How Stephen King Raised Me (Sorry Mom & Dad)

Summary I started reading Stephen King at age 10, and it shaped my worldview in so many ways.

Dad encouraged me to read, and mom sometimes winced, but both let me explore the books I chose in my own time.

The horror of Stephen King and his exploration of human nature exposed me to adult ideas and expanded my mind.

There were three people who raised me as a child: my mom, my dad, and Stephen King. I learned early that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who started reading Stephen King books at far too young an age and those who have never read him at all. I was firmly in the former camp, and it made all the difference to me, a bookworm kid with a taste for the weird and macabre. It's not an exaggeration to say that I wouldn't be the person I am today – or the writer – without Stephen King.

It's hard to say or write anything about Stephen King that hasn't already been said or written before. He's one of history's most successful authors, with over 400 million copies of his books sold, and he still appears to be going strong with his latest book, You Like It Darker, just out. For most people under the age of 50, Stephen King books, and the movie and TV adaptations based on Stephen King books, have just sort of always been there, like the sky, or the polio vaccine, or Dick Van Dyke. Knowing he's there, rising and falling like a tidal fixture, is like knowing the moon is there: he just is. He certainly was the moon for me – or rather, he was the hand that pulled back the curtain to show me what lurks at night under that moon.

Related 1 Stephen King Theory Completely Changes How You See His Books Stephen King is one of the most prolific writers, but one of his books secretly suggests the writing hasn't always come as easy for him as it seems.

I Started Reading Stephen King When I Was 10 Years Old

My Parents Were Great About Letting Me Explore

In the aforementioned first camp, I started reading Stephen King when I was just 10 years old. I started off with Christine, arguably the most entry-level of King's books in 1990 – if you can call a story about a murderous, possessed car ruining a formerly kind, sweet teenager entry-level. I then moved on to Carrie, then Cujo, and away I went. Dad encouraged it – within reason. I wasn't, for example, allowed to read Gerald's Game because he didn't want to explain why Jessie Burlingame was handcuffed to the bed. Understandable, in hindsight. Mom, a classic lit and Harlequin gal, winced when she saw me cracking open a King, but never dampened my enthusiasm. I'm glad about that.

Stephen King was love at first read for me. Maybe it was because I, then a daddy's girl, knew my dad was such an avid reader of King that I cleaved to my insistence that I loved his books from the start. I never admitted that it was probably just a little over my head, or that I had a sneaking, annoying suspicion that I wasn't quite catching everything Mr. King was throwing at me. I was determined to love Christine, but in truth, I didn't have to try hard. The King of Horror had a way of peeling back the layers of the world to give me a glimpse of the strangeness just underneath.

The King of Horror had a way of peeling back the layers of the world to give me a glimpse of the strangeness just underneath.

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It helped that so many of Stephen King's stories were set in small, blue-collar towns. I grew up in one of those same towns, one where everybody knew each other's business (for better or worse). Most people had jobs that required them to shower after work, not before, as the old saying goes. In any crowd of men, you could pick five at random who, together, could probably build a full house from scratch. Throw a rock into any crowd of women and you'd get a nurse, a teacher, or a woman who knew how to work the farm as well as her husband – if not better. Mom-and-pop shops were all that I knew before the Walmart opened up and shut most of those businesses down. It was a good way to grow up – but then, I didn't know any different.

Stephen King Got Me To Think Bigger Ideas About The World - And Human Emotion

He Expanding My Mind In Ways Children's Books Didn't

Close

So I felt like I knew the characters in his stories. They might have been the people I saw at school events or at church (when I deigned to go). That familiarity was deceptive, though; once his books got me rooted in the mundane, they got me thinking about the fantastic and thrilling. And once they got me thinking about the fantastic and thrilling, it opened me up to the human condition, and, more importantly, myself.

Say what you want about Stephen King. Maybe his writing isn't for you. Maybe you're just not a horror fan. Maybe you think he's low-brow – as King himself has said of his writing, he's "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." But no one should ever confuse simple with stupid. They're not the same, and it's through the simplicity of his writing that King reveals some big truths about people. He's as good at dissecting the interior of the human heart as he is the origins of an interdimensional, child-eating demon clown, and there's nothing stupid about that.

Stephen King has a way of getting right at the core of things, prying open human nature and pulling out all its bits and baubles.

Stephen King has a way of getting right at the core of things, prying open human nature and pulling out all its bits and baubles. He spreads the facets of the human soul out on a black velvet cloth like a jeweler and allows you to examine the pieces. I wasn't always sure what I was looking at, but I liked not knowing. Grappling with his sometimes very adult themes and observations about humanity made me stretch my brain like a muscle. Reading Little Women or Fahrenheit 451 made me ponder life, but so did Stephen King.

Sometimes, I'd read a passage and I'd feel something in my brain shift. Suddenly, I felt like I was on the verge of having a Big Adult Thought, one way above my age's pay grade. Like trying to think of the right word, or remembering a lost thought, I could just make out the shape of that new understanding in the fog of my inexperience. It was like trying to tease a carved shape out of a block of wood, like a word being on the tip of your tongue, but it was a thought on the tip of my mind. I wouldn't always get the shape, but that struggle to unearth it rewired my brain in ways that made me think bigger, dream deeper, and understand more broadly.

The Horror Of Stephen King Shaped Me, Too

Scares And Scars Come With A Kid's Exploration

It wasn't just the human exploration part that got me, either, nor was it only his books. Two Stephen King works have haunted me more than any others, and neither of them were novels. One is his short story "The Jaunt." Even just thinking "Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!" is enough to make me shudder. The existential horror of the endless always stuck with me: Ricky, a kid my age, gone mad, his stark white hair, his rocking and clawing out his eyeballs. Nothing had ever shocked me to that point in my young life like the ending of that story did. Nothing had ever been as horrifying to me as this:

The thing that had been his son bounced and writhed on its Jaunt couch, a twelve-yearold boy with a snow-white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient, the corneas gone a sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time masquerading as a boy; and yet it bounced and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and at its choked, lunatic cackles the Jaunt attendants drew back in terror. Some of them fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an unthinkable eventuality. The old-young legs twitched and quivered. Claw hands beat and twisted and danced on the air; abruptly they descended and the thing that had been his son began to claw at its face. "Longer than you think, Dad!" it cackled. "Longer than you think! Held my breath when they gave me the gas! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!"

In a way, reading Stephen King was a little like being Ricky. I peeked into a universe I wasn't supposed to see, some of it wonderful, some of it horrible, and all of it expanding my mind. I didn't claw out my eyeballs, but I did have nightmares. Yet even those were welcome.

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The second work of King that forever scarred me in a good way was the 1990 IT miniseries. If you know, you know. Today, it's a little cheesy. But watching it as a 10-year-old in the basement of my babysitter's house was a formative experience. Tim Curry as Pennywise was a regular rotation at the top of my nightmares list. To this day, I still can't walk past a storm drain without giving it a wide berth, unconscious or not. Stephen King left scars on this Constant Reader's soul. He left scars. But I'm grateful for each one – after all, scars are how we know we live. Thanks to Stephen King, I lived more adventures in my young mind than most.