Quote:
Originally Posted by Section8
My wife recently read Stephen King's 11/22/63 (her first Stephen King book). She was born & grew up in Ft. Worth, TX, and has lived most of her life in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area - she has a childhood memory of seeing JFK in downtown Ft. Worth just before the assassination.
She had a lot of complaints about various details of King's portrayal of the Ft. Worth area. The only one I specifically remember is she thought it laughable when he talked about being able to smell oil fumes from the the west Texas oil wells in Ft. Worth (or maybe Dallas) when the wind was right. These wells are hundreds of miles from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. She doesn't recall ever in her life smelling oil fumes from west Texas.
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I'm not much of a King devotee, but being born and raised in Fort Worth, I'll have to give the book a try - just so I can find the passage myself.
Who knows? Maybe my elementary school will make it in there... as per urban legend, Oswald was supposedly an alumnus. lol
But in King's defense (again, not that much of a fan) there are oil fields near Fort Worth, although I would figure they would have dried up to the point of being inconsequential by the '60s. Also, not having read the book (yet) he might have meant it figuratively - many of the wealthier families of Ft. Worth (Bass, Richardson, etc) got rich during the oil boom and continued to invest their holdings further west. So it could be the "smell of money" he was describing.
But getting back to the topic at hand, the closest I've come to reading a book set in a city I was well acquainted with was a relatively recent murder mystery set in the rural Minnesota town where my Grandmother lives. Apparently, it caused quite the sensation there as there were enough similarities between minor characters and residents that everyone wanted to see if they were "in the book"!