stephen king on fear essay

Stephen King on Writing, Fear, and the Atrocity of Adverbs

By maria popova.

While he may have used a handful of well-placed adverbs in his excellent recent case for gun control , King embarks upon a forceful crusade against this malignant part of speech:

The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs … are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly . Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. … With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door , and you’ll get no argument from me … but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly ? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late. I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences: ‘Put it down!’ she shouted. ‘Give it back,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said. In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions: ‘Put it down! she shouted menacingly. ‘Give it back,’ he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said contemptuously. The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately.

King uses the admonition against adverbs as a springboard for a wider lens on good and bad writing, exploring the interplay of fear, timidity, and affectation:

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. […] Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as ‘good’ and other sorts as ‘bad,’ is fearful behavior.

This latter part, touching on the contrast between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, illustrates the critical difference between working for prestige and working for purpose .

Complement On Writing with more famous wisdom on the craft from Kurt Vonnegut , Susan Sontag , Henry Miller , Jack Kerouac , F. Scott Fitzgerald , H. P. Lovecraft , Zadie Smith , John Steinbeck , Margaret Atwood , Neil Gaiman , Mary Karr , Isabel Allende , and Susan Orlean .

— Published March 13, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/03/13/stephen-king-on-adverbs/ —

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• Arts & Humanities
• Communications

“Stephen King on Fear” – A Personal Essay

Rational: thoughts or behaviour that are guided by intellect and logic rather than emotion

Irrational: thoughts or behaviour that are guided by emotion that seem to conflict with what is logical

Reciprocated: to act, feel, or give in return

Croup: a cough that babies can get. Can be very serious

Mute: unable to speak

Avid: eager, enthusiastic

Alienation: becoming unfriendly or hostile, a sense of not belonging

1. How does King “hook” the reader? How does he create atmosphere/mood in the first few paragraphs?

King writes: “Let’s talk, you and I.” He draws the reader in by inviting him or her into a conversation. He creates mood by describing the setting in which he’s writing as though it’s the setting for a scary story: “It’s night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it’s blowing now, we lose the power.” “Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness”

2. What are the “rational fears” King lists?

-turning off the lights when our hands are wet

-sticking a knife in the toaster without unplugging it

-getting bad news from the doctor

-dying in a plane crash

-running out of oil, good air, good water

-child might die in a car accident

-alienation

-growing lovelessly old

3. What are the “irrational fears” King lists?

-werewolves

-trucks that start on their own and drive themselves

-monsters in the closet

-demon lovers

4. What is his purpose in inviting the reader to compare these types of fears?

He does this to show the difference between the types of fears that horror writers write about and the types of fears we experience in everyday life.

5. How do children learn fear according to King?

They learn from their parents. When children discover a parent won’t always be there when they cry, or that they can’t always help even if they are there. And they learn from seeing the expression on a parent’s face when they do something dangerous.

6. Why do we like horror stories according to King.

They allow us to exchange our rational fears—the ones we don’t have solutions to—for irrational fears—the ones we do have solutions for. Once the story is done we feel like we’ve dealt with a fear, even if it isn’t what’s really scaring us.

7. Find two interesting metaphors and explain why King uses them.

Fable about the seven blind men and the elephant: The elephant represents the source of fear that makes us blind. We are unable to understand fear on our own. The blindness represents the absence of rational thought. When the men get together in the fable, they are able to understand what they are touching in the same way we get a better understanding of our fear if we talk about it and deal with it.

Welsh sin eater: The sin eater is supposed to take away the sins of the dying person by eating his food. King compares the horror writer to the sin eater. He allows you to substitute one of your fears (the ones you can’t deal with) with one of his (the ones you can deal with).

8. King’s thesis: People enjoy reading horror stories because they allow them to deal with their real-life, rational fears in a manageable if temporary way.

9. Audience: Fairly general audience because he writes in a conversational way. Probably also people who are familiar with his writing because he references subjects from some of his most famous stories.

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Screen Rant

What scares stephen king the horror author's biggest fears explained.

Stephen King is often asked in interviews what scares him, but his biggest fears are laid out in his work, evolving from childhood fears to dementia.

Stephen King is often asked in interviews what scares him. It's one of those questions that he seems to answer rather grudgingly, despite the fact that he writes horror. Still, his biggest fears are laid out in his work, as well as how they have evolved over the years.

Stephen King has been a popular author of horror since his first novel was published. Carrie came out in 1974 and struck a chord with people. It revolves around a young high school girl with mysterious telekinetic powers. 'Salem's Lot , King's second novel, came out shortly after that, and was about vampires in a small town. This was followed by The Shining , which firmly established King in the horror genre. At the time, his agent warned him about being typecast as a horror writer, but King considered it a compliment and kept writing horror.

Related: The Stephen King Adaptation The Author Should Direct Himself

Over the years, Stephen King has sometimes strayed from the horror genre with his forays into fantasy, science fiction, and mystery. However, his work almost always contains some elements of horror. He has dipped his toes in almost every standard horror trope in some way—such as 'Salem's Lot for vampires, The Stand for apocalyptic fiction, and It for small-town horror —sometimes shaping certain types of horror so that future stories evolve directly from his work. King, as a horror writer, is a master at expressing his fears on the page. As such, to answer the question of what scares Stephen King, looking through his work is a good place to start.

Bad Things Happening To Children

It would be easy to point to King's novel It and say that the horror novelist is afraid of clowns. While it's true he certainly recognizes how scary clowns can be, the real fear he explores in a novel like It is how vulnerable children are and how easily they can succumb to tragedy. In exploring this theme, King was one of the first to point out how children were afraid of clowns, despite what adults might think. In fact, the novel is really about how adults often ignore children and how, ultimately, they are forced to stand up to the horrors of the world on their own.

Bad things happen to children in a lot of King's work. They often have dangerous and unexplained powers, such as Danny Torrance's shine ( The Shining ) that awakens and enhances the evil spirits around him, and Charlie McGee's pyrokinetic powers ( Firestarter ). Inevitably, the attention these powers provoke from the adult world leads to bad times for the children, whether it's the psychotic break of a parent or a shady government agency like The Shop .

Small Town Paranoia

In many of King's works, small-town ignorance and paranoia run rampant, leading to all sorts of problems. Small towns are isolated places and when something happens there, everyone tends to be involved. In 'Salem's Lot , for instance, the master vampire Barlow is able to get away with killing and nearly taking over the community because he now resides in a small town.

Related: Stephen King Theory: Kubrick's Movie Is About The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

In It , the town of Derry is filled with people who are willfully ignorant of the horrible string of murders that take place every 27 years. Another small town featured in several King stories is Castle Rock , which is often beset by supernatural horrors. For instance, in Needful Things shop owner Leland Gaunt manipulates everyone in town until they turn against each other in hurtful and violent ways.

