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Stephen King Essay, Research Paper

Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the most successful authors of the twentieth-century. He brings nightmares to life in a way that no other writer has succeeded to do, and is now among the most prestigious horror writers of the time. King is indeed a genius at work; however, to fully understand the legacy of Stephen King, one must understand the background from which he came and the manner in which he handled it. Due to the desertion of his father and his lack of self-esteem, Stephen decided early in his childhood that he would not be consumed by the terrors of his fears. He created a world of fantasy in which he controlled the terror.

By definition, a fantasy is “the power or process of creating unrealistic or improbable images in response to a psychological need” (Webster Dictionary). Stephen King has proven to be a master of this process, as he continues to baffle the minds of horror reader’s around the world. Unlike past authors of horror and science fiction, King writes about topics that his audience may easily identify with and relate to their everyday lives, instead of focusing on literature that completely exempts the reader from relating the book to their fears. Novels such as Pet Cemetery, Cujo, and Christine were successful examples of this: Pet Cemetery, being a novel about the eeriness of pet graveyards; Cujo, describing the consequences of neglecting your pets; and Christine, being a novel about a beautiful car, with a mind of its own. These three novels by King, all extracted fear from a very common scenario, in affect, placing the fear closer to the reader’s phobias.

There were two factors that played crucial roles in the development of King’s literary fantasies: the lack of a father figure; and rejection by his peers. Throughout his childhood, King’s self-esteem was battered by his father’s disbandment and rejection by his peers. At age two, Donald King, Stephen’s father, abandoned him and left his mother to raise him and his brother alone (Commire 63). Times were hard for Nellie, King’s mother. There was very poor sanitation. His home was often corroded and things such as soap and water were hard to come by. Overall, he lived in an impoverished household. King once stated that:

Home was always rented. Our outhouse was painted blue and that’s where we contemplated the sins of life. Our well was always going dry. I’d have to lug water from a spring in another field, and even now I’m nervous about our wells. There were no bathing facilities, so a hot bath meant a half a mile trek to Aunt Ethelyn’s house, an especially difficult task during the icy Maine winter (Commire 63).

Being very overweight and uncoordinated, he fell prey to conflicting emotions, as he tried to suppress his anxiety to fit in. Also, being the outcast of his peers, he was often the victim of demoralization. Though he did have friends, he always felt estranged from others his age. As for being a kid, King recalls:

My nightmares…were always inadequacy dreams. Dreams of standing up to salute the flag and having my pants fall down. Trying to get to a class and not being prepared. When I played baseball, I was always the kid who got picked last. `Ha, ha, you got King’ the others would say. (Commire 63)

As King was left drained of his self-confidence, he attempted to escape these periods of isolation through creative innovation and horror. Withdrawn, and without a father, King ended up spending many of his Saturdays in and out of movie theaters. He went to every horror and science-fiction movie he could cram into a Saturday and soon he developed a fascination with horror and the powers of the imagination (Commire 64). These movies provided the foundation for his fantasy life. It would later be discovered that King’s infatuation with the macabre may have been inherited from his father, who had at one time submitted his own science-fiction/horror tales to major men’s magazines. None of his father’s works were ever published however (Commire 64).

As a result of Donald King’s disbandment, King created an alter ego. The presence of an alter ego allowed King to identify with his manhood. “Cannonball Cannon”, King’s alter ego, was a daredevil character that he made up. Just as children pretend to be the “Incredible Hulk” or “He-Man”, he chose to be “Cannonball Cannon”. As King recalls: “Without a father I needed my own power trips. My alter ego as a child was Cannonball Cannon, a daredevil. Sometimes I went out West if I was unhappy, but most of the time I stayed home and did good deeds” (Commire 64). These power trips made King feel empowered and in control, which supplemented for his feelings of insecurity. Though Cannonball Cannon did give King an outlet from the world, King still suffered from rejection and suppressed anger.

Convinced that he would never see twenty, King fantasized dark deserted streets; strange figures leaping at him from behind bushes. His fascination and intrigue with the subject culminated in a scrapbook of Fifties mass murderer Charlie Starkweather who with his girlfriend, cut a bloody trail through the Midwest slaughtering people. King pasted these news clippings into a book in hope of unraveling the inner horror behind Starkweather’s face (Commire 64). This infatuation with a serial killer was a hobby to King. The effects of involving himself with the enigma of a mass murderer may have provoked King to write Rage, a novel about a psychopath who shoots a school teacher and holds a classroom hostage (Gale 1996).

All throughout his adolescent stage, King experienced moments of temporary insanity, as he remembers moments of walking down the street one minute, and totally losing control the next (Commire 64). King’s identity crisis along with his spurts of violence caused him to channel

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