fun essay by stephen king

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Stephen King’s “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”

I. the first introduction.

THAT’S RIGHT. I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.

II. The Story, or, How Stephen King Learned to Write

When I was a sophomore in high school, I did a sophomoric thing which got me in a pot of fairly hot water, as sophomoric didoes often do. I wrote and published a small satiric newspaper called The Village Vomit. In this little paper I lampooned a number of teachers at Lisbon (Maine) High School, where I was under instruction. These were not very gentle lampoons; they ranged from the scatological to the downright cruel.

Eventually, a copy of this little newspaper found its way into the hands of a faculty member, and since I had been unwise enough to put my name on it (a fault, some critics argue, of which I have still not been entirely cured), I was brought into the office. The sophisticated satirist had by that time reverted to what he really was: a fourteen-year-old kid who was shaking in his boots and wondering if he was going to get a suspension … what we called “a three-day vacation” in those dim days of 1964.

I wasn’t suspended. I was forced to make a number of apologies – they were warranted, but they still tasted like dog-dirt in my mouth – and spent a week in detention hall. And the guidance counselor arranged what he no doubt thought of as a more constructive channel for my talents. This was a job – contingent upon the editor’s approval – writing sports for the Lisbon Enterprise, a twelve-page weekly of the sort with which any small-town resident will be familiar. This editor was the man who taught me everything I know about writing in ten minutes. His name was John Gould – not the famed New England humorist or the novelist who wrote The Greenleaf Fires, but a relative of both, I believe.

He told me he needed a sports writer and we could “try each other out” if I wanted.

I told him I knew more about advanced algebra than I did sports.

Gould nodded and said, “You’ll learn.”

I said I would at least try to learn. Gould gave me a huge roll of yellow paper and promised me a wage of 1/2 cent per word. The first two pieces I wrote had to do with a high school basketball game in which a member of my school team broke the Lisbon High scoring record. One of these pieces was straight reportage. The second was a feature article.

I brought them to Gould the day after the game, so he’d have them for the paper, which came out Fridays. He read the straight piece, made two minor corrections, and spiked it. Then he started in on the feature piece with a large black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

(note: this is before the edit marks indicated on King’s original copy)

(after edit marks)

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.

“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”

“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.

And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

III. The Second Introduction

All of what follows has been said before. If you are interested enough in writing to be a purchaser of this magazine, you will have either heard or read all (or almost all) of it before. Thousands of writing courses are taught across the United States each year; seminars are convened; guest lecturers talk, then answer questions, then drink as many gin and tonics as their expense-fees will allow, and it all boils down to what follows.

I am going to tell you these things again because often people will only listen – really listen – to someone who makes a lot of money doing the thing he’s talking about. This is sad but true. And I told you the story above not to make myself sound like a character out of a Horatio Alger novel but to make a point: I saw, I listened, and I learned. Until that day in John Gould’s little office, I had been writing first drafts of stories which might run 2,500 words. The second drafts were apt to run 3,300 words. Following that day, my 2,500-word first drafts became 2,200-word second drafts. And two years after that, I sold the first one.

So here it is, with all the bark stripped off. It’ll take ten minutes to read, and you can apply it right away … if you listen.

IV. Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully

1. Be talented This, of course, is the killer. What is talent? I can hear someone shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with “what is the meaning of life?” for weighty pronouncements and total uselessness. For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented. Now some of you are really hollering. Some of you are calling me one crass money-fixated creep. And some of you are calling me bad names. Are you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English Departments of America is screeching. V.C. Andrews? Theodore Dreiser? Or what about you, you dyslexic moron?

Nonsense. Worse than nonsense, off the subject. We’re not talking about good or bad here. I’m interested in telling you how to get your stuff published, not in critical judgments of who’s good or bad. As a rule the critical judgments come after the check’s been spent, anyway. I have my own opinions, but most times I keep them to myself. People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented. The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn’t get paid. If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming. Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer – you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters . . . maybe a commiserating phone call. It’s lonely out there in the cold, but there are encouraging voices … unless there is nothing in your words which warrants encouragement. I think you owe it to yourself to skip as much of the self-illusion as possible. If your eyes are open, you’ll know which way to go … or when to turn back.

2. Be neat Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable onion-skin stuff. If you’ve marked up your manuscript a lot, do another draft.

3. Be self-critical If you haven’t marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don’t be a slob.

4. Remove every extraneous word You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new.

5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

6. Know the markets Only a dimwit would send a story about giant vampire bats surrounding a high school to McCall’s. Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. I’m not exaggerating; I have seen such stories in the slush piles of the actual magazines. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top? If you like science fiction, read the magazines. If you want to write confession stories, read the magazines. And so on. It isn’t just a matter of knowing what’s right for the present story; you can begin to catch on, after awhile, to overall rhythms, editorial likes and dislikes, a magazine’s entire slant. Sometimes your reading can influence the next story, and create a sale.

7. Write to entertain Does this mean you can’t write “serious fiction”? It does not. Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.

8. Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?” The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

9. How to evaluate criticism Show your piece to a number of people – ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story – a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles – change that facet. It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with you piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

10. Observe all rules for proper submission Return postage, self-addressed envelope, all of that.

11. An agent? Forget it. For now Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients. 10% of nothing is nothing. Agents also have to pay the rent. Beginning writers do not contribute to that or any other necessity of life. Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

12. If it’s bad, kill it When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

That’s everything you need to know. And if you listened, you can write everything and anything you want. Now I believe I will wish you a pleasant day and sign off.

My ten minutes are up.

For more advice from Stephen King, check out his Reading List for Writers .

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Friday essay: in praise of the ‘horror master’ Stephen King

Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

Disclosure statement

Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Growing up in the 1980s, the name Stephen King was synonymous with macabre, terrifying, apparently taboo (though ubiquitous) book covers. They seemed to appear everywhere: bookstores, to be sure; but also newsagents, supermarkets, cinemas, airports and libraries. They always seemed to be spinning in some library carousel, looking tattered, like they’d been borrowed 100,000 times.

Like a kid from a King novel, I was obsessed with the forbidden. I would spend hours staring at these book covers, thinking about the horrors that might lie within.

A giant, bloody salivating dog. A freakish pair of eyes looking out of a drain. A silhouette of a figure with an axe eclipsing someone in a wheelchair. Hell, they looked more like movie posters than book covers. I’d go to bed and imagine one of these figures coming alive and creeping towards the house from the backyard.

Very occasionally, this was actually scary – but mostly it was just fun.

Why we love horror

Why do we gravitate towards subject matter that, if it existed in the real world, would be at best supremely unpleasant? There are many theories regarding why people love horror film and literature.

Perhaps it’s cathartic. Maybe it reflects Freud’s “ death drive ,” or what Edgar Allan Poe described, in a titular short story, as the “imp of the perverse,” (suggesting we all have self-destructive tendencies). Or maybe it simply reflects our fascination with extreme experiences, a desire to be overwhelmed by the sublime, which Edmund Burke defined as a mixture of fear and excitement, terror and awe. Perhaps horror thus manifests a desire to re-enchant the world with magic in a controlled and safe context, physically activating the body and its response mechanisms in an environment that only simulates real peril.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the collective pleasure of inflicting pain on others through punishment. Does our fascination for horror channel this? Or, as Julia Kristeva ’s theory suggests, does art help us manage our abject horror at the breakdown between self and other – most pointedly captured in our confrontations with corpses?

Literary theorist René Girard ’s ideas are equally compelling. Perhaps we’re attracted to images of violence because of its anthropological function in the earliest periods of community formation. A victim – the scapegoat – would be chosen to bear the violence that would otherwise be destructively directed towards other members of the community. This idea is beautifully rendered in Drew Godard’s The Cabin in the Woods , a horror film about the origins of horror films in ritual and sacrifice.

In a broader cultural sense, our modern interest in horror, the supernatural and the weird has grown in direct proportion to industrialisation, and the parallel shrinking of the world’s magic and mysteries (captured in the term “globalisation”).

In a post-sacred era of intense scientific rationalism and technological development, the aesthetics of the weird, supernatural and horrific – in all their wondrous irrationality – allow us to occupy an alternate, imaginary space removed from the horror of things as they really are: mass industrial wars of attrition, precarious states of living, pandemic disease and global warming.

Read more: Friday essay: scary tales for scary times

My first King

When I finally had the autonomy (and my own money) to pick the books I wanted to read, it was with mixed feelings of shame and excitement that I went to buy my first Stephen King novel.

I still remember the suburban bookstore and the sardonic frown of its middle-aged clerk as she looked down at my ten-year-old self when I placed Pet Sematary on the counter and got 12 bucks out of my wallet. I remember blushing when she intimated (or was it actually a question?) I must have been buying this for an older relative.

The novel follows what happens to a doctor and his family when they discover, in the woods, a children’s pet cemetery that reanimates whatever is buried there. It lived up to the promise of its cover, offering splashes of superlative gore, a handful of genuinely terrifying moments (the sequences involving Rachel’s sick sister Zelda still get to me) and a plethora of new words. Not swear words, mind you – any self-respecting kid knows all of these by seven or eight – but terms like “cuckold”, about which I had to consult my mum.

For the next two years, I spent most of my reading time dedicated to King. I quickly got through the pantheon – massive tomes like The Stand , Needful Things and It ; more moderately sized ones like Carrie , The Shining and Salem’s Lot ; and short, explosive ones like The Running Man , published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. And then I started with the new releases (there was at least one every year – like 1994’s Insomnia ), generally available from Kmart in hardback.

I found in King an interlocutor who spoke with gusto and enthusiasm about all kinds of things – old age, domestic abuse, natural and supernatural horrors of the mind and closet. But, more than anything else, he seemed not only to write stories that often featured young characters, but to accurately dramatise what it actually felt like to be a kid.

Short stories like The Sun Dog , novels like Cycle of the Werewolf and the monumental It – not to mention more obvious outings like The Body, the basis of the massively successful nostalgia film Stand By Me – captured the peculiar melancholic excitement, both intense and slightly wistful, of being near the beginning of life in that delirious halcyon era just before puberty sets in.

Then I grew up – and stopped reading King. Through writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, I was introduced to prose worlds that seemed to be richer: both more concentrated and more expansive, certainly more nuanced. King gradually disappeared from my field of vision.

