Place in King is often richly detailed and grounded in its contemporary reality, with towns like Castle Rock and Derry feeling familiar and like part of the real world, places where we could accidentally wind up if we took a wrong turn. However, there are also places that King describes which are disjointed from that surrounding reality, specific places that are severed from the usual flow of time in which they should be firmly situated. In the Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993) story “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” two travelers wind up in a northwestern town where rock and roll will never die, and in The Shining (1977), the past of the Overlook continuously and maliciously intrudes on the present. “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” (also in Nightmares and Dreamscapes), the whole of the Dark Tower series, and the Hulu series Castle Rock (2018-19) feature a multitude of thinnys, places where the boundary between wheres and whens is thin enough that a person could slip through and find themselves somewhere (and somewhen) else entirely. 

Two King tales where familiar and even mundane places are separated from the temporal flow of reality are the novella The Langoliers (in the 1990 collection Four Past Midnight) and the story “1408” (in the 2002 collection Everything’s Eventual). The settings of these stories—a couple of airplanes and Bangor International Airport in The Langoliers and a cursed room at New York City’s Hotel Dolphin in “1408”—are places that are, by design, temporary, through which travelers pass through without much connection. But in both The Langoliers and “1408,” characters become mired in these places, divorced from the regular flow and passage of time in the outside world. 

In The Langoliers, the passengers of Flight 29 end up separated from their time stream (and alive to tell the story) almost entirely by chance: the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston slips through a tear in space and time and only those passengers who were asleep when this inexplicable event occurred remain on the other side, with all the other passengers reduced to their earthly artifacts, from wallets and jewelry to pacemakers and fillings. As the passengers begin to piece together what has happened, they must fundamentally shift how they understand the world around them and their place within it. Rather than time being something that passes almost without notice, running uncomplicatedly from the past to the present and on into the future, time becomes a physical presence, with the past violently consumed by the langoliers once people are done living it. Once this handful of people have slipped out of their time and place, there is no reasoning or benevolent protection offered by the universe: they’ve been left behind and if they don’t find a way out of the past and back to the present, they will be destroyed, just like those stale and used up moments that have been relegated to the past. 

In “1408,” Mike Enslin actively chooses to enter the Hotel Dolphin’s Room 1408 and try his luck against whatever danger waits there, despite the hotel manager’s repeated attempts to dissuade him. Once he has entered the room, Mike’s perception breaks down, along with the previously reliable parameters of place and time, and the story is punctuated by temporal hiccups and ellipses. As King frames this act of narrative construction and comprehension, “The most interesting artifact left in the wake of Michael Enslin’s brief stay (it lasted about seventy minutes) in room 1408 was the eleven minutes of recorded tape in his minicorder, which was charred a bit but not even close to destroyed. The fascinating thing about the narration was how little narration there was. And how odd it became” (483, emphasis original). King offers this observation just as Enslin is about to walk into 1408, providing foreshadowing, establishing some basic narrative expectations (i.e. Mike won’t be staying long, something incendiary is going to happen), and highlighting the dissonance between Mike’s subjective perceptions and the concrete record of his experience. Much like the Overlook Hotel, 1408 has a thickly layered and dark history of suicides, ‘accidental’ death, and for those who survive, bad luck that follows them long after they’ve left the room. Though we know Mike’s stay in 1408 is brief (at least in terms of objective measurements of time), when he is in the room, time melts and collapses, becoming impossible for Mike to truly sense or engage with in a meaningful way. Time has very little power in 1408, with the past ever present, both in the room itself and for the people who have come and gone. 

Airports and hotels are both places outside of the regular stream of our daily lives—spaces that are intended to be temporary. But in The Langoliers and “1408,” those intentionally temporary places break out of those expectations, threatening to become permanent, purgatorial, and fatal. These are places that many of us enter or pass through without giving them much thought or paying much attention to the moments that have passed there before our arrival or those that will come after. With The Langoliers and “1408,” King disrupts our thoughts about and experiences of these places by severing that sense of time, divorcing these places from their mundane utility and familiarity. In this temporal disruption, these places become remarkable, locations of tremendous significance for the individual characters who must fight for their lives there, even if these places remain indistinct, relegated to background awareness, and ignored by just about everyone else. When time is taken out of the equation—or at the very least, distanced and muffled—all that remains are these places and the will to survive them. 

[Page numbers for “1408” are from the Pocket Books paperback edition of Everything’s Eventual]