Stephen King will always be synonymous with the horror genre, but he has been much more than just a creator of other-worldly monsters, ghost stories and gruesome death, and now his recent Hard Case Crime novel, Later, is being adapted into a limited series from Blumhouse Television. King is no stranger to TV adaptations, and recently he has seen great success with The Outsider, Castle Rock and Chapelwait. Blumhouse are already dipping their fingers in the King pie with upcoming movie adaptations such as Firestarter and Christine just two of the titles in production based on the legendary author’s work.

King has been prolific in his writing over the last decade, returning to old ground with belated sequels such as Doctor Sleep, the follow-up to The Shining, as well as putting out brand-new stories such as Sleeping Beauties and The Institute, with his latest novel, Fairy Tale, being releasing this September. However, in March 2021, King released Later, his third crime novel following The Colorado Kid and Joyland. Despite being published by Titan Books under the Hard Case Crime brand, the story does involve some supernatural elements with a lead character who can talk to the dead. The full synopsis reads:

“The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine – as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.”

“Later is Stephen King at his finest, a terrifying and touching story of innocence lost and the trials that test our sense of right and wrong. With echoes of King’s classic novel It, Later is a powerful, haunting, unforgettable exploration of what it takes to stand up to evil in all the faces it wears.”

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For many years, some Stephen King adaptations for TV and cinema suffered due to a lack of budget and technology, with many films like Graveyard Shift, Cat’s Eye and Sleepwalkers being enjoyable enough but always falling short of the images King could create on the page with his words. Despite that, there were plenty of hits based on the author’s work that managed to land just right with critics and fans, such as Pet Sematary, Carrie and Salem’s Lot, along with the non-horror based The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

Recently, King adaptations have had as much of a renaissance as his novels, with a lot of his work heading to the small and big screen in the coming years. While there are a lot of straight horrors being adapted, or in many cases remade, Later could well join that exclusive club of non-horror offerings of King’s that seem to translate so well on screen. There is currently no information on when we can expect to see Later arrive on screen, but it is likely to be sometime next year at the earliest.