Stealing Stephen King
When people ask what authors inspire me, they expect me, AP Literature teacher, to list off names from the Canon. Sure, I’m a fan of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hardy, one Bronte sister, and so on, but I sort of fangirl for Stephen King — and not only because he writes horror. No, I am a multigenre connoisseur: Morrison, Hosseini, Whitehead, Walker, Allende, Erdrich, Atwood, Franzen, even the troublesome Irving… but the man who made me want to be a writer is Stephen King.
His influence on my criminal career began before that of my writing aspirations, back in the summer of 1984.
That was the summer my cousins from Colorado came to visit us on the farm. They stayed less than a week, but it was enough to awaken my darker side.
My father had bought my sister and I one of those barn-like sheds with a front porch and a split barn door and two screened widows with white trim. It was my favorite hangout spot, especially after the paper wasps had been removed each summer.
Scott and Chris, my favorite cousins came for a rare visit from the Vail area. Products of Colorado skiing, skateboarding, and the high fashion of Denver, they mesmerized my Missouri mind. Scott was stylish and seemingly cultured for a fourteen year-old, and Chris, just a year and a half my senior, was always cracking jokes (the “dead baby” variety were his favorite for most…
