Why You Should Definitely Give Stephen King A Chance
Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with his mastery of horror.
Stephen King is admitedly one of the most prolific and popular writers of our time. Going through his bibliography, we can see he has written over 60 novels, hundreds of short stories and even tried his hand at non-fiction. All that, in barely over 50 years.
Even if you’ve never read one of his wildly popular books, you have most likely seen one of their movie adaptations.
At the very least you’d recognize the titles of some of his best works, like the classics The Shining and The Green Mile or the recently repopularized It, even if you never knew he was the writer behind them.
I’ve considered myself to be a longtime fan of Stephen King, having read as many of his books and seen as many of their adaptations in other media as I could get my hands on. I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was 16 years old. In retrospect, I have to admit that was quite a young age, considering the mature and complicated content of many of his books.
Yet I only recently tried to get a clear picture of how many of his works had escaped me. I’d figured it would definitely be a handfull, but it turns out I have read only half of his novels. Half?? It was the first time I looked up the full list of his work and my jaw dropped numerous times while reading the relevant wikipedia page.
The master of horror
But all this got me thinking. Why is Stephen King so popular and what makes him one of my favorite writers? What has made me want to read every last one of his works?
Well, he is best known for his amazing ability to flesh out thriller, horror and supernatural stories. The sort that makes you curl up in your bed at night a little more than usual. Wrapping the covers a little tighter around you subconsciously, like a child thinking this might just keep the night-demons away.
His terrifying novels are known to be filled with all sorts of monsters: from bloodthirsty vampires to huge rabid dogs and from hungry haunted hotels to possessed murderous vintage cars. Superpowers like telekinesis, telepathy and pyrokinesis have also been prominent in some of his best-known novels.
More than shock-value
But that is not it. The metaphysical horror and graphic violence, while kind of his trademark, is not what draws me to his books again and again. Let me explain by starting with one of the first of his stories that I fell in love with. It is actually one of the few I have read so far with zero supernatural elements, not even a hint of them.
If you recognize which of his works I am talking about before I give you the title, I am glad a fellow fan is reading this! Otherwise, do you need a hint? What about Ben E. King’s Stand By Me? It probably sounds familiar but you cannot really place it. What does it have to do with Stephen King (besides the coincidentally common last name)?
The book won me right away with its opening lines about 10 years ago and to this day these words bring tears to my eyes:
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”
We all have some kind of weird secret that hardly any other soul knows about. I am glad (and at the same time jealous) for those who have found a person who they can trust enough to openly share such secrets. But what secret is the author talking about? I promise you this is no spoiler, it’s right there in the first few pages.
The narrator is reminiscing about his early childhood years, recalling the incident that abruptly brought him in some ways into adulthood: Seeing a dead body for the first time and the quest to find it.
This Stephen King novella called “The Body” was adapted 4 years after its publication into a movie titled “Stand by Me”, hence the title of its well-known soundtrack, featuring an astonishingly young and villainous Keifer Sutherland and a then little-known child actor named Wil Wheaton.
Drinking problems
While this Stephen King story is one of the few to not use metaphysical horror and thriller elements, it shares many similar themes with his other works. Themes that permeate most of King’s work and make it grounded in humanity and real-world problems, much of them experienced by the writer himself.
Sometimes these themes are openly expressed through flawed characters: the villains, side-characters or even the protagonists themselves. Their attributes and actions or the way others perceive them are used as sharp social commentary. The narrator himself often does the commentary directly. This is partly King’s way of expressing his demons, but it doesn’t make the message any less meaningful.
A notable example is Dan Torrence and his father Jack. Despite the troubles his dad’s drinking brought to the family before and during the events of The Shinning, little Dan grows to become an alcoholic himself in Stephen King’s late sequel Doctor Sleep (which recently also became a popular movie).
“Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him [Jack] of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.” ― The Shining
Things that go bump in the night
Take Stephen King’s It as another example. The story mostly known for its contribution to the popularization of coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, in the modern age. The book has inspired two movie versions, one to scare our generation out of our pants and one two-part movie for the younger ones.
I’d forgive you if you thought the original story was just about a scary clown terrorizing and eating innocent children. I am here to tell you it is much more than that. Friendship, bullying, abusive parents, the magic about being a child and the inevitable landing to reality that is growing up, are all integral parts of the story. As much if not more than Pennywise the dancing clown.
“The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself — that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you didn’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.” ― It
In a weird and unique way, so many of Stephen King’s terrifying supernatural monsters thrive around or are themselves very human problems. A very real kind of broken that often feels like pure evil. And in many of his stories it is simple people or such human problems that are the true villain of the story.
Monsters are real
While the covers (and movie versions) of Stephen King’s books are all about the scares, I assure you the stories themselves are about life. Its dark and desperate sides, but also its bright and beautiful ones. Because the light shines brightest in the dark, isn’t that right?
His works have moved me to tears more times than I can count and in the most unexpected ways. Terror has also been there quite a lot but it has made for an even deeper and powerful contrast. And even if the monsters seem strange and otherworldly, they can be seen as reflections of the real ones out there. Stephen King himself put it best:
“The truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win. That our better angels sometimes — often! — win instead, in spite of all odds, is another truth. And thank God it is.” — The Shining
Way more than a horror writer
It is unfair to judge Stephen King’s work solely based on its scariest and macabre parts, when his stories explore much more than that.
“We each owe a death — there are no exceptions. But, oh God, sometimes the Green Mile seems so long. […] I think about all of us. Walking our own Green Mile, each in our own time.” — The Green Mile
“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.” — Carrie
“Has it ever occurred to you…that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?” — Christine
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.” — The Stand
So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time…Best not to look back. Best to believe that there will be happily ever afters all the way around — and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question…So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away…drive away from Derry, from memory…but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness. — It
None of this gets the same attention as the terror, the blood and the violence in Stephen Kings stories. But if you think about it, isn’t it a bit like that in real life too? All the ugly and scary and horrifying of the world takes the spotlight so easily, out-staging the kindness, the complexities, the everyday happiness and sorrows, the marvel that is being alive.
Sure, Stephen King’s work is not for everyone. But I suspect that many of you might at the very least enjoy his stories. If you happen to be thinking about what book to read (or audiobook to listen to) next, having way too much free time quarantined in your home, give one of Stephen King’s books a try. And you might just fall in love like I did.
For the fellow Stephen King fans reading this, which is your favorite of his stories? Mine would have to be Under The Dome (The Body and 11.22.63 being strong contenders too), which explores the dynamics within a small-town society when it suddenly and unexplicably gets cut-off from the outside world. Dark secrets and psycological pathologies surface producing nail-bitting events, in the midst of the panic-driven search for a way out and an answer to the question of what or who created the titular dome. Comment below with your favorite, explaining why if you like. I need ideas on each of his books to sink my teeth into next.
