Stephen King, “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories” — The bard of our worst nightmares is back with a fresh story potpourri. And he’s in a sharing mood once more. Along with these 20 tales, King offers insights into his creative process, something he’s done via social media and past story collections.

“If I don’t know how things come out the reader won’t either,” he writes during one of several reader asides that introduce each short story.

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“Bazaar” finds King expounding on life, death and the mistakes we make along the way. Consider “Afterlife,” the tale of a man who dies from colon cancer only to return to life and, tragically, refuse to change his deadly habits. Sometimes the greatest horrors can be our own immutable flaws. The 68-year-old author brings us close to the edge in his new collection in ways longtime fans will surely recognize.

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Stan Lee, “Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir” — How did a lad who grew up during the Great Depression become the father of the modern comic book movement? Leave it to the excitable Lee, along with co-author Peter David and illustrator Colleen Doran, to turn his life story into a graphic memoir.

“Amazing Fantastic Incredible” details Lee’s impoverished childhood and unlikely rise to pop-culture superstar. Along the way, he helped make military training films and jump-started the fledgling Marvel Comics line with some of today’s most popular heroes, from Spider-Man to the Fantastic Four.

Doran’s illustrations keep the tone in line with Lee’s outsized persona which, at the age of 92, hasn’t changed for decades.

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Umberto Eco, “Numero Zero” — Journalism in 2015 is a mess, but the acclaimed Italian author sets his newest tale back in 1992, before clickbait headlines robbed even more of the industry’s professionalism. It’s still focused on journalism, or rather a journalist who acknowledges he’s a hack first and foremost.

Eco’s latest conspiracy-minded yarn involves a newspaper that never plans to go to print. Their purpose is more sinister, to blackmail people in power to behave a certain way. The story itself digs deeper, intertwining actual Italian events with the author’s precocious imagination.

At just over 200 pages, the novel should be a brisk read, a far cry from the sprawling text for which he’s best known stateside, “The Name of the Rose.”