Welcome to The Deep Dives, the show where we
take a huge stack of sources, articles, memoirs,
essays, you name it, and distill it all down
for you. We do the reading so you don't have
to. And today we are tackling an absolute giant,
a name that, I mean, it really defines a whole
era of American literature, Stephen King. Born
Stephen Edwin King, 1947, in Portland, Maine.
And you hear that name and your brain immediately
goes to one place, right? King of Horror. The
King of Horror, exactly. And he is, there's no
denying that. But when you actually dig in, I
mean, we're talking about something like 200
short stories, over 60 novels. That label starts
to feel almost laughably restrictive. And that's,
well, that's really the mission of this deep
dive. We know he's the architect of fear, but
we want to understand the architect himself.
Yeah, we're moving past the monsters to look
at... the architecture of his anxiety, the sheer
volume of his work across suspense, crime, sci,
fantasy. And his personal resilience. That's
a huge part of it. The story behind the stories.
It really is. I mean, the output is just staggering.
But the range, the range is what really gets
you. You look at his first novel, Carrie, back
in 1974. That sets the template, right? The horror
icon is born. It does. But then, just eight years
later, 1982, he drops... different seasons. And
that collection is just, it's the immediate undeniable
proof that there's so much more going on. Not
a single ghoul or ghost in the entire book. No.
And yet. It gave us the stories that became The
Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, two of
the most beloved dramas, you know, ever made.
It's a juxtaposition, isn't it? On one hand,
you have the bloody psychic horror of Carrie
White at the prom. And on the other, this incredibly
moving story about friendship and death and childhood
in the body. It just shows you right from the
start that the real source of his power isn't
the monster. It's always the human beings he
puts under pressure. Flawed, real, recognizable
human beings. Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack
all of this. We have to start at the beginning.
To understand the writer, you have to look at
the foundation. And Kane's early life in Maine
was defined by this constant sense of financial
instability. A really profound instability. And
it all stems back to one single event, right?
His father. His father, Donald Edwin King. When
Stephen was just two years old, his dad went
out for a pack of cigarettes and just never came
back. Just gone. leaving his mother, Nellie Ruth
King, to raise Stephen and his older adopted
brother, David, completely on her own. And the
sources just paint this picture of a relentless
struggle. She was always moving, chasing work
from Illinois to Wisconsin to Massachusetts.
Before finally landing back in Durham, Maine,
to take care of her own aging parents. So you
have this irony, you know, the man who had become
famous for creating these fictional, deeply rooted
small towns like Derry and Castle Rock. Spent
his own childhood as a transient. just watching
his mom fight to keep their heads above water.
Exactly. It's that lack of roots, that stress,
that really fuels what comes next. He talks about
having an unremarkable childhood, but... It was
anything but. And it created this incredibly
active imagination. He was looking for some kind
of control, and he found it in stories. He did,
really early on, around age six or seven. He
started out just copying panels from comic books.
So he's not just consuming them, he's trying
to understand the structure. Right. And his mother
sees this and she gives him the push that basically
changes everything. She looks at what he's doing
and says something like, I bet you could do better.
Write one of your own. And what a thing to say
to a kid. Oh, it was everything. King said it
gave him this immense feeling of possibility.
It was like she didn't just give him a suggestion.
She handed him a key to this massive secret building
and said, go open any door you want. Yeah. And
that's. That's the birth of the writer right
there. At seven years old, yeah. And that spark
just sends him into this frenzy of reading. He's
reading everything. Nancy Drew, pulp horror.
Psycho. But there are a couple of books that
really stand out as being truly formative. The
first one was Richard Matheson's The Shrinking
Man. He read that when he was eight. And if you
think about it, it's a story about a man who
is... Completely powerless, just shrinking away
while the world becomes this huge, alien, terrifying
place. And she has to resonate with a kid who's
feeling a lot of financial and social vulnerability
himself. Absolutely. But the other book, the
one that really taught him about the stakes of
writing, that was Lord of the Flies. How so?
What was so crucial about that one? It was the
raw power of it. He described it as the first
book that had strong ones that reached out of
the pages and seized me by the throat. It wasn't
just fun. It was visceral. Life or death. Exactly.
It taught him that novels are for life or death,
that the stakes have to feel monumental. It took
reading from being a hobby to being something
essential. And he was already getting paid for
it, in a way. His Aunt Gert would pay him a quarter
for every story he wrote. Which is so important.
