The Langoliers
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"The Langoliers" is one of four short stories published in the Stephen King book Four Past Midnight.
Plot summary
Something unusual happens on a cross-country red-eye flight. All of the passengers still awake in-flight disappear. Only the sleeping passengers remain, a blind girl, a 5th Grade teacher, an Englishman with a mysterious past, a tool and die engineer, a stoner, a teenage musician, a mystery writer, an exceedingly Type A personality businessman, and one of the airline's pilots, "deadheading" on that particular flight. After these passengers awake and the pilot assumes control of the plane, they find themselves unable to make contact with... anything. The flight was headed to Boston, but diverts to "safer" Bangor, Maine (the pilot cannot contact anyone by radio and decides that Bangor is a safer landing site than the potentially crowded skies of Boston). Once the plane is on the ground, the "crew" makes some terrifying discoveries. It turns out that not only are they the only ones on the plane, they're the only ones left in that world. The blind girl begins to develop a type of "second sight," and the businessman, hard-pressed to get to Boston to attend a meeting, begins sliding in to profound madness. Part of his madness involves a vision given to him by his Type-A father, a vision of the Langoliers, demon beasts that chase down the purposeless and lazy, and eat them alive. First the little girl, and eventually the rest, searching for the cause of their plight, hear the sound of some inhuman monster slowly approaching their location. The passengers of American Pride Flight 29 quickly find that time is their problem—the plane had actually flown through a sort of time rift and travelled back to the deadened, lifeless world of a past moment in the timestream, and that moment's time is running out. The "langoliers" (think "pacmen") are actually roving, purposeful beasts that, each day and hour and minute of eternity, rove across these worlds, eating the now-useless past out of existence. They are levitating entities, without any facial features or limbs, only a large mouth with shark-like teeth which rotate like chainsaws, apparently able to cut through any material. The remaining passengers are able to run back to their airplane, leave and fly back to California. Midway, they go through a narrow escape through a hole, which transports them back to their time. They end up back at their airport and life continues as it usually does... but it leaves a little something behind for them to remember.
TV adaptation
The Langoliers was adapted for a two-part TV Movie in 1995. The TV movie starred Kate Maberly, Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, and Bronson Pinchot.The movie version of "The Langoliers", produced for broadcast on ABC-TV, was filmed almost entirely in and around the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine (author King's hometown) during the summer of 1995. King himself made a cameo appearance in the film as the businessman's boss in a hallucination.
External links
- [The Langoliers] publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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