Stephen King has a distorted vision of Colorado
sillygoosie
Posts: 1,109 Member
I am almost finished reading The Stand. While I love that it's set mostly in Colorado, it made me realize that Stephen King, as much as he loves to write about this fine state, has a pretty skewed view of it. In The Shining, the entire premise of the story is based around a hotel that is closed for an entire winter season due to weather conditions. Here in Colorado, the main tourism season for the mountains is the winter. I can't imagine there is actually a fine hotel (such as The Stanley) that would dare close for an entire winter.
In The Stand, when Tom and Stu are traveling over the Rockies back to Boulder, there are several things that bother me. First is the fact that he mentions that it snows for ten days straight. This simply doesn't happen here. We an average of 300 days of sunshine per year. There are a lot of things he states about the snow that aren't realistic to Colorado but I don't need to go into all of them. Let's just say I was rolling my eyes a lot and accepted the fact that it made the story better.
The biggest thing that bothered me was the fact that he says that Stu and Tom stop off in Kittredge on their way to Boulder on I70 to the HWY 6 turn off. This is just physically impossible. Kittredge is no where near I70. They would have had to go about 40 miles out of their way. If he had said they stopped in Evergreen that might have been more believable but still highly unlikely. I know that Mr. King has a great knowledge of Colorado and it just bugs the *kitten* out of me that he got this detail wrong.
Sorry for the rant but I've been reading this (extended version) book for 2 months and the last hundred pages are just pissing me off. I do tend to get nit picky about details. At least he got it all right in Misery.
In The Stand, when Tom and Stu are traveling over the Rockies back to Boulder, there are several things that bother me. First is the fact that he mentions that it snows for ten days straight. This simply doesn't happen here. We an average of 300 days of sunshine per year. There are a lot of things he states about the snow that aren't realistic to Colorado but I don't need to go into all of them. Let's just say I was rolling my eyes a lot and accepted the fact that it made the story better.
The biggest thing that bothered me was the fact that he says that Stu and Tom stop off in Kittredge on their way to Boulder on I70 to the HWY 6 turn off. This is just physically impossible. Kittredge is no where near I70. They would have had to go about 40 miles out of their way. If he had said they stopped in Evergreen that might have been more believable but still highly unlikely. I know that Mr. King has a great knowledge of Colorado and it just bugs the *kitten* out of me that he got this detail wrong.
Sorry for the rant but I've been reading this (extended version) book for 2 months and the last hundred pages are just pissing me off. I do tend to get nit picky about details. At least he got it all right in Misery.
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