The King of Horror: Essay on Stephen King's Way of Life

Your mind is the most powerful weapon you can possess, and sometimes the hardest challenge you will have to overcome. Stephen King is an author who has mastered the ability to use your mind against you when reading his books. Due to this, King has won many awards for his unique writing style and the ability to use graphic imagery; all of which can be directed back to his family experiences and his reaction to those events. Stephen King is a very profound author, who developed a particular style that earned him the title ‘The King of Horror’.

Stephen King’s life while growing up and even still today has been an important and crucial part to his ability to write with such a strong emotional connection with family and friends. King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. When King was very young, his parents Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King divorced, so Stephen King and his brother, David King, spent several years between India and Connecticut. Later on he moved back to Maine with his mother and brother; there he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966. After high school King decided to go to college at the University of Maine at Orono, he did this to stay close to home and his mother. While he was at college, he started his writing career, he writes for the school’s newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. Also, while he was in college he wrote a collection of stories that would be at first individually published in Startling Mystery Story, and later these stories would be collected up and published all together titled the Night Shift collection. Also, while he was at college he met the girl that would eventually become his wife at the Fogler Library, where they both worked as students.

He and Tabitha Spruce would later marry on January 2, 1971. King ended up graduating from the University of Maine in Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. After graduation King went to a Draft Board Examination, there he was determined as unfit for military service due to High blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums. At the beginning of King’s marriage, he was unable to find a job as a teacher, so he and his wife lived off of his earnings a laborer at an industrial laundry, and Tabitha’s student loan and savings. Throughout his marriage, King and his wife had three kids, Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hillstrom, and Owen Phillip. In June of 1999, Stephen King was involved in a very severe accident! He was walking along the side of a highway and was hit by a car, it left him in critical condition with injuries to his lungs, broken ribs, a broken leg, and a severely fractured hip.

After three weeks of operations he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center When Stephen and his wife moved to a town west of Bangor, Maine he “began to work on a short story about a girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it wasn’t a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash”(IMDb). His wife found the thrown-away pages and began to read them, upon reading them she confronted her husband and convinced him to continue his story, and King did. In January 1973 he submitted “Carrie” to Doubleday, and they bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. Stephen King’s contract called for him to receive half of that sum of money, and upon the result of his first novel, King quit his teaching job and pursued writing full-time! After having such a successful beginning to his writing career Stephen King set the bar high for his future books, and for most if not all of the books he has currently written he met that bar and exceeded it.

Stephen King has written at least 88 books so far in his writing career each book has its own horrific story that will trouble a reader’s mind in some way; the crazy thing is that even the King of Horror himself has some books he wrote that even bother him due to the horrors they contain! To Stephen King, the most horrific book he wrote is Pet Sematary, and it isn’t necessarily because it is such a graphic horror book. However, the reason this book haunts King is how he conjured up the book. This book is based on a personal experience he and his family experienced in the late 70s. Around this time he and his family were living in Orrington, Maine, the house that they rented to stay in was off of a very busy road that was constantly driven by heavy tanker trucks. One day the road even claimed his daughter’s cat Smucky(who is name is even included in the Book Pet Sematary), he and his family even buried the cat in the pet Sematary near their house. After that day not soon after King’s two-year-old son who just learned how to run attempted to run towards the road while a tanker truck was driving by. Stephen chased after his son just like in the book, but unlike the book his son fell when he reached the side of the road.

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This book is such a gruesome reminder to Stephen King because to him it reminds the near loss of his son. To those who have become obsessed with Stephen King’s books have been rewarded with the ability to now see his greatest stories come to life through movies. At least 75 of King’s 88 books have been turned into a graphic Hollywood horror movies. All in all, Stephen King has made his mark and set his legacy in stone not only the literary aspect of horror but even now as in the cinematic world too! Stephen King has developed a unique style of writing in which he enjoys bringing people's greatest fears to life. He enjoys taking real-life events and incorporating that sick and twisted “What If” idea into play. King designs most of his writing with the incorporation of places or things he has witnessed or been to. Most of his stories are set in small towns of Maine, which is the place where he spent most of his life growing up.

