u/BassPlayer11271971

I know the main hook of the story is inspired by the real life mystery of the Somerton Man. Body appears on a beach with unusual items on its person, big mystery as to who he was and how he ended up there. And the Colorado Kid was pretty much the same. Found a Russian coin in his pocket, a pack of cigarettes with one missing despite his wife saying he wasn’t a smoker. Anyway, King said that the story is about the power of a mystery and wasn’t meant to be solved. It was just a bunch of random elements put in place. Until, and I could be wrong, that they aren’t so random. In a publication I read and can’t find again, King said that the answer IS there. And it got my wheels turning. Every solution I thought of only brought up more questions. But I want to focus on two elements of strangeness. One the book puts out and one that I’m probably overthinking about. First, before his disappearance from the ad firm he worked for, he told his colleague he was going to the Starbucks in the lobby of the building he works at. But at that time, Starbucks didn’t extend to Denver. And Vince and Dave who are telling the story to Stephanie didn’t bat an eye when it was mentioned. So are we reading a story that takes place in another dimension and the Colorado Kid’s body on the beach might be from a parallel dimension? Maybe ours?? And the second element. The person who the Kid talked to, the last person who saw him alive, was named George. But Vince and Dave can’t remember his last name and they say as a placeholder “be he Rankin or Franklin” so many times that even Stephanie jokingly says it. I didn’t put much into them using those names UNTIL I looked at the initials of those two surnames. “R.F.” Who else’s name has those initials?? So did George “be he Rankin or Franklin” have something to do with the Kid disappearing at his lunch and appearing dead on a beach in Maine? So am reading too much into it? Is there a solution?

The internet. So they can get three W’s in a row. 😉

Spoilers for Rat and Revival! You’ve been warned.

I had the pleasure of rereading the novella Rat from the collection If It Bleeds and the main character, writer and teacher Drew Larson (a writer and teacher in a Stephen King story. Shocking, I know) made a deal with the title character to sacrifice someone he loved in exchange for helping him finish his novel. The person Drew chooses was his colleague, fellow teacher Al Stamper. And that made me pause. There is a character in Revival with the exact same name of Al Stamper. Only in that book he was a retired soul singer who helped out Pastor Charles Jacobs with his tent revivals. Now it may be just a coincidence that two different characters share the same name. But Stephen King doesn’t strike me as someone who would use a name like that twice haphazardly. Might there be some kind of connection? Or am I just reading too much into it?

…when they dedicate most of their baseball talk to the Cubs? Even the so called “South Sider superfan” J Hood.