In stories like “The Body” and It, King does the same period scene-setting, but he isn’t able to call attention to it in a meta way like he does in 11/22/63. He could just set his story in the past, as he has done many times before, but the time-travel aspect allows us to go on the ride with King the writer as he set-designs the past. Of course he doesn’t need his characters to time-travel in order to write about the 50s. His time-travel premise allows him to go back to one of his best eras for subject matter: the 1950s. They don’t depend on the allegorical level.ġ1/22/63 does everything King is good at and more. The beauty of such allegories is that they are supported by their own rules-the fantasy worlds work whether you read into them or not.

Carrie and The Shining are brilliant manifestations of bullying and alcoholism with the added complexity of the supernatural. It uses a mad clown in order to get at the deep social forces among people living in in close proximity to one another. Stories like “The Body” and “Apt Pupil” don’t even have any fantastical elements, but the death and violence at their centers bring out the darker subtexts of their coming-of-age plots. These books do what horror and science fiction do best: They talk about who we are as humans, how we deal with each other, and our psychology, through the horror genre, in order to get at something even more true. My favorite King material deals with his home state of Maine, the 1950s, madness, or all these things at once-books like It, Different Seasons (which contains the stories “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” “Apt Pupil,” and “The Body,” which were all adapted into movies), Carrie, The Shining, and 11/22/63. Yes, he has the track record and know-how, so I understand how he got the rights to 11/22/63, but still, why do I get so much flack for doing it all? I ain’t the only one. He co-authored a meta-novel called S., which involves a master narrative that serves as the basis for a meta-narrative told though handwritten margin notes between a grad student and an undergraduate student.

He took on Star Trek, and is now doing my personal favorite, Star Wars. I’ve been accused of being ubiquitous, of occupying too much cultural ground, of being a pop culture hog, like a guest at a wedding who sticks his dirty fingers in every cake and pie. Abrams as much as the next person (though I bet there are some pretty ardent Lost fans that I’ll never match in fervor), but come on.

Abrams has them and is adapting the novel into an online miniseries.

Books like 11 22 63