Maureen Corrigan

Jordan is the nickname that those two clever college boys give Casey Peabody, who some of us readers have met already in Writers and Lovers.

In that earlier novel, Casey is older, a 31-year-old who's been waitressing and writing her first novel for over six years.

Heart the Lover suggests a big reason why Casey would have been stuck in her 20s.

But the structure of Heart the Lover is so ingenious, its emotional charge so compelling, you don't have to have read the earlier novel to be drawn into what's essentially a great triangular love story.

The young Casey, again here nicknamed Jordan, is pursued by Sam and then by his best friend, the other star student in that classroom, a boy named Yash.

The first love erotic energy between Jordan and Yash is off the charts, and the two envision an artsy adult life together in New York.

Yash, however, feels conflicted by his loyalty to Sam and by his need to safeguard his autonomy.

Guess which way the seesaw tips and who gets crushed beneath.

I'll stop the plot summary there, because readers deserve to experience for themselves the devastation of the final section of Heart the Lover, which takes place at a reunion of the now middle-aged trio in a dying man's hospital room.

If you've ever lived through such a moment, you'll appreciate how King renders the all of it, the banality of visitor small talk, the unreal sense of melodrama, the sporadic awareness that a deadline for final conversations is approaching.

Heart the Lover is about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself, and realizing what you may have lost in the process.

To quote Elena Ferrante, another great chronicler of women's lives, Heart the Lover is also about the velocity with which life is consumed.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

That's the immortal opening sentence of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's 1938 masterpiece.

How often have I been lured into both the novel and the 1940 Hitchcock film of Rebecca by that sentence?

Is it an incantation, a curse, a virus that infects the imagination?

Whatever mojo du Maurier conjured up in that sentence, its potency lingers.

Perhaps, just by hearing it, you too have become spellbound.

Rebecca dominates du Maurier's legacy, but she wrote plenty of other macabre novels and short stories in her over-40-year career.

A new collection, called After Midnight, gathers together 13 of her stories, appropriately introduced by long-reigning master of horror Stephen King.