Stephen King

Stephen King (born 1947) is a prolific and immensely popular author of horror fiction. In his works, King blends elements of the traditional gothic tale with those of the modern psychological thriller, detective, and science fiction genres.

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. When he was two years old King's father deserted the family, leaving his mother to care for Stephen and his older brother. By the time King was seven he had begun writing stories. After discovering a box of horror and science fiction books in his aunt's house, he discovered his forte. In 1965 his first story was published in Comics Review.

King graduated high school in 1966 and pursued a bachelor of arts degree in English at the University of Maine at Orono. He graduated in 1970 and married Tabitha Spruce the following year.

King began work on a novel about a girl with telekinetic abilities entitled Carrie. When it was released in 1974, the book was an instant success and catapulted King into the top ranks of horror writers.

King's fiction features colloquial language, clinical attention to physical detail and emotional states, realistic settings, and an emphasis on contemporary problems, including marital infidelity and peer group acceptance, that lend credibility to the supernatural elements in his fiction. King's wide popularity attests to his ability to create stories in which he emphasizes the inability to rationalize certain facets of evil in seemingly commonplace situations.

King's interest in the demonic and the paranormal is usually reflected in his protagonists, whose experiences and thoughts serve to reveal psychological complexities and abnormalities. Carrie concerns a socially outcast teenage girl whose emotional insecurities lead her to take violent revenge on taunting classmates by means of telekinetic powers. In The Shining, malevolent spirits in a remote resort hotel manipulate a recovering alcoholic caretaker into attempting to murder his wife and child. Similarly, a haunted car in Christine gains control of an alienated teenage boy. Other works in which paranormal events recur include The Dead Zone and Firestarter.

Some of King's novels offer variations on classic stories of fantasy and horror. Salem's Lot, for example, is a contemporary version of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula set in an isolated New England town. In this work, a young writer and an intelligent youth combat a small group of vampires that turns out to include an increasing number of the town's residents. King's apocalyptic epic The Stand is close in structure to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in its tale of a deadly virus and the resulting battle between the surviving forces of good and evil. Pet Sematary, a version of W. W. Jacob's classic short story "The Monkey's Paw," tells of a physician who discovers a supernatural Indian burial ground where the dead return to life and succumbs to temptation after his child is killed. The Talisman, written in collaboration with English horror writer Peter Straub, also recalls The Lord of the Rings in its evocation of a fantasy world in which a boy searches for a cure for his mother's cancer. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three are two in a series of episodes previously published in periodicals and inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." These books focus on a gunslinger who pursues a mysterious man in black toward the Dark Tower, "the linchpin that holds all of existence together."

King has admitted to writing five novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman to avoid over-publishing under his own name. These novels seldom contain elements of the supernatural or occult, focusing instead on such themes as human cruelty, alienation, and morality. In Rage, a psychopath shoots a schoolteacher and holds a classroom hostage, singling out one pupil for physical and mental torture. The Long Walk and The Running Man focus on near-future societies in which people compete to the death in ritualistic games. Roadwork explores a man's reactions after observing his family, work, and home destroyed by corporate and governmental forces beyond his control. Thinner describes the fate of an obese man who begins to lose weight following a gypsy's curse.

It is intended as a compendium of horror that King has identified as concluding his treatment of children and supernatural monsters. Set in the fictional community of Derry, Maine, the novel focuses on a self-proclaimed "Losers Club" consisting of seven outcasts who successfully fought off a supernatural threat living below the town's sewer system in 1958, unaware that It resurfaces every twenty-seven years to control individuals and kill children as a sacrifice for adult sins. An amalgam of fears, It may appear as whatever frightens an individual, as a vampire or werewolf, or less melodramatically, in the form of crime, racial and religious bigotry, or domestic violence. When It telepathically recalls the Losers Club in 1985, the group's members must rediscover their childhood humor and courage to counter the limitations of adulthood. Although many reviewers considered the novel overlong, Robert Cormier commented: "King still writes like one possessed, with all the nervous energy of a young writer seeking his first big break. He never cheats the reader, always gives full measure.... He is often brilliant, and makes marvelous music, dark and sinister."

