De Palma's film is Stephen King's first published novel, made two years after it appeared, and it is the film that established King as adaptable at all. It keeps the shower scene that opens the book, the mother's religious violence, the invitation that looks like mercy and is a trap, and the telekinesis that arrives with puberty. What it drops is the novel's frame: King tells the story through inquest documents and extracts from books written afterwards, so the reader knows from the first pages that the town was destroyed. The film plays it forward instead.