Johnny Smith, who woke from a five-year coma with psychic visions, foresees that politician Greg Stillson will become president and start a nuclear war.

Reading historical fiction can make the past memorable, build empathy for people in other eras and encourage curiosity, though research also warns that readers can absorb errors from fiction.

Retired detective Bill Hodges stops Brady Hartsfield, the “Mercedes Killer” who drove a car into a crowd of job-seekers, from bombing a boy-band concert.

Astronaut Mark Watney, stranded alone on Mars after his crew thought he was dead, survives by growing potatoes and hacking equipment.

College student Devin Jones, working at a North Carolina amusement park in 1973, unmasks the serial killer who murdered Linda Gray in the park’s Horror House: Lane Hardy, a friendly ride operator.

Detective Ralph Anderson and private investigator Holly Gibney track the shape-shifting creature that framed Little League coach Terry Maitland for a child’s murder to a cave in Texas.

Robert Grainier, a laborer in the early twentieth-century American West, lives alone for decades after a forest fire kills his wife Gladys and baby daughter Kate.

Sal Paradise, after years of wild cross-country trips with his friend Dean Moriarty, settles down in New York with a woman he loves.

In the final chapter, Alex, the violent teenager who was “cured” by the Ludovico Technique and then “uncured,” simply outgrows violence.

The narrator, Francis Thurston, pieces together evidence from his late great-uncle’s papers and a sailor’s diary showing that Cthulhu, an ancient, monstrous being sleeping beneath the Pacific, briefly woke when its sunken city of R’lyeh rose.