King's fiction is often semi-autobiographical in subject. Misery focuses on Paul Sheldon, a pseudonymous author of popular historical romances featuring an indomitable heroine known as Misery Chastain. After writing his first "literary" novel, Sheldon stages a funeral for his alias but suffers an automobile accident and awakes to find himself the invalid prisoner of a psychotic nurse who forces him to resurrect Misery by writing another book. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt commented: "[Unlike] much of Mr. King's fiction, this novel is more than just a splendid exercise in horror.... Not only must Paul create under pressure a story he doesn't particularly want to tell, but he must also make it plausible, even inspired, for Annie Wilkes is a shrewd connoisseur of storytelling, what one might call the ultimate editor and critic. Under her tutelage the experiences of meeting a deadline and being cut take on terrifyingly literal meanings." The Dark Half revolves around Thaddeus Beaumont, a writer who as a child experienced headaches resulting from the incompletely absorbed fetus of a twin lodged in his brain. Although Thad decides to give up his pseudonymous identity as an author of thrillers, his alter ego returns, intent on revenge and forcing Thad to teach him the craft of writing by holding his wife and child hostage. George Stade called The Dark Half "a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes."

In The Tommyknockers (1987), King tells the story of the residents of Haven, Maine, who somehow acquire powers that no ordinary human beings have, and in the process turn their town into a death trap for outsiders. King's 1998 novel, Bag of Bones, is a traditional ghost story involving a best-selling suspense novelist who is plagued by nightmares, writer's block, and ghostly visitations following the untimely death of his wife.

King has also written two short story collections, Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, comprised of detective, science fiction, and horror tales. Stephen King's Danse Macabre includes autobiographical essays and a critical history of the horror genre in films, television, and literature. Different Seasons consists of four novellas which, like the Bachman novels, focus on the terrors of everyday existence. King has also written screenplays for several films. These include Creepshow and Cat's Eye, which consist of horror vignettes presented in a humorous, comic-book style; Silver Bullet, an adaptation of an earlier novel, Cycle of the Werewolf; and Maximum Overdrive, an expansion of the short story "Trucks," which King himself directed. In this film, a passing comet inexplicably causes motor vehicles to come alive and hold a group of people captive in a highway diner.

"With Stephen King," muses Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, "you never have to ask `Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?'--You are. And he knows it." Throughout a prolific array of novels, short stories, and screenwork in which elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and humor meld, King deftly arouses fear from dormancy. The breadth and durability of his popularity alone evince his mastery as a compelling storyteller. "Nothing is as unstoppable as one of King's furies, except perhaps King's word processor," remarks Gil Schwartz in People magazine, which selected King as one of twenty individuals who have defined the decade of the eighties. And although the critical reception of his work has not necessarily matched its sweeping success with readers, colleagues and several critics alike discern within it a substantial and enduring literary legitimacy. In American Film, for instance, Darrell Ewing and Dennis Meyers call him "the chronicler of contemporary America's dreams, desires, and fears." And fantasy writer Orson Scott Card, citing King's "brilliant" exploration of current American myths and legends, proclaims in a Contemporary Authors interview with Jean W. Ross: "If someone in the future wants to see what American life was like, what Americans cared about, what our stories were in the seventies and eighties, they'll read Stephen King." Moreover, says Card, in fifty years, King will be "regarded as the dominant literary figure of the time. A lot of us feel that way."

Credited with revivifying the macabre in both fiction and film, "this maker of nightmares," says Andrew Klavan in the Village Voice, has finally become synonymous with the genre itself. A publishing marvel with nearly one hundred million copies of his work in print worldwide, not only is he the first writer to have had three, four, and finally five titles appear simultaneously on New York Times' bestseller lists, he remained on those lists continuously for more than a decade--frequently at the top for months at a stretch. Moreover, his recent The Dark Half commanded a record-shattering first printing for hardcover fiction of one and a half million copies. As David Streitfeld assesses it in the Washington Post, "King has passed beyond bestsellerdom into a special sort of nirvana reserved for him alone." Widely translated, King's work has also been regularly adapted for the screen and recorded on audio and video cassette, prompting Curt Suplee, in the Washington Post Book World, to call him "a one-man entertainment industry." While pointing out that King has not "single-handedly and overnight" transformed horror into the marketing sensation that it is, literary critic Leslie Fiedler concedes in Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King that "no other writer in the genre [has] ever before produced so long a series of smash successes ... so that he has indeed finally become--in his own words--a `brand name.'" But as Paul Weingarten makes clear in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, "Stephen King, like any good brand name, delivers."

The genre of horror fiction, which boasts an avid and loyal readership, dates almost to the origins of the novel itself. Fiedler explains, for instance, that just as the portrayal of mundanity in Samuel Richardson's work represents a disavowal of the fantastic elements of Medieval and Renaissance Romance, "a kind of neo-fantastic fiction which abandoned the recognizable present in favor of an exotic past" emerged near the end of the eighteenth century as a partial reaction against the popular, sentimental, domestic novel. Consequently, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, continues Fiedler, "the fantastic was reborn in sinister form, as terrifying nightmare rather than idyllic dream," and was manifested in 1818 by the first and perhaps the best known of horror stories--Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, Or the New Prometheus. The novel was not critically well regarded during its time, though, and a similar reception awaited its progeny--Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although the modern horror tale is founded in these three works, he notes in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, his study of the Gothic arts, especially literature, film, and television, "all three live a kind of half-life outside the bright circle of English literature's acknowledged classics."

