Authors: Stephen King

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In another early novel, The Shining, King sets his demons loose in an isolated mountain retreat where a blocked writer has gone with his wife and small son to find the solitude he needs to get on with his writing. King again takes an ordinary group of people and puts them in an impossible situation, one in which the psychological pressures of the father’s writer’s block almost press the ghosts, demons, and other terrors from the inn’s woodwork. As in most of his fiction, once the father’s personal demons begin to tear free of their shackles, King indulges his taste for the horrifyingly graphic description of the blood, gore, and violence that shakes the family.

Besides being a gifted writer of popular horror in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft (a writer whom King admires) and Edgar Allan Poe, King is an adept weaver of stories of childhood, but a childhood full of the terrors that most children experience only in their worst nightmares. In King’s novels the bogeyman does not vanish when the light comes on; he stays and terrifies child and adult alike. King seems to be saying that the horror waits for everyone just beneath the phony surface sophistication that people prefer to believe they can maintain, even in the face of the nameless terror waiting in the closets of childhood bedrooms. That is certainly the case in such King novels as It, in which a terrifying reptilian bogeyman lurks in a small town’s sewers, slithering out at dusk to capture children by enticing them to follow the shapes out of which their daydreams are made. Once snared by this demon the balloonman’s face disappears, and the monster beneath reaches out to drag the child screaming into the bowels of the sewer. How many adults gave sewer grates a wide berth as children, fearing the worst? In It King shows his readers that they had good reason to fear those dark, dank holes.

Similarly, in Pet Sematary, King takes a childhood preoccupation with death and explores what happens when the children of another small town bury their dead pets in a section of the fields best left to the ancient ghost-demons that inhabit them. King is at his best when writing either about an adult’s personal demons—as in Misery, which tells the story of every writer’s worst nightmare (an author is taken prisoner by a demented fan)—or about children and adolescents, as in Firestarter or his short novel The Body. Besides such domestic horror tales, King has written a gripping account of a postapocalyptic world in his book The Stand, in which 95 percent of the world’s population has been destroyed by a virulent strain of influenza. The Dead Zone, on the other hand, is a tale in which a young man awakens from a long coma to discover that he can see the futures of certain people—most important, a politician whom the young man sees rising to power and starting a nuclear war. In both these novels King takes on Armageddon with startling reality and clarity of vision; unlike his other horror stories, these books each project a horror that could conceivably become a reality—which may be why both stories strike many readers as particularly unsettling.

King has also tried his hand at “sword and sorcery” tales and has produced some remarkably entertaining stories of knights, damsels in distress, and sinister sorcerers. The Gunslinger is the first book in an epic fantasy series about a mythic land grounded in Western legends, and The Eyes of the Dragon, which King wrote for his children, tells the story of a young man’s quest to outwit an evil magician and save a magical kingdom. On the other hand, King’s novels of the early to mid-1990s focus on more adult, realistic horrors, downplaying or even excluding supernatural elements. Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder eschew imaginary monsters, dealing instead with the all-too-real horrors of incest and spouse abuse. Insomnia, though replete with fantastic situations, grounds its otherworldly horrors in the real-life controversy regarding abortion.

In June 1999, King was struck by a car as he walked along the side of the road near his house in Maine. His injuries were severe and for a while it was uncertain whether he would be able to continue writing. Although he recovered more completely than many expected, his work since the accident has been, in the opinion of some critics, of lesser quality, and King began to express a desire to retire; both King and his critics felt that he was beginning to repeat himself. Although his injuries have made it uncomfortable for him to sit down to write for long periods of time, King has continued to publish best-selling and well-received books throughout the 2000s and 2010s. His 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story, told from the point of view of the widow of a popular writer, was directly inspired by the 1999 accident.

King is a prolific writer, much to the satisfaction of his readers. The fiction that he produced in the 1970s (some of it written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) is perhaps somewhat more graphic in its violence, while that of the 1980s tends more toward implied menace, the monsters lurking offstage, waiting in the wings to slash and grab the characters—and, by implication, the reader. This, in turn, gives way to his less traditionally horrific, more socially conscious fiction beginning in the 1990s. Examining the first three decades of King’s work provides a good idea of the scope of his interests and talents, his ability to provoke thought as well as chills. In 2015, King received a National Medial of Arts for his contributions to American literature.