I want to talk to you about Stephen King.

I want to talk to all people, at all times, about Stephen King. I think people must be sick of hearing me talk about him at this point in my life, because I've been doing it for the past 27 years, beginning when I wrote a paper about him for my 6th grade English class. Shout out to the teacher who allowed me to do that and even helped me with the research.

My love for Stephen King is the thing I hold up to show people who I am. If I want to be truly known, I will share my favorite of his works, and my least favorite. I will tell you about the first time I read Gerald's Game and the way it made me feel terrified and undone in a way I didn't like, so I couldn't revisit it for the next 18 years. I will tell you about reading It and Pet Sematary and 1408while home alone and realizing I had made a mistake every time, and about reading The Shining and The Boogeyman from Night Shift while not home alone and realizing the same. I will tell you about the way that Bag of Bones lived in my soul for so many years, until I got a little older and started to think about the themes and the depictions and who gets to tell those stories.

This is the thing. I got older and Stephen King's work didn't, and now I have to hold multiple truths simultaneously. I call him my problematic father who raised me because that's what it feels like to love someone's work so deeply for so long. It did raise me, and I love it and I love him, but I also see him. I see the writing choices he's made alongside the political ones, the things he's defended alongside the things he condemns, and I see a flawed man who is trying, who is moving forward in ways I respect even as his body of work stands still, gets a little more weary and weathered as time passes.

I wish I had something cooler, something more progressive or more unique to feel connected to with this level of devotion, but this is what I've got. This is who I am, and I've been shaped by the writing of Stephen King for better or worse. I don't even know who I would be if I hadn't seen the 1990 IT miniseries when I was 8 years old, and if that hadn't spurred me on to seek out his books even as I cowered from shower drains for months. Stephen King and I are inextricably linked, and so to examine his work is to examine myself. To tear apart what he has created is to dig into my own chest and excavate my heart, raw and bloody and furiously beating, and present it for inspection and judgment.

What I want you to know is that this isn't going to be a glowing retrospective. It isn't going to be all rapturous praise. I love most of these books, but I also believe that the things we love can and should be criticized. There is rapturous praise to be found here, and there is also anger, and frustration, and disappointment. And there are more complicated feelings, too, like trying to separate my unadulterated adolescent adoration from my current adult understanding, trying to unpick the threads of what held me together during some of the bleakest parts of my life and recognize them for what they are.

If that sounds like something you're interested in exploring with me, then hello, welcome. The plan is to go in chronological order, on no particular schedule, which means I'll finally have to read some things I've been avoiding. I eventually want to have read Stephen King's entire bibliography and this will give me a reason to power through. I've been wanting to undertake this project for years and I'm excited to do it, and I hope that even if you love Stephen King the way I do, you can separate yourself from that love enough to be a little bit critical with me. I think we'll all be better for it by the end.