The Sun Dog

Stephen King

Dec 2018 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this eBook

#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King’s novella The Sun Dog, published in his award-winning 1990 story collection Four Past Midnight, now available for the first time as a standalone publication.

The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you.

Kevin Delavan wants only one thing for his fifteenth birthday: a Polaroid Sun 660. There’s something wrong with his gift, though. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, vicious dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town’s sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it. But the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn’t exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.

Ratings and reviews

Seriously? For ten bucks I could buy four past midnight and have 3 more stories to read. This is like highway robbery for folks that havent read Stephen King before.

Way to go Stephen!! Charge your faithful readers money for books already published. Saw this book at a retail store and started laughing. Guess Stephen does have a little bit of Trump in him. Great story though.

5 for the story. Which you get with 3 other great ones in the similarly priced Four Past Midnight. "The Sun Dog" has haunted me for 32 years; King proved again he knows horror better than any other living writer.

About the author

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch (May 2025), the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.