"Willa" is a short story by Stephen King that was originally published in the December 2006 issue of Playboy magazine. It is also included as the first entry in King's 2008 short-fiction collection Just After Sunset.
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"Willa" is a short story by Stephen King that was originally published in the December 2006 issue of Playboy magazine. It is also included as the first entry in King's 2008 short-fiction collection Just After Sunset.
Plot summary
A man finds himself in a train station after an apparent wreck with a few of the other passengers. Unable to locate his fiance, Willa, he decides to set out to a nearby town--where he knows she would go--to find her. The others attempt to convince him that not only is the shuttle going to arrive any minute to pick them up, going to town is dangerous as the almost three-mile hike goes straight through deserted terrain that is inhabited by dangerous wolves. Ignoring their advice, he heads into town and has a close-encounter with one of the wolves on the way. Noticing some lights and music at a nearby honky-tonk, he decides to investigate and finds Willa sitting all alone in a corner booth. As they talk with him trying to convince his girl to come back to the station with him, he begins to realize what they both have known all along: That he and Willa (along with the rest of the passengers at the train station) are actually ghosts -- dead from a train-wreck that happened nearly 20 years before.
Critical reception
Several critics, in reviewing Just After Sunset, also included their opinions of "Willa". In the Washington Times, the reviewer says, ""Willa" is more than just a flirty romance. It's a ghost story, albeit one with a kicker that causes goosebumps of a different order." Carole Goldberg, in the Sun Sentinel, calls the story a "wistful love song in a haunting minor key." A review for NPR says that in "Willa", as well as in another story in the collection, "The Things They Left Behind", King uses "the supernatural as a way to movingly depict life's frailty."
Connection to King's other works
The characters in Willa are similar to the idea of the "vagrant dead" in King's The Dark Tower series. They are described as those who "either died so suddenly they don't yet understand what's happened to them, or they refuse to accept it."
Also in The Dark Tower series, specifically book V, Don Callahan is reading a newspaper that mentions "a train derailment in Vermont."
