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My books are arranged on my shelves alphabetically by author. The vagaries of the alphabet and the size of the shelves are such that the letter “K” is at eye level as you go through the door and turn left. As a direct result of this, a question I am asked more and more often these days is “Why on earth do you read so many books by Stephen King?” The questioner usually has a sneer in his voice and I reply by mumbling something and changing the subject.
As it happens, however, I know exactly why I read so many books by Stephen King. It’s a strange little story in itself, and I thought you might be interested. It starts with fluffy baby ducklings (aaaah!).
I think it was the biologist Konrad Lorenz who first described the phenomenon of imprinting. A newly hatched duckling will assume that the first moving thing it sees is mum and will behave accordingly. Lorenz was often to be seen striding around his garden followed by a long line of cheeping ducklings brimming over with mother love. They were imprinted with Lorenz, and nothing would convince them otherwise. I seem to recall a couple of Tom and Jerry cartoons on the same theme.
But ducklings are not the only things that get imprinted. So do Bearded Triffids. I remember it very well indeed. I was about seven years old…
About once a week, my mum and dad and I would go and visit my grandmother. This was a little dull and so I always made sure that I took plenty of toys with me. Once I made my dad carry my whole meccano set. It was large, made of metal (no plastics in those days) and stored in a heavy wooden box. My grandmother lived about twenty minutes walk away. For the rest of his life my father walked with his knuckles dragging along the ground.
One particular week, whichever toy it was that I had with me failed to hold my attention, and I wandered into the back parlour where there was a cupboard with a glass fronted door. The cupboard shelves were full of boring looking books, and I’d never investigated too closely. But today I did, and I struck gold. Two very thick books: The Mystery Book edited by H. Douglas Thomson, published by Odhams Press Ltd (1934) and The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries edited J. M. Parrish and John R. Crossland, published by Odhams Press Ltd (1936). I have no idea who these editors are (or were), but the collections that they put together were inspired—every classic horror and ghost story you can think of was there: The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs, The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, the list is endless and I scared myself silly reading the stories. I was imprinted. The ghost story, the horror story had entered my life, and my life was totally changed from that point onwards. You will know what impression those books made when I tell you that today, nearly thirty years later, I still have them, I brought them with me from the other side of the world, and nothing would ever induce me to part with them. Every week, when we went to visit my grandmother’s, I made a bee line for that cupboard. I think my father was very grateful. He didn’t have to carry meccano sets any more.
For me, the golden age of the horror and supernatural story will always be the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The stories were fresh and new and exciting then and they still are today. They don’t scare me now as much as they once did (perhaps familiarity has lessened their effect), but I reread Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James just before sitting down to write this essay and it frightened me all over again—the magic hasn’t gone away.
I was imprinted, you see. The stories in these two books define the genre. If they aren’t in these books, then they can’t possibly be successful as horror stories. If pressed hard, I will admit that some of the stories are better than others. (The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is just as unreadable today as I found it to be thirty years ago—I totally fail to understand James’ honoured place in literature. I’ve always found him to be a pompous old windbag.) I think this probably explains why I never had much time for H. P. Lovecraft and his legions of imitators. They weren’t in the books, you see. The fact that they were piss poor writers and story tellers was of secondary importance.
The names of these writers in these books were written in my mind in letters of fire, and over the years I sometimes came across other works by them buried in dusty corners of the public library, books long out of print by writers long dead. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. F. Benson, E. Bulwer Lytton. Other names, more famous names had books more easily available: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Walter De La Mare. Generally I was disappointed, which is not really to be wondered at. After all, if these other works had been any good, they would have been in my definitive books. (By now my grandmother had tired of never seeing anything but the back of my head as I bent over her books so she gave them to me to take home so that my parents could put up with it instead. They were my books now, and for years, I took them with me to my grandmother’s every week. It didn’t seem right to read them anywhere else. I think my grandmother must have found me an exasperating grandchild. But I was the only one she had, so she put up with it.)
In many ways those two books had a deeper and more long-lasting effect on me than did the later addiction to SF. I was never imprinted with SF as I was with these two books. SF was merely an addiction. These books were a fundamental part of my life. Just as Konrad Lorenz would always be mum to generations of ducklings, so would these books occupy a very special place in my affections.
But children and ducklings grow up and both eventually leave the nest. I stopped reading the stories in the books—I knew most of them almost off by heart anyway—so it didn’t matter if I gave them a rest for a while. SF was taking a prominent place in my affections. From time to time I would pick up a “horror” book and thumb through it (this was a relatively easy thing to do as they were often shelved alongside or mixed in with the SF), but generally I sneered and put them back. They couldn’t possibly be any good.