A Global Pandemic

Although King usually explores horror in isolated locations, be it a small town or an empty snowed-in hotel, he did write about horror on a more global scale. The Stand features a flu-like disease that spreads across the United States until the vast majority of the population is dead. King writes in vivid detail about loved ones getting sick and dying to the helpless horror of the Super Flu's few survivors.  The Stand is one of King's most important and well-known novels. It also happens to be one of his most relevant in the current global environment with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Being Struck By A Vehicle

Oddly, this may be one of Stephen King's biggest fears. Although it might not seem obvious, there is a theme of vehicular murder running through his work. In the 80s, he wrote his novel, Christine , about a 1958 Plymouth Fury possessed by supernatural forces that goes on a killing spree. That same decade, King wrote and directed Maximum Overdrive , an admittedly terrible movie about killer trucks with a mind of their own.

Related: Why Stephen King Bought The Van That Nearly Killed Him

However, those are the obvious ones. Stephen King's novella, The Body , is about finding a boy's body that's been struck by a train. Similarly, Pet Semetary features one of King's most heartbreaking scenes when a young Gage is hit and killed by a semi. Part of this fear may stem from an event that happened during King's childhood in which a friend of his was hit and killed by a train. Nevertheless, the vehicular horror continued to plague King when he was struck by a van while out on one of his walks and was nearly killed in 1999.

Crazy Fans And Success

As King's horror writing career developed, he began to grow a fear of success. This fear is particularly evident in his 90s work, such as in The Dark Half and Misery . The Dark Half is about a writer's dark pseudonym that comes to life, murdering everyone in his way so the violent novels he writes will continue to be produced. Similarly, Misery features a fan so obsessed with author Paul Sheldon's romance novels that she kidnaps him and forces him to write for her.

Isolation, A Broken Mind, And Dementia

Perhaps one of Stephen King's biggest fears is going crazy and losing his mind. Early in his career, he often wrote about how isolation drove people mad, such as Jack Torrance in The Shining . Similar things happen to various characters through his work as his career progresses, such as Beverly Marsh's father in It . King is aware that sometimes good and well-intentioned people lose themselves and do horrible things.

These days, this fear has grown for King. Now, at 72 years old, his biggest fear is losing his mind to dementia and Alzheimer's. He's spoken about how since he's a writer, he needs a sharp mind. His biggest fear is not being able to create and share his work. As Stephen King  told NPR a few years ago, " That's the boogeyman in the closet now. I'm afraid of losing my mind ".

Next: Stephen King Theory: Every Character That Has The Shine

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.

The University of Notre Dame Australia provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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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.

• Sigmund Freud
• Friday essay
• Edmund Burke
• Stephen King
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Horror fiction

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

Analysis of Stephen King’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 31, 2018 • ( 3 )

Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version of the “plain style” may smell of commercialism, but that may make him the contemporary American storyteller without peer. From the beginning, his dark parables spoke to the anxieties of the late twentieth century. As a surrogate author in The Mist explains King’s mission, “when the technologies fail, when… religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night” is a “cheerful” thought in the context of a “dissolving ozone layer.”

King’s fictions begin with premises accepted by middle Americans of the television generation, opening in suburban or small-town America—Derry, Maine, or Libertyville, Pennsylvania—and have the familiarity of the house next door and the 7-Eleven store. The characters have the trusted two-dimensional reality of kitsch: They originate in clichés such as the high school “nerd” or the wise child. From such premises, they move cinematically through an atmosphere resonant with a popular mythology. King applies naturalistic methods to an environment created by popular culture. This reality, already mediated, is translated easily into preternatural terms, taking on a nightmarish quality.

King’s imagination is above all archetypal: His “pop” familiarity and his campy humor draw on the collective unconscious. In Danse Macabre , a study of the contemporary horror genre that emphasizes the cross-pollination of fiction and film, he divides his subject according to four “monster archetypes”: the ghost, the “thing” (or human-made monster), the vampire, and the werewolf. As with his fiction, his sources are the classic horror films of the 1930’s, inherited by the 1950’s pulp and film industries. He hints at their derivations from the gothic novel, classical myth, Brothers Grimm folktales, and the oral tradition in general. In an anxious era both skeptical of and hungry for myth, horror is fundamentally reassuring and cathartic; the tale-teller combines roles of physician and priest into the witch doctor as “sin eater,” who assumes the guilt and fear of his culture. In the neoprimitivism of the late twentieth century, this ancient role and the old monsters have taken on a new mystique. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the magic and terrors of fairy tales present existential problems in forms children can understand. King’s paranormal horrors have similar cathartic and educative functions for adults; they externalize the traumas of life, especially those of adolescence.

Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie , is a parable of adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Carrie White is a lonely ugly duckling, an outcast at home and at school. Her mother, a religious fanatic, associates Carrie with her own “sin”; Carrie’s peers hate her in a mindless way and make her the butt of every joke. Carrie concerns the horrors of high school, a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry,” as King explains, where students “are no more allowed to rise ‘above their station’ than a Hindu” above caste. The novel is also about the terrors of passage to womanhood. In the opening scene, in the school shower room, Carrie experiences her first menstrual period; her peers react with abhorrence and ridicule, “stoning” her with sanitary napkins, shouting “Plug it up!” Carrie becomes the scapegoat for a fear of female sexuality as epitomized in the smell and sight of blood. (The blood bath and symbolism of sacrifice will recur at the climax of the novel.) As atonement for her participation in Carrie’s persecution in the shower, Susan Snell persuades her popular boyfriend Tommy Ross to invite Carrie to the Spring Ball. Carrie’s conflict with her mother, who regards her emerging womanhood with loathing, is paralleled by a new plot by the girls against her, led by the rich and spoiled Chris Hargenson. They arrange to have Tommy and Carrie voted king and queen of the ball, only to crown them with a bucket of pig’s blood. Carrie avenges her mock baptism telekinetically, destroying the school and the town, leaving Susan Snell as the only survivor.

As in most folk cultures, initiation is signified by the acquisition of special wisdom or powers. King equates Carrie’s sexual flowering with the maturing of her telekinetic ability. Both cursed and empowered with righteous fury, she becomes at once victim and monster, witch and White Angel of Destruction. As King has explained, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

Carrie catapulted King into the mass market; in 1976 it was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Brian De Palma. The novel touched the right nerves, including feminism. William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), which was adapted into a powerful and controversial film, had touched on similar social fears during the 1960’s and 1970’s with its subtext of the “generation gap” and the “death of God.” Although Carrie’s destructive power, like that of Regan in The Exorcist , is linked with monstrous adolescent sexuality, the similarity between the two novels ends there. Carrie’s “possession” is the complex effect of her mother’s fanaticism, her peers’ bigotry, and her newly realized, unchecked female power. Like Anne Sexton’s Transformations (1971), a collection of fractured fairy tales in sardonic verse, King’s novel explores the social and cultural roots of evil.