I forgot about the “gypsy” curse on Billy Halleck (the basis of Thinner ) and about Arnie and Dennis from Christine , as they struggle to overcome the eponymous evil car. Like one of the children of It – who forget their childhoods, until they reunite as adults to confront them – I forgot about my horror master, erasing my childhood experiences from memory. When I was 15, as a gag, I tried reading Firestarter and found it garish, gross, infantile. A few years earlier, King’s novel about a pyrokinetic child being hunted by a government who want to weaponise her would have seemed thrilling, maybe even insightful.

But the King was dead.

Read more: 'Supp'd full with horrors': 400 years of Shakespearean supernaturalism

Literary snobs and good writers

Perhaps the only thing worse than the literary snob who looks down on everyone who doesn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses on loop is the literary snob of the populist variety, the one who scowls at everyone who doesn’t read the kind of fiction that ord’nary folks like.

When outspoken literary critic and professor Harold Bloom described the 2003 awarding of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Stephen King as “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life,” it was easy to dislike Bloom as an example of the former. Listening to King discuss his writing, it is almost as easy to dismiss him as the latter.

What makes a good writer? According to King,

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

So is King, as Bloom writes, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis”? King does, after all, describe his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s”. And there are numerous passages throughout his work – probably most pronouncedly in the words of writer Bill Denbrough in It – in which King expresses a serious disdain for academic knowledge and scholarship.

As Bloom would probably argue, consistency in style and tone, and complexity of form, are key elements underpinning any kind of aesthetic mastery. And it’s undeniable that King has produced a not-inconsiderable volume of poorly written and inconsistent work. Sometimes his novels warrant criticisms of pretentiousness, hackneyed style and tediously repetitive prose.

King may or may not be a great, or even good, writer. His more self-consciously serious stuff sometimes seems intolerable to me: kitsch is only fun if the attitude is fun. And some of his work ( Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Dolores Claiborne , for example) feels heavy-handed to the point of being virtually unreadable. Never mind – these works are frequently adapted into incredibly popular and incredibly dull films.

In any case, the debate continues to play out, with critics intermittently arguing for and against King’s writing. Dwight Allen, for example, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books that King creates one-dimensional characters in dull prose. In the same publication, Sarah Langan responded :

All of [King’s] novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. […] his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgement. […] No one except King challenges [Americans] so relentlessly, to be brave. To kill our monsters.

King is, undeniably, a juggernaut of commercial literary production – an industry unto himself, a literary and cinematic brand – who has written a handful of genuine horror genre masterpieces throughout his career.

Perhaps it’s in part this combination of prolific volume and intermittent brilliance that keeps me, like an addict, coming back for more.

Ultimately, though, I would suggest I like reading King for the same reason so many others do, a reason that accounts for his enduring popularity when better horror stylists (King’s contemporaries Clive Barker and Peter Straub , for example) have fallen by the wayside. And that’s his unprecedented capacity to tap into nostalgia.

Returning to King-world

Nearly 20 years after I gave up on Stephen King, in one of those random nostalgic moments that seem to populate his fictional world, my brother gave me Revival for Christmas.

King’s Frankensteinian novel, published in 2014, is about the aftermath of an encounter between a young boy and a Methodist minister fascinated by electricity. After years of mainly reading what is sometimes pretentiously called “literary” fiction, and mostly avoiding anything written after the 19th or very early 20th centuries, I returned to King-world.

And I was dazzled by what I found there, realising what I must have known as a kid: King is a superb storyteller. Much of his work is characterised by an infectiously energetic prose style, governed by a flair for simple but satisfying plotting and a supremely inventive imagination.

And – yep – I was stunned by his capacity to precisely render in prose, perhaps more acutely than any other contemporary writer, the confusing, often hokey and melodramatic, but always exciting images, emotions, and sensibilities of youth.

I realised there’s something brilliant, and totally inimitable, about King. Despite his work’s sometimes kitsch silliness (a hazard of the horror genre), despite the not uncommon misfires – and despite the absurdly voluminous output - King is able to authentically generate an atmosphere of nostalgia that taps into something at the very core of the pleasure of reading.

Read more: Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley's sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God

It: a masterpiece of nostalgia

His novel It is a case in point: a masterclass in narrative development through a nostalgic structure.

It – for anyone who hasn’t read it, or seen one of the three film adaptations – cuts between the adult lives and childhoods of a group of misfits, the “ Losers Club ”, who collectively band together to fight the evil of their town, Derry. That evil takes the form of a shape-shifting clown, Pennywise.

The Losers Club battled and banished Pennywise as kids, but now “it” has come back. The club members return from around the world to live up to their childhood promise: that if “it” ever returns, they, too, will return to fight “it”. The narrative cuts between characters, en route to Derry, as they recall forgotten passages from their childhood “it’s” return has forced them to remember.

So, the novel is structured around a nostalgic trope: adults literally remembering and reconstructing their childhood in the present. At the same time, the town Derry is developed by King according to a quintessentially nostalgic image of the American small town, recalling peak 1950s Americana. Think Grease : soda fountains, switchblades and quiffs. But behind closed doors, fathers abuse daughters, mothers keep their children sick, and a monster that assumes the form of whatever demon most terrifies you stalks the streets, killing and eating children.

The narrative architecture is starkly simple, sustaining a profound sense of dread in the reader. The characters remember a dreadful past, in a present-future they wish had never materialised. Perhaps nostalgia always contains shades of the dreadful, given its suggestion that one’s future is foreclosed, that all we have are memories of a better time: memories that only exist as memories.

In some of King’s work – Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, for example – nostalgia acts mainly as window dressing, functioning primarily as an aesthetic. But in It, nostalgia is neither incidental nor benign: it’s a way of exploring the impossibility of having to remember trauma .

Memory appears inevitably nostalgic, because it involves, for the characters, narrative reconstruction of childhood in the present. In the Derry library, for town librarian Mike Hanlon – the only Loser to remain in Derry as an adult (and the only one who didn’t battle It in the sewers as a child) - for example. Or for Ben Hanscom, an internationally successful architect, once the fat kid of the group, who flies back to Derry, drunk and asleep in first-class.

In this way, the novel functions as a kind of treatise on narrative itself. A grab bag of clichés from the horror playbook become legitimately terrifying for the children in the novel - they’re kids after all, and the cultural worlds of kids are often constructed around clichés – from mass-produced popular figures like the Wolf Man, to figures associated with the characters’ nightmarish personal traumas.

It’s a “coming of age” story with a vengeance - a metatext on the horrors of youth, of fitting in, metamorphosing into adulthood, and breaking free of one’s parents - and it inherently explores the ways we use horror stories (like fairytales) to come to terms with this.

As Adrian Daub, revisiting the novel on its 30-year anniversary, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016:

Anamnesis — remembering — is the central structuring device of It’s parallel plots: characters have to find out what they once did, and confront what on some level they already know. […] Perhaps all the kids who devoured It in the ’80s sensed that King had made their pre-adolescent mode of experiencing the world — that unique combination of vivid clarity and forgetfulness — its formal principle. […] All the friends, events, images, and feelings that we ever-so-gently cover in sand as we stumble into adulthood can startle us when we come face to face with them again, and these are the true source of It’s terror. What else have we hidden back there, we wonder uneasily?“

In It’s truly weird (over)length, in It’s oscillating moments of genius and stupidity, in It’s ambition – as King’s horror book about horror, the horror book to end all horror books – it is an American masterpiece. It captures everything incisive, deluded, cruel and sentimental about the popular American literary imagination.

Read more: Why do we find it so hard to move on from the 80s?

Reading as escape and connection

So why is nostalgia such a powerful affect in It, and in King’s work in general?

I think it taps into something at the heart of the process of reading novels. We sit with a novel and retreat from the world: an intensely solipsistic act. A novel sweeps us up into a fantasy image of things (no matter how distant or close to reality) and makes us feel, in our solitude, excitement about what’s to come – but also a faint melancholy in remembering we will soon have to leave this world.

It’s no surprise many people cry at the end of novels: we’ve made such a personal investment, then that world simply disappears, and all we’re left with are our memories of it. In our desire to return to this pleasurable state, we may feel compelled to borrow – or buy – another book.

But while reading a novel feels like a private act (as opposed to going to a movie or concert), there’s also always a sense we are connected to (and connecting with) some kind of cultural and historical continuum.

We read Dickens in our solitude, yet imagine we’re in Victorian England, connected across 150-odd years. Time and space seem collapsed into a vibrant, active present. Dickens speaks to us, but more significantly, the zeitgeist addresses us in a moving presence – perhaps we can cheat death, after all?

The structure of It (and much of King’s other work) reproduces what attracts many of us to reading fiction in the first place – an escape into a present that is at the same time a kind of memory-fantasy, governed by lingering nostalgia.

For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch , literature offers a utopian space in which we can transcend and transform the past and future, captured in the figure of heimat (meaning homeland – and appropriated in opposition to the term’s German nationalist use). Literature allows us to return to a mythic-nostalgic image of "home” – which we know has never actually existed. This nostalgic space opens the possibility of a better collective present and future.

Read more: The psychology behind why clowns creep us out

Long live the King!

There are definitely better, more controlled stylists than King in popular horror fiction. But their work is somehow more forgettable. King’s perpetual presence - as ringmaster, as media conglomerate, as relentless worker – is always in performance in his work.

You may find his style annoying, or his narratives hokey, but you will always recognise them as Stephen King. He has a flavour, and it ties his work together, good and bad. Much of it emanates from the man himself and his sheer love of writing and reading – dare I say it, of “literature”.

This is evident in his publishing history, but also in the forewords and reviews, and endorsements, he writes for writers he loves. The revival of interest in noir master Jim Thompson , for example, who had vanished into obscurity, seems to be at least in part down to King’s forewords to several of his books. And one wonders how much the Hard Case Crime imprint, which publishes hard-boiled crime novels in the flavour of those of the 1950s and 60s, relies on the success of King’s original crime novels written for them. How many forgotten masterpieces of noir literature have been brought back into print because King publishes with Hard Case? How many books have moved because a line from King is featured on the cover?

