An Ode to Stephen King

I’m sitting here on the twenty first of September watching Doctor Sleep and thinking about how Stephen King shaped who I became as an artist and a human. When I was twelve, maybe thirteen, fresh off of whatever Sweet Valley Twins book I just finished, I found a copy of Carrie at the local Walmart.

I finished it in a day and a half and promptly picked up The Shining, It, and Cujo. I was hooked. Obsessed. Shocked that my religious minded small town Walmart would stock such horrific stories, but glad they did. So very glad.

In 1994, I waited restlessly for The Stand to air on ABC. The VCR had a broken pause button, so when I recorded the four night event, I had to hold down the pause button so it wouldn’t record the commercials. I did the same with Tommyknockers, Rose Red, The Shining, The Langoliers, and Storm of the Century.

In 1997, on a school trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, I read Misery for the first time. It is the only book I ever had to set aside for a moment to settle myself after a gory chapter. Sixteen year old me wasn’t ready for Paul Sheldon to think about BBQ as his leg was blowtorched by Annie after she cut off his foot. And the moment solidified my love of horror. It’s the only book I’ve read twice, back to back.

I didn’t read the Dark Tower series until my thirties, but read the entire series in less than two months. I scoured local book stores looking for copies when Amazon failed on delivering the third and fourth books. The Talisman is my favorite of the Dark Tower books even though it’s only adjacent to the main series.

Personally, I find Duma Key, Joyland, and The Girl Loved Tom Gordon to be his most underrated books. Tom Gordon I reread every summer throughout my twenties, and it was the inspiration for many of my hiking adventures in my thirties. And I loved that the main character was a huge baseball fan. We have that in common.

Unpopular opinion – I like the miniseries adaptation of The Shining better than the Kubrick version. Its a truer adaptation. And I believe that the adaptation of Doctor Sleep is a very rare occurrence of the movie being better than the book. That’s by no means a knock at King’s writing. It’s a compliment of how talented Mike Flanagan is as a film maker. I’m obviously not the only one inspired by King’s work.

My love of both reading and writing comes from Stephen King. My teen years were spent getting my hands of everything he had written until then. My adult years allowed me to expand on the authors I read, but King is a mainstay. The excitement of picking up his new novels never wanes. My love of writing can also be traced back to my teen years when I wrote my first horror story and made my English teacher critique it. I didn’t write much in my twenties, but my late thirties and early forties have produced four novel length manuscripts that I might publish one day. Regardless, I would never have written them without the creative inspiration from all my favorite authors, King most of all.

I’ll wrap this up by wishing the man the happiest of birthdays. Stephen King is an American treasure, and I’m eternally that he exists.