While striking a deep and responsive chord within its readers, the genre of horror is frequently trivialized by critics who tend to regard it, when at all, less seriously than mainstream fiction. In an interview with Charles Platt in Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction, King suspects that "most of the critics who review popular fiction have no understanding of it as a whole." Regarding the "propensity of a small but influential element of the literary establishment to ghettoize horror and fantasy and instantly relegate them beyond the pale of so-called serious literature," King tells Eric Norden in a Playboy interview, "I'm sure those critics' nineteenth-century precursors would have contemptuously dismissed [Edgar Allan] Poe as the great American hack." But as he contends in "The Horror Writer and the Ten Bears," his foreword to Kingdom of Fear: " Horror isn't a hack market now, and never was. The genre is one of the most delicate known to man, and it must be handled with great care and more than a little love." Furthermore, in a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, reprinted in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, he predicts that horror writers "might actually have a serious place in American literature in a hundred years or so."

The genre survived on the fringe of respectability through movies and comic books, observes Fiedler, adding that during the repressive 195Os, "the far-from-innocent kids ... fought back; surreptitiously indulging in the literature of horror, even as they listened to the rock music disapproved of by their fathers and mothers." Profoundly an offspring of the 195Os, King imparts the influence of its music and movies to the content and style of his fiction. In Esquire, Barney Cohen describes King's writing style as "American yahoo--big, brassy, and bodacious"; and according to Gary Williams Crawford in Discovering Stephen King, it derives not only from the American literary tradition of Realism, but the horror and science fiction film, and the horror comic book as well. King grew up with rock `n' roll, played rhythm guitar in a rock band, and still enjoys playing--even though the family feline invariably leaves the room, he told the audience in a talk presented at a public library in Billerica, Massachusetts, reprinted in Bare Bones. As owner of a local rock radio station, he often works to the blare of its music, and laces much of his fiction with its lyrics. And as a lifelong fan of film, he conveys a cinematic immediacy to his books: "I see them almost as movies in my head," he explains to Michael Kilgore in a Tampa Tribune interview.

The first motion picture King remembers seeing is "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," but another film proved more portentous. He relates to Norden that he still has difficulty expressing how "terribly frightened and alone and depressed" he felt when, in 1957, a theatre manager interrupted "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" to announce to the audience that the Soviet Union had launched the satellite "Sputnik": "At that moment, the fears of my fictional horror vividly intersected with the reality of potential nuclear holocaust; a transition from fantasy to a real world suddenly became far more ominous and threatening." King believes that his entire generation is beset with terrifying itself because it is the first to mature under the threat of nuclear war; he adds in a Penthouse magazine interview with Bob Spitz that, consequently, it has been "forced to live almost entirely without romance and forced to find some kind of supernatural outlet for the romantic impulses that are in all of us." King suggests in Danse Macbre that "we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones"; and, as he relates to Keith Bellows in a Sourcebook interview, "The more frightened people become about the real world, the easier they are to scare." Douglas E. Winter comments in the Washington Post Book World that "in a time of violence and confusion, it is little wonder then that so many readers have embraced the imaginative talents of Stephen King."

King's ability to comprehend "the attraction of fantastic horror to the denizen of the late 20th century" according to Deborah L. Notkin in Fear Itself, partially accounts for his unrivaled popularity in the genre. But what distinguishes him is the way in which he transforms the ordinary into the horrific. Pointing out in the Atlantic that horror frequently represents "the symbolic depiction of our common experience," Lloyd Rose observes that "King takes ordinary emotional situations--marital stress, infidelity, peer-group-acceptance worries--and translates them into violent tales of vampires and ghosts. He writes supernatural soap operas." But to Crawford, King is "a uniquely sensitive author" within the Gothic literary tradition, which he describes as "essentially a literature of nightmare, a conflict between waking life and the darkness within the human mind." Perpetuating the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft, "King is heir to the American Gothic tradition in that he has placed his horrors in contemporary settings and has depicted the struggle of an American culture to face the horrors within it," explains Crawford, and because "he has shown the nightmare of our idealistic civilization."

Some critics, though, attribute King's extraordinary accomplishments simply to a deep and genuine enjoyment of, as well as respect for, the genre itself. According to Don Herron in Discovering Stephen King, for instance, "The fact that King is a horror fan is of more importance to his fiction than his past as a teacher, his aims as an artist, or even his ability as a craftsman." Herron suggests that although King's work may very well represent "a psychological mirror of our times," he doubts whether "the majority of fans or even his most intelligent critics read him for Deep Meaning." In Herron's estimation, most readers begin "a new Stephen King book with thrills of expectation, waiting for this guy who's really a horror fan, see, to jump out of the old closet and yell `Boo!!!'"

