Watch Stephen King's N

A woman is writing to an old friend; a voice-over conveys the words of her letter. The voice is solemn and strained. She is sending to Charlie the packet of papers that her brother, Johnny - a recent suicide - had instructed her to burn. She had read the papers, though, and in puzzlement is sending them on to Charlie, who has become a medical doctor who perhaps can understand what's going on.

Thus begins Episode 1 of the made-for-TV series Stephen King's N. Originally a novella that appeared in the short-fiction anthology Just After Sunset, the plot of N. is classic King. Johnny turns out to be a psychiatrist treating a patient referred to by the initial N. The man is suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder - or is he? Perhaps in fact N. is saving the world from a massive invasion from another dimension, one that can only be prevented by an obsessive-compulsive focus upon weirdly shifting phenomena.

Contributing to the eerie effect of this story is the graphic-novel format, divided up into 25 90-second mini-episodes. Cutout animation with a sound-track and excellent voice actors prove to be a creepily convincing way to consume Stephen King's novella.

Stephen King's N is a series that ran for 1 seasons (5 episodes) between July 28, 2008 and on Simon & Schuster