Reading Stephen King, Chapter 1: Scary in the ’70s
February 11th, 2008 by Curt Holman in Books
While I was reading Stephen King’s latest novel, Duma Key (published Jan. 22 by Scribner), I thought about putting together some kind of “Top Five Stephen King†book list. As I reviewed his work in my head, it occurred to me that 2008 marks my 30th anniversary of being a life-long reader of Stephen King. A long-term reader/writer dynamic resembles other kinds of extended relationships: Both individuals can change, grow apart, reconcile and test their loyalties, even if they never meet face to face.
So this week I’ll be doing a decade-by-decade overview partly on my favorite books, but mostly on the experience of reading King during my adult life.
I’m not sure which book marked my introduction to the horror writer from Maine. I definitely recall The Dead Zone as being the first hardback book I ever read as soon as it was published in 1979 – someone in my family bought a copy at the Phipps Plaza bookstore (back when that mall had bookstores). I suspect that I started with his vampire novel Salem’s Lot in 1978 and read Night Shift not long thereafter.
His books caught me up in their narratives like none I’d ever read. Even then, I marveled at his lightning-in-a-bottle gift for building up momentum. Being 13 years old could be the best time to be introduced to a writer like King. I soaked up his novels and short stories without reservations or awareness of irony. As an adult, I probably would have seen some humor in “Gray Matter’s†bad beer causing ravenous mutations, or “The Mangler’s†killer industrial laundry press machine (to name two stories from Night Shift).
I got caught up with his work as quickly as I could, although I probably wasn’t old enough to appreciate some of the more grown-up themes of Carrie or The Shining. On a summer vacation with my family in 1979, I noticed a copy of The Stand on the bookshelf of some out-of-town friends, and begged to read it. At the time, I knew nothing about the book but its title – it no longer had the dust jacket, and although it was nearly brand-new, the massive tome could have been sitting on those shelves for decades. As I started reading the book before returning to Atlanta, I had the fascinating experience of reading it “blind,†with no more knowledge of the plot than the hapless characters – all survivors of a “superflu†that gradually wiped out most of the American population. I certainly didn’t expect the story to turn into an allegory of societal construction and good vs. evil as rival communities of survivors declared war.
The Stand still strikes me as his best book. I even reread it a few years later when it came out in paperback (although I never read the expanded version from 1990). Commentators have likened it to a Lord of the Rings for the United States, but it strikes me more as a monumental pop fiction equivalent of one of those epic Bruce Springsteen albums of the era. Like Born to Run or The River, there’s something quintessentially American about The Stand’s vision of individuals’ coming together to rebuild the nation, and it transcends his penchant for smaller-scale scares.
My reading of King in the next decade started well. At first…
(The story continues in the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s.)
February 11th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Great post. I too started reading King in the late 70’s, which for me was in high school. I’ll be interested to see how your relationship as a reader changed through the following decades. I think King’s writing has always been amazing, but at times it seems to me that he occasionally gets bored of just being a great writer and feels like he needs to experiment. Does it work? It the words of his Duma Key character, Wireman, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I really hoped that the Gunslinger series was going to be my favorite King work. But by the end, I had to go back to The Stand. Bag of Bones and The Talisman would be close seconds.
As an author, I wonder how it would feel to have your readers feel that a book you wrote decades before was your best work.
As an author, I wonder how it would feel to have your readers feel that a book you wrote decades before was your best work.
February 15th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I first read King in 1975 when I was 17. The book was ‘Carrie’ and , being female, it spoke to me in ways that were, at that time, hard for me to express. It spoke to a more primitive part of me and one that I was pretty uncomfortable with at the time. Now, having just passed age fifty, I wonder that anything like high school cruelties could have made me so uncomfortable! I have been hooked on Steve’s writng ever since.
I’ve read all of it, and though I cannot claim to love all his work, all of it speaks to me in some way. Because of this long relationship, I feel comfortable with his writiing: I welcome all of it into my home , even the stories that don’t claw at me and demand a hugely visceral response. It comforts me in a very strange way to see links between books—to meet Christine briefly in ‘Needful Things’, to see Abby Freemantle’s surname reappear in his newest work–to visit the Territories in earlier times when I was not aware I was there. To me, nothing is as comforting as continuity, no matter how fragmented it may seem.
I also love having been witness to the evolution of another human being’s thought processes in a way that is unique and intimate: I am forever grateful to have grown up with Steve–and I call him that not out of a presumptive claim to an intimacy that is not real, but because his author pesrona is one that has given me enjoyment,a love of reading and writing and pieces of that author that I am so very happy to have glimpsed. I
I look forward to reading your further thoughts!