There’s a part of me that wants to format this post as an open letter to Stephen King. However, it would feel far too presumptuous to think King himself would ever read this. Here’s to shyly hoping! For now, though, I’m content simply to talk about the author who has had the most singular, encompassing impact on me as a reader, a writer, and a person.
I want to preface with a point I’m going to come back to, and which I find myself repeating often as a bookseller who curates the Horror section at my local Barnes & Noble: Stephen King is so much more than a horror writer. Some of his best, most enduring works transcend genre, whether grounded dramas or human stories with mere touches of the supernatural. His newest book, FAIRY TALE, is one I’ve pointed people to recently, saying “So, I know you just said you don’t read Stephen King because his work scares you, but trust me—this isn’t a horror novel.” And then I usually go on about how wonderful of a book it is, a love-letter to myths, fairytales, and the magic of storytelling, which also happens to be a fine example of pure, enchanting storytelling itself.
What I’m getting at is: King’s best works range across genre. At the heart of all of them, even the most horrific, is a deep, grounded, resilient humanity. There are so many writers whose work has come to mean so much to me. Many of those writers are of times past—distant and more recent: Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Chambers, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Richard Matheson, Peter Straub. There are many who are still writing, shaping the horror genre today: John Langan, Laird Barron, Carmen Machado, Thomas Ligotti, Stephen Graham Jones, Ania Ahlborn. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about many of them, and probably, at some point, will.
But I want to talk about Stephen King. For me, King is where things changed. I read my first King novel at age thirteen. I’m twenty-seven now, and King continues to influence me and amaze me.
I tried writing a novel for the first time when I was ten. It was basically a total ripoff of The Lord of the Rings and Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. I was always drawing or making stories as a kid, but on the first day of summer after 5th grade, when a friend of mine wanted to discuss with me about a book he’d been trying to write, it sort of clicked in my head: People write books. I wanted to do that. So I started writing a very (VERY) bad story with knights and dragons and magic. It’s still in an old notebook somewhere, with piles of other notebooks full of very bad stories. If I recall, it was episodic by chapter, probably nonsensical, with pages and paragraphs of tangents when I’d start reading a new writer and would sort of adopt their style for a little bit. My school of writing was reading, first and foremost, and as many writers do, I started by imitating those books I loved the most. Imitating very badly, I should add.
I haven’t stopped writing since then. Thankfully—needless to say—so much has changed.
My dad, ever a lover of horror, was always introducing me to increasingly scary movies. I remember watching and loving old episodes of The Twilight Zone. They came from a place of pure imagination that I could relate to. I remember movies like The Sixth Sense, and The Birds, and I Am Legend, how they gave me nightmares, made me lose sleep… and for some reason I wound up gravitating back toward that feeling. Fear is important to reckon with, as a child, I think. And there are those of us who end up truly fascinated with it. Guillermo Del Toro says horror is healing. Peter Straub said darkness can be extraordinarily beautiful, full of richness, as it explores perhaps the darkest but also the deepest sides of the human experience. And I think there’s a profound truth in that.
So my dad asked me, one day, if I’d ever want to read something from the horror author Stephen King. That was a name I knew from a distance, probably from movie posters or opening credits of a few things, and of course in the section I didn’t yet shop in at bookstores. Up until that point, what I read was mostly Young Reader and Young Adult. From Harry Potter, to Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, and the first Hunger Games book.
I went from that type of fiction to, suddenly, IT, Stephen King’s Master’s thesis on Horror literature, a tome of over a thousand pages. It practically traumatized me. I had not the slightest clue of what I was getting into. I was thirteen—a fairly young thirteen. And the memories of reading IT for the first time are still sharply vivid in my memories. I was amazed at how it seemed like Stephen King had actually been there in every scene, so vivid and so clear was his writing. I don’t mean that as a slight against the fiction I’d been reading before. But to experience such unthinkably horrible, terrifying things at the hands of a book, and for it to be written in such a way that it felt to me as if the author had actually been there—that was new for me. The same is true not simply for the descriptions, but for the emotional truths found in King’s books, rooted in the characters.
Equally new to me was the grounded humanity of its characters and their stories. These felt, more so than in any book I’d ever read, truly like people I not only could know, but like people I already knew. And oh, man, did I cry through the last pages.