It reinforces this idea that writing isn't just
a dream, it's work. It's a viable thing you can
do. So he keeps at it. Sells stories to his friends,
gets a story serialized in a fanzine in 1965.
This wasn't some overnight success. It was years
of grinding. Years of work. And then in 1966,
he gets a smaller ship to the University of Maine
at Orono, graduates in 1970 with an English degree.
And he finds some really important mentors there.
Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlin. Hatlin especially.
He ran a writing workshop. And that's where King
met Tabitha Spruce. His future wife. They married
in 1971. And their partnership. It's pretty clear
that it became the stabilizing force that made
his entire career possible. Which brings us right
to that famous story. The story of Carrie. Right.
It's 1973. He's an English teacher. They're living
in a trailer. They're broke. And he has this
idea. What if you combined adolescent cruelty
with telekinesis? He writes three pages. And
he hates it. He thinks the idea is thin, he's
exhausted, and he throws them in the trash. And
this is where Tabitha steps in. She pulls the
pages out of the garbage, she reads them, and
she sees the potential. She sees the psychological
trauma he's tapped into. She tells him, you've
got something here. I really think you do. And
that single moment. I mean, a wife literally
rooting through the garbage because she believes
in her husband's talent. That's the difference
between a forgotten manuscript and a literary
phenomenon. It's incredible. He finishes the
novel and they sell the paperback rights for
$400 ,000. Half of which went to King. In one
sale, they went from living in a trailer to being
financially secure. It just launched him. So
let's get into the philosophy behind that success.
Because his longevity, it's not just luck. It's
rooted in this very consistent, almost blue collar
approach to writing he lays out in on writing.
A very disciplined approach. And it all starts
with the seed of the idea. For him, it's almost
always that simple question. The what if. The
what if. It's the little disruption that gets
the whole engine running. So let's break that
down. Like, what are some classic King what ifs?
Well, they're usually a blend of something supernatural
with something painfully mundane. What if an
alcoholic writer struggling with sobriety gets
stuck caretaking a haunted hotel in the dead
of winter? That's The Shining. What if a man
gets the ability to see the future and has to
make these impossible moral choices? The Dead
Zone. Or, you know, much later. What if you could
go back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination,
but you had to deal with all the consequences?
1 -1 -2 -2 -6 -3. The story isn't about the monster.
It's about how the what -if affects a real person.
Precisely. But his philosophy on where that story
comes from, that's what's so fascinating. He
doesn't believe stories are invented. Right.
This is the stories as relics idea. He says they're
found things like fossils in the ground. I love
that analogy. So if the writer isn't an inventor,
they're more like. An archaeologist. Exactly.
The story already exists out there. Your job
isn't to create it from nothing. Your job is
to excavate it carefully. You use your tools,
grammar, vocabulary description to chip away
all the rock and dust to reveal the fossil completely
intact. So the technique is the same, whether
you're uncovering a small seashell, a short story,
or a giant T -Rex skeleton like the stand or
it. The method doesn't change. It takes the pressure
off of... being original and replaces it with
the discipline of being a careful discoverer.
And that idea extends to how he handles his characters.
He doesn't force them into a plot. This is the
character autonomy thing. He really lets them
surprise him. He does, and it's on purpose. He
says they start out flat and unfeatured, but
once he puts them in the what -if situation,
they start to develop their own voices, their
own histories, and then they dictate the story.
He never makes them do things his way. He wants
them to do things their way. Which is why it
feels so psychologically real, even when the
situation is completely fantastic. A real person
dropped into that situation isn't going to be
a perfect hero. They're going to screw up. They're
going to panic. And that realism is... why his
work gets so much serious critical attention
from people like Joyce Carol Oates. She pointed
out that his real subject isn't monsters. It's
small -town American life. It's the communities
of Derry and Castle Rock that we all recognize.
And his big theme is always, in his own words,
the intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary
life. Right. It's not about the scary thing.
It's about how ordinary people cope when the
impossible crashes through their front door.
So the monster. whether it's a vampire or a clown,
it could just as easily be a cancer diagnosis
or a horrible trauma. The supernatural is just
the lens. It's what Oates called his gothic imagination.
