If he steps into the past again, he’s back in 1958 and everything resets. There’s intricacy built into King’s narrative logic: If Jake returns to the present through the portal, he sees the ripples of the changes he made. The portal deposits him every time in the year 1958, which means he has to live in the past for five years just to arrive at the watershed moment in American history that he is determined to stop. School teacher Jake Epping can’t just quantum leap to the day John F. King’s take on a time-travel story is unique because its method of venturing into the past (a supernatural tear in the fabric of reality) is so imprecise. It’s also about toxic masculinity, long before that term became widely used. Like most of King’s best, there is a lot more happening beneath the eerie premise. In this case, it’s a candy apple red 1958 Plymouth Fury with a mind of its own, the ability to heal itself from damage, and a love of doo-wop and vengeance. This 1983 book is prototypical King: the Haunted. Let’s start the countdown with the luckiest number of all. These ground rules may infuriate some Constant Readers, but I want to focus on the longer-form King tales, where his imagination runs so far away that we race to keep up despite the fear of what awaits the next page. I’m also going to leave out the short story collections, but keep the novellas. Let’s also set aside his collaborations, such as The Talisman and Black House with Peter Straub, Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and Gwendy’s Button Box with Richard Chizmar. The real debate over the Best of King begins once you move past those classic novels, his near-perfect memoir On Writing, and the serialized Dark Tower books, the best of which ( The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Land) frankly feel inscrutable without the others.

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