Needful Things

Needful Things is a 1991 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It is the first novel King wrote after his rehabilitation from drug and alcohol addiction. The story focuses on a shop selling collectibles and antiques, run by a new arrival in Castle Rock, Maine, a town that appears in many of his stories.

Leland Gaunt arrives claiming to come from Ohio and sets up the shop, and the novel's mechanism is the transaction he offers. Every customer finds something in the shop matched precisely to what they want, from a rare baseball card to a fragment of petrified wood said to come from Noah's ark, and the price is low. What he adds is the requirement to perform a prank or a mysterious deed against another resident, and each customer becomes agreeable when making the deal and forgets anything unusual about it afterwards.

Gaunt knows the long-standing private disputes and histories of the townspeople, and the pranks are his method of forcing those animosities into the open. Alan Pangborn, previously a character in King's novel The Dark Half, is the law enforcement figure at the centre of the response. The publisher's material notes that the book was advertised as the last Castle Rock story, although the town later appears in other work, including the short story It Grows on You, which King described as an epilogue to this novel.