Today is Stephen King’s 79th birthday. Many words have been written about the man and his words and stories, but his “holy cow!” birthday post on social media got me thinking about all the hours I have spent inside his imagination. I read King’s works heavily from around 1984 to 1991, then just bought his “Dark Tower” books until 2004. I only started reading his new books, and rereading some classics, when the COVID pandemic hit in 2022. I am by no means a completist like I used to be, but I have probably read tens of thousands of King’s words; more than any other author.
I’ve been thinking about the kernels of my love for genres King swims in: horror, fantasy, sci-fi. There were not many books in my house growing up, let alone horror and sci-fi fiction. My life was already layered with real and imagined horrors since my dad ran a funeral home and drove an ambulance in the pre-EMS 1970s rural south. I heard about the wrecks, shootings, feuds, violence, and gore at a young age. I knew about death and grief and loss as well, and it was at times difficult for my developing brain to understand what was going on emotionally and physically. This gave me a bit of wisdom about my surroundings, but also a tough skin to deal with it. Back then, I also enjoyed scaring myself. It was easy to imagine witches in shadows, trap doors at the stairs, and giant spiders in carports.
Somewhere in the late 1970s, I began to pick up newspapers and news magazines to read. I saw the horrors of Jonestown while reading and watching it on TV. I probably understood the Iran hostage crisis more than most older children. I wasn’t even 10 years old then. Somewhere around 1979, Stephen King’s book “The Shining” ended up in the magazine rack by my dad’s recliner. My parents didn’t read books, but my older sister had borrowed “The Shining” from a friend, and she was so scared she couldn’t finish it. I recall she had sat through the TV version of “Helter Skelter” and gotten through it. I hid behind a chair during the gruesome murder scenes. If my older sister couldn’t finish this novel, I was curious to know why. I tried to read it, but ended up skimming to look for the scary parts.
As the 1980s started, I was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s short works. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was taught in my English class. Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” also stuck with me as a horrific story. I got through the school reading, but did not read much past it. Instead, I soaked in horror and sci-fi from cable TV and at the movie theaters. The list of films and TV that inspired my imagination is long, but the original “Twilight Zone” series, and directors like George Lucas, Terry Gilliam and Stanley Kubrick stand at the top of the pile of things that sparked my love for great story telling. Reading George Orwell’s “1984” in 1984, also became a huge step to falling in love with the written word.
But the step off the cliff into fictional worlds started when King’s 1983 “Pet Sematary” landed. A horror story about death and grief, complete with grave robbing and magically terrible resurrection?! I know more than enough about these topics, having used my imagination for the latter bits. Can the writer that scared my sister scare my toughened skin? I bought the paperback from a local grocery store, probably in 1984 to find out.
“Pet Sematary” did not scare me that much. After reading a few articles about Caroline Bicks’ nonfiction work “Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King” in 2026, I realized that “Pet Sematary” was not one of my picks for King’s scariest books. “It” surely scared me, but I was more impressed with reading a book that long than being scared by a clown. What stuck with me over the decades was how “Misery” really freaked me out. I had a hard time getting through that book.
While rereading King’s books since the COVID pandemic, I reread “Misery” and “Pet Sematary” within a month of each other. “Misery” still got my heart pumping. I had to put the book down to catch my breath during some of the brutally violent moments. Whew! It still shook me. “Pet Sematary” had freights and scares, especially King’s writing about losing – and un-losing – a child to a horrific accident. But losing fingers, a foot, and one’s sanity and control of reality, just to write a book from the nurse who has in-prisoned you: “Misery” is indeed a book about misery and the story-within-the-story about Misery.
I stopped collecting and reading much King novels in the early 1990s. I didn’t know about his drug problems, but I still recall not enjoying “The Tommyknockers” and “Needful Things”. Now an adult, my money was tight, so I was buying cheaper paperbacks if I was reading at all. I worked in a record store at a mall in 1991-2, and made a connection at the Waldenbooks next door. I got some Stephen King bookstore promotional items around that time, and could get a discount on books. But I was buying other things by then.
There is a large world of fiction out there, and I had moved on. But King’s stories haven’t really left me.
I did keep buying the limited editions of “The Dark Tower” series, which I read until 2004. My sister met a coworker form Bangor, ME who frequently saw King at a local bar. My sister mailed him two of my books, which King gladly inscribed for me. I’ve sold most of my collection, but I’ve kept those two books – both from “The Dark Tower” – as well as my Barbara Kruger-designed trade edition of “My Pretty Pony” (1988).
Having a good friend who reads Stephen King kept me in the loop. He’s ready “It” and “The Stand” multiple times, but also recommended I read “Under the Dome”. Then I started supporting Green Apple Books here in San Francisco by buying new King books during the pandemic. I have read all his works since 2021, and have gone back to catch up on “The Talisman” sequel to prep for the third book coming this year. I also picked up a few of King’s books in free libraries on the streets here, and decided to read “Doctor Sleep” from the library. King is now back in my reading stacks as travel books. Back in 2022, I started lightly reading his new releases and then reselling them on ebay at a discount.
Though I read more now than I ever have in my life, I do not need more books on my shelves to move around and eventually put in boxes. I sold my King collection, because it was in boxes for about 25 years. It needed new loving fans to enjoy the items like I did. Getting rid of my “Castle Rock” collection was probably the hardest. I loved subscribing to this newsletter. I even had a letter published in it that King responded to. But hopefully these things are not back in boxes, but lovingly on display and read.