"We value his unique ability to scare the living daylights out of us," says William F. Nolan in Kingdom of Fear, because "King, more than any other modern master of Dark Fantasy, knows how to activate our primal fears." Referring to himself as a "sort of Everyman" where fear is concerned, King admits to Kilgore that perhaps his books succeed because his own fears, some of which are the natural residue of childhood, are simply "very ordinary fears." Only through exercising his imagination, he adds, has he honed his "perceptions of them." Although he indicates to Norden that he never experienced anything paranormal as a child, he does recall being "terrified and fascinated by death--death in general and my own in particular--probably as a result of listening to all those radio shows as a kid and watching some pretty violent TV shows." Religion, too, provided its share of trepidations. "It scared me to death as a kid," he confesses to Spitz. "I was raised Methodist, and I was scared that I was going to hell. The horror stories that I grew up on were biblical stories ... the best horror stories ever written." As an adult, though, he shares a widespread anxiety over society's propensity toward self-destruction, frets about his family's security, is resolutely superstitious, and is prey to such pedestrian terrors as bugs, airplanes, and getting stuck in crowded elevators. He also retains a vigorous fear of the dark. "The dark is a big one," he admits in the talk presented at the Billerica library. "I don't like the dark." Or as he elaborates to Norden: "There's a lot of mystery in the world, a lot of dark, shadowy corners we haven't explored yet. We shouldn't be too smug about dismissing out of hand everything we can't understand. The dark can have teeth, man!"

"The desire to be scared is a childish impulse, belonging to innocence rather than to experience," writes Barbara Tritel in the New York Times Book Review. "Frightening escapist literature lets us escape not to a realm of existential terror ... but to the realm of childhood, when, within some cozy setting, we were able to titillate ourselves with fear." And in Tritel's opinion, "King has understood and answered a profound and popular need." While most of his fiction is aimed at an adult audience, young people are especially drawn to it, and children are vital to it. Unlike his portrayals of women, which he acknowledges are at times weak, some of his strongest characters are children; and his realistic depictions of them have earned much critical praise. Lauding King's "energetic and febrile imagination," Richard R. Lingeman adds in the New York Times that he has "a radar fix on young people."

Observing that children suspend their disbelief easily, King argues in Danse Macbre that, ironically, they are actually "better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are." In an interview for High Times, for instance, he marvels at the resilience of a child's mind and the inexplicable, yet seemingly harmless, attraction of children to nightmare-inducing stories: "We start kids off on things like `Hansel and Gretel,' which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it." Adults are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, but in the process of growing up, laments King in Danse Macabre, they develop "a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty"; thus, he perceives the task of the fantasy or horror writer as enabling one to become "for a little while, a child again." In Time, King discusses the prolonged obsession with childhood that his generation has had. "We went on playing for a long time, almost feverishly," he recalls. "I write for that buried child in us, but I'm writing for the grown-up too. I want grown-ups to look at the child long enough to be able to give him up."

Of his own childhood, King recounts to Norden that he was only two when his father (whose surname was originally Spansky, but was also known as Pollack before he legally changed his name to King) caroused his way out of the family one night, never to be heard from again. Several years thereafter, King discovered that his father had also had an affection for science fiction and horror stories, and had even submitted, albeit unsuccessfully, stories of his own to several men's magazines. With few resources after the departure of King's father, the family moved to the Midwest, then back East to Connecticut before returning to Maine when King was about eleven to live with and help care for his ailing grandparents. Despite his mother's valiant efforts to provide for herself and two sons, King tells Norden that their's was a "pretty shirttail existence." Remembering being "prey to a lot of conflicting emotions as a child," King explains, "I had friends and all that, but I often felt unhappy and different, estranged from other kids my age." Not surprisingly, throughout most of King's adolescence, the written word afforded a powerful diversion.

"Writing has always been it for me," King indicates in a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, reprinted in Bare Bones.Science fiction and adventure stories comprised his first literary efforts. Having written his first story at the age of seven, King began submitting short fiction to magazines at twelve, and published his first story at eighteen. In high school, he authored a small, satiric newspaper entitled "The Village Vomit"; and in college, he penned a popular and eclectic series of columns called "King's Garbage Truck." He also started writing the novels he eventually published under the short-lived pseudonymous ruse of Richard Bachman--novels that focus more on elements of human alienation and brutality than supernatural horror. After graduation, King supplemented his teaching salary through various odd jobs, and by submitting stories to men's magazines. Searching for a form of his own, and responding to a friend's challenge to break out of the machismo mold of his short fiction, King wrote what he describes to Peck as "a parable of women's consciousness." Retrieving the discarded manuscript from the trash, though, King's wife Tabitha, a writer herself, suggested that he ought to expand it. And because King completed the first draft of Carrie at the time William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist and Thomas Tryon's The Other were being published, the novel was marketed as horror fiction, and the genre had found its juggernaut. Or, as Herron puts it in Fear Itself, "Like a mountain, King is there."

