THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION

“I first read Skeleton Crew as part of my initial King binge, aged 13 and hugely impressionable. His shorts weren’t what I wanted from him, so a tiny part of it felt like duty – getting through something that represented a huge amount of time and effort from somebody of whom I was in awe. But the quality of the tales (starting with The Mist, which would have been a novel for most other writers) was such that it soon became one of my favourite King books…”

“Until this point, Bachman wrote human stories. The four Bachman books were about broken, trapped men, desperately clinging to humanity while the world they inhabited pushed them further away from it. Rage, Running Man, The Long Walk, Roadwork: while they might trip into SF territory, they all exist by focusing on the human side of their protagonists, backing them into corners and making them fight their way out . King’s work at this point utilised more traditional horror tropes – the haunted or possessed whatevers that drove the stories along. That line dividing King from Bachman collapsed with Thinner, which throws its hat firmly into the supernatural ring almost from the first…”

“Hollywood has always played fast and loose with books – risking the author’s wrath by changing plot and characters wholesale. Joe Dunthorne looks back on some memorable film cheats…”

“In the wake of Sandy Hook, I wrote an essay called “Guns,” and published it as a Kindle Single — an e-book, in other words — because I wanted to be a part of the discussion before the whole subject slipped from the consciousness (and consciences) of the American people…

“The response to that essay has been strong but, in many ways, depressing. There have been more than 1,300 capsule reviews on the Amazon website. A thousand have been favorable (834 five-star reviews, 205 four-star reviews). More than 200 have been unfavorable (160 one-star reviews, 49 two-star reviews). In the middle, the place I really wanted to reach, less than 90. If you need a statistical example of how polarized the country is, there it is.”

“I wanted to buy Cycle of the Werewolf, but it was just so expensive. So I saved. I bought it over Misery. That’s not a choice I’m necessarily proud of, now. Now, I realise, it’s almost the very definition of a book that would have been better off staying in the library. Not because it’s bad or anything, but because it’s just so slight…”

“The Shining, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, Christine: they’re all horror novels, in the most conventional sense of the word, the kind that is so unfairly maligned: haunted houses, vampires, possessed whatevers. But King knows that horror can be something else. It can, at its best, make us reflect on the darkness of the human soul. Sure, Pet Sematary is a story about evil from beyond the grave, reanimated animals, terrible physical injuries … But more than that, it’s about what happens when we want something so much we don’t care about the consequences…”

“A lot of people who got scared to death by The Shining, they’ll come up to me and say, ‘I read that book when I was at camp when I was 12,’ or ‘I read that when I was in high school at 15, and it really scared the living crap right out of me.’ And [while writing Doctor Sleep] I’m thinking, ‘Those people are now in their 40s and they’ve been exposed to Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees and other stuff. It crossed my mind that they might read the new one and say, ‘Well, this isn’t so scary. I thought he was a scary guy!’ And it’s not so much that I’ve changed, but that they’ve grown up and matured. And they aren’t such easy targets!”

“This tale of a stereotypical nerd who buys a possessed car plays into the hands of those detractors who label Stephen King’s work formulaic. I suspect it was the first time his fans felt cheated…”

“I once had an argument with somebody about The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn’t complicated: they didn’t believe me that it was written by Stephen King. When I assured them that it was, and that it was published in the same novella compendium as the story that became the classic 80s movie Stand By Me, it was possible to see their belief system crumble…”

“The Gunslinger is a quiet, meditative novel; as inauspicious a way to start a sprawling epic fantasy series as I’ve ever encountered. In Roland Deschain, the titular Gunslinger, there’s a superb, violent, powerful and thoughtful protagonist – Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name by way of Robert Browning’s poem, Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came. He’s cold and dark, and we see him wander through dusty western towns, shooting and fucking his way towards his nemesis, The Man in Black. This is Randall Flagg, whom you might remember from The Stand (though he is never called by that name here). He’s a Very Bad Man. It transpires that he’s been a part of Roland’s life, in various guises, since the Gunslinger was a child, and that’s he’s responsible for some horrible things. Roland has to find him, catch him and kill him. That’s what a Gunslinger does…”