No other living horror writer has enjoyed King’s longevity. There’s no one whose monsters have lingered quite as long in the popular imagination, and in the imaginations of countless readers like me.

The literature we read as children and adolescents has a profound effect on our cultural and personal formation, shaping our becoming as adults. King’s worlds, where children struggle to shape their futures, draw upon our own, personal nostalgia. But they also tap into a kind of nostalgia that lies at the heart of novelistic pleasure itself.

Horror films and novels situate us in precarious situations - we identify with victims, sense their isolation as monsters attack, and feel their glory when and if the monsters are defeated.

We creep through the worlds of horror, watchful, alert, before returning to the safety of our bedrooms, but we’re always a little sad when we come back: that world may have been dominated by killer birds , or by hellish blood-sucking fiends , but it was an exciting, atmospheric - and beautifully solitary – place.

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Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More

The May 2011 issue of The Atlantic features the short story "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," by Stephen King. The story's origins are unusual. As part of The Atlantic 's package on "First Drafts," James Parker, The Atlantic 's entertainment columnist, talked to King about how the story came into being, about King's creative process, about the state of short fiction today, and about the relative merits of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest as background music to write to. They spoke on April 1.

James Parker: Would you mind filling our readers in just a little bit on the back story to "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"?

Stephen King: Every year my son Owen and I have a bet on the NCAA March Madness Tournament, and last year the stakes were that the loser would have to write a story [with a title] the winner gave to him. And I lost. Except I really won, because I got this story that I really like. The title that he gave me for the story was "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," because he'd just a read a piece saying that the guy was still alive and he's still writing even though he's 95 or 96 years old.

So I thought about it a lot--believe me, I thought about it a lot. The tournament was over by the first of April that year, and I mulled that over in my mind until about July. So there was a period of about four months when I thought, "What am I gonna write, what am I gonna write?" Usually you get an idea yourself and then you write a story -- you don't think of a title and then write a story to go with it. So it was kind of an ass-backwards kind of thing. And my first thought was to write a story about a guy in a mental asylum who believed that he was keeping certain writers alive by brainpower. And it was going to be kind of a funny story, and there was going to be a list of writers that he'd gotten tired of and that he had allowed to die.

SK: Like J. D. Salinger. When he finally decides J. D. Salinger's never going to publish another book, it's kind of like, "Fuck it! Move on!" So I had this idea, and then one day there was a terrible motorcycle crash about a mile from our house and a woman died and about two days later, you know how it is, the crosses started to appear and the flowers and that sort of thing, and I started to think about that, and this ["Herman Wouk is Still Alive"] is the story that came out of it.

JP: Dare I say this to Stephen King, but it's a very Stephen King sort of a setup, isn't it? I mean the bet, and the random title -- if you'd written a story about this happening to a writer, then the story that he wrote would have acquired some sort of prophetic power, or it would have overtaken him in some way. Wouldn't it?

SK: That's not a bad idea, actually. That's not a bad idea at all. I like that.

JP: Well you've written books like that, haven't you?

SK: Yeah, I've written some stuff like that, and I'm actually thinking of something like that right now. I don't want to spill the beans on it. That kind of thing is very liberating, actually, it gives you a chance to stretch out and do something different. So I like it, I like it a lot. It turned out that there was an actual accident on Mother's Day in Maine about seven years ago where a bunch of people, mostly children, were killed. You know how it happens when you write a story or when you start to get an idea, all sorts of different elements kind of pull together. That's the real magic of the job.

JP: And is that sort of suggestibility, or availability to coincidence, and to these pokings and prods that come out of reality and into your imagination -- is that something you cultivate? Or is it something that you have at different levels of intensity at different times? I mean, how does that work for you?

SK: I don't think you can force it. I think that sometimes you have a certain ... Well in this case I had a job to do. We made the bet and I wanted to come through with it, that's the honorable thing to do. So I think that probably my unconscious was looking for something to pitch upon. That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals. I'll give you an example. The other day I went out to the mailbox at the end of the road and there was a flyer in there, one of these things where they give you coupons and you get a dollar off mouthwash or makeup or whatever, and on the back there's a number of pictures of children, missing children. It says: "Have you seen me?" It's just a sort of throwaway -- you get it and you don't really look at it. And I was looking at it on the walk back from the mailbox, and I thought: "What if there was a guy who got one of these and one of the pictures started to talk to him and say 'I was killed and I'm buried here in this location or that location, in a gravel pit or stuffed into a culvert ...'"? And I thought: "You know, a guy like that, who could find bodies, would be under a lot of suspicion from the police. And there's a story there."

JP: Yes. Yes!

SK: So that's kind of the way it works.

JP: Are the ideas, or the suggestions, still coming at the same pace?

SK: No. I don't think so. And in a way that's a relief.

JP: I was going to ask that.

SK: In the old days, it would seem like ideas were crammed in like people in an elevator. And my head was sometimes a very noisy place to be. The other thing that happens with that is, say you're working on something and it's going along pretty well, and two or three ideas occur, and they're all yelling "You should write this! You should write this!" It's almost like being married and all of a sudden your life is full of beautiful women. You have to stay faithful to what you're working on. But it can be uncomfortable.

JP: So do you keep them in a different file, or ...?

SK: No. I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own.

JP: So this awful thing of the writer who goes, "Oh, I had a great idea but I forgot it!" -- you don't really subscribe to that.

SK: No. Because that wasn't a great idea. If you can't remember it, it was a terrible idea.

JP: Well let's go to the story itself, which I read today. It's such a gut-punch of a thing -- it couldn't have been anything other than a short story, right?

SK: Yeah I think it's only a short-story idea. The motorcycle accident made me think of this terrible crash that happened on Mother's Day -- these two women, and they were going upstate with a whole bunch of kids, and there were eight or nine fatalities, and the van was going over a hundred miles an hour, and nobody knows why. Okay? Were they arguing? Were they maybe on a cell phone? There was no alcohol involved. And I think sometimes we write a story to try and figure out what happened, to our own satisfaction.

JP: One of the things that you seem to enjoy is sort of mixing, or actually in this case colliding, different categories of experience.

SK: Walks of life.

JP: Right. I mean, here you have these two poets who've both had these rich, fulfilling lives, even if they're waning a little bit now, and then these stomped-on women ...

SK: What I wanted to do is: You've got two people who are intellectuals, who have made a career out of using language to exalt the human experience. To me that's what poetry does. It takes ordinary life, it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that's what you get. When the Philip Larkins or the James Dickeys do that, you get something that is heightened, that says to us that reality is finer and more beautiful and more mysterious than we could ever possibly express ourselves. Which is why we need poetry. And then on the other hand you've got these women whose lives are the absolute opposite of poetry. Who are living below the margin, below the radar, this kind of desperate life, and it seems to me that when they look at each other, and take this unspoken decision to just end it, not only for themselves but for their children, who are going to have lives that are just the same -- that's almost like a poetic epiphany. That moment. Their deaths are a kind of poem. It's an awful poem, it's an awful decision -- nobody's saying that this suicide is the right thing to do -- but if you read the story and respond to the story, you can say, "Well maybe for them at the time it was the only thing to do ..."

JP: I'll tell you what I responded to. In the last two paragraphs, the tears sort of jumped to my eyes, but I realized that it wasn't the deaths, oddly enough, that I was responding to -- it was the bravery of the old poet, staggering around.

SK: Oh yes. I love that little moment there ... when I thought to myself: Well, these are poets. And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language -- it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives, that these women or their children would speak in their daily lives. And at a moment like this the old lady poet turns and says, "What the fuck does it look like?" Because that's all you can say. Poetry falls apart. In that sense it's not a very cheerful story. The woman is almost saying "There's no language that describes how terrible this is."

JP: But on the other hand, they are still present at the scene, the poets. I mean, they are witnessing to this thing ...

JP: I mean, that was my takeaway -- that in the instant, there are no words for it, but later, perhaps ...

SK: I'm not very good at analyzing my own work, but I would say that probably this is an event that neither one of these people would ever write about in their own poetry, because it's beyond poetry. It almost negates poetry. But I think it's tough to overanalyze a short story, because they don't stand up to it.

JP: I don't know. I think if you drive into a reader that hard, they're going to be left with all sorts of things to think about and process, right?

SK: Yeah, but when fiction works for me it works on an emotional level first and an intellectual level second. If you say that tears jumped to your eyes, even if they were metaphorical tears --

JP: They weren't. They were physical tears.

JP: I sniffed a little bit.

SK: (laughs) That's good. Well, James, it was all made up.

JP: Martin Amis has that line about how the writer dies twice -- first the talent, then the body, or however it goes. This story would seem to deny that. Herman Wouk's still writing!

SK: Undoubtedly. And that's why the poets are old in the story, because I wanted to be able to say: These are people who were young and roistering --

JP: That, I really liked. The fact that he was a broad-shouldered dude, I loved that detail.

SK: Kinda like some of the Beats that came out of San Francisco, I really kind of wanted that, and the idea of the passage of time and now he's this skinny old man and she's had all these lovers. But the thing is, though, they're still working, and Herman Wouk is still working. And you know, I remember very clearly, probably10 or 12 years ago, I was at a bookstore in my hometown in Maine and I walked in and there on the new-novel table was this book A Hole In Texas by Herman Wouk, and I was just... I was slain, James! I thought to myself: "What a hero! He's still working!"

JP: More generally, are you still as pessimistic about the short story as you seemed to be in that New York Times essay that you wrote?

SK: Ah well ...

JP: Or was that like a cranky moment?

SK: Well it wasn't really a cranky moment. I mean, it's a question of who reads them. And I've got a perspective of being a short-story reader going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time there were magazines all over the place. There were so many magazines publishing short fiction that nobody could keep up with it. They were just this open mouth going "Feed me! Feed me!" The pulps alone, the 15- and 20-cent pulps, published like 400 stories a month, and that's not even counting the so-called "slicks" -- Cosmopolitan , American Mercury . All those magazine published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction. And I've always felt like I wanted to write for a wide audience. And I think that that's an honorable thing to want to do and I also think it's an honorable thing to say, "I've got something that will only appeal to a small slice of the audience". And there are little magazines that publish in that sense -- but a lot of the people who read those magazines are only reading them to see what they publish so that they can publish their own stories.

