Stephen King & Me: An unfinished introduction from an unpublished book

This one is part of the unfinished introduction to a non-fiction book I was to write on Stephen King.

And if you have read Stephen King, even liked his work, or some of it at least, then I don’t need to say another word.

Why King Really Is King

I. The Beast Within: A (Very) Personal Confession

I was doubly damned. First, for reading novels. Second, for reading horror. The dark lurid covers with gelid eyeballs, taloned hands reaching, girls with blood-streaked faces didn’t help much. It was hard to expect anyone–parents, teachers, friends, strangers on buses–to believe that there was something more than just a cheap thrill to be had between those paperback pages. What’s more, it was mostly cheap thrills. And I loved it.

And yet.

And yet.

Growing up with a psychotic mother, abandoned by a womanizing father, exposed to almost every act of human decrepitude imaginable–rape, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, infidelity, attempted matricide, attempted fratricide, blackmail, theft–compared to all these uplifting realities of my everyday life, those cheap fictional thrills were somehow…comforting.

Horror fiction was comforting.

A couple of years after my addiction to horror fiction–and King–began, I read an interview with Stephen King about his early years, I was struck by a pencil-sized bolt of jagged lightning. He talked about his money troubles, the struggle to put food on the table, the two jobs apiece he and wife Tabitha had to take to make ends meet (barely), debtors banging at the doors, the baby eating wallpaper, and revealed that it had been a “reliefâ€? to actually sit down and write about vampires and werewolves and rotting corpses in bathtubs. At that moment–I must have been around 15–I experienced a moment of epiphany, the kind you read about in biographies of Joan D’Arc and Saint Teresa. I got it.

Horror was entertainment, sure. But so were movies, streetfights, domestic violence, drunken couples bawling at each other from balconies (as you can see, I grew up in a posh part of town). What made horror different was that it admitted that monsters do exist in the real world. And that while they can get you most times, every once in a while, just occasionally, you could maybe beat the rap and get away clean. Well, almost clean.

I had monsters in my life. They were all around me. Growing up in a chronically dysfunctional family in Bombay, India, in the Seventies and Eighties, I felt a lot like the little kid in The Shining (the miniseries, not the Kubrick version, please)–able to see what was really going on yet powerless to do anything to save myself. I was stranded here in this metropolis of terrors, this island of ghouls. And sooner or later, they would get me in the worst way possible–they would make me one of them.

I don’t know what your reason was for first reading and liking King. I assume you have one, or you wouldn’t be here. (If you’re a first-timer and still haven’t popped your cherry, well, wow! Grab a chair and sit down. Boy, do you have a great time ahead! We vets would give our right arms to be in your pants. The only thing better than being a King fan–always “No. 1 fanâ€? mind you–is to be a first-timer coming to King’s work with no clue to what lies in store. You are a very lucky reader.)

My reason was intensely personal. I identified. Not with the normal people in his books–are there any? oh hell, yeah, they’re mostly normal, sorta–but with the ones besieged by vampires, moated by ghouls, beset by rabid dogs or inefficiently resurrected familiar corpses. With the protagonists of his novels and stories. Because if there’s one clear theme running through all of King’s ouevre, it’s that of the ordinary john or jane (scheduled to quickly become John and Jane Doe) trapped by monsters.

It’s about making a stand, usually with someone you care about enough to risk your life. About fighting your way through the terrible night that seems to last forever, and making it to daybreak. Or sometimes, not making it, but dying content, knowing you fought the good fight and died saving that beloved someone.

Reading King got me through the worst patches of my childhood and youth. The day my mother came home bleeding, dazed and babbling after a drug party gone very, very bad (don’t ask), the first image that sprang to my mind was Rachel Creed in Pet Sematary returned from the dead, dripping leaves and fungal mold onto the polished kitchen floor.

When I was called home from my job at an advertising agency to find my mother and grandmother grappling with a blood-smeared butcher’s knife in a roomful of broken glass and cutlery (splattered with blood from their bleeding bare feet), what sprang to mind was the scene in Needful Things when Nettie Cobb and Wilma Jerzyck are cutting each other’s intestines out.

