I first read the novel as a teenager, and I saw the original movie
around the same time. I remember the blood, the bullying and the
revenge - how the story starts and how it ends. It was interesting to
re-read the book and see how vivid and visceral the writing is. How
quickly the story unfolds, how close we get to several characters.
And I noticed how explicitly the author tells us early on that this
and that person will die, and a lot of people will die. In addition,
the main narrative is interspersed with several other sources - news
articles, AP bulletins, Sue Snell's autobiography, "scientific"
journals about TK/Telekinesis, witness statements - most of which
have been written in the aftermath of the events. King sets the
reader up like this: You know how this will end, but you really want
to know how it gets there.
The book was published in 1974, but the main narrative is set to 1979.
Some of the aforementioned articles and books, which build up a sort
of objective and scientific framework for the supernatural premise of
the book, are dated in the 1980s, all the way up to 1988. I found it
curious that King chose to place the events five to fifteen years
into the future. Is it a strategy to make the story seem more
believable? Or frightening, like a premonition? Or would teenage
characters in 1974 have a different cultural background than those on
1979? In that sense - is the author making a gamble? What will 1979
be like? Would disco and punk rock have been relevant phenomenons if
the story had been written five years later? Or even: will there be a
1979? The book makes a couple of references to the atomic bomb, which
I also related to the idea of "a possible future" - or no future at
all. For the small town of Chamberlain, Maine, the night of May 27/28
1979 was Armageddon.