It just magnifies the real -life problem so we
can see the human drama more clearly. You see
that perfectly in Carrie. The telekinesis is
scary, sure. But the real horror, the thing that
stays with you, is the bullying. It's her mother's
religious fanaticism. It's the human cruelty.
And he often explores this stuff through the
lens of a writer. So many of his main characters
are authors. Jack Torrance in The Shining, Bill
Denver in it. Mike Noonan in The Bag of Bones.
It's a constant theme. And it becomes a way to
talk about the act of creation itself. You get
novels like Misery, which is this terrifying
parable about the relationship between an artist
and their audience. Or their addiction. He said
Annie Wilkes, his number one fan who holds him
prisoner, she was his drug problem. demanding,
controlling, never wanting to leave. Or the dark
half, where a writer's gritty pseudonym literally
comes to life and starts killing people. He's
always using horror to dissect the creative process.
And he's always in conversation with the writers
who came before him. We mentioned Richard Matheson
as his biggest influence. But he also does these
direct homages. He calls it literary racquetball.
I love that. So Salem's Lot is his attempt to
take Bram Stoker's Dracula. And smash it against
the wall of a modern 20th century New England
town to see how it bounces. How does that ancient
evil work here now? And more recently, his novel
Revival is basically a modern take on Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein. It's a conversation with the masters.
And his own craft is built on reading everything,
not just horror. He talks about learning description
from hard -boiled writers like Chandler and Hammett.
And from poets. T .S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams.
Yeah, he's looking for that perfect, compact
image. The simile or metaphor that makes you
see something old in a new way. It's a very practical,
technical skill that he applies to this deeply
psychological material. And that discipline led
to this absolute explosion of work in the 70s
and 80s. The Golden Age. This is where he really
cements his place in the culture. And the origins
of these huge novels are often rooted in these
really interesting personal moments. We talked
about Salem's Lot coming from him teaching Dracula.
What about The Shining? That came from a trip
in 1974. He and Tabitha were staying at the Stanley
Hotel in Colorado. It was the end of the season
and they were the only guests left. So they're
in this huge, empty, echoing hotel. Exactly.
And King, who is already struggling with his
drinking, is sitting alone at the bar. He realizes
that this is the perfect setup. Isolation, a
writer failing his family, and a malevolent place
that just feeds on all that weakness. It's not
a ghost story. It's a story about a man's mind
breaking down. Then you get The Stan. The epic.
The one he says readers still tell him is their
favorite. A massive world -building novel about
a pandemic that wipes out almost everyone. It
really set a new standard for that kind of story.
But then you have a book like Pet Sematary, where
the inspiration was almost too real, too scary
for him. Yeah, that came from when his family
was living next to a busy highway where lots
of pets were killed. His own daughter's cat died
and they buried it in a local pet cemetery. And
walking home, he had this horrifying thought.
What if the cat came back? But it was wrong.
And he found the book he wrote from that idea
so disturbing, so bleak, especially because it
deals with the death of a child. He put it in
a drawer for years. He only published it because
he had to, to fulfill a contract. He thought
he'd gone too far with that one. And then, of
course, there's it. his final exam on horror
as he called it the idea was to take every classic
monster the vampire the werewolf the mummy and
put them all into one single shape -shifting
entity an entity that feeds on the specific fears
of children right but right in the middle of
all this horror in 1982 he releases different
seasons and this book completely changed how
people saw him because there was no horror and
the critics were forced to look at the character
work the human drama Without any distractions.
And then the movies came out. Stand By Me. The
Shawshank Redemption. And they were huge critical
and commercial successes. He said he got the
best reviews of his life. It was the moment the
literary world finally had to admit he was more
than just a horror writer. He was a great American
writer, period. But all that productivity created
a practical problem. Back then, publishers had
this rule. The one book a year rule. Right. They
thought the public wouldn't accept more than
that from one author, which, for a writer as
prolific as King, was a major roadblock. So he
invents an escape hatch. He creates Richard Bachman.
A pseudonym. A sheltered place, he called it,
where he could release more books. He put out
five novels as Bachman. Rage, The Long Walk,
The Running Man. And the tone of those books
was really different. They were darker, much
grittier, more despairing, really. Less supernatural
horror, more social commentary and dystopian
dread. And people bought it. There's a great
story about someone at the Literary Guild reading
Thinner and saying it was what Stephen King would
write like if Stephen King could really write.