The morning I sat in a freezing suburban morgue surrounded by several dozen dead people and struggled to dress my mother’s jaundice-yellowed body for her funeral (the municipal morgue attendants, whose job it was , wanted a bribe, which I couldn’t afford), what kept me going was the memory of 12-year old Jack Sawyer in The Talisman journeying across two separate Americas to save his mother’s life.

This wasn’t because I had some kind of a morbid personal fascination for gore and misery. In fact, it was the exact opposite. I related (and still relate) to King’s work so intimately not because he writes about terrible happenings, or because so many good people in his stories suffer these events, but because mostly–at great cost and after enduring much pain, it’s true–some of those good people did surmount and survive those awful happenings.

The sense that I could, someday, somehow, someway, outlive the real-life horrors of my childhood just as the protagonists of King’s stories sometimes outlived his gut-wrenching supernatural terrors.

This is the greatness of King’s genius.

Not that he scares us to death–or into paying him the hundreds of millions his craft earns him–but that he shows us that wavering light at the end of the dark corridor.

That he connects with us in a deeply emotional, almost spiritual way, way that few writers of popular fiction ever do.

That on every page, every paragraph, every scene, every story by King (with only a couple of notable exceptions) there is a deep faith in the inherent goodness of the human condition. A sense of a purpose, a plan, a pattern, to all the madness and badness of our lives. A sense that if we can just live through this, we will be the better for it.

Unlike many, many fans, I don’t have the same fascination with Stephen King the man.. That is to say, I don’t idolize him, or even (as his other “No. 1 fan� did in Misery) idealize him. He’s just a guy, a writer. But I believe that some of us are blessed by forces and powers beyond our imagining, touched by that giant magic wand, given the power to reach out and touch others in a way that makes them see, if only for a moment, what lies beneath the deceptively normal veneer of our civil lives. To glimpse the beast within.

And that is important. Because to forget or deny this beast is to forget a major part of what we truly are; like venturing into the African veld unarmed and in bermudas, whistling. We can only become better human beings if we acknowledge our basest impulses and learn to deal with them.

Stephen King, no therapist, M.D. or New Age spiritual guru, helped me achieve that much just through the power of his words and imagination.

That’s why I’m writing this book. That’s why I still get so much pleasure from reading his work. That’s why I was so happy to learn that he not only survived that crazy van accident, but came back writing better than ever (you can skip straight to the reviews at the end of the book if you don’t believe me) and seems set to produce his best work ever–again beating the odds for popular novelists by a mile and a miracle.

That’s my reason for being a King addict.

What’s your excuse?

II. When It All Comes Together

You don’t really need a reason to read Stephen King. But if you’re one of those who came late to his work–or has been away so long, you think maybe you might have outgrown him along the way, or have been disappointed by some of his later work and are on the verge of subscribing to the popular theory that any author who sells so many gazillion copies can’t be any good, well, then I’ve great news for you.

This is the perfect time to read (or start reading, or resume reading) Stephen King. Here’s why:

With Black House, King (and co-author Peter Straub) touched a career peak. This collaborative sequel to The Talisman not only exceeded expectations–if it’s possible to exceed expectations in the hype-driven sphere of bestselling fiction–but it also marked a new high in his career.

This brilliantly constructed novel pulled in elements and ideas from virtually all his previous novels–notably the ongoing Dark Tower series, and his Derry novels–and linked them together in much the same way that science fiction novelists do with personally created ‘universes’ (Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ series, Asimov’s franchised ‘Foundation’ saga) and fantasy novelists do with ‘shared worlds’ (Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, George R R Martin’s Thieves’ World, TSR’s Forgotten Realms). Black House wasn’t the first time King had attempted to create a kind of unified field theory–all his novels have subtle links which show up on repeated readings, or even, as in the case of the Castle Rock and Derry novels, obvious in-your-face connections.

But with Black House it all seemed to fit together. It was as if you’d been working on this enormous infinite-pieced jigsaw puzzle for a quarter of a century and you were finally shown a glimpse of the picture you were putting together. Just a glimpse, mind you, because Black House raises as many new questions as it answers old ones, but a startling vivid glimpse that stays in the mind.