"Stephen King has made a dent in the national consciousness in a way no other horror writer has, at least during his own lifetime," states Alan Warren in Discovering Stephen King. "He is a genuine phenomenon." A newsletter--"Castle Rock"--has been published since 1985 to keep his ever-increasing number of fans well-informed; and Book-of-the-Month Club is reissuing all of his bestsellers as the Stephen King Library collection. In his preface to Fear Itself, "On Becoming a Brand Name," King describes the process as a fissional one in that a "writer produces a series of books which ricochet back and forth between hardcover and soft-cover at an ever increasing speed." Resorting to a pseudonym to get even more work into print accelerated the process for King; but according to Stephen P. Brown in Kingdom of Fear, although the ploy was not entirely "a vehicle for King to move his earliest work out of the trunk," it certainly triggered myriad speculations about, as well as hunts for, other possible pseudonyms he may also have used. In his essay "Why I Was Bachman" in The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, King recalls that he simply considered it a good idea at the time, especially since he wanted to try to publish something without the attendant commotion that a Stephen King title would have unavoidably generated; also, his publisher believed that he had already saturated the market. King's prodigious literary output and multi-million-dollar contracts, though, have generated critical challenges to the inherent worth of his fiction; deducing that he has been somehow compromised by commercial success, some critics imply that he writes simply to fulfill contractual obligations. But as King tells Norden, "Money really has nothing to do with it one way or the other. I love writing the things I write, and I wouldn't and couldn't do anything else."

King writes daily, exempting only Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. He likes to work on two things simultaneously, beginning his day early with a two- or three-mile walk: "What I'm working on in the morning is what I'm working on," he says in a panel discussion at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, reprinted in Bare Bones. He devotes his afternoon hours to rewriting. And according to his Playboy interview, while he is not particular about working conditions, he is about his output. Despite chronic headaches, occasional insomnia, and even a fear of writer's block, he produces six pages daily; "And that's like engraved in stone," he tells Moore.

Likening the physical act of writing to "autohypnosis, a series of mental passes you go through before you start," King explains to Peck that "if you've been doing it long enough, you immediately fall into a trance. I just write about what I feel I want to write about. I'm like a kid.... I like to make believe." King explains to Moore that although he begins with ideas and a sense of direction, he does not outline: "I'm never sure where the story's going or what's going to happen with it. It's a discovery." Neither does he prepare for his novels in any particularly conscious way: "Some of the books have germinated for a long time," he tells Christopher Evans in a Minneapolis Star interview. "That is to say, they are ideas that won't sink." Also, research follows the writing so as not to impede it: "Afterward," he comments to Moore, "I develop the soul of a true debater ... and find out the things that support my side." Besieged by questions about where his ideas originate, King tells Norden, "Like most writers, I dredge my memory for material, but I'm seldom really explicitly autobiographical." And, while he indicates to Randi Henderson in a Baltimore Sun interview that his ideas often begin in a dreamlike fashion in which "disconnected elements ... will kind of click together," he adds in his foreword to Kingdom of Fear that they can also come from his nightmares, "Not the nighttime variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious."

King describes himself in Waldenbooks Book Notes as one of the eternal "Halloween people," replete with "vampire bat and a rattlesnake on my desk--both mercifully stuffed"; but a customary response when people first encounter him is that he does not seem weird enough. Noting that "they're usually disappointed," he tells Joyce Lynch Dewes Moore in Mystery: "They say, `You're not a monster!'" And when he is asked, endlessly, "Why do you write that stuff?," he replies that aside from being "warped, of course," writing horror fiction serves as "a kind of psychological protection. It's like drawing a magic circle around myself and my family," he explains to the audience at the Billerica library. But King also approximates the role of horror writer to that of an "old Welsh sin eater" called upon to consume the sins of the dying so their souls might hurry unblemished into heaven; "I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves," King tells Norden. "We're sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spinning out our spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spinning it out into the night."

