m hrw(w)'') is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom ...
'' (1989) and later included in King's short story collection ''
Nightmares & Dreamscapes'' (1993).
Plot
The protagonist of the story is Maddie Pace, a timid and indecisive young woman who lives on a small island named Gennesault (or "Jenny"), off the coast of
Maine
Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north ...
. Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a
fishing boat accident.
After a scattering of initial outbreaks, dead bodies all over the world begin to reanimate ''en masse'' and attack the living. The source of the phenomenon is eventually traced to "
Star Wormwood", a bizarre alien construct orbiting above the
ozone layer
The ozone layer or ozone shield is a region of Earth's stratosphere that absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. It contains a high concentration of ozone (O3) in relation to other parts of the atmosphere, although still small in rela ...
at the Earth's
south pole
The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole, Terrestrial South Pole or 90th Parallel South, is one of the two points where Earth's axis of rotation intersects its surface. It is the southernmost point on Earth and lies antipod ...
. A space shuttle under joint American-Soviet authority visits the site and promptly meets with disaster. After further attempts to destroy the object fail, the
zombie
A zombie (Haitian French: , ht, zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in whic ...
plague spreads and
civilization collapses.
Jenny's inhabitants gather up all the available firearms to prepare for their own attack, which all too soon erupts from the island's small cemetery. The island's men are forced to destroy their undead loved ones as they crawl out of their graves. The still-moving pieces of the reanimated corpses are then burned with kerosene and the remains plowed underground by a bulldozer. Frank Daggett, the elderly man who did most of the organizing of the successful defense, suffers a fatal heart attack and has himself blasted to pieces so he won't reanimate.
While she is hearing about the battle at the cemetery from her neighbor, Maddie recalls her own confrontation with the animated corpse of her husband, come back to get her from the bottom of the sea. She succeeds in destroying him/it and faces the future, however grim, with renewed confidence and hope.
Version changes
There are some differences between the versions published in ''The Book of the Dead'' and ''Nightmares and Dreamscapes'', none of which are significant to the plot. For example, the space expedition in the original publication was
U.S.-Soviet; it is changed to U.S.-Chinese in later publication to reflect the end of the
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
.
Adaptations
A 2005
animated short
Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anima ...
of the story was produced and was screened at
RiverRun International Film Festival
The RiverRun International Film Festival is an annual Oscar-qualifying film festival held each spring in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The festival is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and presents a variety of feature-length and short films fro ...
, produced by
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro Gรณmez (; born October 9, 1964) is a Mexican filmmaker, author, and actor. He directed the Academy Awardโwinning fantasy films ''Pan's Labyrinth'' (2006) and ''The Shape of Water'' (2017), winning the Academy Awards for Be ...
.
"Home Delivery" has been adapted by artist
Glenn Chadbourne
Glenn Chadbourne is an American artist. He lives in Newcastle, Maine. He is best known for his work in the horror and fantasy genres, having created covers and illustrated books and magazines for publishers such as Cemetery Dance Publications, ...
for the book ''
The Secretary of Dreams'', a collection of comics based on King's short fiction released by
Cemetery Dance in December 2006.
In September 2009, the story was optioned as a theatrical release and was in pre-production. No release date has been set at this time. John and Paul Buckholts, of Our Thing Productions, have written the screenplay and Japanese director
Ryuhei Kitamura was scheduled to direct.
Reception
George Beahm said that the story is "quintessential King" and that King writes the characters with "considerable skill and sympathy".
See also
*
Stephen King short fiction bibliography
This is a list of short fiction by Stephen King (b. 1947). This includes short stories, novelettes, and novellas, as well as poems. It is arranged chronologically by first publication. Major revisions of previously published pieces are also noted ...
References
External links
*
{{Stephen King
Short stories by Stephen King
Horror short stories
Science fiction short stories
1989 short stories
Zombies in comics
Maine in fiction
Short stories adapted into films
Zombie short films
American horror short films