We also meet the subject of his obsession, literary novelist John Rothstein (a cross between John Updike and J.D. We meet Morris Bellamy on the first page of Finders Keepers, and he is absolutely the wrong person. One of the major thrusts of Lisey’s is the subject of authors’ legacies, especially in the work they leave behind when they die, and what happens when the wrong person believes he has a right to that material.

This timeline is important, because Finders Keepers follows Lisey’s Story far more directly than Misery. In 1998, King discovered new ways to write about writers and writing with Bag of Bones, a book about a novelist who can’t write, and in 2006, King explored the way writer’s private lives affect those who love them in Lisey’s Story. King riffed on this in 1990’s “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” looking more deeply into the nature of writing itself. 1989’s The Dark Half continued the thread, delving deeper into the internal lives of writers who let their creations overwhelm their real lives. Misery, in 1987, was his first major thesis on the subject, exploring the hold fiction has over both its creators and audiences. For a good portion of his career, King has followed his own obsession, striving through his novels to understand the symbiotic triptych of writers, writing, and readers. Once again, the books bear nothing but the most fleeting resemblance to one another, and that’s by King’s design. Now we come to Finders Keepers, whose early reviews seem intent on comparing the novel to Misery, due to a featured character’s literary obsession. It would be like saying The Dead Zone and Desperation were the same because a central character had visions. The car in Buick 8 wasn’t even properly a car so much as a portal to another world, while Christine herself was “simply” haunted. When Buick 8 was finally released in 2002, the initial feats were set to rest: while both novels did, indeed, have a car (of sorts) as a catalyst for horror, the books couldn’t be more dissimilar. After all, King had already written a novel about a spooky car: Christine had overcome some middling early reviews to become one of King’s touchstone classics. When Stephen King announced From a Buick 8, there was some concern that the man was starting to repeat himself.

Finders keepers novel