SK: It isn't a general thing. You don't see people on airplanes with their magazines folded open to Part 7 of the new Norman Mailer. He's dead of course, but you know what I mean. And all of these e-books and this computer stuff, it kind of muddies the water and obscures the fact that people just don't read short fiction. And when you fall out of the habit of doing it, you lose the knack, you lose the ability to sit down for 45 minutes like you can with this story and get a little bit of entertainment.

JP: Get a little buzz.

SK: A little buzz! That's great.

JP: It is odd, though, if you think about it, that with all the speeding-up that we're being told about, and the dwindling of the attention span and all that, that people would rather chomp their way through a 400-pager than just get zapped by a little story ...

SK: And so many of the 400-pagers are disposable in themselves. When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: "These are basically books for people who don't want to read at all." It just kind of passes through the system. It's like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any part of you. I don't want to name names, but we know who we're talking about.

JP: Are you still listening to music when you write?

SK: I listen to music when I rewrite now. I don't listen to music when I compose anymore. I can't. I've lost the ability to multitask that way!

JP: You used to listen to Metallica, right?

SK: Metallica, Anthrax. I still listen to those guys ... There's a band called the Living Things that I like a lot. Very loud group. I never cared for Ozzy very much.

JP: I'm obsessed with Black Sabbath.

SK: No, no. They don't really work for me. "I AM IRON MAN!"

JP: That doesn't do it?

SK: No. Judas Priest, now ...

JP: I love Judas Priest.

SK: Did you ever hear their cover of "Diamonds and Rust"?

JP: Yes. I love it. Now: In your grand maturity ...

SK: (laughs) I don't feel very mature.

JP: ... what is your favorite part of the creative process?

SK: It's still when you sit down and you get a really good day, and something happens that you don't expect and you just take off, you just go off on the material -- I love that, when that happens.

JP: How often does it happen?

SK: I don't knock myself out as often as I used to. But often enough so that you know it when it happens. In the new book, which is called 11/22/63 , I was writing about a high-school variety show and I just went off. Terrific. Lot of fun.

JP: And how does it feel to have an unwritten book inside your brain?

SK: I never started a book that I expected to finish. Because it always feels like a job that's much too big for a little guy like me. Thomas Williams -- do you know his work at all?

JP: No, I don't.

SK: He was a wonderful, wonderful novelist. He wrote a novel called The Hair of Harold Roux , which is one of my favorite books, about a writer named Aaron Benham. Benham says that when he sits down to write a book it's like being on a dark plain with one little tiny fire. And somebody comes and stands by that fire to warm themselves. And then more people come. And those are the characters in your book, and the fire is whatever inspiration you have. And they feed the fire, and it gets big, and eventually it burns out because the book is at an end. It's always felt that way to me. When you start, it's very cold, an impossible task. But then maybe the characters start to take on a little bit of life, or the story takes a turn that you don't expect ... With me that happens a lot because I don't outline, I just have a vague notion. So it's always felt like less of a made thing and more of a found thing. That's exciting. That's a thrill.

JP: And how do you keep your energy up?

SK: I don't know. Eat three meals a day and sleep eight hours a night. I read a lot. I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

JP: Well with that, we come to the end of my questions.

SK: I'm delighted that The Atlantic is publishing the story. It's a dream, because I can remember sending stories to The Atlantic when I was a teenager, and then in my 20s and getting the rejection slips. So this feels like a real benchmark. It's a great thing.

Stephen King Revisited

Essays, memories, and even a little history…, racing the king by wrath james white.

Beginning with the very first book I ever read, I developed the habit (or perhaps compulsion is a better word) of picking a subject matter and reading every book written on that subject in the three local libraries I had access to—Lovett Memorial Library, Northwest Regional Library, and the little library at Lingelbach Elementary School. The first subject I latched onto, like many six-year-old boys, was dinosaurs.

My grandmother, Luvader Logan, bought me my very first dinosaur book. I was instantly obsessed. Over the course of that year, I read every book in all three libraries on prehistoric beasts. Then came modern animals, both wild and domesticated, then paranormal phenomena, aliens, and then the Tolkien trilogy. Then I read Firestarter .

Firestarter was the book that began my love affair with the writings of Stephen King. I was eleven or twelve when I first read it back in 1982. I’ve read it seven or eight times since. What fascinated me, captivated me, about that book was it required far less suspension of disbelief than reading about hobbits and trolls. I believed Firestarter . I believed in pyrokinesis and mental domination. I wasn’t suspending my disbelief. Stephen King had actually convinced me these things were possible, at least for the duration of the novel, and that completely awed me. So, my new quest was to read everything Stephen King had ever written.

The problem, however, was that I had a late start, and the good Mr. King was still writing. This was the early eighties, when he was throwing down six thousand words a day and cranking out two to three books a year. But I was on a mission.

I imagined we were in a competition, that he was in on this crazy game with me. I read Cujo and Salem’s Lot . He wrote Christine and Pet Sematary . I read Carrie , The Stand , The Dead Zone , and Cycle of the Werewolf . He wrote The Talisman . I read Christine and Pet Sematary . He wrote It , Misery , and The Tommyknockers . It was a race I was determined to win. I would not be denied.

In one year, I read Night Shift , The Talisman , The Shining , The Dead Zone , Different Seasons , Eyes of The Dragon , and Skeleton Crew . I even convinced my high school English teacher to allow me to read It instead of Julius Caesar because it was “more relevant to my development as a writer in today’s market.”

I was catching him. No one, not even the wildly prolific Mr. Stephen King, could write faster than I could read. And, somewhere between 1987 and 1988, right before graduating from the Philadelphia High School of the Creative and Performing Arts, I caught up. I had read every Stephen King novel written up to that point (with the exception of The Dark Tower ), or so I thought. That’s when my then best friend and fellow Creative Writing major told me about “The Bachman Books.”

“The what?”

“The Bachman Books? Come on, you know. Stephen King wrote a bunch of books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. They talked about it in Writer’s Digest a couple years ago.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

What fuckery was this? I had been tricked, fooled, bamboozled! Mr. King hadn’t played fair. I’d read everything he had written to that point, even the new stuff, while keeping up with my school work and all my other reading and writing assignments. Even as his books grew longer and longer, I’d still managed to read them all. But he had been slipping books past me the entire time. I was pissed. Unreasonably so. But I wasn’t ready to give up. So, I read Rage , Roadwork , The Long Walk , Thinner , and finally, The Running Man .

The Bachman novels were noticeably different. They were bleaker. The heroes weren’t terribly heroic. Ben Richards, for example, was kind of racist, sexist, and homophobic. The n-word fell from his lips too effortlessly, as did “faggot” and other unflattering terms. Yet, I knew guys like him. Uncivilized, crude, anti-authoritarian, yet intelligent and possessed of a bravery born of hopelessness and desperation. And we were all a little racist, sexist, and homophobic back then. They were less enlightened times. I look back on some of the ideas and opinions I held in the 80s and cringe. Ben Richards wasn’t a great guy, but I could relate to him. He was from the streets, just like me.

I grew up in a part of Philadelphia that guys who looked like Stephen King couldn’t walk safely through at night. Yet, I was betting on my ability to tell a scary story to get me out. My odds weren’t terribly better than Ben Richards’s odds of avoiding the hunters for 30 days.

The cops in my neighborhood were as brutal and corrupt as those chasing Ben Richards. You could bribe a Philly cop out of a traffic ticket with five bucks back in the 80s, and everyone knew you got the best weed from cops. They would take it from white college kids, let them off with a warning, and sell it back to us. You wanted an untraceable firearm? Buy it from a cop. That’s what Philly was like in the 80s. Those of us who knew how to navigate all that corruption and criminality did okay. Others? Not so much.

The folks who lived in the more affluent neighborhoods like Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill were as oblivious and indifferent to how the rest of us lived as Amelia Williams was to the lives of the contestants on The Running Man , plucked from the slums to die for the amusement of the well-to-do while maintaining the facade that they had a fair chance.

Just like the wonderful folks who reply “All Lives Matter” as a way to silence those proclaiming the equal value of Black American lives, Amelia and her ilk fervently believed the contestants they saw slaughtered on the “Free-Vee” were hardened criminals, anarchists, and murderers rather than poor people trying to scrape out a living any way they could, reduced to bartering their lives for the lives of their families. They believed the underclass were all animals who would have come for their posh insulated lives, destroyed their entire way of life, raped their women, and murdered their kids had they not been stopped. Their deaths were justified by how and where they lived.

The poor are dangerous. This wasn’t just an idea manufactured by Mr. King to give his novel more drama. This is how the upper class always looked upon us on the bottom. We were dangerous, subhuman, savages, impossible to empathize with, unworthy of sympathy. If we only worked harder, we wouldn’t be in the situations we were in. In their eyes, our poverty was proof of our laziness and poor character. The same dehumanization that allowed the upper-class citizens of King’s dystopian future to watch poor people murdered for sport is what has allowed that same class of people to watch people of color in this country murdered by police while justifying and excusing it.

“He shouldn’t have run.”

“He shouldn’t have resisted.”

“She shouldn’t have talked back.”

“She should have followed the officer’s instructions quicker.”

“He must have been doing something wrong, or he wouldn’t have been stopped.”

Over the years, King’s vision of 2028 has come to me again and again in sudden bursts of déjà vu as reality shows like Cops , America’s Most Wanted , and even The Ultimate Fighting Championships hit the airwaves. When I was twenty-four, awaiting the birth of my first child while working as a bouncer at a nightclub, I watched the very first UFC and began training to enter it. I fought in No-Holds-Barred tournaments all over The Bay Area for a few hundred dollars to buy food and clothing for my wife and son.

When the economy imploded in 2009 and I lost my ninety-thousand-dollar-a-year job as a construction manager, I considered coming out of retirement, at forty years of age, and taking a few fights just to put food on the table. I was older, slower, with joints that ached with arthritis and injury from all the abuse I had put my body through in the ring and the cage, but I was ready to risk my life to feed my family. I knew exactly how Ben Richards must have felt.

