A few days ago (21st September) was Stephen King’s birthday. A mastermind of horror, dense storylines , narrative and capturing the effects of childhood trauma, I’ve decided to take some time to reflect upon the novels by King that I have read and enjoyed.
So far I’ve only read three of his books (not excluding extracts from his On Writing). Those have been Carrie, IT and Dreamcatcher. Without planning on it, I’ve ended up reading one every summer for the past three years which, now that I’m aware of it, will make sure this is a continued tradition! Incidentally, my summer’s lack of a university schedule already usually gives me insomnia which partners with the fear of characters in Stephen King’s novel quite horribly… but his books are usually too gripping to resist!
Carrie was the first novel I read by King, and I’ll always remember it in companionship with my room in UEA halls. It was after all my coursework for the year had been completed that I read it whilst studying for my end of year exams. Carrie was the least scary of the three novels I have read, and it was being engrossed by King’s narrative of a teenage girl, overbearing Christian mother and high school that really kept me going. Religion and its place in America is always interesting to hear about, from a country that is based upon principles that include separation of the church and the state, and is full of radical Christians (that I had kind of thought were extinct before I visited the place last year!) I also really liked how easy it was to follow along King’s plot in this novel – the others I have read can get a bit over complicated and require your full concentration. For this reason, I’m glad Carrie was the first King book I read, as it definitely encouraged me to explore Kings work further whereas I may have been put off from this if I had read Dreamcatcher first.
IT. Ah, IT. The novel that made me scared like no other book before it had. There were times when I, as 20 year old, genuinely thought that IT was in my room at four in the morning, ready to kill me dressed in its sickening clown suit. The only way to calm these fears was to keep reading and King did what I had always wanted an author to do, to properly scare me into believing what I was reading was real. It only takes five seconds from a horror film’s movie trailer to do this to me and keep me paranoid for the rest of the week, but I was yet to discover a book that worked magic like this before reading IT. Beforehand, only JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith had made my stomach churn for real when reading The Silkworm but it hadn’t been enough to properly scare me, only sicken me. And Stephen King delivered that in 61,000 words, fear chasing me like the past chased the adults in the story. If you haven’t read IT, you do not know the full extent to which books can come alive. 10/10 would be too scared to read again.
Dreamcatcher was my most recent read, spent whilst tanning in my parent’s back garden over summer and whimsically wishing of being back in America – though maybe not Bangor, Maine. It certainly gave me a few shivers down my spine at night from thinking aliens where in my room, but it was the least enjoyable of all three of the novels I have read, with an over-complex plot with little in the way of fear as a reward for being so attentive. The gem of the book is Dudders, a character with Down syndrome with telepathic communication abilities, and the ideas of alien invasion through the mind is certainly interesting to read. King doesn’t shy back from gory gruesome details which is nice, and the book, like so many of his works, centres around childhood friends and the impact this friendship makes by echoing into their future lives, which is a personal interest to me. Maybe I was expecting too many scares after reading IT, but I would have liked King to take this to just the next level with something – it is the scares, or Dudders, that falls just half a step short of something really impactful.
Next, I think I’ll be reading the classic The Shining or King’s latest novel, Outsider, and hoping they fall somewhere between Carrie and IT for being scary yet easy to read!
The Last Book She Read 