How could a person be in two places at once? One of the main characters - Holly Gibney - doesn’t show up until halfway through the novel and while she’s a character in a prior series of King crime novels, it’s not necessary to have read them beforehand, though you might want to after finishing this one. Until, that is, overwhelming evidence comes to light placing him in a completely different town at the same time. The evidence against him is overwhelming. In a small Oklahoma town, a teacher and Little League coach is arrested for the brutal murder of a young boy. If you didn’t watch the recent HBO series based on this 2018 book (the novelist Richard Price was the showrunner and Dennis Lehane wrote two episodes), then the twists of this supernatural detective story remain intact. It’s one secret of King’s success - that so many of his characters feel as ordinary as we believe ourselves to be. By the book’s back half, when he begins to cross paths with real historical figures and events, you’re fully invested in Jake. from dying on that titular day in Dallas.Ī big part of the book’s pleasures (and over 800 pages, there are many) come from the procedural-like manner in which Jake must establish a new identity in a new era and live in real-time without revealing his true mission.
Kennedy, what would the next decade-plus have looked like? In “” King imagines a scenario in which Maine school teacher Jake Epping finds he can travel back to the year 1958 through the pantry in a local diner, and uses that ability to try to stop J.F.K. If Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t killed John F. God, she never wanted to leave.” But none of that matters much when you’re deep into the middle of this novel and Paul sleeps a little too long and wakes up and you realize what’s going to happen and your stomach just plummets.īuy this book: Local booksellers, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.įor a certain generation - King’s generation - the assassinations of the 1960s were their great traumas. And King, a recovering addict, has talked about the sub-subtext, saying, “Annie was my drug problem, and she was my No. The subtext is clear: Sometimes, fame can feel like a trap.
Paul Sheldon, the protagonist of “Misery,” is yet another writer, one who finds himself in a particularly horrifying situation- held captive, post-car accident, by an obsessed fan, Annie Wilkes, who wants him to write a book just for her. There’s a decent percentage of King’s work that features writers as main characters, from “‘Salem’s Lot” and “The Shining” to “The Tommyknockers” and “The Dark Half” to “Bag of Bones” and “Lisey’s Story” to “Rat,” one of the stories in his latest book.
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