Luckily, it didn’t come to that. I sold a few manuscripts instead. But who knows what may have happened if no one purchased my novels. If the country was ruled by an omnipotent TV network, and the only way to take care of my family was to enter contests like “Treadmill to Bucks,” “Swim The Crocodiles,” “Run For Your Guns,” or “The Running Man.” See, the wonderful thing about Stephen King’s writing, just as I’d discovered almost forty years prior when I was an eleven-year-old kid reading Firestarter for the first time, was that it didn’t require much suspension of disbelief to imagine myself making the choices Ben Richards made. I was convinced I would do it. Given the choice between letting my family starve or running from an entire country eager to kill me, for a slim chance at a better life for my loved ones, I would have gone out the same way Ben Richards did, grinning and giving the establishment the finger.

Oh, and if you’re wondering if I ever caught up, if I ever managed to read everything Stephen King has ever written, I didn’t. But the game isn’t over.

The complete list of the books to be read can be found on the  Stephen King Books In Chronological Order For Stephen King Revisited Reading Lists  page. To be notified of new posts and updates via email, please sign-up using the box on the right side or the bottom of this site.

WRATH JAMES WHITE is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.

Wrath is the author of such extreme horror classics as THE RESURRECTIONIST (now a major motion picture titled “Come Back To Me”) SUCCULENT PREY, and its sequel PREY DRIVE, HORRIBLE GODS, YACCUB’S CURSE, 400 DAYS OF OPPRESSION, SACRIFICE, VORACIOUS, TO THE DEATH, THE REAPER, SKINZZ, EVERYONE DIES FAMOUS IN A SMALL TOWN, THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND SINS, HIS PAIN, POPULATION ZERO and many others. He is the co-author of TERATOLOGIST co-written with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, SOMETHING TERRIBLE co-written with his son Sultan Z. White, ORGY OF SOULS co-written with Maurice Broaddus, HERO and THE KILLINGS both co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, POISONING EROS co-written with Monica J. O’Rourke, among others.

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Roadwork Revisited by J.D. Barker

I purposely haven ’ t read the essays by the other authors in this book. I wanted to approach this with a clean slate, no preconceived notions, no roadmap. Most likely, that means I ’ m doing it all wrong. If I am, I apologize for that. I ’ ve never been good at following directions. After (God, has it really been) forty-plus years of reading King and Bachman, I get the distinct feeling that King tends to follow most directions in life while Bachman is more likely to scoff when someone tells him what to do, take their suggestions under advisement, then do whatever the hell he wanted to do before that someone rudely interrupted him.

We all have that inner voice, the devil camped out on our shoulder whispering in our ear. The difference here is King made a conscious decision to grant his life, set him free. He handed him a Black Beauty pencil and pad, pointed at an armchair across the room, and said, “ You do your thing, and I ’ ll be over here doing mine. Curious to see what you come up with. ”

The weekend psychologist in me has often wondered how exactly that worked, but it did. And the odd thing is, there are distinct differences between the two. Voice, cadence, sentence structure … the stories themselves. Bachman will say things King wouldn ’ t dare. Those differences grew over the years. In many ways, this is a testament to King ’ s ability to tell a story, to create a character. Bachman started as an idea on the page and eventually became someone else living in the house. I can see the two of them fighting over the remote, because they wouldn ’ t want to watch the same thing. Tabitha is probably the real hero of the story. She somehow managed to keep them both in line.

As an author, I get it. The moment you write a book, everyone wants to tag you with a label and stuff you into the appropriate genre box. Heaven forbid you write fast and gum up the publisher ’ s production line with too many titles. Using a pseudonym granted King the ability to skirt both those problems. He ’ s also used John Swithen and Beryl Evans. Although the two of them were more like passing acquaintances, while Bachman was akin to that old friend who popped up every few years, crashed on the couch for a bit, then vanished again after leaving a note on the coffee table with a few bucks to cover groceries.

Just as the members of a successful band sometimes do side projects, Bachman, I imagine, was also a much-needed outlet. King ’ s books were successful right out of the gate. Bachman ’ s got relegated to the back of the rack, and that kind of anonymity offers a lot of freedom.

I ’ ve had Roadwork up on the shelf for some time. I ’ ve got a first edition paperback with Bachman on the cover, no mention of King. I do remember knowing King wrote it when I bought it, so I imagine I picked it up sometime around 1985, most likely at the long defunct used bookstore in Englewood, Florida. I would have been fourteen at the time, having just moved to the sunshine state from Illinois. I finished reading it on 2/10/1986, again on 10/19/2009, and most recently on 3/20/2020. I know this, because anytime I read a book, I sign and date it in the back—a habit I started back when I was ten after finding a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at a garage sale with signatures and dates on the last page going back almost a hundred years. When I first saw that, it made me realize how books live a quiet life of their own—read, borrowed, sold, given—most will outlive us. The book you ’ re reading right now is only visiting. Where will it go when you ’ re done? Up on a shelf? Off into the world? Or will it vanish with the flick of a power switch? I guess that ’ s up to you, but if it ’ s a physical copy and someone picks it up a century from now, wouldn ’ t it be cool if they saw your signature and date?

Roadwork is about a man named Barton George Dawes, who learns a highway extension is about to be built in his backyard, literally. His house will be demolished. His neighbors’ homes. Even the laundromat where he works is on the chopping block. Someone else ’ s idea of progress is set to dismantle his life. Bart doesn ’ t take the news well. He ’ s compensated financially for the house but doesn ’ t buy a replacement. He ’ s tasked with finding a new location for the laundromat but lets the deal fall apart. When his wife learns about the numerous balls he ’ s dropped, she leaves him. Bart is not in a good place, and led by his anger, begins exploring ways to put an end to the construction project, with very little consideration of what that means for him.

The story struck home with me for a silly reason. Several years before, back in Illinois, my friends and I considered a real-life plot similar to the one in the book. My parents had bought a forest and built our family home in the middle when I was still in diapers. That forest was our childhood playground for the years that followed—riding ATVs, playing capture the flag, hide and seek—everything we did took place in those woods. Around the time I was thirteen, my friends and I learned that someone bought the sod farm next door to our forest and planned to build a shopping mall there. That night at dinner, my parents told my sister and me the same company made them an offer on the forest, and they planned to accept. Our world came apart. For the weeks that followed, every kid in the neighborhood had a singular thought—how do we stop this from happening? There were talks of dynamite, sabotage. We even considered telling people the forest was built on an old Indian graveyard, land that had to be preserved. That was probably our best idea. None of it played out, though. Kids don ’ t have access to dynamite. Sabotage is scary. And when children tell stories of old, haunted burial grounds, adults shrug it off and refer back to these crazy things called “ town records ” that held no mention of such a thing.

The sod farm sold.

My parents’ land sold.

Our house sold, and we made the move to Florida.

They broke ground on the shopping mall about the same time I found Roadwork in that old bookstore and read the jacket copy. So the first time I met Barton George Dawes, I think I related to him in a roundabout way. I understood his frustration and anger. My shopping mall was his road, and my teenage brain wanted to see him succeed. This was a time when Stallone and Schwarzenegger ruled the box office and the A-Team dominated television. Problems were solved with explosions and gunshots. Shouldn ’ t Bart be allowed his revenge? Damn right, he should.

What would Rambo do?

Ah, the eighties.

I ’ ve always liked the way books take on different meanings if you read them at different times in your life. That ’ s all I really remember from that early read. Bart ’ s drive, the action stuff. I remember him being horribly pissed off, trying to do something about it, and failing miserably.

I wouldn ’ t pluck it down off the bookshelf again until I was thirty-eight and fast approaching my first midlife crisis (yes, you can have more than one). I was trapped in a job I hated (I really wanted to be a writer), a marriage slowly moving toward the finish line (she didn ’ t understand why I wanted to write when I had a real job), and my father had recently passed away with cancer.

I ’ ve always read a lot, and a handful of books had made my shortlist of repeat-worthy:

All the classics—Dickens, Golding, Orwell, Brontë , Stoker, Twain, Austen, Vonnegut, Bradbury …

Anything by Thomas Harris.

Anything by Stephen King.

Life ’ s too short to read a bad book, but there ’ s certainly enough time to go back and revisit the good ones a couple times. For every three or four new books I read, I ’ ll go back and pull one of the above down and give it another look. In October 2009, Roadwork was back on deck, and I nearly missed it. It ’ s a small paperback and was tucked in with the B ’ s rather than the several shelves of King books I ’ d accumulated at that point. I ’ d completely forgotten about it. It ’ s not one of his bestsellers. I ’ m not sure it was even a mediocre seller. I barely remembered the story, and I think that ’ s what compelled me to give it another go.

About twenty pages in, I remember thinking, This is King, but it isn ’ t . His innate ability to develop a character in only a handful of sentences was there. The inner thoughts and structure that completely hooked me in Gerald’s Game  were there, too. But this didn ’ t feel like a King book. There was no supernatural element. He used the phrase “ a long second, ” the bastard cousin of “ a long moment, ” something he ’ s complained about on Twitter when found in other books. There was horror, but this particular horror had a strange sense of realness to it. One I found unnerving. Unlike most King books, this story could happen. Easily. I personally find that far more frightening than some of the other night-bumpers he ’ s created over the years. Bart was a monster. Bart could be living right across the street. Bart might be ahead of you in line at the supermarket. Behind you at the gas pump. This world is filled with Bart s —we ’ ve seen them in the headlines on the regular.

When my younger self read this book the first time, it was the action that grabbed me. This time, twenty-some years later, it was that human element. Bart was in a bad place. He went dark, and then he only got worse. His high school yearbook said he was the class clown, but life had thrown one horrible event at him after another, and this rapid fire of suffering changed him, beat him down. You can feel the pain in his thoughts, his every action. Again, I related to Bart, not because of what he wanted to do but because of what he had been through.

I later learned King lost his mother to cancer around the same time he wrote this book, and while my younger self wouldn ’ t have noticed the influence of something like that in an author ’ s work, there was no denying it here. Bart bled for him. When I closed the cover on that second read, I thought about the loss of my father a lot. I missed him. On that second read, I found myself wondering about Olivia, too. The young girl who spends a night with Bart before thumbing her way to Nevada in search of something better. I didn ’ t remember her from my first read, but by this time in my life, I had known my share of Olivias. I ’ d seen girls just like her get on a bus all bright-eyed, only to return years later with the sheen gone. I can ’ t help but wonder if she ever came back and learned just what Bart did.

