Essay Questions

Why does the specter of Donald Trump hover so heavily over this novel?

Despite being a novel written by the most successful horror writer in history, this is essentially a crime novel. More specifically, a murder mystery of a certain type. And yet, the story is very deeply infused with the political zeitgeist of the Trump era. It is, after all, primarily set within the period marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection by gullible Trump supporters. This is a book steeped deeply in the atmosphere of seemingly irreparable division between the two political parties as well as between conservatives and the rest of the country. At one point, Holly contemplates how this division comes down to the fact that “holder-owners are never able to understand let-goers. They are tribes that just can’t understand each other.” This identification of foundational tribalism between those who cling so strongly to the past that they simply cannot cognitively penetrate any other intellectual belief becomes central to the crime story itself with the revelation of the psyches of those responsible for the killings themselves.

What is almost impossible to ignore but possible to misunderstand about King’s use of pop culture references in this particular novel?

The book had been out less than a month before certain corners of the internet attacked the author for being out-of-touch with his millennial readership because so many of the references reach back to the previous century. The very first instance is just a few pages in with a character quoting from William Goldman’s book, The Princess Bride, and subsequent beloved screenplay adaptation: “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.” A young man is characterized as having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark at least ten times. Holly herself is described as being a horror movie fan with references to not just characters from 1980s slasher movies, but Christopher Lee’s multiple vampire roles in Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 1960s. What is being mistaken as the reference of a seventy-something writer being out of touch with millennials is symbolic imagery. As the previous example illustrates, this is a book constructed from the deep divide of political and social tribalism threatening the country in the 2020s. The specificity of the pop culture allusions King chooses in this book—almost none of which apply to present-day pop culture—manifest a previous epoch in American history when people of all ideologies could put their political views aside and come to a common agreement on entertainment products. This aspect of the book could be interpreted as King’s commentary on the so-called “war on woke.”

How does the author engage in self-referential meta-fiction in this novel differently than his usual approach?

Stephen King’s body of work has reached such a point of volume that another expectation in his latter work is the self-referenced allusions to his previous novels. Typically, this happens within the realistic construct of the story in which characters or events from his older novels are integrated. For instance, characters from It briefly appear in the actual storyline of 11/23/63. A different approach is found in this novel in which one character alludes to the events of a previous King novel as a work of fiction. Penny Dahl observes that her daughter was the queen of her prom, but “nobody dumped a bucket of blood on her.” This is a reference to the mean prank pulled on the title character of King’s novel Carrie. The context within which Penny says this makes it clear she is not referencing some actual event that previously occurred during the multiverse connecting King’s novels but is referencing the fictional story—probably the original film version—itself.