It's the perfect illustration of the bias he
was up against. They thought Bachman was the
serious writer because he didn't have King's
blockbuster horror style. So he keeps the secret
for five years. But in 1985... The whole thing
comes crashing down, and it wasn't a journalist
who figured it out? No, it was a bookstore clerk
in Washington, D .C., a guy named Steve Brown.
Just a really smart reader. He notices the stylistic
ticks are too similar, so he starts digging into
publisher records. And he finds the copyright
filing for Rage, and whose name is on it? Stephen
King. Busted. I just love that story. So how
does King react? In the most King way possible.
He holds a press conference and announces that
Richard Bachman has died from cancer of the pseudonym.
Of course he did. He just leaned into the meta
-narrative of it all. Which, speaking of meta
-narratives, we have to talk about his magnum
opus. The Dark Tower. His grand unifying theory
of everything. An eight -volume epic that he
started in the 70s. And he described the initial
idea as... what mixing tolkien's middle earth
with a clint eastwood western exactly the epic
fantasy quest of lord of the rings meets the
gritty philosophical vibe of a sergio leone film
it follows roland the gunslinger on his quest
to the dark tower which is the nexus of all realities
and it connects everything so many of his other
books and characters are woven into this one
massive story it gets intensely meta to the point
where in the later books stephen king himself
becomes a character in the story He writes himself
into his own epic. As a crucial, vulnerable part
of the plot, it's an incredibly audacious move,
and it solidifies the series as just this unique,
sprawling masterpiece of modern fantasy. But
this is where the story gets really intense.
Yeah. Because that incredibly productive period
in the 1980s, it was fueled by something much
darker. Yeah, this is the period of his most
intense struggles with addiction, cocaine and
alcohol. It's a terrifying paradox, isn't it?
His creative peak happening alongside this deep
personal dependency. And he's been brutally honest
about it. He says he barely remembers writing
Coochie. A whole novel just gone in a haze. But
what's so fascinating is how he was unconsciously
processing that addiction in his writing. Misery.
Misery is the prime example. He said flat out
that Annie Wilkes was his addiction. This obsessive
fan who holds him captive and forces him to write.
That was the drug. And the tawny knockers, too.
This alien influence that takes over a town,
making everyone dependent on its toxic power.
Yeah. That's a direct metaphor for drug dependency.
He was writing about the demon he was fighting,
but hiding it inside a horror story. And it went
on until his family, led by Tabitha, finally
had to stage an intervention. A huge turning
point. They confronted him with the evidence
of his addiction, and he finally agreed to get
help. And his work after that, after he gets
sober, has a different kind of clarity. But his
resilience was about to be tested in the most,
just the most dramatic way possible. The accident,
June 19th, 1999. He's on his daily walk on the
shoulder of a road in Lovell, Maine. And a driver,
distracted by his dog in his minivan, just...
veers off the road and hits him. And the injuries
were catastrophic. A collapsed lung, a shattered
hip. His leg was so badly broken, they considered
amputating it. It's just horrific. And he said
later the irony was just so dark. He was almost
killed by a character straight out of one of
his own books. Not some monster, just an ordinary
guy in a minivan, a moment of distraction and
then disaster. The recovery was just brutal.
He was in the hospital for weeks, multiple surgeries,
and it had a huge impact on his writing. A physical
impact. He tried to start working on writing
again that July, but he could only sit for maybe
40 minutes at a time because of the pain. The
trauma literally shaped the book. And in the
aftermath... Tabitha did something really unusual
to protect him. It's such a great story about
their partnership. She was worried that the minivan
that hit him would get sold on eBay or something,
become this morbid souvenir. So she just bought
it. She bought the minivan from the driver, and
then she had it crushed, just quietly removed
it from existence. King said he had these revenge
fantasies about smashing it with a sledgehammer,
but her way was quieter, smarter, more protective.
And the book that came out of that recovery on
writing was this Instant classic. Part memoir,
part style guide. Critics loved it. Roger Ebert
said it was more useful than Strunk and White's
The Elements of Style. It was King laying his
entire process bare for everyone to see. Around
the same time, he also became a real pioneer
in digital publishing. He really did. In 2000,
he released a novella called Writing the Bullet
exclusively as an e -book. It was called the
world's first mass e -book. Over half a million
downloads in the first day? It proved the model
could work, and that led him to an even bigger
experiment with the plan. Yeah, he released that
online in installments using an honor system.
