A lot of characters in "Doctor Sleep"

  • This message board permanently closed on June 30th, 2020 at 4PM EDT and is no longer accepting new members.

fushingfeef

Finally Uber!
Aug 14, 2009
10,194
21,965
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
It seemed this book was populated with a lot of characters for a 500-pager. I'm the kind of reader who usually puts a face to the names when I read a book, but my imagination had a hard time keeping up with all the names in a relatively short span of pages! There were many names introduced for the True Knot characters, the nursing home/hospice, Abra's family, the fellow AA members, Dan's co-workers, etc. Maybe I'm getting scatterbrained but I found it a little confusing sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I loved the book! I'll definitely be giving it a reread!

I didn't have any problems keeping track of the characters in The Stand, although for Under The Dome I was grateful for the character list at the beginning of the book!
 

Walter Oobleck

keeps coming back...or going, and going, and going
Mar 6, 2013
11,749
34,805
I've been reading Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and came across something called Benford's Law, apparently a fraud examiner's tool. Pynchon's telling explained a bit about what the Law is/does...although I have not search-engined it to see if it is true--with Pynchon anything is possible--with any writer, really. But the way I understand it, it has to do with probability...of numbers. Not letters. Has to do with the probability of numbers appearing equally...I dunno...on a list or something. Thing is, I wondered if the same could be applied to stories...and the character list is why I wondered that...since if you think about it, the names/characters span the alphabet, a through z...with a few that occur more often, like Torrence, but that's a given all things considered. That's one of the things I like about King stories...there are so many that have names...and quite a few with no names at all. It would be interesting to compare the Doctor Sleep list to other long lists...and they do exist.