Fast-forward to 2020. I received an e-mail from Brian Freeman of Cemetery Dance, asking if I ’ d like to read Roadwork and contribute an essay to Stephen King Revisited . For the third time in my life, I reached for that tattered paperback and settled into a comfortable chair. Much had changed in my own life since my last read—I met and married the most incredible woman. I write full time now. And we have a little girl. Again, I had changed. While the book itself was comfortingly familiar, one particular scene jumped out at me, one I didn ’ t recall from my first two visits with Barton George Dawes. He goes up into the attic of his soon- to -be demolished home and opens a box of his son ’ s clothing, sifts through the contents. His son, Charlie, had died of a brain tumor.

I nearly closed the book at that point and put it away.

I could hear my own little girl laughing with her mother in the other room, and just the thought of losing a child was too much. It wasn ’ t something I wanted in my head. Not ever.

My younger (non-parent) self had glossed right over this scene, not once but twice.

That is the magic of a good book.

While the words don ’ t change, the meaning, their impact, might. It ’ s one of the main reasons I revisit the good ones.

Roadwork is dark. It ’ s unforgiving.

It ’ s one of the good ones .

If your reading of King has been limited to the big hitters, pick this one up and give it a shot. You ’ ll find hints of the author he ’ d later become, but more importantly, you ’ ll see where he came from. This is Springsteen before the Nebraska album , and every note hits home.

J.D. Barker is an international bestselling American author whose work has been broadly described as suspense thrillers, often incorporating elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction, and the supernatural. Find him on the web at jdbarker.com

Richard Chizmar’s Latest Project: GWENDY’S BUTTON BOX co-written with Stephen King

As most of you probably know by now, Richard Chizmar hasn’t had a lot of time to write his essay for The Talisman (although he promises it is on the way!) because he’s been busy writing and then promoting his new novella, Gwendy’s Button Box, which he co-wrote with Stephen King!

If this is news to you, a great way to catch-up is to read this story in  Entertainment Weekly : Stephen King made a frightening proposal with Gwendy’s Button Box: Write a story with him.

The Eyes of the Dragon Revisited by Joseph Maddrey

What really got me was the author’s voice. Stephen King conveyed a sense of awe about his fictional world, constantly dropping hints that there were countless stories within his story. It was as if the world of his imagination was comprised of fictional fractals. Even more importantly, he expressed a contagious curiosity about his characters. I felt like he knew them all as real, flesh-and-blood people and cared about every move and every decision they made. As a result I cared about them too, and I quickly realized that this myth was not really about dungeons and dragons, but about human relationships—particularly the relationships between two fathers and two sons.

King Roland, the biological father of Peter and Thomas, is essentially a good man—but weak. Prince Peter is a good man like his father, but strong like his mother. Prince Thomas is weak like his father, and thus susceptible to the manipulation of a surrogate father-figure named Flagg, who is strong but evil. King assures us, however, that Thomas is NOT evil like Flagg…. And it was this assurance that resonated with me as an eleven-year-old boy. » Read more

Revisiting The Eyes of the Dragon by Richard Chizmar

THAT WAS THEN…

Well, this should be an easy one.

Roadwork was the first of the pair, and despite its overwhelmingly dark nature and (at times) rough prose, I greatly enjoyed that initial reading and regretted not doing so earlier.

And so now, ladies and gents, we come to the final Stephen King book I’ve somehow managed to never crack open: The Eyes of the Dragon .

My reasoning these past nearly thirty years was simple (and clearly misguided; but more on that later): Eyes of the Dragon, huh? It sounds a little too fantasy-oriented for my tastes. Castles. Dragons. Kings and Queens. Heck, there are probably a dozen characters with names I can’t even pronounce. And elves, I bet you anything there are elves running around a dark forest. And fairies living up in the treetops. And…

…and no thanks. I’ll pass for now and get around to it one day. When I have nothing else tempting to read.

But I never did. » Read more

The Two Princes by Bev Vincent

By the age of thirteen, King’s daughter, Naomi, was an avid reader but hadn’t read any of his books [1] , even though her younger brother, Joe, had already read two. Her mother pushed her to read some horror with the idea that it would be another way for her to know her father. However, she made it clear to him that she had “very little interest in my vampires, Ghoulies and slushy crawling things.” So, as he wrote in a letter for Viking Press [2] , “I decided that if the mountain would not go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.”

He started working on the story, originally called The Napkins , in their house in western Maine. He wrote on a yellow legal pad in front of a woodstove while a screaming northeaster blew snow across the frozen lake outside. King had recently been working on The Talisman with Peter Straub, so the fantasy land of the Territories was fresh in his mind. He wrote The Eyes of the Dragon at the same time as he was writing Misery , working on one in the morning and the other at night, completing the first draft in 1983.

Naomi, he admits, took hold of the manuscript with a marked lack of enthusiasm, but he was rewarded. The story kidnapped her and the only thing wrong with it, she told him later, was that she didn’t want it to end. » Read more

A Stony Heart by Stewart O’Nan

Of all Stephen King’s early novels, Pet Sematary is the simplest and direst. A sustained riff on W.W. Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw,” it cleaves to its twisted source. From the very beginning the reader knows the story: someone is going to die, and someone who can’t bear to let that loved one go will make a desperate bargain to raise him from the dead.  What happens then—the awful complications—is what the reader wants to see.

Was there ever a balder promise? And by 1983, King’s constant readers didn’t have to wonder if he’d balk at killing a child. Just two years before, the author who’d spared Mark Petrie in ‘Salem’s Lot and Danny Torrance in The Shining had already crossed that line in Cujo.

Set-up, build-up, payoff. Basic storytelling. In this case, we think we know the set-up and build-up. The author can throw variations at us, and delay, which he does, introducing a dying student who warns Louis to steer clear of the Pet Sematary, later using the family cat, Church, as a test case for its powers, but ultimately a child must die. Early on it feels as if King is running a subtle shell game, making us guess which one it will be, with both Gage, the adorable toddler, and Ellie, the needy kindergartener, slipping away unnoticed from their distracted parents.  When the accident inevitably happens, it’s a shock, mainly because of how it’s presented. » Read more

Revisiting Pet Sematary by Richard Chizmar

I can’t remember when I first read Pet Sematary or where I was when I first read it (unusual for me). All I really remember is the story , and my intense reaction to it.

So…I was young. That much I know. Brand shiny new to the perils of adulthood. Wide-eyed, unmarried, and childless.

And still Pet Sematary destroyed me.

‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie and The Shining had thrilled me and scared me – but Pet Sematary was different. Once things went bad (and this happened quickly by King standards; only about a third of the way into the book), they not only stayed bad, they kept getting worse. Much worse. The rest of the book was a dark spiral and there were no reprieves to be found anywhere. The story was grim and unrelenting and profoundly unpleasant…yet I couldn’t stop reading.

King spends the first third of Pet Sematary introducing and establishing a fairly small (for him) cast of characters and a wonderful sense of place. Ludlow, Maine is the kind of small, picturesque New England town so many of us wish we had grown up in, and the Creeds and the Crandalls are the kind of folks we wish we had grown up across the street from: kind, big-hearted, interesting, companionable folks with a real sense of friendship and loyalty. » Read more

A Man’s Heart Is Stonier by Bev Vincent

In 1978, Stephen King was invited to be writer in residence at the English department of his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono. He moved his family into a rented house on a major highway in Orrington. The heavy traffic included transports heading to and from a nearby chemical plant. A new neighbor warned the Kings to keep their pets and children away from this road, which had “used up a lot of animals.” [1] In support of this claim, the Kings discovered a burial ground not far from the house, with “Pets Sematary” written on a sign in a childish hand. Among its residents: dogs, cats, birds, and a goat.

The road almost “used up” the Kings’ youngest son, too. Owen was about eighteen months old when he wandered dangerously close to the highway. To this day, King isn’t sure whether he knocked Owen down before he reached the highway as a tanker approached or if the boy tripped over his own feet. Owen had been born with an unusually large head, and the Kings had already agonized over the possibility of losing him to hydrocephalus. This near miss was an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of their children. » Read more

Revisiting Cycle of the Werewolf by Richard Chizmar

Cycle of the Werewolf was yet another Carol’s Used Bookstore find for me. I had somehow completely missed the spring 1985 release, so when I stumbled upon a used copy of the Signet trade paperback on the crowded shelves at Carol’s it was a total surprise to me – and what a wonderful surprise it turned out to be!

Clocking in at a mere 127 pages, Cycle was a slender volume, especially compared to my earlier Stephen King reads. That was my first impression, and I remember feeling mild disappointment because it was so short. But then I opened the glossy, black cover and flipped a couple pages, and that feeling went away pretty darn fast.

There was artwork inside – both color and black-and-white illustrations – and so much of it! In fact, I couldn’t turn more than a page or two without being confronted with yet another magnificent, visual feast. Full-page paintings, two-page spreads, even spot art! I flipped back to the cover and saw that the illustrator was a guy named Bernie Wrightson. I made a mental note to remember his name (not realizing at the time that I already knew his amazing work from many previous comic book excursions).

And then there was the story…boy, what a fun, old-fashioned story. I couldn’t even remember the last werewolf novel I had read, much less one presented in such a unique manner. » Read more

Why We Crave Horror Movies

27 pages • 54 minutes read

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Summary: “why we crave horror movies”.

In the essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” Stephen King—a novelist and writer known as the “King of Horror”—elucidates what draws people to not just watch but crave horror movies. The essay was first published in the January 1981 issue of Playboy magazine, by which time King had written seven novels ( Carrie , The Shining , Salem’s Lot , The Dead Zone , The Stand , Firestarter, and Cujo ) , a novella, several novels published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, a short fiction collection, and the nonfiction book Danse Macabre . In 1976, his novel Carrie was adapted into a film, the first of many of his books to be adapted for the screen, including Salem’s Lot in 1979 (as a television miniseries) and The Shining in 1980.

This study guide refers to a reprint of “Why We Crave Horror Movies” published in Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition, Eighth Edition from 2004, edited by Alfred Rosa and Paul Eschholz. King’s essay examines why modern movie audiences love to watch horror films—the primitive urges and emotions that drive this desire and the necessity to express them. He proposes that the appetite for horror is a need that all people have.

