Continuing with discussions about short stories from Stephen King's 2015 collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, today it's about Ur, a novella-length piece that touches upon alternate realities. Wesley, a digitally-challenged college English instructor...after breaking up with his girlfriend who would ridicule his insistence on using only paper books...decides to buy a Kindle online. It arrives...strangely colored pink...but he soon discovers that this is the least of its anomalies. Turns out that he can use it to access and purchase works of different authors that are not in their bibliographies...many written after their supposed deaths! In time he sees that he can hit upon different alternate scenarios of reality...and then he explores the device's news archive feature. One selection has the world ending in a nuclear holocaust...no future there. And speaking of the future, a local news app on the Kindle displays future newspaper headlines...leading to the story's climactic crisis...
Ur combines good characters and a Twilight Zone-like speculative mood to form a great story of suspense and possibilities. It also forms a part of Stephen King's "universe" of related stories that tie together on different levels. It's definitely a worthwhile investment of your reading time...as are most of the tales in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams...
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