Skimmings

Read and written by Stephen King. Unabridged; three CDs, four hours. (Simon and Schuster Audio, $19.95)

In case you missed the somewhat well-received John Cusack horror flick "1408," now you can listen to the original short story, as well as two others — "In the Deathroom" and "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe" — read by the author. These stories are taken from the 2002 collection titled "Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales."

King, who has been hailed as a master of the horror genre, shows in these unsatisfying short stories — their only connection being characters who share an addiction to smoking — why he's best known for his novels, most recently "Lisey's Story" and "Cell."

The story "1408," for example, presents a classic horror scenario: A hack writer with failed literary expectations now writes books about spending a night in supposedly haunted places, and a lot of "1408" builds up the wealth of terrors such as unexplained deaths and suicides that occur in the titular hotel room. A nice detail is that even though the staff changes the sheets and towels every day, the room hasn't been updated to take an entry card and instead is still accessed with a key. The writer's night there, though, is short, confusing and, actually, not all that scary.

The bonus of these tales is that they are read by King, who knows how to enliven a story through reading, even if the stories aren't his best.

– Albany (N.Y.) Times Union

In Secret Service

By Mitch Silver; read by Simon Jones and Dagmara Dominczyk. Abridged; five CDs, six hours. (Simon and Schuster Audio, $29.95)

First-time novelist Silver has taken an interesting idea — a secret manuscript written by James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, that contains secrets about the British royalty that people are willing to kill for — and wrapped it around a preposterous thriller.

Amy Greenburg is a young American academic who winds up with the manuscript and running for her life in a series of convoluted set pieces that involve mayhem, death and the question: Will she finish reading the manuscript before she gets killed?

The real meat of the book is the Fleming tale, which contains lots of interesting details about the many affairs of Wallis Simpson. She's the woman for whom King Edward abdicated the throne so he could marry her. She also supposedly couldn't get pregnant, so she had lots of affairs before her marriage to Edward, including with the young Fleming. But her history with Edward could also involve working with the Nazis.

At times, all the details about the British royalty move from intriguing to TMI — too much information. And this bogs down the book, even the abridged edition. Dominczyk does a fine job reading the Amy Greenburg section, but the real star is Jones and the fascinating early career of Fleming, who ends up sounding very much like a young James Bond.

– Cox News Service

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

By Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books, $25)

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is a roller-coaster ride of a novel that soars with hilarity. It swerves around passionate curves. It drops into descents of sheer terror.

Oscar Wao, the hero of our story, is a second-generation Dominican living in New Jersey with his mother and sister. They make frequent trips back to their homeland.

Oscar is the ghetto nerd, fascinated with comic books, science fiction and fantasy novels.

Oh, and there's one other fixation in Oscar's life: women. That's the problem. He's grossly overweight and a complete dweeb. Women look and run the other way.

As Diaz charts Oscar's childhood, adolescence and adulthood, we endure the slights and the fantasies that he does. He's intelligent, funny, desperate, suicidal, obsessed, pathetic — a complicated, lovable guy.

At the midpoint of the novel, his mother, Belicia Cabral, threatens to take over the book. Readers are treated to an extended flashback to her early life in the Dominican Republic during the terrifying regime of their dictator for life, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.

Diaz writes like an angel. His words flow like some magnificent sensual river, spilling forth with abandon, reckless, inspired.

His portrait of the Dominican police state is searing. He writes that it "was a lot like being in that famous 'Twilight Zone' episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world."

That kid's power was like Trujillo's. "After each atrocity he commits — whether it's giving a gopher three heads or banishing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops — the horrified people of Peaksville have to say: "It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing."

Oscar falls in love with a dangerous woman. "What do you expect? He was a not-so-fat fatboy who'd never kissed a girl, never even lain in bed with one."

The story climaxes in a profusion of beauty and brutality. Archetypal images drift across the Dominican dreamscape, a mongoose, a man without a face.

Junot Diaz is a literary force.

– The Associated Press