King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White High school is hell.īorn in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century.

This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery.

Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history - Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison - nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St.

Without Carrie, we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. Without The Shining, and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material. That means if you’re a King fan - or looking to become one - there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.Īfter all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things, whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It. In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary, the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one - even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is.

Write Like Your Brain Works by Dene Low