I was vaguely aware that someone called Stephen King was making a big name for himself, breaking out of the horror genre into the best seller lists. That was two strikes against him before he even started, so my eyes just skipped over his books whenever I saw them on the shelves. One bored afternoon I went to the pictures and saw Carrie, it was okay. The blood was a satisfying shade of red, and the ending made me jump in brief shock. But I thought no more about it, and continued to ignore King’s books. The years passed, as years do, and then one day disaster struck. I ran out of things to read.
When I don’t have anything to read, I am unlivable with. I twitch and drool and pick fights in pubs, my wife and pussy cat run away, my hands tremble. Taking her courage in her hands, Rosemary pointed me in the direction of a bookshop, “Go in there” she said, “and don’t come out without a book”.
There was absolutely nothing worth reading in the whole of the shop. So in desperation I bought the only thing that looked even vaguely interesting. It was Danse Macabre, a book of essays by Stephen King. He talked about the horror genre, and his philosophy as a writer. He mentioned names that I held in respect from my two anthologies. He discussed stories that I had read and loved. I began to think that he might not such a bad person after all. He discussed some of his own books and the next day I brought one of them: The Stand.
It is without doubt one of the best “after the holocaust” stories I have ever read. The world is decimated with a flu epidemic. Most people die. The book examines what happens to some of those who don’t. Pure SF, solidly in the SF tradition, and very, very well written. I loved it. Towards the end it gets a little mystical: two of the characters may (or may not be) supernatural powers, it’s hard to tell. But it is no bad thing and does not detract from the book. It’s 734 pages long and I read it in one sitting. Afterwards I went back to the bookshop and bought every book by Stephen King that I could find. And I have continued to buy every new book of his since.
King has quite a wide range as a writer. He is classed in the horror genre by the media Mafia who have to label everything for the sake of their filing systems. On the face of it that is understandable, many of his books do set out to shock and horrify. Exterminating most of the world population (as in The Stand) is a pretty horrifying notion if you stop to think about it. But outside of this broad classification he is hard to pigeon hole. Firestarter and The Dead Zone and Carrie are novels about psionics—telepathy, telekinesis and similar powers. (John W. Campbell once got a psionic bee in his bonnet and for a while Astounding was full of people thinking at each other. All three of those Stephen King novels would have fitted perfectly into Campbell’s magazine.)
Cujo is a perfectly naturalistic novel about a rabid dog. No SF, no supernatural events. The Shining is about a haunted hotel with telepathy with a subplot. Salem’s Lot is the definitive vampire novel (the only good one since Bram Stoker wrote Dracula). Christine is about a haunted car. And so on and so forth. The basic subject matter is not particularly exciting perhaps; but neither is any book when considered only at this very basic level. As I once remarked in another essay, you could say that War and Peace is about Russia.
A surprising large percentage of King’s stories have young children or adolescents playing a central role. But don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking that this makes them children’s books. Oh dear me no. One of King’s major strengths is his ability to get inside the heads of these young people. They come alive on the page, probably because they are you and me. They are very easy to identify with. If you remember the desperate need to belong to what in these days the jargon calls the peer group (but in my day and I suspect in King’s as well was simply “the gang”), then you will understand these books. Stephen King knows how to put on the skin of these people. Indeed one of his books (Pet Semetary) is so believable, so easy to identify with that I don’t actually own a copy. It upsets me too much to read it. Honestly; I am not exaggerating; this is no hyperbole. The book hits all my emotional buttons one after the other. I have only read it once. I will never read it again. It is too draining. That is writing skill of a very high standard indeed. No other book has ever had that effect on me.
Stephen King does not write about anything that a million writers before have not written about, he is no innovator. What he is, is a craftsman. That is why his books are so effective. They do shock, they are full of horror on both the subtle psychological level and the gross bucket of blood level. Normally you can dismiss that in a book. It’s only words on paper after all—Stephen King’s strength is that he involves you so much in his story that you can’t dismiss the words on paper. You are there in the story, taking part; and that makes the shocks hit so much harder. Do not make the mistake of lumping Stephen King in with the rest of the hack rubbish that has “Horror” printed on the spine of the book. He is very different. He doesn’t fit there. That is why his books are best sellers; that is why they transcend the category. I used to make that mistake; I used to sneer. I was wrong.
At the end of The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries are nine stories sealed off from the rest of the book. They are so scary, so horrible that the publishers felt obliged to put them in a group by themselves and to warn any readers with weak hearts not to read them because of the effect they might have. For many years I took these words at their face value and refused to read the stories in this section. After all the ones in the main body of the book already scared me stupid. What would the ones in the special section do? I was well into my teens before I dared to read those stories. I read them in broad daylight in a spacious and airy room. They still scared me sick. I was imprinted you see. Dispassionately, I suppose the stories are not really all that scary. I doubt if too many other people would get the same clammy palms and pounding heart that I get when I read them. But I can’t help it. The imprinting is simply too powerful and it is not under my conscious control. There are probably still a lot of ducks around who take their offspring to see old grandfather Konrad.
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