It’s SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE MOVIE … and I liked the movie! I’ve read and heard many Stephen King books. And I know that he’s read some of the same classic Golden Age SF and especially Spec-Fic (Speculative Fiction) that I know and love. Look in his Afterword (I think that’s where it is) to 11-22-63, where he cites L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall as one of the best examples of Alternate Spec-Fic — It was published in 1939 and I think it may have been the first entry in the genre. IMO it’s the best I’ve ever read. That’s my area of specialization, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s (with outliers, like John Varley’s Rogue Tomato and The Phantom of Kansas and Bob Leman’s Instructions). The Crawling Eye in IT really took me back, too.
