The King

No, this post is not about Elvis Presley.

This post is about the leader of horror/thriller literature, the one and only Stephen King.

From the introductions he writes at the beginning of his novels to the ironic twist at the end of them, King is probably my all-time favorite author.

My favorite King novel of the eight I've read is The Shining. It is a tough choice, but I am probably the biggest admirer of how King mixes it all up in the end, and his best work at this was in The Shining, when the bartender says, "You've always been the caretaker, Mr. Torrance". Plus, who didn't get goosebumps at the end of the movie, when Kubrick focuses on a picture on the wall from 1921, with Jack Torrance standing right in the middle of it?

I guess that explains why I've watched The Shining five times and read the novel twice.

Stephen King's best quality as a writer is that he gets human nature so well. In the Pet Semetary, his reflection on how people deal with the death of someone, from a cat to their own son, in Needful Things, how he showed how people can get crazy over an object, in Mist, the way he showed how people revert to religion in stressful times, and in The Shining, his take on loneliness and its effects on people, are just a few examples.

With all these people and their actions that the reader can relate to so well, come the extremely vivid descriptions. Last night, I read IT  before I went to sleep, and just as I turned off the Kindle, put it on my bedside table and closed my eyes, I saw the silver eyes and the orange hair of IT, and these letters written in blood by Stanley Uris on the bathroom wall.

If you've read some of King's work, you'll understand what I mean. After reading a couple of his novels, you look at the descending mist doubtfully, hesitate each time you pick up your cell phone, look at every Saint Bernard to see if it has scratches on his nose, shiver every time you pass a pet cemetery, and be afraid to look down the holes in the sewer lid to see a red, painted smile and two, silver, unblinking eyes looking up at you.