King’s Carrie is a dark modernization of “Cinderella,” with a bad mother, cruel siblings (peers), a prince (Tommy Ross), a godmother (Sue Snell), and a ball. King’s reversal of the happy ending is actually in keeping with the Brothers Grimm; it recalls the tale’s folk originals, which enact revenge in bloody images: The stepsisters’ heels, hands, and noses are sliced off, and a white dove pecks out their eyes. As King knows, blood flows freely in the oral tradition. King represents that oral tradition in a pseudodocumentary form that depicts the points of view of various witnessess and commentaries: newspaper accounts, case studies, court reports, and journals. Pretending to textual authenticity, he alludes to the gothic classics, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot , King’s next novel, is a bloody fairy tale in which Dracula comes to Our Town.

‘Salem’s Lot

By the agnostic and sexually liberated 1970’s, the vampire had been demythologized into what King called a “comic book menace.” In a significant departure from tradition, he diminishes the sexual aspects of the vampire. He reinvests the archetype with meaning by basing its attraction on the human desire to surrender identity in the mass. His major innovation, however, was envisioning the mythic small town in American gothic terms and then making it the monster; the vampire’s traditional victim, the populace, becomes the menace as mindless mass, plague, or primal horde. Drawing on Richard Matheson’s grimly naturalistic novel I Am Legend (1954) and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), King focused on the issues of fragmentation, reinvesting the vampire with contemporary meaning.

The sociopolitical subtext of ‘Salem’s Lot was the ubiquitous disillusionment of the Watergate era, King has explained. Like rumor and disease, vampirism spreads secretly at night, from neighbor to neighbor, infecting men and women, the mad and the senile, the responsible citizen and the infant alike, absorbing into its zombielike horde the human population. King is especially skillful at suggesting how small-town conservatism can become inverted on itself, the harbored suspicions and open secrets gradually dividing and isolating. This picture is reinforced by the town’s name, ‘Salem’s Lot , a degenerated form of Jerusalem’s Lot, which suggests the city of the chosen reverted to a culture of dark rites in images of spreading menace.

King’s other innovation was, paradoxically, a reiteration. He made his “king vampire,” Barlow, an obvious reincarnation of Stoker’s Dracula that functions somewhere between cliché and archetype. King uses the mythology of vampires to ask how civilization is to exist without faith in traditional authority symbols. His answer is pessimistic, turning on the abdication of Father Callahan, whose strength is undermined by secret alcoholism and a superficial adherence to form. The two survivors, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie, must partly seek, partly create their talismans and rituals, drawing on the compendium of vampire lore—the alternative, in a culture-wide crisis of faith, to conventional systems. (At one point, Mears holds off a vampire with a crucifix made with two tongue depressors.) The paraphernalia, they find, will work only if the handler has faith.

It is significant that the two survivors are, respectively, a “wise child” (Petrie) and a novelist (Mears); only they have the necessary resources. Even Susan Norton, Mears’s lover and the gothic heroine, succumbs. As in The Shining , The Dead Zone, and Firestarter , the child (or childlike adult) has powers that may be used for good or for evil. Mears is the imaginative, nostalgic adult, haunted by the past. The child and the man share a naïveté, a gothic iconography, and a belief in evil. Twelve-year-old Mark worships at a shrinelike tableau of Aurora monsters that glow “green in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus” he was given in Sunday School for learning Psalm 119. Mears has returned to the town of his childhood to revive an image of the Marsten House lurking in his mythical mind’s eye. Spiritual father and son, they create a community of two out of the “pop” remnants of American culture.

As in fairy tales and Dickens’s novels, King’s protagonists are orphans searching for their true parents, for community. His fiction may reenact his search for the father who disappeared and left behind a box of Weird Tales . The yearned-for bond of parent and child, a relationship signifying a unity of being, appears throughout his fiction. The weakness or treachery of a trusted parent is correspondingly the ultimate fear. Hence, the vampire Barlow is the devouring father who consumes an entire town.

The Shining

In The Shining , King domesticated his approach to the theme of parent-child relationships, focusing on the threat to the family that comes from a trusted figure within it. Jack Torrance, a writer, arranges to oversee a mountain resort during the winter months, when it is closed due to snow. He moves his family with him to the Overlook Hotel, where he expects to break a streak of bad luck and personal problems (he is an alcoholic) by writing a play. He is also an abused child who, assuming his father’s aggression, in turn becomes the abusing father. The much beloved “bad” father is the novel’s monster: The environment of the Overlook Hotel traps him, as he in turn calls its power forth. As Jack metamorphoses from abusive father and husband into violent monster, King brilliantly expands the haunted-house archetype into a symbol of the accumulated sin of all fathers.

In Christine, the setting is Libertyville, Pennsylvania, during the late 1970’s. The monster is the American Dream as embodied in the automobile. King gives Christine all the attributes of a fairy tale for “postliterate” adolescents. Christine is another fractured “Cinderella” story, Carrie for boys. Arnie Cunningham, a nearsighted, acne-scarred loser, falls “in love with” a car, a passionate (red and white) Plymouth Fury, “one of the long ones with the big fins,” that he names Christine. An automotive godmother, she brings Arnie, in fairy-tale succession, freedom, success, power, and love: a home away from overprotective parents, a cure for acne, hit-andrun revenge on bullies, and a beautiful girl, Leigh Cabot. Soon, however, the familiar triangle emerges, of boy, girl, and car, and Christine is revealed as a femme fatale— driven by the spirit of her former owner, a malcontent named Roland LeBay. Christine is the medium for his death wish on the world, for his all-devouring, “everlasting Fury.” LeBay’s aggression possesses Arnie, who reverts into an older, tougher self, then into the “mythic teenaged hood” that King has called the prototype of 1950’s werewolf films, and finally into “some ancient carrion eater,” or primal self.

As automotive monster, Christine comes from a variety of sources, including the folk tradition of the “death car” and a venerable techno-horror premise, as seen in King’s “Trucks” and Maximum Overdrive . King’s main focus, however, is the mobile youth culture that has come down from the 1950’s by way of advertising, popular songs, film, and national pastimes. Christine is the car as a projection of the cultural self, Anima for the modern American Adam. To Arnie’s late 1970’s-style imagination, the Plymouth Fury, in 1958 a mid-priced family car, is an American Dream. Her sweeping, befinned chassis and engine re-create a fantasy of the golden age of the automobile: the horizonless future imagined as an expanding network of superhighways and unlimited fuel. Christine recovers for Arnie a prelapsarian vitality and manifest destiny.

