One Past Midnight: The Langoliers Summary & Key Insights

Stephen King's "One Past Midnight" is an anthology, and "The Langoliers" is one of its stories. It's not authored by Willem Dafoe. Dafoe merely starred in a television adaptation. The story focuses on a group of airline passengers aboard a nearly empty flight from London to Maine. A sudden, unexplained turbulence leaves them stranded in a time-warp, their reality subtly shifting and dissolving around them.

The passengers, a diverse group with their own anxieties and secrets, become the central characters. Craig Tooms, a writer haunted by a disturbing past, serves as a somewhat reluctant leader. Bob Jenkins, a retired airline pilot, offers his aviation expertise. Annalyn, a young woman, provides some emotional strength. Other key passengers include a flight attendant, a nervous businessman, and a mysterious older woman. The story focuses less on individual character development than on their collective struggle for survival and the unraveling of their shared reality.

The primary antagonist is the Langoliers, unseen creatures that exist outside of perceived reality. They are described as monstrous, possibly extra-dimensional beings that feed on time itself, erasing matter and leaving behind only nothingness. The passengers' plane is drifting further and further into this temporal void, and the effects of the Langoliers' presence become progressively disturbing. Objects disappear, time becomes increasingly distorted, and the passengers themselves experience physical and psychological deterioration.

The passengers soon discover they're several hours adrift in time, stuck in a strange, seemingly empty reality where the familiar aspects of their world are gradually dissolving. Their plane's food runs out, and the passengers grapple with starvation, paranoia, and the existential horror of their predicament. Their attempts at communication with the outside world fail.

As the Langoliers' presence intensifies, the passengers' plane is literally being erased. Tooms realizes they need to face the Langoliers directly to survive; escaping this temporal anomaly necessitates confronting its cause. In a harrowing climax, the remaining passengers attempt to confront and possibly destroy the Langoliers, a mission fraught with peril and ambiguity. The ending is left slightly open to interpretation, leaving room for the audience to contemplate the existential implications of the story.

The overarching themes include the fragility of reality, the power of human connection amidst terror, and the confronting of existential dread. "The Langoliers" explores anxieties around time, mortality, and the unknowable horrors that may lie beyond our everyday perception. It's a story that leaves a lasting sense of unease and fascination, highlighting the potential terrifying nature of the unseen and the limits of human understanding.