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Content Warning : The essay refers to “insanity,” which is often a stigmatizing term to discuss mental health and psychology. To reflect this, the guide encases the term in quotation marks. The essay also refers to lynching.

King begins with the idea that all people are “insane” in some way but that most are adept at hiding it. He notes that everyone has seen a person on the street who seems to be “insane” or knows someone with an irrational fear. King posits that the “insanity” of everyday people stems from irrational fears, such as the fear of snakes, claustrophobia, or the fear of heights—and the ultimate, most notable fear: the fear of death. King proposes that going to see a horror movie is a way of “daring the nightmare” or facing that fear (Paragraph 2), albeit differently than facing the fear head-on.

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He points out the different reasons that people watch horror movies, such as to prove that they have no fear, for amusement, and to confirm their sense of “normality” by comparing themselves to the characters and plots of these movies and viewing them as separate from their own lives. He notes that watching horror movies for fun and as a form of entertainment is a strange pastime because of the enjoyment of seeing others being stalked or killed by evil entities. King cites an unnamed critic who makes the case that horror movies are the “modern version of the public lynching” (Paragraph 6) because of its public and collective nature; watching a lynching, while horrific, was once a means of entertainment, a desire for human bloodshed that resides in just about everyone. He considers how the past experience of attending a lynching parallels the collective experience and entertainment of watching horror films in the present day.

King explains that horror movies provide audiences with absolutes, and he emphasizes that they remove the middle ground between “black and white,” or “good and evil.” Characters must be one or the other. Such films allow the viewer’s emotions and irrational side to run wild in a way similar to how children experience emotions and life without having much ability to control their feelings. He notes that society allows the sharing of certain emotions, like love and kindness, but emotions that are “anticivilization,” such as hatred or disdain, while meant to be suppressed, still require exercise, much like people exercise to maintain muscular strength. Horror movies provide a type of exercise for one’s “primitive” urges and emotions, he argues, that addresses these emotions without either suppressing them or letting them run rampant. They provide a certain equilibrium for the mind, keeping it balanced. Furthermore, King posits, all people experience these “uncivilized” emotions because everyone is “insane” in some way—everyone fears something, no matter how much or little that fear exhibits itself. He refers to this shared “insanity” existing along a spectrum, on which serial killers are on the extreme end, distant from the mild “insanity” of “regular” people who enjoy horror movies or might laugh at an inappropriate joke. He compares horror movies to jokes that are considered “sick”; both are similarly inappropriate entertainment for audiences or listeners.

King characterizes top-tier horror films as “reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary” (Paragraph 11), noting that they bring out the darkest aspects of people, the parts that enjoy a “sick” joke or the “insanity” that lies dormant in them most of the time. Horror films shine a light on the uncivilized nature that all people carry within them.

He concludes by considering why people should watch horror movies: not just for enjoyment but to keep humans’ primal urges and feelings from escaping and reaching the real world: Horror films thus allow audiences to tap into those urges and emotions without experiencing them in the extreme. He proposes that humans must experience these urges periodically in order to maintain their goodness and the positive emotions they bring to society.

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Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing

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Book of the Month Club

Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing is an exclusive Book-of-the-Month Club anthology of hard-to-find non-fiction pieces, little-known interviews, short stories, and articles about writing. It includes an Introduction by Peter Straub.

From the Flap

One day, while in his laundry room, Stephen King squeezed behind his dryer, looked out of a window, and realized that he was seeing a garden that he'd never noticed before. This is what great writers do, he thought. They look out of an almost forgotten window at an angle that renders the common extraordinary. Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing is an exclusive Book-of-the-Month Club anthology of hard-to-find non-fiction pieces, little-known interviews, short stories, and articles about writing for those looking for direction on how to find their own "windows"--or for anyone wishing to be touched by Stephen King's humor and wisdom. Included in this collection are unpublished early fiction ( very early; King was twelve when he wrote "Jumper" and "Rush Call"); a pre- Carrie article with tips for selling stories to men's magazines ("The Horror Writer and the Ten Bears: A True Story"); advice to his son on writing (with the look-twice title "Great Hookers I Have Known"); recommendations to teen readers in a Seventeen article ("What Stephen King Does for Love"); a long chapter from his wonderful treatise on the horror genre ("Horror Fiction" from Danse Macabre ); and even a first-time-in-print short story, "In the Deathroom" (just for fun). Intended as a companion to Stephen King's 2000 book On Writing, Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing captures the author's mind in action--spontaneous, subversive, quirky, yet morally and ethically serious. Together, they comprise virtually the sum of the thoughts on writing of the dominant force in American fiction for the past three decades.

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© Copyright © 2000 - 2020 Stephen King - All Rights Reserved.

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Stephen King: ‘I have outlived most of my critics. It gives me great pleasure’

The writer on his new book about a camp for telekinetic children, being a national treasure and listening to rock music as he works

B orn in Maine in 1947, Stephen King wrote his first published novel, Carrie , in 1974 and has spent the subsequent half-century documenting the monsters and heroes of small-town America. His rogues’ gallery of characters runs the gamut from killer clowns and demonic cars to psychotic fans and unhinged populist politicians.

His best-loved books include The Stand , It , The Dead Zone and Pet Sematary . King’s latest novel, The Institute , revolves around a totalitarian boot camp for telekinetic children. The kids check in – but don’t check out.

Carrie was published against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Is America a more or less scary place to write about now? The world is a scary place, not just America. We’re in the spooky house – on the ghost train, if you prefer – for life. The scares come and go, but everyone likes make-believe monsters to stand in for the real ones.

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book? Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

You were raised in a working-class Republican household. What would your mother make of today’s GOP? My mother bolted the GOP the last time she voted and cast a ballot for George McGovern. She hated the Vietnam war. I was sworn to secrecy, but feel the statute of limitations on that has run out. In Maine, lots of Republicans are more purple than red. It’s how Senator Susan Collins keeps sliding by.

For all the terrors in your work, there’s an underlying faith in basic human decency. This suggests you think most people are basically good. Yes, most people are good. More people are anxious to stop a terrorist attack than to start one. They just don’t make the news.

You started out being dismissed by the literary establishment as a lowly peddler of cheap horror. You’re now a lauded national treasure. How does it feel to be respectable? It feels good to be at least semi-respectable. I have outlived most of my most virulent critics. It gives me great pleasure to say that. Does that make me a bad person?

Isn’t it also partly because the boundary between literary fiction and genre fiction has become more porous? The old high/low distinction doesn’t exist in the same way . Well, there’s still a strange – to me, anyway – and totally subjective line between high culture and low. An aria from Rigoletto, La donna è mobile, for instance – is high culture. Sympathy for the Devil by the Stones is low. They’re both cool, so go figure.

I’ve heard that you like to write to loud music. Isn’t that really distracting? I’m listening to Fine Young Cannibals [right now]. Soon to be followed by Danny and the Juniors and the Animals. I love rock – the louder the better.

But does the music leave an imprint on a book’s tone or pace? Would a chapter written while listening to the Animals, say, differ from a chapter written under the influence of the Ramones? The music I happen to be listening to can sometimes affect word choice, or cause a new line, but never affects style.

You’re astoundingly prolific. What’s your feeling about those novelists who spend years crafting and rewriting a novel? Envy at their rigour? Exasperation ? Some writers take years; James Patterson takes a weekend. Every writer is different. I feel that a first draft should take about four months, but that’s me. And I go over my work obsessively. Here’s another thing – creative life is absurdly short. I want to cram in as much as I can.

Have you ever forced yourself to go slower? Deliberately go slower? No, never. I’ve written longhand [ Dreamcatcher ], but poke along and obsessively polish? No. You keep picking a scab, you’re gonna make it bleed instead of heal.

You’ve said your characters sometimes speak in your head to the point where they blot out the real world. That makes writing fiction sound like a close cousin to mental illness... I don’t think writing is a mental illness, but when I’m working and it’s going really well, time and the real world kind of disappear.

If that’s the ideal state of grace, is it sometimes hard to let go? Do you ever find yourself haunted by books or characters you’ve ostensibly laid to rest? Sometimes characters, like Holly Gibney from the Mr Mercedes books and The Outsider , cry to come back – or Roland of Gilead – but they are the exceptions.

You’ve collaborated with the writer Peter Straub (on the novels The Talisman and Black House ) and your sons Owen and Joe . Is there another you’d love to write a novel with? I loved collaborating with my boys, and with Peter Straub, and will hopefully do it again. I’d love to collaborate with Colson Whitehead, Michael Robotham, Linwood Barclay, Alex Marwood, Tana French. No time, I guess, but those would be cool mixes. The ideal is to groove with someone so completely you make a third voice.

The president orders every book in America to be burned. You have time to save three of your own novels . Which three ? Which books of mine would I save? Dumb question, but I’ll play. Lisey’s Story , The Stand and Misery .

The Institute by Stephen King is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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According to Stephen King, This Is Why We Crave Horror Movies

The horror king breaks down our obsession with the macabre.

Stephen King and horror are synonymous. Are you really able to call yourself a fan of horror if one of his novels or film adaptations isn't among your top favorites? The Maine-born writer is hands down the most successful horror writer and one of the most beloved and prolific writers ever whose legacy spans generations. Without King, we might not be as terrified of clowns and or think twice about bullying the shy girl in school. One could say that King has earned the moniker, "the King of Horror." In addition to all he's written, King has also had over 60 adaptations of his work for television and the big screen and has written, produced, and starred in films and shows as well. He has fully immersed himself in the genre of horror from all sides, and it's unlikely that we will ever have anyone else like Stephen King. But did you know that King wrote an essay that was published in Playboy magazine about horror movies?

In 1981, King's essay titled " Why We Crave Horror Movies " was published in Playboy magazine as a variation of the chapter " The Horror Movie As Junk Food" in Danse Macabre . Danse Macabre was published in 1981 and is one of the non-fiction books in which that wrote about horror in media and how our fears and anxieties have been influencing the horror genre. The full article that was published is no longer online, but there is a shortened four-page version of it that can be found.