Christine’s odometer runs backward and she regenerates parts. The immortality she offers, however—and by implication, the American Dream—is really arrested development in the form of a Happy Days rerun and by way of her radio, which sticks on the golden oldies station. Indeed, Christine is a recapitulatory rock musical framed fatalistically in sections titled “Teenage Car-Songs,” “Teenage Love-Songs,” and “Teenage Death-Songs.” Fragments of rock-and-roll songs introduce each chapter. Christine’s burden, an undead 1950’s youth culture, means that most of Arnie’s travels are in and out of time, a deadly nostalgia trip. As Douglas Winter explains, Christine reenacts “the death,” during the 1970’s, “of the American romance with the automobile.”

The epilogue from four years later presents the fairy-tale consolation in a burnedout monotone. Arnie and his parents are buried, Christine is scrap metal, and the true Americans, Leigh and Dennis, are survivors, but Dennis, the “knight of Darnell’s Ga Rage ,” does not woo “the lady fair”; he is a limping, lackluster junior high teacher, and they have drifted apart, grown old in their prime. Dennis narrates the story in order to file it away, all the while perceiving himself and his peers in terms of icons from the late 1950’s. In his nightmares, Christine appears wearing a black vanity plate inscribed with a skull and the words, “ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE.” From Dennis’s haunted perspective, Christine simultaneously examines and is a symptom of a cultural phenomenon: a new American gothic species of anachronism or déjà vu, which continued after Christine ’s publication in films such as Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Blue Velvet (1986). The 1980’s and the 1950’s blur into a seamless illusion, the nightmare side of which is the prospect of living an infinite replay.

The subtext of King’s adolescent fairy tale is another coming of age, from the opposite end and the broader perspective of American culture. Written by a fortyish King in the final years of the twentieth century, Christine diagnoses a cultural midlife crisis and marks a turning point in King’s career, a critical examination of mass culture. The dual time frame reflects his awareness of a dual audience, of writing for adolescents who look back to a mythical 1950’s and also for his own generation as it relives its undead youth culture in its children. The baby boomers, King explains, “were obsessive” about childhood. “We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly. I write for that buried child in us, but I’m writing for the grown-up too. I want grownups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up. The child should be buried.”

Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary , King unearthed the buried child, which is the novel’s monster. Pet Sematary is about the “real cemetery,” he told Winter. The focus is on the “one great fear” all fears “add up to,” “the body under the sheet. It’s our body.” The fairy-tale subtext is the magic kingdom of our protracted American childhood, the Disney empire as mass culture—and, by implication, the comparable multimedia phenomenon represented by King himself. The grimmer, truer text-within-the-text is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818).

The novel, which King once considered “too horrible to be published,” is also his own dark night of the soul. Louis Creed, a university doctor, moves with his wife, Rachel, and their two children (five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage) to Maine to work at King’s alma mater; a neighbor takes the family on an outing to a pet cemetery created by the neighborhood children, their confrontation with mortality. Additionally the “sematary,” whose “Druidic” rings allude to Stonehenge, is the outer circle of a Native American burial ground that sends back the dead in a state of soulless half life. Louis succumbs to temptation when the family cat, Church, is killed on the highway; he buries him on the sacred old Native American burial grounds. “Frankencat” comes back with his “purr-box broken.” A succession of accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths—of neighbor Norma Crandall, Creed’s son Gage, Norma’s husband Jud, and Creed’s wife Rachel—and resurrections follows.

The turning point is the death of Gage, which Creed cannot accept and that leads to the novel’s analysis of modern medical miracles performed in the name of human decency and love. Louis is the father as baby boomer who cannot relinquish his childhood. The larger philosophical issue is Louis’s rational, bioethical creed; he believes in saving the only life he knows, the material. Transferred into an immoderate love for his son, it is exposed as the narcissistic embodiment of a patriarchal lust for immortality through descendants, expressed first in an agony of sorrow and Rage , then ghoulishly, as he disinters his son’s corpse and makes the estranging discovery that it is like “looking at a badly made doll.” Later, reanimated, Gage appears to have been “terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.” Performing his task, Louis feels dehumanized, like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book.”

The failure of Louis’s creed is shown in his habit, when under stress, of taking mental trips to Orlando, Florida, where he, Church, and Gage drive a white van as Disney World’s “resurrection crew.” In these waking dreams, which echo the male bond of “wise child” and haunted father from as far back as ‘Salem’s Lot , Louis’s real creed is revealed: Its focus is on Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (a personification of death to Rachel) and Walt Disney, that “gentle faker from Nebraska”—like Louis, two wizards of science fantasy. Louis’s wizardry is reflected in the narrative perspective and structure, which flashes back in part 2 from the funeral to Louis’s fantasy of a heroically “long, flying tackle” that snatches Gage from death’s wheels.

In this modernization of Frankenstein , King demythologizes death and attacks the aspirations toward immortality that typify contemporary American attitudes. King’s soulless Lazaruses are graphic projections of anxieties about life-support systems, artificial hearts, organ transplants—what King has called “mechanistic miracles” that can postpone the physical signs of life almost indefinitely. The novel also indicts the “waste land” of mass culture, alluding in the same trope to George Romero’s “stupid, lurching movie-zombies,” T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men, and The Wizard of Oz: “headpiece full of straw.” Louis worries that Ellie knows more about Ronald McDonald and “the Burger King” than the “ spiritus mundi .” If the novel suggests one source of community and culture, it is the form and ritual of the children’s pet “sematary.” Its concentric circles form a pattern from their “own collective unconsciousness,” one that mimes “the most ancient religious symbol of all,” the spiral.

In It , a group of children create a community and a mythology as a way of confronting their fears, as represented by It , the monster as a serial-murdering, shape-shifting boogey that haunts the sewers of Derry, Maine. In 1958, the seven protagonists, a cross-section of losers, experience the monster differently, for as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), It derives its power through its victim’s isolation and guilt and thus assumes the shape of his or her worst fear. (To Beverly Rogan It appears, in a sequence reminiscent of “Red Riding Hood,” as her abusive father in the guise of the child-eating witch from “Hansel and Gretel.”)

In a scary passage in Pet Sematary , Louis dreams of Walt Disney World, where “by the 1890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.” To all of It’s protagonists, the monster appears in a similar archetypal or communal form, one that suggests a composite of devouring parent and mass-culture demigod, of television commercial and fairy tale, of 1958 and 1985: as Pennywise, the Clown, a cross between Bozo and Ronald McDonald. As in Christine, Pet Sematary, and Thinner , the monster is mass culture itself, the collective devouring parent nurturing its children on “imitations of immortality.” Like Christine, or Louis’s patched-up son, Pennywise is the dead past feeding on the future. Twenty-seven years after its original reign of terror, It resumes its seige, whereupon the protagonists, now professionally successful and, significantly, childless yuppies, must return to Derry to confront as adults their childhood fears. Led by horror writer Bill Denborough (partly based on King’s friend and collaborator Peter Straub), they defeat It once more, individually as a sort of allegory of psychoanalysis and collectively as a rite of passage into adulthood and community.