Now, we longtime King companions can go on with our piecing together, knowing that there is a Plan.

Everything fits together. We don’t know the whole plan, but we know it exists. Sometimes, that’s enough.

King’s writing has improved vastly. Black House is a quantum leap forward in prose style from Carrie. While most popular writers tend to fall into a repititive self-mocking mode at this stage of their careers, King has grown so visibly, you feel he’s almost writing for a different readership now.

Not that I believe King ever wrote with a readership in mind, but his early novels seemed to be targetted straight for the schlock-horror section of the turnstiles in the Greyhound Bus Terminus, while his recent and (judging from excerpts and previews) forthcoming work is measurably superior in style and composition.

More than this, that unique voice, that warm, rambling, friendly, “I write like fat people diet� Bangor, Maine, New England Yankee twang has actually matured. It’s no longer the holy-cow-did-you-see-that approach gross-‘em-out that made his early genre chillers so simple yet enjoyable. There’s now a mature mind behind the thrill machine and you can hear it speak to you more decisively, more wisely, about the horrible goings on we’re forced to witness.

This is not to say that the early novels were mindlessly written, but that they were mindless entertainment. The new work is still great entertainment, but it’s a lot more besides. It’s like watching a great sportsman slow down, age, retire and turn into an even greater sports commentator.

If this makes him sound like The Old Fart of the horror genre, well, maybe he is that too. It’s sure as hell a lot better than some of the new fresh blood that keeps swinging into town, struts around for a while, then vanishes without leaving even a scene of gunsmoke behind. King continues to work in the horror genre which he not only helped create in the mid-Seventies, but to lend it a mass popularity and appeal which the genre sadly lacked after the Nineties.

King is not horror fiction; he’s just King, the way Elvis was his own brand of rock and roll, or Picasso was modern art. He writes a kind of story that is beyond horror; that is so much more than the tropes of the genre that it’s literature–to use a dirty word–and just plain great storytelling, to use a more homely term.

Sure, he did his vampire novel, his werewolf novel, his haunted house novel. Hell, he shook the whole bag out into our laps.

And when it was empty, he just put his hand in and kept yanking out new surprises, like a magician with a top hat. He didn’t take a sabbatical, retire, become a playboy and hang out in a string bikini on a yacht on the Riviera, turn to religion, politics or business. He just kept writing stories.

(Although, as his memoir and writing manual On Writing shows us, there was a price to be paid for ‘just’ writing.)

And when he ran out of good ideas, he gave us what he had, and did his darndest to make it entertaining. When he was tired of the old stuff, he tried out new stuff.

Sometimes, he didn’t pull it off. Mostly he did though. And even his failures were far far better than the successes of lesser writers.

He even beat that bane of all writers–show business. The film and TV adaptations of his work got better and better, until, from Misery and The Shawshank Redemption onwards, they actually got that most unattainable of halos: mainstream acceptance. Today, King’s work in the miniseries format brought us nothing less than a terrific horror novel for the small screen, Storm Of The Century. Rose Red and Kingdom Hospital further establish his ability to work his magic through the medium of images on a screen rather than words on paper, and they’re just the beginning of many multimedia projects in the pipeline.

With his phenomenal output straddling every possible medium, King is beyond authorship. He’s an industry. But a one-man unfranchised industry. Everything he produces comes essentially from the imagination of one man, hewing to an inner vision that is as original, exciting, and enthralling as any two-dozen writers. Is he doing this for money? Sure, who doesn’t.

Is he doing this just for money (a vital difference)?

I think not.

If the money was the only goal, it would be so much easier to sharecrop his series the way Tom Clancy has done. His grandkids would rake in the royalties till their hair turns grey.

The fact that he continues to produce so much so fast is his greatest strength. There’s no time for BS when you’re producing at that pace. Hell, there’s barely time to spend the hundreds of millions you’re earning!

How many billionaire entertainers continue to work so hard and produce so much good work? Oprah’s one, but she plays off the electricity from live audiences, while King still has to sit in a room alone and type words.

But none of this need convince you to start reading, keep reading, or re-read King’s work.

Just pick up any of his books, turn to the first page, and start reading. You won’t need any other reason.