Drunken Fireworks Audiobook

Winner of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award

2016 Audie Award Finalist for Original Work

A classic Stephen King short story from the bestselling collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams!

Alden McCausland and his mother are what they call “accident rich”; thanks to an unexpected life-insurance policy payout and a winning Big Maine Millions scratcher, Alden and his Ma are able to spend their summers down by Lake Abenaki, idly drinking their days away in a three-room cabin with an old dock and a lick of a beach.

Across the lake, they can see what “real rich” looks like: the Massimo family’s Twelve Pines Camp, the big white mansion with guest house and tennis court that Alden’s Ma says is paid for by “ill-gotten gains” courtesy of Massimo Construction. When Alden’s holiday-weekend sparklers and firecrackers set off what over the next few years comes to be known as the Fourth of July Arms Race, he learns how far he and the Massimos will go to win an annual neighborly rivalry—one that lands Alden in the Castle County jail.

Read by beloved Down East storyteller Tim Sample—praised by Stephen King for his “wit and talent and good-heartedness”—Drunken Fireworks makes for explosive audio listening.

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“Narrator Tim Sample unfurls the story of an escalating rivalry with precision. In the rolling, deliberately paced drawl of a seasoned Mainer, Sample recounts a yearly fireworks competition…Sample’s sardonic delivery peppers a sordid narrative with moments of flippancy, and by grounding the dialogue and characterizations in specificity, he keeps a tight reign on King’s kaleidoscopic sense of detail.”

— AudioFile