It was attacked in reviews as pop psychology and by King himself as a “badly constructed novel,” but the puerility was partly intended. The book summarizes King’s previous themes and characters, who themselves look backward and inward, regress and take stock. The last chapter begins with an epigraph from Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850) and ends with an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” from which King takes his primary theme and narrative device, the look back that enables one to go forward. During the 1970’s, King’s fiction was devoted to building a mythos out of shabby celluloid monsters to fill a cultural void; in the postmodern awareness of the late 1980’s, he began a demystification process. It is a calling forth and ritual unmasking of motley Reagan-era monsters, the exorcism of a generation and a culture.

Other 1980’s Novels

As for King the writer, It was one important rite in what would be a lengthy passage. After It’s extensive exploration of childhood, however, he took up conspicuously more mature characters, themes, and roles. In The Eyes of the Dragon (written for his daughter), he returned to the springs of his fantasy, the fairy tale. He told much the same story as before but assumed the mantle of adulthood. This “pellucid” and “elegant” fairy tale, says Barbara Tritel in The New York Times Book Review (February 22, 1987), has the “intimate goofiness of an extemporaneous story” narrated by “a parent to a child.” In The Tommyknockers , King again seemed to leave familiar territory for science fiction, but the novel more accurately applies technohorror themes to the 1980’s infatuation with technology and televangelism. In The Dark Tower cycles, he combined the gothic with Western and apocalyptic fiction in a manner reminiscent of The Stand . Then with much fanfare in 1990, King returned to that novel to update and enlarge it by some 350 pages.

King and Bachman

The process of recapitulation and summing up was complicated by the disclosure, in 1984, of Richard Bachman, the pseudonym under whose cover King had published five novels over a period of eight years. Invented for business reasons, Bachman soon grew into an identity complete with a biography and photographs (he was a chicken farmer with a cancer-ravaged face), dedications, a narrative voice (of unrelenting pessimism), and if not a genre, a naturalistic mode in which sociopolitical speculation combined or alternated with psychological suspense. In 1985, when the novels (with one exception) were collected in a single volume attributed to King as Bachman, the mortified alter ego seemed buried. Actually Bachman’s publicized demise only raised a haunting question of what “Stephen King” really was.

Misery , which was conceived as Bachman’s book, was King’s first novel to explore the subject of fiction’s dangerous powers. After crashing his car on an isolated road in Colorado, romance writer Paul Sheldon is “rescued,” drugged, and held prisoner by a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes, who is also the “Number One Fan” of his heroine Misery Chastain (of whom he has tired and killed off). This “Constant Reader” becomes Sheldon’s terrible “Muse,” forcing him to write (in an edition especially for her) Misery’s return to life. Sheldon is the popular writer imprisoned by genre and cut to fit fan expectations (signified by Annie’s amputations of his foot and thumb). Like Scheherazade, the reader is reminded, Sheldon must publish or literally perish. Annie’s obsession merges with the expectations of the page-turning real reader, who demands and devours each chapter, and as Sheldon struggles (against pain, painkillers, and a manual typewriter that throws keys) for his life, page by page.

Billed ironically on the dust jacket as a love letter to his fans, the novel is a witty satire on what King has called America’s “cannibalistic cult of celebrity”: “[Y]ou set the guy up, and then you eat him.” The monstrous Reader, however, is also the writer’s muse, creation, and alter ego, as Sheldon discovers when he concludes that Misery Returns —not his “serious” novel Fast Cars —was his masterpiece. Just as ironically, Misery was King’s first novel to please most of the critics.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half is an allegory of the writer’s relation to his genius. The young writer-protagonist Thaddeus Beaumont has a series of headaches and seizures, and a surgeon removes from his eleven-year-old brain the incompletely absorbed fragments of a twin—including an eye, two teeth, and some fingernails. Nearly thirty years later, Beaumont is a creative writing professor and moderately successful literary novelist devoted to his family. For twelve years, however, he has been living a secret life through George Stark, the pseudonym under which he emerged from writer’s block as the author of best-selling crime novels. Stark’s purely instinctual genius finds its most vital expression in his protagonist, the ruthless killer Alexis Machine. Beaumont is forced to disclose and destroy his now self-destructive pseudonym, complete with gravesite service and papier mâché headstone. A series of murders (narrated in Stark’s graphic prose style) soon follows. The pseudonym has materialized, risen from its fictional grave literally to take Thad’s wife and children (twins, of course) hostage. What Stark wants is to live in writing, outside of which writers do not exist. However, the writer is also a demon, vampire, and killer in this dark allegory, possessing and devouring the man, his family, friends, community.

Drawing on the motif of the double and the form of the detective story—on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (c. fifth century b.c.e.), as well as Misery and Pet Sematary —King gluts the first half of the book with Stark/Machine’s gruesome rampages. The last half is psychological suspense and metafiction in biological metaphor: the struggle of the decently introspective Beaumont against the rawly instinctual Stark for control of both word and flesh, with the novel taking shape on the page as the true author reclaims the “third eye,” King’s term for both child’s and artist’s inward vision. Once again, the man buries the terrible child in order to possess himself and his art. The book ends in a “scene from some malign fairy tale” as that child and alter ego is borne away by flocks of sparrows to make a last appearance as a black hole in the fabric of the sky.

In dramatizing the tyrannies, perils, powers, and pleasures of reading and writing, Misery and The Dark Half might have been written by metafictionists John Fowles (to whose work King is fond of alluding) or John Barth (on whom he draws directly in It and Misery). Anything but abstract, however, The Dark Half is successful both as the thriller that King’s fans desired and as an allegory of the writer’s situation. Critic George Stade, in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review (October 29, 1989), praised King for his tact “in teasing out the implications of his parable.” The Dark Half contains epigraphs instead to the novels of George Stark, Thad Beaumont, and “the late Richard Bachman,” without whom “this novel could not have been written.” Thus reworking the gothic cliché of the double, King allows the mythology of his own life story to speak wittily for itself, lending a subtle level of selfparody to this roman à clef. In this instance, his blunt literalness (“word become flesh, so to speak,” as George Stark puts it), gives vitality to what in other hands might have been a sterile exercise.

Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

Some have criticized King’s negative depiction of women, which King himself admitted in 1983 was a weakness. A decade later, King would address, and redress, this in his paired novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne . Both present a strong but besieged female protagonist, and both feature the total solar eclipse seen in Maine in 1963, during which a moment of telepathy, the books’ only supernaturalism, links the two women.