IT was my first foray not only into Adult Fiction, but also into the literature of Horror. In my mind, it cuts a clear BEFORE and AFTER. After that, my life as a reader and as a writer was never the same.
I was already someone who spent a lot of time in bookstores and in front of my own bookshelves. Soon I was acquiring as many Stephen King books as I could. Not only was I reading them—consuming them, really—I also studied them. Rereading first lines to see which ones grabbed me the most; rereading favorite passages, dissecting what made them effective, especially when they affected me either emotionally or by truly scaring me.
King was the gateway for me to a love of the horror genre, too, beyond his own books. I remember the days of placing orders at the local bookstore—Village Books in Mount Shasta, which closed several years ago and which I still miss. I remember picking up copies of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, or Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, or Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Hell House, or Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night. Not to mention the days when I would stay up late reading Edgar Allan Poe.
A brief aside about Peter Straub, who died recently.
Peter Straub was the second horror author I discovered after King. Many know Straub as having co-writtten The Talisman and Black House with King, but my introduction was with Ghost Story. I get goosebumps when I remember that book. It’s one of the first times I remember setting down a horror novel, not entirely certain I’d grasped it in its entirety, only for it to infect my dreams and my daily thoughts, and I realized what Straub had pulled off with it. An incredible book.
Straub introduced me to horror with a deeper literary sensibility, so to speak. His writing felt descended from the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, in some ways. I’m speaking a lot, in this post, about King’s influence on me, but truthfully it’s a shared impact that a handful of writers had on me, and I can never understate the continuing influence of the work of the late Peter Straub. What he did with language, with characters, with the nature of horror itself, is second to none. He was a man who understood darkness, who didn’t shy away from it, driven by curiosity as both a writer and a person. He was one of the poets of the soul of the horror genre, the first I had encountered. I’m grateful to have been alive at the same time as him, and to have encountered his singular voice in literature.
With Stephen King, I began to get more context into the ways he had shaped the genre ever since his first novel, Carrie, and how he consistently pushed the boundaries of genre across his whole career. From supernatural thrillers like Firestarter (one of a few major influences on the show Stranger Things), the haunting fantasy period drama The Green Mile (which I sometimes describe as Stephen King’s To Kill a Mockingbird, in a sense), to all-out horror as with Pet Sematary (a tale about death and grief, which is as heartbreaking as it is disturbing).
Later in his career, too, are some of my favorites of his. Books that explore interiority and emotion, verging on the abstract, yet plumbing emotional truth, like the beautiful, haunting, melancholy Lisey’s Story and Duma Key. The resonant love story wrapped inside a well-researched, propulsive time-travel thriller, 11/22/63, which also made me cry. The nostalgia-and-ghost-haunted Joyland, which is so small and yet stands alongside some of his best. I would say “That book made me cry, too” but I’m starting to realize HOW MANY OF THESE BOOKS made me cry… anyway…
With King, though, it’s never just about the story. What amazed me then and amazes me now—and which I find inspiring, as a writer—is Stephen King’s human characters. The people of his novels are the story, far more than the plot. This became a lesson for me about storytelling, which is now a fundamental part of my own writing.
One of the ever-present criticisms of King is that his books are slow-burns, that they’re vivid with detail and take their time getting to “the good stuff.” This statement as criticism never made sense to me. With King, the story is the characters. When I pick up a King book, what I love the most is getting wrapped up inside the lives of these regular everyday people, people I can relate to. Even with the books of his that I liked less than others, I never failed to feel immersed inside the world of the characters. They feel alive, they feel real, so when the horror comes, the horror feels just as real.
This is the type of fiction, and the type of horror especially, that I’ve come to love the most. The kind that doesn’t fit easily into any category, with its heart deeply inside the worlds of its characters. Whether that’s the books of Stephen King, or Peter Straub, or books I deeply love and which mean a great deal to me for what they’ve done to me as a reader and as a writer, like The Fisherman, by John Langan, and A Cosmology of Monsters, by Shaun Hamill. Those two books are ones I’ve read more recently, which still haven’t left my mind months later—for the writing, for the characters, for the stories they tell.
When horror novels disappoint me, it’s often because they lack that simple yet vital thing: the grounding human element that puts me there with the characters and makes me truly care for them, making the horror come viscerally alive.
