Constant Reader
I have belonged to Stephen King since I was 8 years old, trembling and terrified in the doorway between living room and kitchen with the 1990 IT miniseries on the TV. I was too afraid to fully go in and watch it, but I also wasn't willing to commit to leaving. I shrank from showers for months afterward, and yet, some part of me perversely thrilled to the experience. Some part that already knew that horror was going to mean everything to me. Some part that recognized a kindred spirit in a man whose name I didn't even yet know.
I tried and failed many times to read IT before I actually made it through the whole thing. I was absorbing the words of the losers club and Henry Bowers and Pennywise himself without really understanding most of it, just as I did with Needful Things. Those were the two books I kept trying with as a child much too young to be reading either. Something stuck, though, because in sixth grade I did a report on Stephen King for a class that was probably only tangentially related. That was the beginning of my ongoing attempts to shoehorn horror into any space I could force it to occupy. See also: writing a fictionalized account of Lizzie Borden's murders from the perspective of her maid in high school for a prompt to reimagine an event from history. The only thing I clearly remember about the Stephen King report is that I was very taken with a quote I found where he said he had the heart of a young boy, which he kept in a jar on his desk, and that I was filled with boundless gratitude for the teacher who allowed me to do such a report and even encouraged me and helped me with research.
It's hard to know how to talk about this. Everyone who has ever met me knows how much I love Stephen King. It's a part of me, baked into my DNA. I am helpless in the grip of my devotion to a man who often disappoints me by being painfully, hopelessly human, who tweets like his life depends on it and has forced me to know so much about his views, beliefs, and preferences, and who continues to thrill and delight me with each new book release. I'll read it all, from short story collections to novellas and epic-length novels. If his name is attached, I'm there, and while I have evolved from effusive praise for every word he pens to lovingly criticizing his recurring tropes and phrases and character choices, I still want so badly to love everything he gives me. I go in hopeful and optimistic no matter how many times he creates one-dimensional villains with cartoonishly evil internal monologues, no matter how many times he swings and misses with regard to weight and race and sexuality and other minority issues, no matter how much he wants to be a crime novelist now and how lackluster I find those narratives, and no matter how bad he is at endings. I want to feel like a child again, breathless for the next page turn while simultaneously dreading the horror he'll unleash on me when it comes.
Bag of Bones was my book in high school and into my early 20s. I didn't give a second thought to the 20-year-old woman and the 40-year-old man falling in love or whatever they were doing, or to the optics of a privileged white man writing about the rape and murder of a black woman, or the frankly horrifying sex scenes. I read and reread that book so many times, specifically the audiobook narrated by Stephen King himself. It became a comfort read for me, which feels uncomfortable to say now given the subject matter, but it was just so well-worn and familiar and the gothic ghost story of it all was exactly what my soul needed. There were even songs in it, with music, performed as though Sarah herself were singing them. The theatrics!
Night Shift was my other early love, and it's one I stand behind still. I think it's his best short story collection. Short stories are not my favorite medium from any author, and I find them particularly unsatisfying from Stephen King because I don't feel that brevity suits him. He's meant to wander his way unconstrained through a story on his own sweet time. But the stories in Night Shift are largely great, and they're not all straightforward horror, so there's something in there for every reader.
The thing about Stephen King is that while he cut his teeth on straightforward horror, I don't actually find most of his work scary. Pet Sematary is an exception, brutal and terrifying and so, so bleak, and I love it for that. And The Shining traumatized me as a child, with the woman in the bathtub and, inexplicably, the hedge animals. But for the most part, what I feel he excels at more than scares is the ache of being human, the indignity of being a person living in a body, the slow, gentle erosion of relationships, the mundanity of love. He knows people and he knows how to capture their complexities, as long as they're not villains. He seems, to me, to be very interested in examining how ordinary people would react if thrust into the wild situations horror presents its characters with and the effects it would have on their relationships with the people around them, something I'm also interested in.
Would you believe me if I told you that he's written some of the sweetest love stories I've ever read? He has. Lisey's Story is the prime example of this, a polarizing book that many people disliked because it's very slow to start and is one of the more egregious versions of his penchant to use the same absurd phrases over and over again. I loved it, and I love it, and I will continue to love it because Scott and Lisey deserve nothing less. Their story is beautiful to me, although also tragic and terrible because it is, after all, still a horror novel. And the sex scenes, as usual, don't even bear mentioning. He can't write sex to save his life and doesn't seem to know that anything other than missionary PIV is an option. It's fine. That's not what anyone should be going to Stephen King for anyway.
He's also concerned with women and their inner lives and agency in a way I find so endearing and charming. He doesn't always get it right, and sometimes he gets it wrong in ways I think someone should really take him to task for, but he tries. He cares, and I get the sense that he writes these things from a place of genuine compassion and a desire to illuminate things that weren't being spoken of in real ways when he was coming up. Look at Carrie and the time when it was written. Look at Rose Madder, which, for all its many faults, is such keenly observed writing on the cycle of abuse. Look at Gerald's Game, which distressed me so much with its resonance when I first read it at 18 that I've never read it again since.
What I need you to understand is that I know he's deeply, deeply flawed. I see him. I've always seen him. There's a reason I call him my problematic father who raised me. I grew up on his words and I've continued to live in and with and for them in the years since that adolescent adoration, but I also know who he is. I know what he's written. I call him out constantly, sometimes with love and sometimes with anger and sometimes with desperation for him to be better than I think he's capable of at 76 years old. Multiple truths can exist simultaneously, and I refuse to expect perfection from anyone. I especially don't require ideological purity from the people who make the art I consume. There are lines and limits, obviously, and maybe some people believe he's gone too far over them, but I don't. He's made some major missteps over the years, as with his Woody Allen and J.K. Rowling comments, and his political takes are centrist nonsense at best, and I don't have blinders on about any of this.
But I love him. I will be destroyed when he's gone, and I tear up every time I hear his voice, as I did when I listened to his interview with The Losers Club podcast because I am incapable of being normal about anything I care about. I don't think I would love books half as much as I do if not for him. I don't think I would love horror half as much as I do if not for him. He was my gateway and I'm eternally grateful to him for that. I pretend Apt Pupil and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Christine and most of Skeleton Crew simply don't exist, and I look forward to the day when I've finally forced myself to tackle The Stand and The Dark Tower so that I can be a completionist and be able to say I've read his entire body of work.
As a final note, I really enjoyed Grady Hendrix's writing about him and his books for Tor back when it was published, so read that if you want more Stephen King thoughts. And please, please, pretty pretty please talk to me about him, whether you already love him like I do or you want to know what you should read from his massive catalogue or, I guess, even if you hate him and think he's a hack as many do. I can't promise you a reasonable or objective response if that's the position you're coming from, but you're entitled to it and I welcome the opportunity to try to change your mind.