Life and Craft: Stephen King Turns 78

Typically, on writers' anniversaries, a list of their best books is published, with the goal of encouraging rereads (though, let's be honest, they might even be read for the first time). In King's case, this is impossible for one reason – she is so prolific as a writer that she's probably already caught up with Balzac and Dickens.

But while literary history has long since determined the "best books" of classic authors, with King, this is still to come, not to mention the fact that his books can be divided into two parts. The first period was when he wrote truly terrifying novels and stories, such as "The Shining," "The Dark Half," "Pet Sematary," and "Misery." According to his later confession, during this period of his creative work, he actively used illegal substances, which fueled his fantasies.

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But in 1999, one of King's fantasies became reality. As readers of Pet Sematary will recall, one of the main locations is a highway, along which trailers travel at high speed. First, the protagonist's cat and then his young son are run over. He buries them in an abandoned Indian cemetery where, according to legend, the dead come back to life. And so it happens, but instead of the cat and son, evil zombies appear in the protagonist's house in their guise.

King wrote the novel after the real-life death of his beloved cat, but added the story of his child. Back then, this was his favorite method—transforming reality (he is, in principle, a realist writer) into horror through the author's own imagination.

And then, 16 years later, in 1999, his fantasies caught up with him—only instead of a trailer, there was a minivan that hit King on the highway at such a speed that the writer was thrown several meters into a ditch. The injuries were so severe that they initially wanted to amputate King's leg. At first, he couldn't sit at all from the pain, then he could sit for more than forty minutes, after which the pain became unbearable—and finally, three years later, he announced that He quit writing. Incidentally, three years later, the minivan driver died of a drug overdose—as if King had written his biography after the accident.

However, the "king of horror" eventually returned to his beloved and only craft (we call it "craft" because for King, it truly is—he even has a manual, "How to Write Books"). But this was a different King—his novels became more expansive, combined into entire epics, and some of them incorporated elements of fantasy. This was a different King, which can be seen even in those works where he tried to remain scary—for example, in "Mr. Mercedes," where, at least in the TV series based on it, episodes of the criminal's Oedipus complex become simply unbearable in erotic scenes between the son and mother. (By the way, the young actor originally chosen for the role of the antihero died, so a new one had to be chosen—all in the spirit of King.)

However, there are probably Readers who prefer King's second period to his first. As for King himself, for him, writing and life are one and the same (incidentally, his sons also became writers), and life is a whole. Moreover, writing and film adaptations of his books have earned King, according to some estimates, around half a billion dollars.

And King the man is greatly vindicated by the fact that immediately after Russia's full-scale armed aggression in Ukraine began, he banned the publication and republication of his books in the aggressor country and has since made repeated statements in support of our country.

Photo: Wikipedia