Aware that "people want to be scared," as he relates to Abe Peck in a Rolling Stone College Papers interview, and truly delighted to be able to accommodate them, King rejects the criticism that he preys on the fears of others. As he explains to Jack Matthews in a Detroit Free Press interview, such people simply avoid his books just as those who are afraid of speed and heights, especially in tandem, shun roller coasters. And that, he declares to Paul Janeczko in English Journal, is precisely what he believes he owes his readers--"a good ride on the roller coaster." Regarding what he finds to be an essential reassurance that underlies and impels the genre itself, King remarks in Danse Macbre that "beneath its fangs and fright wig," horror fiction is really quite conservative. The scare we experience from reading it is safe, he tells Henderson, because "there's a real element of, thank God it isn't me, in the situation." Comparing horror fiction with the morality plays of the late middle ages, for instance, he believes that its primary function is "to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands." Also, there is the solace in knowing that "when the lights go down in the theatre or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure." But King admits to Norden that despite all the discussion by writers generally about "horror's providing a socially and psychologically useful catharsis for people's fears and aggressions, the brutal fact of the matter is that we're still in the business of public executions."

"Death is a significant element in nearly all horror fiction," writes Michael A. Morrison in Fantasy Review, "and it permeates King's novels and short stories." Noting in Danse Macabre, that a universal fear with which each of us must personally struggle is "the fear of dying," King explains to Spitz that "everybody goes out to horror movies, reads horror novels--and it's almost as though we're trying to preview the end." But he submits that "if the horror story is our rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination--just one more pipeline to the infinite." While he believes that horror is "one of the ways we walk our imagination," as he tells Matthews, he does worry about the prospect of a mentally unstable reader patterning behavior after some fictional brutality. Remarking that "evil is basically stupid and unimaginative and doesn't need creative inspiration from me or anybody else," King tells Norden, for instance, that "despite knowing all that rationally, I have to admit that it is unsettling to feel that I could be linked in any way, however tenuous, to somebody else's murder."

King, who was absorbed as an adolescent by the capacity of evil to appear deceptively benign, separates the evil with which horror fiction is concerned into two types: that which resides within the human mind or heart and represents "an act of free and conscious will," and that which threatens from without and is "predestinate ... like a stroke of lightning," he says in Danse Macabre. "He is obviously an intelligent, sensitive and voluptuously terrified man who writes horror stories as a way of worrying about life and death," observes Annie Gottlieb in the New York Times Book Review. "He knows that we have been set down in a frightening universe, full of real demons like death and disease, and perhaps the most frightening thing in it is the human mind." King recognizes, as he says in Time, that "there is a part of us that needs to vicariously exorcise the darker side of our feelings," and much of his fiction probes mental perturbation. Relating to Norden that one of his darkest childhood fears was of going suddenly and completely insane, King explains that writing is a way of exorcising his own nightmares and destructiveness: "Writing is necessary for my sanity. I can externalize my fears and insecurities and night terrors on paper, which is what people pay shrinks a small fortune to do." While the process is therapeutic for the writer, it seems to extend its benefits to the reader, as well. Summarizing what he finds as one of King's most important qualities as a writer, Clive Barker states in Kingdom of Fear: "He shows us ... that on the journey which he has so eloquently charted, where no terror shows its face but on a street that we have ourselves trodden, it is not, finally, the stale formulae and the trite metaphysics we're taught from birth that will get us to the end of the ride alive; it is our intimacy with our dark and dreaming selves."

Although King has frequently referred to his own work as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald's," Winter cites the general hallmarks of King's fiction as "effortless, colloquial prose and an unerring instinct for the visceral." Yet, because King likes to work within traditional themes, myths, and forms, however, some critics find his work derivative and contend that he ought to be concentrating his considerable creative energy and talent in areas traditionally deemed more literary or serious. King indicates to Norden that while he has never considered himself "a blazingly original writer in the sense of conceiving totally new and fresh plot ideas," what he tries to do is "to pour new wine from old bottles." Acknowledging that he has always viewed his own work as "more humdrum or more mundane than the sort of thing the really great writers do," King tells Moore that "you take what talent you have, and you just try to do what you can with it. That's all you can do."

Careful to keep his own fame in perspective, King tells Mel Allen in Yankee magazine, "I'm very leery of thinking that I'm somebody. Because nobody really is. Everybody is able to do something well, but in this country there's a premium put on stardom." Describing what he calls the "occupational hazard of the successful writer in America," King tells Kilgore that "once you begin to be successful, then you have to avoid being gobbled up. America has developed this sort of cannibalistic cult of celebrity, where first you set the guy up, and then you eat him." Pertaining to such disparaging critiques as a Time condemnation of him as a master of "postliterate prose," and an uncomplimentary Village Voice profile, King tells Norden: "People like me really do irritate people like them, you know. In effect, they're saying, `What right do you have to entertain people. This is a serious world with a lot of serious problems. Let's sit around and pick scabs; that's art.'" But as Cohen points out, "People consume horror in order to be scared, not arted." King, however, suggests in Danse Macbre that horror actually "achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of."

