The story Stephen King couldn’t write because it was too scary: “What the hell was going on in there?”
If there’s one thing that Stephen King knows, then its how to put the fear of God into his readers. After all, the Maine-born writer has been considered the master of the horror genre ever since his debut novel Carrie arrived in 1974 and since then, he has continued to write stories that truly send the shivers up his readers’ spines.
Elsewhere, King has detailed the worlds of the supernatural and macabre on many brilliant occasions, including in his novels, Christine, The Shining, Misery and It, each of which has been brought to the big screen in film adaptations by John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick and a swathe of others acclaimed movie directors.
So it’s fair to say that King has serious power at his fingertips when it comes to him weaving tales of terror and time and time again he’s proven his position as the king of spooky fiction. In fact, there was once a horror story that King began writing that seemed to be so terrifying that even he couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on and had to abandon writing it.
When speaking with Conan O’Brien, King said that he had an idea for a story about the ladies’ bathroom at Stapleton Airport in Denver, Colorado. He explained: “What the story was going to be was this guy and his wife are on their way to their plane, and the woman says, ‘Hun, I gotta use the ladies’ room.’ ‘Okay, but remember, five minutes, and we gotta be at the gate’.”
According to King, in the story, the woman goes into the bathroom, but after some time, she still hasn’t come out. The man is just standing around waiting for her to return, which King admitted had an element of humour, noting, “Because every guy’s been in this position at one time or another where you’re someplace where even Superman can’t go.”
A “strange” atmosphere creeps over the airport where everyone feels alien to one another, but eventually, another man and his wife come up to the toilet; the wife goes in but also does not return. King continued, “Soon, there’s a third guy and a fourth guy, and finally, one of them says, ‘Well, screw it, I’m gonna go in there and get her’, and just as he goes, this thing slides closed, this pneumatic door, and he hears screams from inside.”
Having written that part of the story, King felt that he was on to something big and said to himself, “Wow, this is good; I like this.” As the story progresses and more women are trapped in the toilet, several people, “The state militia, the FBI, you get the governor involved, the army and the rest of it”, are brought in to try and help, but they equally get sucked into the mystery.
King knew that he had a story on his hands, but the problem was that no matter how many people were sent into the toilet of suffering and despair, he “could never figure out what the hell was going on in there.” The story was a moment when even King had conjured up something too scary for him to even comprehend, so the only option was to leave the poor victims of the toilet stuck in there, in writing limbo, for the rest of literary eternity.
