Pop Smart - Reading Stephen King, Chapter 2: Eerie in the ’80s

(For the first chapter, click here.)

The decade started out so well for Stephen King and me. I eagerly snatched up everything by him that I could find, although I remember puzzling over a short story about an enigmatic gunslinger in a “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy” collection in the early 1980s (little did I know what was to come). When “The Mist” was first published in the anthology Dark Forces, I stayed up late reading it, and then vainly tried to reduce my heart rate and go to sleep with my nerves completely shot. (Frank Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist, made about 25 years after King wrote the story, stays faithful to the letter of the book but misses something essential about its spirit.)

I brought King with me to college, and vividly recall finishing Christine one night of my freshman year, then went for a walk around campus and enjoying the creepy feeling every time headlights went past. In 1984 I wrote my first book review for the Vanderbilt University student newspaper The Hustler, praising King’s Pet Sematary, one of his most disturbing novels, which has timeless quality worthy of classic writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson. I can’t say I liked the irreverent headline slapped on my review, “Trad King tome packs zing” (Trad?) but it probably balanced my oh-so-serious undergrad’s prose.

Our sort-of relationship hit some trouble spots, however.