Although he does not necessarily feel that he has been treated unfairly by the critics, King expresses what it is like to witness the written word turned into filmed images that are less than generously received by critics. "Whenever I publish a book, I feel like a trapper caught by the Iroquois," he tells Peck. "They're all lined up with tomahawks, and the idea is to run through with your head down, and everybody gets to take a swing.... Finally, you get out the other side and you're bleeding and bruised, and then it gets turned into a movie, and you're there in front of the same line and everybody's got their tomahawks out again." Nevertheless, in his essay "Why I Was Bachman," he readily admits that he really has little to complain about: "I'm still married to the same woman, my kids are healthy and bright, and I'm being well paid for doing something I love." And despite the financial security and recognition, or perhaps because of its intrinsic responsibility, King strives to improve at his craft. "It's getting later and I want to get better, because you only get so many chances to do good work," he states in a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa. "There's no justification not to at least try to do good work when you make the money."

According to Warren in Discovering Stephen King, though, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that success has been detrimental to King; "As a novelist, King has been remarkably consistent." Noting, for instance, that "for generations it was given that brevity was the soul of horror, that the ideal format for the tale of terror was the short story," Warren points out that "King was among the first to challenge that concept, writing not just successful novels of horror, but long novels." Moreover, says Warren, "his novels have gotten longer." King quips in the Chicago Tribune Magazine that his "philosophy has always been take a good thing and beat it 'til it don't move no more"; and although some critics fault him for overwriting, Warren suggests that "the sheer scope and ambitious nature of his storytelling demands a broad canvas." Referring to this as "the very pushiness of his technique," the New York Times' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt similarly contends that "the more he exasperates us by overpreparing, the more effectively his preparations eventually pay off."

"I just want to scare people," King remarks to Kilgore. "I'm very humble about that." And in Yarbro's estimation, "King knows how to evoke those special images that hook into all the archetypal forms of horror that we have thrived on since earliest youth." Recognized for the varied and vivid descriptions he consistently renders of the emotion he so skillfully summons, King claims no other technique for inducing fear than lulling a reader into complacency and then "turn[ing] the monsters loose," as he relates in a Shayol interview. To create a comfortably familiar world for the reader so that the horrors experienced within it will seem more real, he imbues his fiction with touchstones of reality--recognizable brand names, products, people, and events. King does, however, delineate a certain hierarchy of fear that he tries to attain, telling Norden: "There's terror on top, the finest emotion any writer can induce; then horror; and, on the very lowest level of all, the gag instinct of revulsion. Naturally, I'll try to terrify you first, and if that doesn't work, I'll try to horrify you, and if I can't make it there, I'll try to gross you out. I'm not proud.... So if somebody wakes up screaming because of what I wrote, I'm delighted. If he merely tosses his cookies, it's still a victory but on a lesser scale. I suppose the ultimate triumph would be to have somebody drop dead of a heart attack, literally scared to death. I'd say, `Gee, that's a shame,' and I'd mean it, but part of me would be thinking, Jesus, that really worked!"

Influenced by the naturalistic novels of writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, King confesses to Janeczko that his personal outlook for the world's future is somewhat bleak; on the other hand, one of the things he finds most comforting in his own work is an element of optimism. "In almost all cases, I've begun with a premise that was really black," he says in a panel discussion at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, reprinted in Bare Bones. "And a more pleasant resolution has forced itself upon that structure." But as Andrew M. Greeley maintains in Kingdom of Fear: "Unlike some other horror writers who lack his talents and sensitivity, Stephen King never ends his stories with any cheap or easy hope. People are badly hurt, they suffer and some of them die, but others survive the struggle and manage to grow. The powers of evil have not yet done them in." According to Notkin, though, the reassurance King brings to his own readers derives from a basic esteem for humanity itself, "For whether he is writing about vampires, about the death of 99 percent of the population, or about innocent little girls with the power to break the earth in half, King never stops emphasizing his essential liking for people."

"You have got to love the people in the story, because there is no horror without love and without feeling," King explains to Platt. " Horror is the contrasting emotion to our understanding of all the things that are good and normal." While stressing the importance of characterization, he regards the story itself as the most integral part of crafting fiction. "If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible," he explains to Mat Schaffer in the Boston Sunday Review, reprinted in Bare Bones. "But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in your story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important." Harris speaks for several critics when he observes that King is at his best when he "is simply himself, and when he loses consciousness of himself as a writer--the way the old tale-teller around the campfire occasionally will--he can be outstanding." Praising King's "page-flipping narrative drive, yanking the reader along with eye-straining velocity," Brown describes his prose as "invisible," and points to those moments of pure transport in which "the reader is caught in the rush of events and forgets that words are being read. It is a quality as rare as it is critically underappreciated."

