King employs a first person narrator and opens with the protagonist, Stan Norris, in the clutches of Cressner, a wealthy, cruel criminal overlord.

Seemingly without any other choice, Norris accepts the wager and proceeds to make his way carefully around the building's cold, windswept exterior.

Cressner slyly claims that he never welches on his bets and that, while the heroin has been removed from Norris' car and the money is his for the taking, his wife's fate was sealed before the wager was even made.

King wrote "The Ledge" as a homage to the 1956 story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" by Jack Finney.

[5] "The Ledge" was dramatized as a section of the film Cat's Eye, starring Robert Hays as Norris and Kenneth McMillan as Cressner.

[3] In 1982, an interlude or vignette entitled "Vertigo" outside the main continuity of the graphic novel V for Vendetta was published which used the same basic idea of a man being forced to traverse a narrow ledge around a tall building.