Gerald’s Game is the story of Jessie Burlingame, a young wife who submits to her husband’s desire for bondage in a deserted cabin, only to have him die when she unexpectedly struggles. Alone and helpless, Jessie confronts memories (including the secret reason she struck out at Gerald), her own fears and limitations, and a ghastly visitor to the cabin who may or may not be real. In a bloody scene—even by King’s standards—Jessie frees herself and escapes, a victory psychological as well as physical. The aptly named Dolores Claiborne is trapped more metaphorically, by poverty and an abusive husband, and her victory too is both violent and a sign of her developing independence and strength.

Initial reaction from critics was sometimes skeptical, especially given the prurient aspect of Jessie’s plight and the trendy theme of incestuous abuse in both novels. However, King examined family dysfunction in works from Carrie and The Shining to It, and he continued his commitment to women’s issues and realistic strong women in Insomnia, Rose Madder , and other novels. Archetypal themes also strengthen the two books: Female power must overcome male dominance, as the moon eclipses the sun; and each woman must find her own identity and strength out of travail, as the darkness gives way to light again. (King uses mythology and gender issues more explicitly in Rose Madder, which evenly incorporates mimetic and supernatural scenes.)

The books are daring departures for King in other ways. In contrast to King’s sprawling It or encyclopedic The Stand , these books, like Misery, tightly focus on one setting, a shorter period of time, and a small cast—here Misery’s duet is replaced by intense monologues. In fact, all of Dolores Claiborne is her first-person narrative, without even chapter breaks, a tour de force few would attempt. Moreover, King challenges our ideas of the genre horror novel, since there is little violence, none of it supernatural and all expected, so that suspense is a function of character, not plot (done previously by King only in short fiction such as “The Body” and “The Last Rung of the Ladder”).

Character and voice have always been essential to King’s books, as Debbie Notkin, Harlan Ellison, and others have pointed out. Dolores Claiborne is especially successful, her speech authentic Mainer, and her character realistic both as the old woman telling her story and as the desperate yet indomitable wife, the past self whose story she tells. In these novels, King reaches beyond childhood and adolescence as themes; child abuse is examined, but only from an adult point of view. Dolores and Jessie—and the elderly protagonists of Insomnia—reveal King, perhaps having reconciled to his own history, exploring new social and psychological areas.

Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones , which King calls a “haunted love story,” opens with narrator Mike Noonan recounting the death of his wife, Jo, who collapses outside the Rite Aid pharmacy from a brain aneurysm. Both are relatively young, and Jo, Mike learns, was pregnant. Because Mike is unable to father children, he begins to question whether Jo was having an affair. As Mike slowly adjusts to life without Jo, he is forced to make another adjustment. Formerly a successful writer of gothic romance fiction, he now finds that he is unable to write even a simple sentence. In an attempt to regain his muse and put Jo’s death behind him, Mike returns to Sarah Laughs (also referred to as “TR-90” or the “TR”), the vacation cabin he and Jo purchased soon after he became successful. As Mike quickly learns, Sarah Laughs is haunted by ghosts, among them the ghost of blues singer Sarah Tidwell.

While at Sarah Laughs, Mike meets Mattie Devore, her daughter Kyra, and Mattie’s father-in-law, Max Devore, a withered old man of incalculable wealth who is accustomed to getting anything he wants. Having rescued Kyra from walking down the middle of Route 68, Mike quickly becomes friends with both Kyra and Mattie. Mattie is the widow of Lance Devore, Max’s stuttering son. Lance had nothing to do with his father after learning that his father had tried to bribe Mattie into not marrying him. After Lance’s death from a freak accident, Max returned to Mattie’s life in an attempt to get acquainted with his granddaughter, Kyra. The truth is, however, that Max wants to gain custody of Kyra and take her away to California; he will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.

To help Mattie fight off Max’s army of high-priced lawyers, Mike uses his own considerable resources to retain a lawyer for Mattie named John Storrow, a young New Yorker unafraid to take on someone of Max Devore’s social stature. As Mike is drawn into Mattie’s custody battle, he is also exposed to the ghosts that haunt the community. As Mike sleeps at night, he comes to realize that there are at least three separate spirits haunting his cabin. One, he is sure, is Jo, and one, he determines, is Sarah Tidwell. The third manifests itself only as a crying child, and Mike cannot tell whether it is Kyra or some other child. Mike and Kyra share a special psychic connection that allows them to share dreams and even to have the same ghosts haunting their homes—ghosts who communicate by rearranging magnetic letters on each of their refrigerator doors.

As Mike becomes further embroiled in the custody battle with Max Devore, his search to determine the truth about Jo’s affair finally leads him to a set of journals Jo was keeping, notes from a research project that was her real reason for sneaking away to Sarah Laughs. Jo’s notes explain how everyone related to the people who murdered Sarah Tidwell and her son have paid for this sin by losing a child of their own. Sarah Tidwell’s ghost is exacting her revenge by murdering the children of those who murdered her own child. Mike, related to one of the people who murdered Sarah’s child, has been drawn into this circle of retribution from the beginning, and the death of his unborn daughter, Kia, was not the accident it seemed to be. Mike also realizes that Kyra, the last descendant of this t Rage dy, is to be the final sacrifice used to put Sarah Tidwell to rest. Mike’s return to the ironically named Sarah Laughs, it seems, has been a carefully orchestrated t Rage dy. Everything is tied to the ghost Sarah Tidwell’s purposes, even Mike’s writer’s block. Mike’s writing abilities return while he is at Sarah Laughs, but by the end of the novel he realizes it was simply to lead him to the information he needed to put Sarah’s spirit to rest. Sarah’s ghost may have destroyed his wife and child, but Jo’s ghost gives him the means to save Kyra.

The usual King trademarks that fans have come to expect are present in Bag of Bones . The novel, moreover, shares much with the southern novel and its themes. Guilt is a predominant theme of many southern works, especially those of William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tennessee Williams. Racism, not a theme usually associated with northern writers, has been successfully transplanted by King via the traveling Sarah Tidwell. By the end of the novel the evils of the community have become so entrenched in the soil (another similarity to Faulkner’s fiction) that they begin to affect Mike himself, and he has to fight the urge to kill Kyra. Only by reburying the past—in this case, by literally reburying Sarah Tidwell’s body—can matters finally be put to rest. Mike dissolves Sarah’s body with lye and her spirit finally leaves Sarah Laughs. Jo’s spirit also leaves, and all is quiet once more at the cabin.

By the 1980’s, King had become a mass-media guru who could open an American Express commercial with the rhetorical question “Do you know me?” At first prompted to examine the “wide perceptions that light [children’s] interior lives” (Four Past Midnight) and then the cultural roots of the empire he had created, he proceeded to explore the phenomenon of fiction, the situations of reader and writer. During the 1990’s, King continued to develop as a writer of both supernatural horror and mimetic character-based fiction. His novels after Dolores Claiborne—from Insomnia through Lisey’s Story—all provide supernatural chills while experimenting with character, mythology, and metafiction.

