I've figured out Stephen King's plots.
First, there's the milieu. This is a situation that the characters can't get out of and others can't get into. Prison. A desert island. An isolated town. A closed airport. A snowed-in house.
Then there are the characters. You have <Leader>, a person with authority of some kind. Next, you have <Person With Mysterious Ability>. Then there's <Homicidal Nut>, who goes around terrorizing all of the other characters. Finally, you have a cast of assorted supporting characters for the others to lead, terrorize, and heal.
They go through a contrived plot, which starts with conflicts among all the characters, and builds in intensity until <Leader> manages to build a coalition with <Person With Mysterious Ability> and <Cast Of Assorted Supporting Characters> to overthrow/kill/heal <Homicidal Nut>, which leads into a denouement in which all of the characters are more or less normal again, but somehow profoundly changed.
From what
I've seen of Stephen King stories, that covers pretty much all of them.
Every one of his stories is some variation on that theme.
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