It’s this special thing about Stephen King’s books, the intertwining of the humanity, the drama, the realism, with the fantastical, the supernatural, the horrific, that allows them to fill so much space in my heart and in my life, elevating them to stories that stay with me beyond merely having scared me or having been simply good reads that I flipped through and set down. I’ll never forget when I picked up the book Christine, thinking I was in for a sillier-than-usual horror novel about an evil, haunted car. What I got was a soulful coming-of-age story with serious, heavy themes and broken, resonant characters that—like with IT—I shed tears for. Same with Cujo. “Oh, a small horror novel about a dog with rabies.” Pages later, I’m immersed in this sad, emotional story about betrayal, about losing who we thought we were—plus a handful of other touching themes about family—wrapped inside a relentless thriller.
Another thing people like to criticize about King is his endings. To which I say, when you have a body of work that expands to over sixty novels, there are inevitably going to be those that don’t work as well as others. Yet, more than a handful of his books that could be said to have lackluster endings are ones that still would make my favorites list, because of the way the story resonated with me, how the characters stayed with me. It’s about so much more than just the plot. I guess it depends on what you read for. Often, the experience of a King book as a whole has a way of transcending smaller flaws.
Because of King, my writing began to change and evolve at a rapid pace when I was still young. I tried to imitate him for awhile, and then some of my other favorite writers, especially in horror. Then, because of the effectiveness of his stories, I felt driven to begin studying writing and storytelling as a craft. Years later, I’m still learning—but I’m at a place where I’m confident in my work. I’m at a place, too, where I can say I love my own writing, and although that may sound conceited, it comes after years and years of practice, trial-and-error, etc. Back then, as a developing young writer, I would finish writing a book, hate it, and move on immediately, never able to say anything positive about my own writing. As I continued writing, though, pushing through all of that, plus studying and reading and writing and writing, all of that began to change.
Not that I don’t finish a book and have vengeful feelings toward it. First drafts are difficult things to love. But the revision process is a writer’s best friend. That’s something that took me awhile to learn, and then nurture, and eventually fall in love with.
My recently published horror novel, The Family Condition—I’m proud of it. I love the story, still, and its characters. And the reception I’ve received for it so far has been surreal, exciting—it’s made me happy.
I’m not sure I have an overarching point here, beyond expressing my gratitude to all I’ve learned from Stephen King. His influence doesn’t end with his earlier works, either. Revival, his novel from 2014, was one of my first introductions to the genre of Cosmic Horror. That book shook me to my bones. As did his short story N., from the collection Just After Sunset, of a similar Lovecraftian nature. It was those two stories, and the aforementioned book by John Langan—The Fisherman, which I can’t recommend highly enough—which showed me what’s possible in storytelling in the genre of Cosmic Horror.
Currently I’m close to finished writing a novel inspired by a few works of Cosmic/Lovecraftian horror, a genre I feel I’ve been hovering around for years—the existential themes explored in the genre speak to my joyfully cosmically insignificant heart—and I owe my thanks to a few authors for that.
In Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, one of my cherished favorite books—which I can’t talk about without mentioning how deeply it burrowed into my heart, and how openly I wept during its final pages… and I seriously mean that I wept—one of the dozens of passages that stuck out to me was the main character, a young boy, talking about the writers that stuck out to him as having a child’s imagination. He named Ray Bradbury as a prime influence; a writer of adult fiction, fantasy and horror and science fiction, whose work made sense to a young boy because he recognized something in the imagination behind those books. For me, that was Stephen King, an author who seemed to write what he wanted to write, regardless of genre, and who grounded an immense imagination in a mature and digestible way—an adult way, adult fiction, without losing any of the sense of playfulness or fun. I get excited just writing about it, and my eyes gravitate toward my shelves of Stephen King books, which are, to me, as much literature that lives in my heart as they are treasured memories of things I feel I’ve lived through.
Oh, and don’t get me started on The Dark Tower series, the epitome of what I mean when I talk about King’s imagination, his storytelling abilities, and what makes him so singular as a writer.
So, for me, King isn’t merely an influence, but an inspiration. He’s known as the King of Horror, but if you know, you know: he’s so much more than that. I could probably write on and on about him and his work, but what I wanted to do, for now, was talk a little about him and what his work has meant—and continues to mean—to me. And, along the way, talk about a number of other writers and books that have equally shaped me as a reader, a person, and a writer.
Long days and pleasant nights, everyone.