The books that made “something click” in the head of Stephen King
As an undoubted master of the realms of horror and suspense fiction, Stephen King has established himself as a monolithic figure in American literature. Capable of delivering haunting narratives as well as detailing the inner workings of human psychology, King boasts a popularity unlike any of his contemporaries.
The author of Carrie, The Shining, Misery and The Green Mile has always been of good value for film adaptations, and many significant pieces of cinema have been crafted from King’s source novels. In addition, King’s memoir On Writing reveals a love for the craft of writing that’s essential to any budding pensmith.
Like any great writer, King found an early kinship with the medium of literature itself, which mostly began with children’s novels. However, as is often the case with many of the most literary inclined, King eventually made the jump to more mature writing, and in an interview with The Paris Review, he explained the moment he put behind his childish reading after an experience with more adult themes.
“In 1959, probably, after we had moved back to Maine,” King said. “I would have been twelve, and I was going to this little one-room schoolhouse just up the street from my house. All the grades were in one room, and there was a shithouse out back, which stank.”
The town that King grew up in possessed no library; instead, the state of Maine organised a van to arrive in Durham where the local children could pick out three books to read over the following month. Before that, King had predominantly read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books, created by Edward Stratemeyer and ghostwritten by Leslie McFarlane.
However, by the time King was able to pick out his own adult novels, he found enjoyment in the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. “In the one I read first, the cops go up to question a woman in this tenement apartment, and she is standing there in her slip,” the writer noted. “The cops tell her to put some clothes on, and she grabs her breast through her slip and squeezes it at them and says, ‘In your eye, cop!’”
At that point, King realised that there was an element of truth in fiction, leading him to abandon his previous children’s literature interest in favour of more mature writing. He said, “I went, ‘Shit!’ Immediately, something clicked in my head. I thought, ‘That’s real, that could really happen.’ That was the end of the Hardy Boys. That was the end of all juvenile fiction for me. It was like, ‘See ya!’”
The 87th Precinct works focus on a detective squad in Isola, a fictional city based on New York, with Isola itself serving as an analogue to Manhattan. Each 87th Precinct novel begins with the disclaimer, “The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.”
McBain’s novels left a deep impression on the young King, and it was likely at that point that he began to develop an interest in writing itself, realising that he would be able to craft stories of his own that dive into the deepest and darkest recesses of his imagination, a testament to the power of literature itself.
