"Home Delivery" is a short story by American writer

Stephen King Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author. Dubbed the "King of Horror", he is widely known for his horror novels and has also explored other genres, among them Thriller (genre), suspense, crime fiction, crime, scienc ...

. It was first published in the zombie anthology ''

Book of the Dead The ''Book of the Dead'' is the name given to an Ancient Egyptian funerary texts, ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom of Egypt, New Kingdom (around 1550 BC) to around 50 BC ...

'' (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 U.S. state, state in the New England region of the United States, and the northeasternmost state in the Contiguous United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and ...

. Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a

fishing boat A fishing vessel is a boat or ship used to catch fish and other valuable nektonic aquatic animals (e.g. shrimps/prawns, krills, coleoids, etc.) in the sea, lake or river. Humans have used different kinds of surface vessels in commercial, arti ...

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 absorption (electromagnetic radiation), absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. It contains a high concentration of ozone (O3) in relation to other parts of the a ...

at the Earth's

South Pole The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is the point in the Southern Hemisphere where the Earth's rotation, Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True South Pole to distinguish ...

. 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: ; ; Kikongo: ''zumbi'') is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies appear in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folkl ...

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 was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

Adaptations

A 2005 animated short of the story was directed by Elio Quiroga and produced by

Guillermo del Toro Guillermo del Toro Gómez (; born 9 October 1964) is a Mexican filmmaker, author, and artist. His work has been characterized by a strong connection to fairy tales, Gothic fiction, gothicism and horror fiction, horror often blending the genres ...

. It was screened at RiverRun International Film Festival. The short is a Dollar Baby film. "Home Delivery" has been adapted by artist Glenn Chadbourne 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, with John and Paul Buckholts, of Our Thing Productions, writing the screenplay and Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamu scheduled to direct.

Reception

George Beahm said that the story is "quintessential King" and that King writes the characters with "considerable skill and sympathy".

References

External links