I wrote about Stephen King on FB yesterday, but it turns out
I had this huge blarp waiting to come out as well. It’s pretty emo, so sorry if
you were hoping that I’d do some kind of postmodern critical reassessment of my
attachment to a problematic author etc. This is definitely not that.
I was 12 when I stumbled onto my first Stephen King book. It
was 1988 and it was my first day at Colac High School, and I visited the school
library. (I was already a lifelong library-dweller by then. I spent so much time
in my primary school library that the librarian sometimes made me her ‘helper’.) That first day the high school library felt new and exciting. It had its own
building, for a start, like the town library; my primary school library was
just a room. It had a lobby with a display case and TWO doors: one to go in,
and one to go out. There were full-length windows in the back, so there was
actual sunlight inside; and most importantly, LOTS of books. I remember walking
through the fiction stacks, excited that there were SO many new books I’d never
heard of. There’s nothing more exciting to a book lover than MOAR BOOKS.
Anyway, one
book stood out to me on that day: Skeleton
Crew by Stephen King.
When I went to the front desk to check it out, the
librarian, Mr. Martino was waiting at the counter. He was a tall wiry man with
black hair and a kind face hidden behind a full beard and big wire-rim 80’s
glasses. He always wore plaid shirts and sneakers and walked on the balls of
his feet like he was about to break into a full sprint. He looked at the book
and then peered over his glasses at me.
“There’s some pretty scary stuff in here. Won’t it give you
nightmares?”
He smiled at me but his eyes held just the slightest hint of concern.
I remember nervously laughing and saying, “I hope not!” and secretly hoping
like crazy I was right. Something told me I could handle it. Or at least I
wasn’t afraid of trying. I was feeling brave, apparently.
My biggest memory of actually reading Skeleton Crew was firstly of how scary some of the stories were –
‘The Mist’ and ‘The Raft’ scared the PANTS off me – but I also vividly remember
being excited by how ‘grown up’ it was. Nothing was more illustrative of that than
‘Survivor Type’. Even for Stephen King that story was just plain bananas. A surgeon smuggles heroin onto a cruise ship
that then sinks. He ends up marooned on a desert island with his pile of
heroin. After trying to eat seagulls and whatever else he can find, he starts
amputating his own body parts for food, while loaded on heroin. And he narrates
all of it in his journal. By the end he’s amputated almost everything from the
waist down. It’s crazy. CRAZY.
Remember: I was twelve. I barely knew what heroin was! I
knew about ‘drugs’ as a catchall from different ‘very special episodes’ of TV
shows (Punky Brewster, Diff’rent Strokes, even Little House on the Prairie had
a two-parter where Albert got hooked on morphine) but I was far from worldly
about them.
The fact that the scary/horror element didn’t deter me is interesting.
You have to understand: at twelve I was afraid of the IDEA of horror movies;
just seeing the trailer for Death Ship was enough to make me cry. I would sneak
down the horror movie aisle at the video store & look at the covers but
then I’d get real scared and run away back to the ‘normal’ sections. Even Alice
Cooper album covers scared me! Michael
Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video was about as scary as things got for me back then. And
I don’t remember ready scary books up until that time. For some reason, Skeleton Crew with its cannibalistic
mists and oil slicks and limb amputations didn’t send me scurrying back to my
Enid Blytons.
I’m not 100% sure why, but I have a theory.
For me reading scary stuff in print was different to seeing
it. I could deal with written material more rationally. And more importantly,
with print, I felt like I had more control.
When I read Skeleton
Crew, I imagined what was being described, but I was in control of what I
saw in my mind’s eye. And I could always stop reading if I got too scared and
think about something else.
The scary stuff in movies always felt like it was going to
come out of the TV and get me. I wasn’t
able to think on my feet quickly enough to tell myself it wasn’t real. With a
book, I knew that it was just words on a page and that the monsters I imagined
were in my head: nothing could tangibly hurt me. I always subconsciously knew I wasn’t in any
danger; whereas with movies and visuals I was scared as soon as I saw something
scary, and it was hard to dial that back; it was a lot harder for me to
consciously know that I wasn’t in danger.
And that dovetails into an aspect of my childhood that bears
mentioning. Life at home during my tweens and teens was tumultuous; much as I loved her, in those days Mum could
be downright terrifying sometimes. The fear that horror movies brought was too
similar to fear I had already felt: and as a kid fear was something I wanted to
avoid more than anything. I did not like being afraid. It wasn’t fun being
scared back then, so why would I want to watch something that scared me? But reading
Stephen King was empowering; I believe that over time those early books made me
brave. They helped me to understand my relationship with fear. I mean, I don’t
think it’s 100% because of the books, obviously a lot of that was just part of
growing up and maturing mentally, but I think being able to independently
process certain types of fear in Stephen King novels helped me develop
critical-thinking about fear in my own life. They also gave me an escape during
times when I couldn’t handle what was going on around me. I could escape to his
imaginary places. By escaping to a place where things were supernatural and terrifying,
the scary things in my own life didn’t seem quite so bad.
From Skeleton Crew
onward, Stephen King’s books were all-consuming for me. Especially in my high
school years. If I was brushing my teeth for bed, I was reading. I remember
wishing there was a way I could read on my bike on my way to and from school.
Recently I wondered
what it might be like to meet Stephen King in person. I thought about it for a
minute or two and I started crying. Because when I thought of seeing him face
to face I immediately thought back to my teenage years. I cannot shake the feeling that he gave me
something more than just books to read. I can’t think of Carrie, or Salem’s Lot, or Christine,
or It, without thinking of them as a kind
of Stephen King treehouse where I could go and hang out and hide and get myself
together. That treehouse
gave me happiness and courage during times when I don’t think I could have
found those things on my own. Thinking about it overwhelms me. It
makes me feel like I owe him something more than just a thank-you. But I don’t think
I could ever articulate that in person.
