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| photo credit: Sun Journal Frank Anicetti, the third-generation-owner of the Kennebec Fruit Company in Lisbon Falls, is featured in 11.22.63 |
Michelle Souliere, author of Strange Maine, shared a cool link with me. The article by Mark LaFlamme (HERE) discusses Maine in relation to King's novels. A subject I always find interesting! By the way, the article has one of those titles that goes on for four lines! It could simply be titled, "Stephen King's Maine."
LaFlamme discusses not only buildings and sites from King's Maine, but people we discover in his novels. 11.22.63 is a mix of fictional, historical and. . . how do I say -- real people. By real I mean people who are not famous, and thus we would not know they were real unless someone told us.
LaFlamme discusses a man named Frank Anicetti. He is in 11.22.63. . . but I didn't know he was anything but another character in King's novel! LaFlamme reveals that Anicetti appears "as himself" in the novel!
"The proprietor of the Fruit Company," King writes at the start of the book, "an elderly sweet-natured man named Frank Anicetti, had once told me the world's population divided naturally (and probably by genetic inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie above all other potables . . . and everybody else."The article is really a lot of fun. Michelle wrote, "It's a nice slice of life, because LaFlamme actually walks around and traces King's steps via his books in a number of Maine towns -- always cool to see where he gets his ideas, and Mark's a great one for putting these adventures into words."
I found Frank Anicetti and discovered him to be all of those things. And if he is real, then maybe the time machine is, too. And so I find myself once more prowling the landscape of a Stephen King novel in search of that weird place where fiction and the real world blend so beautifully.
Souliere is also cited in the article discussing King's blending of places.
Again, the arcle is HERE.
One reason I believe King wrote 11/22/63 was to use the writing of the novel as a way of dealing with a lot of the issues I think he's had with that event for a long time, an act of violence or tragedy, especially one of this national magnitude, is sure to leave some kind of mark on people who, for lack of a better term, scare easy.
ReplyDeleteThat goes double for people who've taught their minds to misbehave.
I think in finishing this novel King has managed write the event out of his system in the same way he used books like The Dark Tower and Dreamcatcher as a way to get over his accident.
I guess writing horror as a way of getting rid of fears is one way of doing it.