King of Kings

Can't a guy get any sleep around here?

It was when I was about twelve or thirteen years old that I discovered a rather new author named Stephen King. I saw a friend at school toting around a book he was reading called Carrie. I don't think I read the book, but I did see the movie.... somehow, since I certainly wasn't old enough to see a Restricted film back then. Maybe that came a few years later, when I could successfully - as an under-ager - get into rated R movies. I was tall for my age. 

Anyway, that same school buddy later had a book called Salem's Lot, also by King. This horror stuff was becoming a real thing in "literature". Well, let's call it what it is: genre fiction, pulp, shlock, whatever derogatory term you want to place on it. Regardless, I was interested in it. After all, I already had a reasonable background in watching horror films, even by that tender age. So why not books?

The Shining, released in '77, was my first Stephen King novel. I snapped it up as soon as I heard about it. A very good choice. I remember a faceless head on a shiny silver book cover. And it was thick. Most of King's books were big, but that didn't put me off.... I loved this stuff. I was unaware of Rage, which King wrote under a pseudonym, so I never got around to that one. But the following year I grabbed Night Shift, a collection of short stories, as soon as it hit store shelves. Terrific late night reading for a young imaginative mind. The nightmares were glorious!

Though I enjoyed King's brand of horror, I guess I didn't keep a close eye on his work, for I missed several of his books along the way. Different Seasons might have been the last novel of his that I ever bought upon its release (though I did pick up an old copy of Danse Macabre decades later). I did, however, see the film adaptation of his book The Dead Zone, which I still rank among my favourite horror movies. It didn't hurt that a young Christopher Walken played our protagonist in the story. A tormented if subdued role, enacted perfectly to help establish the eeriness and the sense of dread in the movie. 

The trouble with the movie adaptations of King's stories was that the master of horror didn't often have a hand in the making of the picture. Where his quality control would have helped rein things in closer to the source material, instead we got directors and screenwriters with grand ideas of improving and changing key elements too much. One exception in my opinion was the auteur director Stanley Kubrick, whose every film is a masterpiece in some respect. Kubrick's take on The Shining was brilliantly realized, though it did stray from King's written version. Here we found a highly visual and visceral experience, dripping with mood and madness. Jack Nicholson breathed frightening life into his character, and the rest of the cast certainly brought their own weirdness into the mix. A resounding success, in my opinion, despite protestations from many a King fan. 

So the King adaptations were inconsistent. I skipped many of them after hearing bad things about them by word of mouth. Some I would finally check out decades later, only to learn that they weren't so bad after all. Like Silver Bullet and Pet Sematary. And Salem's Lot, which I rank among the best vampire stories on celluloid. And I only want to talk about King's horror output here, so please don't think I do not worship films like Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption, both masterpieces of cinema - period. 

Just a few years ago, I was in the mood to try out some later King novels, so I borrowed The Dark Half and Gerald's Game from a friend. I was pleasantly surprised at how good these both were. Oh, and I did buy myself King's entertaining On Writing, both autobiography and guide to the craft of storytelling.

Think you're pretty scary, don't ya?