I immediately feel grounded in the book which must be in my world because the guy's reading the same books as me and get a warm rosie inclusive feeling because the main character share a love for the same books that I do, this has me purring like a kitten.
A lot of what we meet in the King panorama is, by its very nature, outlandish ... alien. But we accept these improbable intrusions into "our" world because the author makes us so comfortable there. It's not just dropping in references that we recognize, but in showing us little things to which we can relate. This is not really the same thing, but it speaks to the same phenomenon:
In
Mile 81, Pete is not allowed to go along with the "big kids" on their bicycle adventures, and so he stumbles into an adventure of his own. This speaks to me very clearly in two very specific ways. I had older brothers (two and three years, respectively) growing up who delighted in nothing so much as including me sometimes and excluding me other times for no particular reason other than because they
could. It is the particular province of older brothers (and sisters, too, now I think of it), to amuse themselves at their younger siblings' expense, but also to protect them from "outsiders" who might do the same.
As I say, when I read the beginning of
Mile 81, this immediately shows me that I
know Pete.
Also, the very idea of those bicycle adventures is something that a lot of guys (and maybe girls, too) will recognize. When I was a teenager, we used to ride our bikes right off the cliffs and into these abandoned granite quarries around where I lived then. Splashing down into the murky depths with one hand still holding onto our bikes and the other desperately clawing for the surface. These are the things that entwine us in the stories. These are the things that make us care about the fictional people. Because they may be made up from whole cloth, but they're
us, too.
Aren't they?
Isn't that why we like them so much?
You know ... it occurs to me now that my mother would have expired from an enormous cardiac event long ago if she ever knew even half the crazy stuff her kids were getting up to when we followed her edict to "go play outside."