Financially invulnerable, King became almost playful with publishing gambits: The Green Mile was a serial, six slim paperbacks, in emulation of Charles Dickens and as a self-set challenge; Richard Bachman was revived when The Regulators was published in 1996. Although he is still thought of as having no style, actually King maintained his compelling storyteller’s voice (and ability to manipulate his reader emotionally) while maturing in the depth and range of his themes and characters.

King, perhaps more than any other author since Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, also creates a sense of literary history within the later novels that ties them all together. In Bag of Bones , King references several of his other novels, most notably The Dark Half, Needful Things , and Insomnia . For longtime fans, this serves both to update King’s readers concerning their favorite characters and to unify King’s body of work. King’s ironic sense of humor is also evident. When Mike’s literary agent tells him of all the other best-selling novelists who have novels coming out in the fall of 1998, the most notable name missing from the list is that of Stephen King himself.

Major Works Long Fiction : Carrie, 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot , 1975; Rage , 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Shining , 1977; The Stand , 1978, unabridged version 1990; The Dead Zone , 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Bachman); Firestarter , 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Bachman); The Gunslinger, 1982, revised 2003 (illustrated by Michael Whelan; first volume of the Dark Tower series); The Running Man, 1982 (as Bachman); Christine, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson); Pet Sematary, 1983; The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); Thinner, 1984 (as Bachman); The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, 1985 (includes Rage , The Long Walk , Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale; second volume of the Dark Tower series); The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; The Waste Lands, 1991 (illustrated by Ned Dameron; third volume in the Dark Tower series); Gerald’s Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; Desperation, 1996; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean; fourth volume in the Dark Tower series); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (adaptation of his teleplay); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999; Black House, 2001 (with Straub); Dreamcatcher, 2001; From a Buick Eight, 2002; Wolves of the Calla, 2003 (fifth volume of the Dark Tower series); Song of Susannah, 2004 (sixth volume of the Dark Tower series); The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident, 2004 (written under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse); The Colorado Kid, 2005; Cell, 2006; Lisey’s Story, 2006 Short Fiction : Night Shift, 1978; Different Seasons, 1982; Skeleton Crew, 1985; Dark Visions, 1988 (with Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin); Four Past Midnight, 1990; Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993; Hearts in Atlantis, 1999; Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, 2002. Screenplays : Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat’s Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story “Trucks”); Pet Sematary, 1989; Sleep Walkers, 1992. teleplays: The Stand , 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999; Rose Red, 2002. Nonfiction : Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist’s Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, editors); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000; Faithful: Two Diehard Red Sox Fans Chronicle the 2004 Season, 2004 (with Stewart O’Nan). Children’s literature : The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, 2004 (text adaptation by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman). Miscellaneous : Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the DC Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Source: Notable American Novelists Revised Edition Volume 1 James Agee — Ernest J. Gaines Edited by Carl Rollyson Salem Press, Inc 2008.

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Friday, August 03, 2018

Stephen king’s ten tips for horrific writing.

16 comments:

I'm so excited to be a part of Fiction University! Let's get writing :)

FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

A top one! Toast Masters can be useful for public speaking fears. They have local chapters for leadership and communication.

Fear of spiders

Love this post. Gave me a lot to think about.

Thank you, Jean! I'm happy you liked it :)

What would be some suggestions for a list in the Mystery Genre?

What about fear of failure? Fear of letting someone down? Fear of letting yourself down? Fear that you're not good enough to save the day? That people will find out you're a phony?

Thanks! Those really help give me direction.

Great questions!

Thanks! You've sparked several ideas for my upcoming novels. :-)

Let the sparks fly :)

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The first one that came to my mind was fear of the unknown

Definitely. You could frame fear of the unknown a few different ways. Internally (the psyche) or externally (space, the sea). I'm interested to know where it takes your story. Best wishes

The only thing I have to fear is fear itself...Baa ha ha ha

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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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Stephen King Has Ruled The Horror Genre For 50 Years. But Is It Art?

A still from 2015, Carrie The Musical , one of the many adaptations from Stephen King's iconic novel which turns 50 this year. Publicity handout from Carrie The Musical hide caption

A still from 2015, Carrie The Musical , one of the many adaptations from Stephen King's iconic novel which turns 50 this year.

Even if you have never read the book, Carrie , you might recognize the bloodbath prom scene from the movie. Published 50 years ago this spring, Carrie was the first novel by Stephen King. Fame, films and devoted fans were quick to follow.

With over 70 novels and 200 short stories to his credit and countless screen adaptations (plus a couple of plays), it's hard to argue that King is a preeminent force in popular fiction. But does he belong on a list of the greatest American writers?

NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Tony Magistrale, an English professor who has brought King's work into the realm of academia.

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org .

Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

The Essential Stephen King

The author has dominated horror fiction, and arguably all popular fiction, for decades. Here’s where to start.

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By Gilbert Cruz

Gilbert Cruz is the editor of the Book Review.

• March 27, 2024

Before the vampires and the haunted hotels, before the killer clowns, killer cars and killer dogs, before Shawshank and that green mile, there was Carrie. A teenage girl, bullied to her very limit, who discovers that she can move things with her mind, and uses that power to massacre her classmates.

By the time “Carrie” was released, in April 1974, Stephen King had already written several unpublished novels. But none of them gave any real indication that he would come to dominate horror fiction, and arguably all popular fiction, for the next half century.

In his review of “Carrie” in The New York Times Book Review, the columnist Newgate Callendar (who was actually the music critic Harold Schonberg writing under a pseudonym) marveled, writing: “That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers.” Eight years later, Time magazine would call him the “master of postliterate prose.” Four years after that, in the same publication, King would call himself “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” In 2003, he accepted a lifetime achievement honor from the National Book Awards. It’s now 2024 and he’s about to publish another collection of short fiction.

This is all to say that critical reception has waned and waxed, but the books have continued apace — more than 70, with no sign of stopping. If you’re like me (committed? troubled?) you’ve had occasion to read them all, some more than once. And if you’re not, and have always been curious, you’re lucky enough to find an author who can write short and long (and extra long!), outside of the horror genre as much as inside of it. Few writers are more famous and few writers have as many accessible entry points.

Where should I begin?

You will find those who recommend jumping straight into the King pool with one of his door-stopper classics like “The Stand,” the postapocalyptic adventure story about the survivors of a plague that decimates much of the world’s population, or “It,” the tale of a group of friends stalked by a murderous supernatural clown. And while both are great, they can also be intimidating for beginners.

