I have never read a book by Stephen King. But I couldn't resist buying Blood and smoke, available only as an audiobook and read engagingly by King himself. It comes in a flip top box resembling a pack of Marlboros, and contains a CD or three audiocassette tapes, depending on the version you buy. The “book” is actually a series of three short stories, which, according to the packaging, take the listener “inside the world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction . . . the world of the smoker”. “The now politically incorrect habit plays a key role in the fates of three different men in three unabridged stories of unfiltered suspense.”

In Lunch at the Gotham Café, Steve Davis is distraught after his wife leaves him. Two days later he quits smoking, after a 20 year history of smoking 20–40 cigarettes a day. For the next two weeks he suffers intense withdrawal from nicotine and his wife, until he meets her and her divorce lawyer for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. While arguing at the table, they are attacked suddenly by a psychotic, knife-wielding maïtre d'. Davis fights him off bravely, saving his own life and that of …