Me and Mr King

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.