I instantly borrowed my dad’s copy, reading a decent chunk of it at his place and taking it home with me after the weekend was over to continue. The fact that there was another new King book-and an 800-page monster at that-already out while I was just finishing up with The Shining and Night Shift kind of blew my mind. So imagine my surprise when I scanned his shelves that day and discovered a new Stephen King book called The Stand. He belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club or something like that, which sent most of his books in hardcover. My father was a reader too and had a whole wall of books in his smallish apartment. At the time, I had no real memory of him being a presence in my life before that although I knew he was my dad, he was in some ways just a relatively nice guy who came to pick me up on weekends and entertain me. As part of the deal, I spent Sundays and sometimes whole weekends with my father at his place in Queens. My father and mother had separated when I was just two years old, finalizing the divorce when I was four. That all changed one day when I went to spend the weekend at my dad’s apartment. Meanwhile the King hits kept coming… only in a different way, and in a fashion that would give me another kind of gift-beside the man’s work itself-that would bear fruit for years to come. But reading King was transformative, and his work eventually led me to discover that of the great Peter Straub ( who we recently lost), the British titan Ramsey Campbell, and frankly lesser lights like Dean Koontz and John Saul who still managed to enthrall and terrify me, even if their work didn’t quite stand the test of time like the others. #Stephen king gentle reader tv#I had been a voracious reader reportedly since the age of three or four, and a lot of my early books consisted of Star Trek episode novelizations, Planet of the Apes novelizations, and non-fiction works about the making of various movies and TV shows, with a few original sci-fi and horror novels sprinkled in. Probably like a lot of people my age, King was in many ways my first adult reading. That went down in two huge gulps, 200 pages a day over two days, and etched into my mind along with the horrors of the Overlook Hotel was the sweet, doomed relationship between little Danny Torrance and his father, Jack, and how the malignancy of the hotel could ultimately not destroy their love. And then perusing the local mall’s book store one day, there it was: the silver paperback cover of The Shining, the brand-new novel from Stephen King. #Stephen king gentle reader movie#When the movie of Carrie came out, I talked my mother into taking me to see it (I somehow managed to convince her to take me to a lot of age-inappropriate movies back then, ranging from Theatre of Blood to Jaws). I devoured ‘Salem’s Lot and then went back to grab Carrie from that same rack in that same store. What King did by bringing them into late 20th century America felt nothing less than revolutionary. Vampires! In a little town like the one I was staying in! Like almost everyone else, my experience of bloodsuckers up until then had been relegated to dusty Universal and Hammer movies. While I’d read some horror before, never before had I encountered a story in which a child died (a child roughly my own age, I should add).Īnd then I remember getting to a point in the story, I don’t recall exactly which scene, when a light switched on in my head and I realized that this was a book about vampires. I recall reading about the terrible death of Danny Glick, his father throwing himself on his son’s coffin. ‘Salem’s Lot was my first King, and remains one of my absolute favorites, probably for that reason. How I convinced my grandfather to purchase ‘Salem’s Lot (which seemed just as adult) remains a mystery to this day. Although I was very young, I was keenly aware of horror titles such as The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, which I was not yet allowed to read. The title of course made me think at first that it was about witchcraft. I remember being drawn to the cover, all black with what appeared to be a child’s face slightly raised in relief, a single drop of blood at the corner of its mouth. Little did I know that buying that book that day would impact my life for decades to come. That store was my go-to for comic books, monster movie magazines, and books whenever I was staying at my grandparents’ summer home. Instead it was King’s second published novel, ‘Salem’s Lot, which I spotted on one of those spinning metal racks in a drug store in a small Long Island town called Rocky Point. It was in paperback that I first encountered the work of Stephen King as well, although it wasn’t Carrie.
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