A journey into the horror and wonder of Stephen King’s literary world
I first heard of Stephen King from a school friend while in the 10th grade. He told me about this wonderful book he had read called ‘The Shining’ written by someone called Stephen King. I had never heard the name but, hearing my friend describe the book as an absolute tour de force of supernatural horror, I was immediately interested.
I loved reading scary books about vampires and werewolves and things that go bump in the night, though, truth be told, apart from Bram Stoker’s masterpiece ‘Dracula’, most of the other books I had read in the genre were pretty shallow, read and soon forgotten. This King guy sounded different. I checked all the libraries I was a member of but none of them appeared to have any books by Stephen King on their shelves.
Discovering Stephen King: From high school to college
On completing my tenth, I joined Government Arts College Trivandrum for my Pre-Degree (as the 11th and 12th used to be called in those primeval times). Here I was fortunate enough to meet up with a bunch of like-minded friends, all voracious readers who also shared my love for cricket. One of the first things I did on joining the college was to check out the college library. The library consisted of several glass-fronted bookshelves crammed with books. There was a counter beyond which the students were not allowed to pass. You had to stand behind the counter and squint at the cupboards which were about 10 feet beyond the counter and try and make out the titles.
Once you had managed to identify a book you wanted, you could request that it be issued and the librarian (a scrawny individual with the face and manner of a constipated bulldog) would reluctantly hand it over with a long litany of admonishments as to the fate that awaited you if the book was damaged in any way.
What with developing a crick in the neck from craning and twisting it in an effort to make out the titles, straining one’s already poor eyesight, and having to listen to the librarian’s diatribe, it’s a wonder that anyone ever ventured to get a book issued from the library. However, I braved these obstacles with a stout heart, accompanied by my friend Suresh. We die-hard readers are made of stern stuff and no privations, not even a demon librarian, were going to stand between us and a book we coveted.
We entered the library for the first time, stood at the counter and started to twist our bodies like a couple of juvenile contortionists, trying to read the titles on the spines of the books, through the grimy, fly-specked glass of the bookshelves. One of the books had a thick spine, and I read the title with a shout of delight.
It was ‘Salem’s Lot’ by Stephen King. At long last, I was going to sink my teeth into a book by this author I had heard others rhapsodise about, but had never sampled myself. I immediately checked the book out and the two of us departed, eager to sample this much-awaited treat.
I had first crack at the book and started on it right away. The book meandered along like a somnolent brook, with nothing really happening for over a hundred and fifty pages. King set the scene, a sleepy town called Jerusalem’s Lot or Salem’s Lot for short, described the various characters and delved into their psyches. I realised that I was mesmerised by his style, even though nothing exciting was happening.
The author made you care for his characters, empathise with them in a way no other author had done before. I realised that I was reading the work of a master craftsman, but when was something going to happen? This was supposed to be a horror story after all. The story deals with author Ben Mears who returns to his childhood home to write a book about the supposedly haunted Marsten House, where he had one of the most traumatic and terrifying experiences of his childhood.
The various characters are beautifully realised and described, especially the village priest Father Callahan. Though the writer’s wonderfully evocative style keeps you reading, the book lulls you into a false sense of security. Suddenly, a hundred and fifty odd pages into the book, the author sank his fangs into my jugular and dragged me kicking and screaming through the rest of the book all the way to the spectacularly bloody climax.
That was a ride like I had never experienced before, not even when I read Dracula. I realised that after P.G. Wodehouse I had discovered another literary hero, one with almost as brilliant a way with words, though his subject matter was as far as you could get from Wodehouse’s lovely carefree world of silly asses and bossy aunts.
The prolific works of a modern master
By the time I had started my pre-degree course, I had read every book by my favourite writer, PG Wodehouse. As I neared completion of the books by Wodehouse it seemed to me that the world was now a dreary place, a vast emptiness with no more books by Wodehouse to look forward to. Now the scenario had changed. I had a new hero to look up to and to my delight King turned out to be hugely prolific, churning out books as if on a conveyor belt, every one of which zoomed up the bestseller lists.
Within a couple of years, he was the world’s bestselling writer and the best part was that he did not compromise on quality while churning out book after book. I next read his first book ‘Carrie’ about a bullied teen with extraordinary telekinetic powers and the revenge she wreaks on her tormentors. The characters of Carrie and her hysterically religious mother were particularly well delineated. This was followed by ‘The Shining’ the book my schoolfriend had recommended, the chilling and goosebump inducing story of a haunted wintry ski resort and yet another child with extraordinary mental abilities. Stephen King was particularly good with his child/teenage characters.
