THE SECRET ORIGIN OF STEPHEN KING

THE MASTER OF MODERN HORROR AS A WEE LAD

by Lint Hatcher

     While perusing a free preview of the upcoming comic book adaptation of “The Stand”, I found myself wondering, "What exactly does the name 'Stephen King' mean to a twenty-four year old? Or even to a thirty year old?"

     I find it hard to imagine that twenty-four year olds are carrying around battered, closely read paperback copies of “Salem's Lot” or “The Shining” or, for that matter, “The Stand”. And while King has continued to parlay perhaps a novel a year, his novels aren't the media events  they used to be. For those of us who spent our teenage years during the late Seventies, early Eighties, Stephen King was an icon. And  yet, I don't imagine we are passing King on to our children as part of our pop-cultural heritage — not the way we might sit Junior down  in front of the TV, pop a disk into the DVD player, and solemnly  intone, "All right, Son. This...is Star Wars."

     It seems odd to say it, but perhaps an introduction to Stephen King is called for. An introduction to King and to the peculiar literary horror boom of the late Seventies, early Eighties.

     In the fall of 1971, Stephen King was living with his wife Tabitha and their baby daughter Naomi in a trailer set atop a snowy hillside in Hermon, Maine. King had a degree in English, but spent most of his working hours at an industrial laundry to the tune of $60 a week. That fall, he finally nailed a high school English instructor position. Still, this brought in only $6,400 a year. King would spend summers at the laundry factor. In the meantime, King came home, gave his wife a hug, and wrote novels.There were around five of them. All which were all rejected.

THE MOVIE POSTER FOR THE 1976 DePALMA ADAPTATION OF THE KING NOVEL "CARRIE"

     Then one day Tabitha King reached into the trash can and pulled out the first few discarded pages of a novel. She handed them back to her husband. She thought he had something there — more than he apparently realized.The novel was “Carrie”. Doubleday bought the hardcover rights for $2,500. Then New American Library purchased the paperback rights for $400,000, of which King received half. "Our lives changed so quickly," King later wrote, "that for more than a year afterward we walked around with big, sappy grins on our faces, hardly daring to believe we were out of that trap for good." Little did King realize, things were just getting started.

     Brian DePalma made “Carrie” into a hit movie and put the name Stephen King in the public eye — right there in the middle of a Seventies horror boom when men and women were standing in line to see if they would throw up while watching The Exorcist, while high school kids debating breathlessly whether The Amityville Horror was a big hoax or a real ghost story. King followed “Carrie” with “Salem's Lot” and then came “The Shining”. The latter was a huge success, inspiring a slew of copycat titles — The Piercing, The Burning, The Nesting. Suddenly, gerunds were scary. And then, as if to prove Stephen King could do no wrong, his short story collection, “Night Shift”, was also a success. A  hort story collection on the bestsellers list!

ARTWORK FROM MARVEL'S LATEEST ADAPTATION OF KING'S WORK, THE "STAND"

     But the real clincher was “The Stand”. At 823 pages, it was more massive than Michener. It was unheard of in the world of horror fiction to aim such a cement block of a book at the bestsellers list. Nevertheless, it was a hit. In fact, “The Stand” became the favorite fear-fest for many of King's fans.

Why?

     Clive Barker once opined that perhaps King's genius was to make it acceptable to be seen on a bus reading a horror novel. I disagree. King grew up reading H. P. Lovecraft and other members of the Cthulhu circle, purveyors of a peculiar cosmic horror. Evil encroached upon the normal world in the form of ancient entities from the darkest corners of the universe. Stephen King didn't really imitate Lovecraft. But he did explore encroachment. And while Lovecraft's form of encroachment appealed to a certain set of horror and science fiction buffs, King's variety of encroachment appealed to the public at large. Maybe this was because King focused on pain. King focused on the question "Just how bad can it get?" He presented believable characters who on some sunny afternoon find they have become a statistic: one of the handful of people who each and every year are gored to death by hogs, for example, their face chewed off before someone can get hold of a shotgun.

     Then King managed to bring the supernatural into this horrible, all too believable world of statistics and "How bad can it get?" This isn't just any supernatural threat, however. The nature, so to speak, of the supernatural encroachment is somehow familiar. Terribly familiar. We saw this, glimpsed it, in “Carrie”, saw it begin to blossom in “Salem's Lot” and “The Shining”, but witnessed it in full bloom in “The Stand”. Instead of giving us ancient entities at the world's rim, King incarnated the invading evil out of bits and pieces of a rag tag assortment of Americana.

     Consider the case of Randall Flagg, the dark man, the walking man, whom we meet in The Stand. A nasty super-flu has killed 99% of the world's population. Earth has become a devastated wasteland of disease riddled corpses.  But Flagg isn't shaken by all this. As King describes it:

"He walked south, south on US 51, the worn heels of his sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took 
it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers unions, the Jehovah's Witnesses (If You Can Answer These Ten Questions "Yes," You Have Been SAVED!), the Blacks for Militant  Equality, the Code of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. There was a button on each breast of his denim jacket. On the right, a yellow smile face. On the left, a pig wearing a policeman's cap. The legend was written beneath in red letters which dripped to simulate blood: how's your pork?

"He moved on, not pausing, not slowing, but alive to the night. His eyes seemed almost frantic with the night's possibilities. There was a Boy Scout knapsack on his back, old and battered. There was a dark hilarity in his face, and perhaps in his heart, too, you would think - and you would be right. It was the face of a hatefully happy man, a face that radiated a horrible handsome warmth, a face to make water glasses shatter in the hands of tired truck-stop waitresses, to make small children crash their trikes into board fences and then run wailing to their mommies with stake-shaped splinters sticking out of  their knees. It was a face guaranteed to make barroom arguments over batting averages turn bloody."

     What we know is America, particularly pop-culture — pop media, pop architecture, pop politics, pop everything. In The Stand, when it comes time for the world to end and for the few survivors to choose up sides for good or for evil, Something Evil steps into this  landscape to take its own stand, as it were. That something is Randall Flagg. In a very real sense, we feel we know Randall Flagg personally. And in a deeper, stranger sense, when it turns out that Randall Flagg can suddenly do magic, is in touch with some dark  supernatural force, and raises himself a couple feet into the air above the dark asphalt of US 51... well, it seems appropriate. He seems to be a monster we knew was there all along, there in the shadows of history and of culture. King has drawn it out into the light, given it form and substance, so we can recognize it for what it is in a kind of patchwork quilt of its various encroachments into our lives.

That's why Stephen King is an icon.