Instead, try ’ Salem’s Lot” (1975), his second novel and first true scary book. This riff on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” sees a novelist return to the small town he lived in long ago at the same time as an ancient vampire and his human companion. It contains many of the most recognizable King elements: a writer protagonist, a Maine town full of idiosyncratic blue-collar characters, echoes of genre fiction standards and memorably creepy set pieces (the school bus, God, the school bus).

I want to read another King classic

Few writers have spoken so damningly for so long about an adaptation of their work as King did about Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Despite the fact that it is regarded as one of the greatest of horror films, King appears to have been genuinely affronted by the changes that occurred from book to screen.

That’s likely because “The Shining” (1977) is particularly personal for the author. Jack Torrance is a down-on-his-luck alcoholic writer who finds one last job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, a resort high in the Rockies. Accompanying him are his wife, Wendy, and his young son, Danny, whose psychic abilities make him vulnerable to the evil spirits that haunt the Overlook.

For King, Jack was a sliding doors version of himself, what he might have become had “Carrie” not been a success — an addict and wannabe novelist who can’t even cut it as a high school teacher and resents (sometimes violently) his family. Where the film’s version (Jack Nicholson in what remains one of his most memorable roles) is a psycho from the jump, the Jack of the novel feels human. He loves his wife and child. We want them all to make it out alive. The book is scary because, as King has said, “You don’t get scared of monsters; you get scared for people.”

I’m a scaredy-cat, OK?

It’s fine not to like scary things! That doesn’t mean you can’t read some Stephen King. Though he’s most famous for his horror novels and stories, at this point, he has written a significant amount outside of the genre. Early in his career, less than a decade after the publication of “Carrie,” King released “Different Seasons” (1982), a collection of four novellas.

Three have nothing to do with the supernatural. Two were adapted into top-tier King movies: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” became, well, you know, and “The Body” was filmed as “Stand By Me.” Both are set in Maine in the early 1960s, and both give a sense of how lovingly King can draw his characters.

Actually, I’m not a scaredy-cat, OK?

Relax! No one said you were. “It” is probably King’s purest horror book, but it’s also one of his biggest and most dense and … the ending has some problems. Let’s call that one part of your graduate study. This starter guide will instead go with “Pet Sematary” (1983).

There’s something elemental about its simplicity: A young family moves into a new house, and terrible things happen after they discover an ancient burial ground deep in the woods. Contrary to what you might think of King’s novels, given the mode in which he typically works, many of them do end with a sense of hard-won victory and optimism. Not this one. It’s as grim as he’s ever gotten.

I want to learn something about the author

Part memoir and part writing manual, “On Writing” (1999) is a bit of an odd duck. Somehow, it has become the fashion to pick one of King’s only nonfiction books as one of his best. (I myself am guilty of this.) And that it is, but it shouldn’t be read without having tackled several of the other titles on this list first. The work gives the life greater meaning.

Written mostly before the 1999 accident that almost killed King, “On Writing” is cleareyed in its account of what it was like to be a pop-culture-obsessed boy in the 1950s, how it felt to be a nearly broke young writer having to support a family, how addiction can quickly imprison you. But the most memorable part might be the 20-page postscript, written after the accident, in which King recalls lying in a ditch on the side of the road, his body pulverized after being hit by a van. The driver of the van sits on a rock looking down at one of the world’s most famous writers. “Like his face, his voice is cheery, only mildly interested,” King writes. Later on it strikes him that “I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. It’s almost funny.”

I want to begin an epic journey

King has referred to “The Stand” as his attempt to do an American version of “The Lord of the Rings.” But his seven-book “Dark Tower” series (an eighth book was published after the story proper concluded) is King’s truest Tolkien analogue.

Indeed, it’s one of the great American genre series — an epic in multiple modes (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, Western) about a gunslinger-knight who is trying to save his world and ours from complete destruction by his foe, the Man in Black. Published over the course of 20 years, the series has become the center of a King extended universe, with multiple novels and stories connecting to its characters and locations. The first volume, “The Gunslinger” (1982) is the shortest, and it will give you a tiny taste of how weird and inventive the series gets.

I’m looking for non-supernatural suspense

A decent percentage of King’s work features writers as main characters, from “’Salem’s Lot” and “The Shining” to “The Tommyknockers” and “The Dark Half” to “Bag of Bones” and “Lisey’s Story.”

Paul Sheldon, the protagonist of “Misery” (1987) is yet another writer, one who finds himself in a particularly horrifying situation — held captive, post-car accident, by an obsessed fan who wants him to write a book just for her. The subtext is clear: Sometimes, fame can feel like a trap. And King, a recovering addict, has talked about the sub-subtext, saying: “Annie was my drug problem, and she was my No. 1 fan. God, she never wanted to leave.”

But none of that matters much when you’re deep into this novel and Paul sleeps a little too long and wakes up and you realize what’s going to happen and your stomach just plummets.

I’m looking for a big, fat read

For King, a prime baby boomer, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the nation’s great pivot points: If Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t fired those three bullets (as King believes he did), what would the next decade have looked like?

In “11/22/63” (2011) King imagines a scenario in which the Maine schoolteacher Jake Epping finds he can travel back to the year 1958 through the pantry in a local diner, eventually using that ability to try to prevent Kennedy’s death.

A big part of the book’s pleasures (and at over 800 pages, there are many) comes from the procedural-like manner in which Jake must establish a new identity in a new era and live in real time without revealing his mission. By the book’s back half, when he begins to cross paths with real historical figures and events, you’ve become fully invested in Jake’s task. It’s one secret of King’s success — that we can so easily put ourselves in the place of an ordinary person experiencing the most extraordinary circumstances.

I want a great crime novel

If you haven’t seen the HBO series based on “The Outsider” (2018) — the novelist Richard Price was the showrunner and Dennis Lehane wrote a couple of episodes — then the twists of this supernatural detective story will remain intact for you. It’s an irresistible setup. In a small Oklahoma town, a teacher and Little League coach is charged with the brutal murder of a young boy. The evidence against him is overwhelming. Until, that is, unequivocal evidence comes to light also placing him in a completely different town at the exact same time.

One of the book’s main characters, Holly Gibney, doesn’t show up until halfway through; and while she’s a character in a prior series of King crime novels (the Mr. Mercedes trilogy), it’s not necessary to have read them beforehand, though you might want to after finishing this one.

Give me a deep cut

This tale of a group of Pennsylvania state troopers and the odd car they keep hidden in a shed has always felt as if it got mysteriously lost. Released the year before King finished his “Dark Tower” epic in a three-book, two-year rush, “From a Buick 8” (2002) is an often contemplative novel that also happens to feature the gnarly dissection of an inter-dimensional bat.

While gross beings make several appearances here, resulting in some of King’s most unsettling descriptions, this is ultimately a book about how events often have no true resolution and life is ultimately inexplicable.

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