SOURCE: “Memories Are Made of This,” in London Review of Books, December 16, 1993, pp. 22–3.

In reviewing King's Yesterday Came Suddenly alongside Giles Gordon's Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement? and William Trevor's Excursions in the Real World, Beer concludes that King's “detached” prose style serves Yesterday Came Suddenly well.

I was well into Giles Gordon's Aren't We Due a Royalty Statement? before I noticed that other readers were taking the book seriously, often to the point of denunciation. Up to then I had been assuming that it had set out to be an ingenious spoof, a sort of hoax or parody which had failed to make its intentions thoroughly clear, and that was nothing to be censorious about. But all leg-pullers have to declare themselves eventually otherwise there would be no point, and as I read on it dawned on me that Gordon was not going to declare any...