Another thing he enjoys incorporating in his writing is the names of other male authors. In many of his books, he even will reference some of his other writing in some way. Another thing King exceeds at in his writing is his ability to portray families as being broken or dysfunctional, and a character usually also is depicted as being isolated or trapped from the outside world. He enjoys taking the thought of a lovely small town and turning it into a town that hides secrets and possesses a dark side to it. In many of his earlier books, he usually wrote about the death of a child, such as in Pet Sematary. The greatest thing that he is able to incorporate in his writing though would have to be his immense ability to use foreshadowing in such a detailed, but yet the subtle way that you will not forget it; such as “REDRUM” in “The Shining” is used to hint at murder. “All memorable literature contains conflict, foreshadowing, and suspense.

King is the master at integrating these three literary devices”(freelance writing). Stephen King is known as a graphically detailed horror author came up with the idea of having a false alias to allow him to write other forms of novelty. He created the alias Richard Bachman and began to write books under that name to widen his horizon of writing styles. He wrote four books under this alias before the people figured out that Stephen King and Richard Bachman were the same people. King has tried to write in other ways and in different styles, but all in all he will forever be remembered as the King of Horror! Stephen King was not just another author who knew how to write good horror books, but he was the man who took the idea of horror and turned it into the monster it is today. King figured out a way to write with such detail that it would make a reader feel as if they were there in the book with the characters. His ability to write with such a sense of reality, yet possess such an amount of supernatural makes his writing second to none in the world of horror.

The mind that King has is the perfect place for horrific ideas to incubate into such graphic stories that he transfers onto paper for us to read. Stephen King not only changed the way horror was written, but he even paved over it completely with his own way and style. King even has the ability to captivate his readers with his technique of writing; “readers can identify with many of King’s three-dimensional, dynamic, characters, his stories engage his loyalist fans and first-time readers”(freelance writing). King has become a very captivating author that leaves those who read his books looking at the world differently, and often able to recall in vivid detail everything they have read due to his immense detail. Starting in the year 1976 King was nominated for multiple awards for his novels, and his ability to write. Ever since that year till the present day he is still being nominated and even awarded many of those awards he was nominated for. One of the greatest awards he has received is the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, winning this proved once again he is the “King of Horror”. However, as the years have gone by Stephen King has gradually begun to decrease in the amount of time he puts into writing his books.

Nowadays he is taking the time that he has removed from writing and putting it towards spending time with his family, so he can not only watch his children grow old but even observe his grandchildren do so also. King will not admit that he is retiring completely, but he has stated that “the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be. I'm not a kid of 25 anymore and I'm not a young middle-aged man of 35 anymore-I have grandchildren and I have a lot of things to do besides writing and that in and of itself is a wonderful thing but writing is still a big, important part of my life and of every day”(StephenKing). As he has begun to grow older and older King started to experience more and more physical issues; King was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which is a genetic disease that causes the gradual deterioration of your eyesight. This means that over time King will start to lose some of his vision, but the good news is that as of right now he is not experiencing any symptoms of the disease. Just like the protagonists in King’s novels he will not the demons knocking at his door beat him into submission, but he will face them head on and fight them till the end! The title “King of Horror” is not given to just anyone, it is a name that is given to a person who can take an idea and turn it into a graphic movie in your head that has you compelled to not stop reading it until you finish it and then once you do you have left yearning for more. Stephen King has mastered the ability to do all that and more, he is able to take a personal experience of his and turn it into an amazing story.

The Stephen King States, “I get my ideas from everywhere. But what all of my ideas boil down to is seeing maybe one thing, but in a lot of cases it's seeing two things and having them come together in some new and interesting way, and then adding the question 'What if?”' (StephenKing). Thar ‘What If’ question has the uncanny ability to take a novel from a good book to an unforgettable experience. King has this ability to make what he writes not just a story with characters, but with people that we feel as if we have known them and feel for them as if they are actually people and not just fiction. With everything King has done and achieved in his writing career, he will not be remembered as just another good or ever great author; however, he will be remembered as one of the greatest writers of all time in all genres of literature, and he will be known for years to come as “The King of Horror”!