Nettie and Wilma then kill each other with knives in a public confrontation, increasing tensions in town. Local boy Brian Rusk vandalizes the home of Wilma Jerzyck, who loathes Nettie Cobb, Polly's housekeeper, and alcoholic Hugh Priest kills Nettie's dog. Gaunt avoids Alan and offers Polly an ancient charm that relieves the terrible arthritic pain in her hands, as well as giving Gaunt control over her. Gaunt quickly marks local Sheriff Alan Pangborn and Polly Chalmers, Alan's sweetheart and proprietor of a local sewing shop, as "tough customers" who are likely to question and interfere with him. Gaunt has complete knowledge of the long-standing private histories and conflicts between the various townspeople, and the pranks are his means of forcing them to escalate.
Each customer enters a trance and becomes highly agreeable when making a deal with Gaunt, afterwards forgetting anything abnormal about the encounter. The prices are surprisingly low, considering the merchandise – such as a rare Sandy Koufax baseball card, a carnival glass lampshade, and a fragment of petrified wood stated to be from Noah's Ark – but he expects each customer to also play a "prank" on someone else in town.
The proprietor, Leland Gaunt, is a charming elderly gentleman purportedly from Akron, Ohio who always seems to have an item in stock that is perfectly suited to any customer. A protagonist of the book is Alan Pangborn, previously seen in Stephen King's novel The Dark Half.Īccording to the cover, this novel is "The Last Castle Rock Story." However, the town later serves as the setting for the short story " It Grows on You" (published in King's 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes which, according to King, serves as an epilogue to Needful Things), as well as King's 2017 novella Gwendy's Button Box (cowritten with Richard Chizmar) and his 2018 novella Elevation.Ī new shop named "Needful Things" opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, sparking the curiosity of its citizens. As time goes by, the many deeds and pranks lead to increasing aggression among the townspeople, as well as chaos and death. Gaunt often asks customers to perform a prank or mysterious deed in exchange for the item they are drawn to. The story focuses on a shop that sells collectibles and antiques, managed by Leland Gaunt, a new arrival to the town of Castle Rock, Maine, the setting of many King stories. It was made into a film of the same name in 1993 which was directed by Fraser C.
It is the first novel King wrote after his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol addiction. Needful Things is a 1991 horror novel by American author Stephen King.
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