The children who play primary roles in ‘The Shining’, ‘Firestarter’, ‘Pet Sematary’, ‘It’, ‘Cujo’, ‘The Talisman’ and many other books, the troubled teens in ‘Carrie’, ‘Christine’ and ‘The Shining’, the demonically evil children in the seminal short story ‘Children of the Corn’ from the short story collection ‘Night Shift’, all are beautifully characterised. I used to marvel at how aptly and succinctly Stephen King would succeed in putting their deepest longings and fears on paper.
No other writer I had read, and even by my late teens I had read more than most people do in a lifetime, had ever written about juveniles with such a razor sharp pen while maintaining a deep understanding of what made them tick. You would empathise with his characters, live, laugh and cry with them and grieve when they suffered tragedy for nothing was certain in King’s world, a dark place as full of horrors as it was of wonders.
Most of the books by Stephen King are very thick, on average between 400 and 600 pages, and can also be used as doorstops, pillows or blunt instruments to bop the ungodly with. A few are over a thousand pages long but what makes Stephen King special is that he keeps you reading these voluminous volumes without ever boring you.
I remember reading the 1000 plus page ‘It’ in a day and a half, and the only reason I took so long was that I was scared to read after the sun went down. ‘The Stand’ is another huge book, about a post-apocalyptic world where most of the population has been wiped out by a pandemic caused by a man-made strain of influenza.
Sound familiar? I finished that book in two days, it’s an absolute white knuckle read. It was a huge success, both commercially and critically, and figured in lists of the best books of all time brought out by Time, Rolling Stone, the BBC and The Modern Library. Another favourite is ‘Christine’, the premise of which sounds campy and laughable at first. It’s the story of a vintage car called Christine, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, that is possessed by the spirit of its former owner.
The teenage protagonists of the book are again brought magically to life by King’s superlative prose and the book will make you look both ways twice before crossing the street. If I ever see a Plymouth Fury in my life, even Usain Bolt would have nothing on me as I will conclusively prove that fear lends you wings.
A special mention should be made of Stephen King’s non-fiction book ‘Danse Macabre’ published in 1982. It is the one single book that has had the greatest influence on me. A study of horror and the supernatural in books, films, television, comic books and other mediums of popular culture, it introduced me to a bevy of great authors, books, films and TV shows that I proceeded to seek out and savour over the years.
I had never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, Harlan Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, John D. MacDonald and so many others until I read about them in ‘Danse Macabre’ and proceeded to seek them out. The book has several autobiographical segments and gives us a glimpse into what makes this genius tick. It also has two appendices in which Stephen King details lists of his favourite books and films and these alone are worth the price of admission. His book ‘On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft’, published in 2000 is another book every bibliophile should possess, describing his experiences as a writer and also containing advice for aspiring writers.
Most of King’s books and stories have been transferred to the screen as films or TV serials. While a few of them like ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘The Green Mile’, ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Carrie’, ‘Misery’ (with a chilling Oscar-winning performance by Kathy Bates) and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ (with an unforgettable scenery chewing star turn by Jack Nicholson) have been very good, the truth is that he usually does not translate well onto screen. If you have read the book or story the film is based on, it will never match up to the vivid images, in-depth characterisation and atmosphere that King conjures up in the books. One of the downsides of being a magical teller of tales.
If I was asked to describe Stephen King in a single word, I’d say he is a storyteller. His style is like that of the old traditional storytellers that each tribe used to have in centuries past, who used to pass on the traditions and legends of the clan to the next generation around the community fire.
He has been called the Dickens of the 20th / 21st Century and like Dickens he has had unparalleled commercial success and has had his fair share of detractors, mostly literary snobs who refuse to believe that a writer so popular could have any literary merit, especially a writer in the horror genre. Dickens used to be reviled by the dim-brained critics of his time but over a century later he is still being read while the names of the fashionable litterateurs of the time have been long forgotten.
Moreover, it is wrong to pigeonhole Stephen King as a horror writer alone. He is the writer who has single-handedly given respectability to and popularised the horror genre, but his oeuvre includes science fiction, fantasy (including the magnificent ‘Dark Tower’ series), historical fiction, crime, westerns, comic books and even literary fiction (though that is a term I hate). He has won numerous awards including the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers of America, British Fantasy Award, World Fantasy Award, The World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004 and the Grand Master Award in 2007 from the Mystery Writers of America.
His contribution has been recognised by the National Book Foundation who awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003 (an honour that horrified some of the snobs). In 2015 he was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the US National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature. It can be safely said that a hundred years hence the name of Stephen King will shine bright and his books will continue to fly off shelves worldwide. I just remain grateful that the man is still producing books at a phenomenal pace and hopefully will continue to delight us for years to come.