"There's unmistakable genius in Stephen King," begrudges Walter Kendrick in the Village Voice, adding that he writes "with such fierce conviction, such blind and brutal power, that no matter how hard you fight--and needless to say, I fought--he's irresistible." The less reserved critical affirmations of King's work extend from expressions of pragmatism to those of metaphor. Lehmann-Haupt, for example, a self-professed King addict, offers his evaluation of King's potential versus his accomplishments as a writer of horror fiction: "Once again, as I edged myself nervously toward the climax of one of his thrillers, I found myself considering what wonders Stephen King could accomplish if he would only put his storytelling talents to serious use. And then I had to ask myself: if Mr. King's aim in writing ... was not entirely serious by some standard that I was vaguely invoking, then why, somebody please tell me, was I holding on to his book so hard that my knuckles had begun to turn white?" Winter assesses King's contribution to the genre in his study Stephen King: The Art of Darkness this way: "Death, destruction, and destiny await us all at the end of the journey--in life as in horror fiction. And the writer of horror stories serves as the boatman who ferries people across that Reach known as the River Styx--offering us a full dress rehearsal of death, while returning us momentarily to our youth. In the horror fiction of Stephen King, we can embark upon the night journey, make the descent down the dark hole, cross that narrowing Reach, and return again in safety to the surface--to the near shore of the river of death. For our boatman has a master's hand."

King survived a personal nightmare that he might have scripted himself. On the afternoon of June 19, 1999, King was struck by a van as he walked along the side of the road near his summer home. The driver, Bryan Smith, 43, claimed he was distracted by his dog. He publicly apologized to King while insisting the crash was an accident and no one was at fault. At the time of the sentencing, King chided prosecutors for making a deal that did not include any jail time and did not permanently revoke Smith's license. The accident required three operations at Central Maine Medical Center, to stabilize a collapsed lung and repair multiple fractures to King's leg and hip. The author made a successful recovery and soon resumed normal activities. On September 25, 2000, King expressed sorrow over the death of Smith, who was found dead in his home in Fryeburg, Maine. Autopsy results showed that he died of an accidental overdose of a painkiller.

In 2000, King released his first eBook, Riding the Bullet. The 66-page ghost story, which was written shortly after his accident, was available only on the Internet. King's book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was published in 2000.

Dreamcatcher (2001) again takes up themes that King had used in It and The Tommyknockers. That novel tells the story of four men who each November reunite at a cabin in the Maine woods to hunt and reminisce about their past. This year's reunion is like any other until the storm comes, bringing with it man named Richard McCarthy, who is lost and delirious. But the storm also brings rumors of a downed spacecraft in the woods. The military comes to kill the aliens and clean up the mess as quickly as possible.

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Stephen King (1947-)
• At the time of King's birth:
• Harry S Truman was president of the United States
• Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
• Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire was performed
• The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established
• The first piloted aircraft broke the speed of sound
• The times:
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1960-present: Postmodernist Period of American literature
• 1967: Six-Day Israeli-Arab War
• 1973: Israeli-Arab War
• 1991: War against Iraq
• 1992-1996: Civil war in Bosnia
• King's contemporaries:
• Nora Ephron (1941-) American writer
• Penny Marshall (1942-) American director
• Arthur Ashe (1943-1993) American tennis player
• Lech Walesa (1943-) Polish president
• Steven Spielberg (1946-) American film director
• Tom Clancy (1947-) American writer
• Danielle Steel (1947-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1947: George Orwell 's 1984 was published
• 1951: J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published
• 1954: The Reverend Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church
• 1960: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird was published
• 1962: Colonel John Glenn was the first American in orbit
• 1974: Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army
• 1986: The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded
• 1987: Toni Morrison 's Beloved was published
• 1991: Boris Yeltsin was elected the president of Russia
• 1993: A terrorist bomb exploded at New York's World Trade Center

Further Reading

• Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 1, Gale, 1989.
• Beahm, George, editor, The Stephen King Companion, Andrews and McMeel, 1989.
• Collings, Michael R., Stephen King as Richard Bachman, Starmont House, 1985.
• Collings, Michael R., The Many Facets of Stephen King, Starmont House, 1985.
• Collings, Michael R., and David Engebretson, The Shorter Works of Stephen King, Starmont House, 1985.
• Collings, Michael R., The Annotated Guide to Stephen King: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography of the Works of America's Premier Horror Writer, Starmont House, 1986.
• Bloom, Harold, ed., Stephen King, Chelsea House, 1998.
• Collings, Michael R., The Films of Stephen King, Starmont House, 1986.