RELATED: The Iconic Horror Movie You Won't Believe Premiered at Cannes

Stephen King Believes We Are All Mentally Ill

The essay starts out guns blazing, the first line reading "I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little bit better." From here, he describes the general behaviors of people we know and how mannerisms and irrational fears are not different between the public and those in asylums. He points out that we pay money to sit in a theater and be scared to prove a point that we can and to show that we do not shy away from fear. Some of us, he states, even go watch horror movies for fun, which closes the gap between normalcy and insanity. A patron can go to the movies, and watch someone get mutilated and killed, and it's considered normal, everyday behavior. This, as a horror lover, feels very targeted. I absolutely watch horror movies for fun and I will do so with my bucket of heart-attack-buttered popcorn and sip on my Coke Zero. The most insane thing about all of that? The massive debt accumulated from one simple movie date.

Watching Horror Movies Allows Us to Release Our Insanity

King states that we use horror movies as a catharsis to act out our nightmares and the worst parts of us. Getting to watch the insanity and depravity on the movie screen allows us to release our inner insanity, which in turn, keeps us sane. He writes that watching horror movies allows us to let our emotions have little to no rein at all, and that is something that we don't always get to do in everyday life. Society has a set of parameters that we must follow with regard to expressing ourselves to maintain the air of normalcy and not be seen as a weirdo. When watching horror movies, we see incredibly visceral reactions in the most extreme of situations. This can cause the viewer to reflect on how they would react or respond to being in the same type of situation. Do we identify more with the victim or the villain? This poses an interesting thought for horror lovers because sometimes the villain is justified. Are we wrong for empathizing with them instead?

Let's take a look at one of the more popular horror movies of recent years. Mandy is about a woman who is murdered by a crazed cult because she is the object of the leader's obsession. This causes Red ( Nicolas Cage ) to ride off seeking revenge for the love of his life being murdered. There are also movies like I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House On The Left where the protagonist becomes the murderer in these instances because of the trauma they experienced from sexual assault. Their revenge makes audiences a little more willing to side with the murderer because they took back their power and those they killed got what was deserved. This is where that Lucille Bluth meme that says "good for her" is used. I'll die on the hill that those characters were justified and if that makes me mentally ill then King might be right!

What Does Stephen King Mean When He Tells Us to "Keep the Gators" Fed?

At the end of the essay, King mentions he likes to watch the most extreme horror movies because it releases a trap door where he can feed the alligators. The alligators he is referring to are a metaphor for the worst in all humans and the morbid fantasies that lie within each of us. The essay concludes with "It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed." From this, we can deduce that King feels we all have the ability to be institutionalized, but those of us that watch horror movies are less likely because the sick fantasies can be released from our brains.

With that release, we can walk down the street normally without the bat of an eye from walkers-by. Perhaps this is why the premise for movies like The Purge came to fruition. A movie where for 24 hours all crime, including murder, is decriminalized couldn't have been made by someone who doesn't get road rage or scream into the void. It was absolutely made by someone who waited at the DMV for too long or has had experience working in retail around Black Friday. With what King is saying, The Purge is a direct reflection of that catharsis. Not only are you getting to watch a crazy horror movie where everyone is shooting everyone and everything is on fire, but it's likely something you've had a thought or two about. You can consider those gators fed for sure.

Do Horror Movies Offer Us True Catharsis or Persuasive Perspective?

Catharsis as a concept was coined by the philosopher Aristotle . He explained that the performing arts are a way to purge negative types of emotions from our subconscious, so we don't have to hold onto them anymore. This viewpoint further perpetuates what King is trying to explain. With that cathartic relief, the urgency to act on negative emotion is less likely to happen because there is no build-up of negativity circling the drain from our subconscious to our reality. However, some who read the essay felt like King was just being persuasive and using fancy imagery rather than identifying an actual reason why horror is popular. Some claim the shock and awe factor of his words and his influence on horror would cause some readers to believe they are mentally ill deep down. I have to say, as a millennial who rummages through the ends of social media multiple times a day, everyone on the internet thinks they're mentally ill, and we all have the memes to prove it. It is exciting and fascinating to watch a horror movie after working a 9-5 job where the excitement is low. Watching Ghostface stalk Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ) in Scream isn't everyone's idea of winding down, but for the last 20-something years, it has been my comfort movie when I'm feeling sad or down. The nostalgia of Scream is what makes it feel cathartic to me and that's free therapy!

What is the Science Behind Loving Horror Movies?

Psychology studies will tell us that individuals who crave and love horror are interested in it because they have a higher sensation-seeking trait . This means they have a higher penchant for wanting to experience thrilling and exciting situations. Those with a lower level of empathy are also more likely to enjoy horror movies as they will have a less innate response to a traumatic scene on screen. According to the DSM-V , a severe lack of empathy could potentially be a sign of a more serious psychological issue, however, the degree of severity will vary. I do love rollercoasters, but I also cry when I see a dog that is just too cute, so horror lovers aren't necessarily the unsympathetic robots that studies want us to be. Watching horror films can also trigger a fight-or-flight sensation , which will boost adrenaline and release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. Those chemicals being released make the viewers feel accomplished and positive, relating back to the idea that watching horror movies is cathartic for viewers.

Anyone who reads and studies research knows that correlation does not imply causation, but whether King's perspective is influenced by his position in the horror genre or not, psychology and science can back up the real reasons why audiences love horror movies. As a longtime horror lover and a pretty above-average horror trivia nerd, I have to wonder if saying we are mentally ill is an overstatement and could maybe be identified more as horror lovers seeking extreme stimulus. Granted, this essay was written over 40 years ago, so back then liking horror wasn't as widely accepted as it is today. It's possible that King felt more out of place for his horror love back then and the alienation of a fringe niche made him feel mentally ill. Is King onto something by assuming that everyone has mental illness deep down, or is this a gross overestimation of the human psyche? The answer likely falls somewhere in between, but those that love horror will continue to release that catharsis through the terrifying and the unknown because it's a scream, baby!

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What Writing is Stephen King Analysis

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Stephen King’s Portrayal of Jack Torrance’s Terrifying Role as Shown in His Movie, The Shining

Similarities between jack,t he main character of the shining, and its author, stephen king, a comparison of the black cat by edgar allan poe and the cat from hell by stephen king, a contrast between the reapers are the angels by alden bell and 'salem's lot by stephen king, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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The Characterization of Roland in The Gunslinger, a Dark Tower Series by Stephen King

Haunted hotels, irony in stephen king's "popsy" and kurt vonnegut's "harrison bergeron", analysis of gerald’s game by stephen king – a great example of psychological horror genre, rhetorical analysis of stephen king's 'why we crave horror movies', what influenced stephen king's writing.

September 21, 1947

Horror, fantasy, supernatural fiction, drama, gothic, fiction, dark fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction, crime fiction, suspense, thriller

September 21, 1947 (age 74)

Stephen King is an American novelist and short-story writer whose books were credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century.

“Carrie”, “Cell”, “Christine”, “Cujo”, “Dolores Claiborne”, “Finders Keepers”, “Firestarter”, “It”, “Lisey’s Story”, “Misery”, “Mr. Mercedes”, “Needful Things”, “Night Shift”, “Sleeping Beauties”, “The Dark Half”, “The Dead Zone”, “The Plant: Zenith Rising”, “The Running Man”, “The Shining”

The themes of loss of innocence, abuse, and the battle between good and evil are woven into Stephen King's stories. In his books King explored almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare, and even a malevolent automobile.

Stephen King's writing style has made him a legacy as a bestselling author under the horror and psychological fiction genre. Though his work was sometimes disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King was a talented storyteller whose books gained their effect from realistic detail, forceful plotting, and the author’s undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. Stephen King also creates identifiable characters that elicit immediate sympathy from readers due to inherently flawed but human traits.

Stephen King is one of the most prolific and celebrated authors of our time. His approach to horror fiction has inspired countless other writers, and his novels have been adapted into some of the most successful films and television shows of all time.

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” “Get busy living or get busy dying.” “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

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Stephen King Essay Examples

Stephen king and gloria steinem – the prominent representatives of pop culture.

Pop culture is a collection of mass media and cultural customs that reflect the interests of many people. Examples of pop culture include comic books, music, sports, movies, and many more. Pop culture has played a major role in American life since its beginning and...

Stephen King's Influence on the Literary World

Award-winning author Stephen King has greatly impacted the history of the literary world with his works in the genres of suspense, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. His award-winning novels and other compositions are well known around the globe and have created room for him in the...

Stephen King and His Unique Writing Style

Stephen King is considered one of the greatest horror writers of our lifetime and of all time. King’s works span over the course of forty-five years starting with his first novel, Carrie, in 1974 and releasing a novel almost every year since with his most...

Impact of Stephen King on American Culture

“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity” (Stephen King). The late twentieth century was a time of racism and bigotry as the civil rights movement was...

Book Review: the Shining by Stephen King

The book I chose is The Shining by Stephen King. The story takes place in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, in an isolated resort hotel called The Overlook Hotel built in 1907. The hotel is isolated because the closest town is 40 miles away and during...

Stephen King and His Impact on the World of Literature

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine. He graduated from the University of Maine and later worked as a teacher while establishing himself as a writer. Stephen King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels. His...

Crime and Punishment: "Shawshank Redemption"

Based on the Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” Genre: Drama and Mystery Opening Image: The movie opens with an ominous setting. It shows the main character, Andy Dufresne, visibly drunk in his car. As Andy continues to drink, he stares down a...

The Role of Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s "The Shining"

Jack Torrance of Stephen Kings “The Shining” is a man with demons and alcoholism, and meets his untimely end in the Overlook hotel, a place where the boiler creeps and the hedges hide sinister intentions. Throughout the novel the Overlook has a strange way of...

Book Review: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Stephen King, an undisputed king of horror known for his masterful horror creatures, monsters, ghosts and demon, always recognised the fact that the bloodthirsty wraiths are never as scary as the terrors of mental illness, addiction, poverty and early trauma. The realities we often conveniently...

Female Puberty in Stephen King’s "Carrie" and "It"

The British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the theory of the “male gaze” in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In the essay, Mulvey sets forth that in a society that is ruled by “sexual imbalance,” media is constructed with the pleasure...

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