Pay what you want. He asked for a dollar in installment
and said he'd only keep writing if at least 75
% of readers paid up. A huge gamble. So what
happened? People assume it failed, that nobody
paid. But King said that wasn't it at all. The
compliance rate was consistently over 75%. The
experiment worked. So why'd he stop? He just
ran out of story. The creative well ran dry for
that particular project, but it proved the commercial
point. He was always willing to challenge the
industry norms. And that consistency continues.
Before we move on, we have to mention the character
of Holly Gibney. Oh, absolutely. She's one of
his great recent creations. She started in the
Mr. Mercedes trilogy as this very shy but brilliant
investigator. And she was so popular, he just
kept bringing her back. The outsider, if it bleeds.
and then her own novel, Holly. And she's coming
back again in 2025. Her evolution shows he's
still deeply invested in creating these complex,
grounded characters who can anchor his stories,
even when they move away from the purely supernatural.
So his cultural status is just. It's immense.
Which means the criticism can be just as intense.
And that all came to a head in 2003. A huge flashpoint.
He was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters from the National Book Awards.
A very prestigious honor. And the literary establishment
just exploded. It really did. Richard E. Snyder,
a big -shot publishing CEO, called his work non
-literature. But the really vicious attack came
from the famous critic Harold Bloom. What did
Bloom say? Oh, he called it a dumbing down our
cultural life. He said King was an immensely
inadequate writer on a sentence -by -sentence,
paragraph -by -paragraph, book -by -book basis.
Wow. That is just brutal. For Bloom? King represented
everything wrong with modern literature. The
commercialism, the focus on genre. He saw it
as a degradation of high art. It was the ultimate
showdown between the academy and popular fiction.
So how did King respond? His acceptance speech
was perfect. He basically said his job, his only
job, is to tell the truth. And he had this incredible
line. He said, That's the whole philosophy right
there. The haunted hotel is the lie. story of
a family falling apart inside it. That's the
truth. The lie is just the vehicle to get to
the truth. Exactly. And he had defenders. The
novelist Cynthia Ozik called him a genuine true
born writer. It was a major moment in arguing
that popularity doesn't automatically cancel
out literary merit. And he's consistently used
that massive public platform to talk about other
things, especially wealth and taxes. Yeah, this
is a huge theme for him. He has repeatedly publicly
called for the rich, including himself, to pay
way more in taxes. He calls it a moral imperative.
And it has so much credibility coming from him
because he knows what it's like to be poor. He
watched his mother. struggle his whole childhood.
It's not an abstract idea for him. Not at all.
And politically, he's always been very open.
He's endorsed Democrats from Gary Hart up to
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But in 2022, he
did something really surprising. He testified
against his own publisher. It was incredible.
He testified for the Justice Department to block
the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon
& Schuster. He argued that more consolidation
would hurt writers, especially new writers, just
trying to get a start. And his testimony was
credited with helping to kill the deal. He used
his power to protect other authors. He did. But
his political voice is probably loudest when
it comes to his home state, Maine. Specifically,
his very public feud with the former governor,
Paul LePage. Oh, it was a war of words. King
just went after him, calling LePage a bigot,
a homophobe, and a racist. And it got really
personal when LePage went on the radio and falsely
claimed that King didn't pay his Maine income
taxes. King's response was swift. Oh, yeah. He
publicly demanded an apology, posted proof he
pays millions in Maine taxes, and told the governor
he was full of the stuff that makes the grass
grow green. It just shows how fiercely protective
he is of his identity as a Mainer. And that's
backed up by his philanthropy. He and Tabitha
give away something like $4 million a year. And
it's all very targeted at the community. They
support libraries, schools, local fire departments.
They'll buy them new Jaws of Life tools. It's
practical help for the very kinds of small towns
he writes about. And we should just briefly mention
his creative energy spills over into all these
other areas. Absolutely. He wrote the screenplay
for Creepshow. He directed one movie, Maximum
Overdrive, which he now freely admits was a disaster.
A disaster he blames on the fact that he was
coked out of his mind the whole time. time the
honesty is just incredible it really is he's
also written a musical with john mellencamp and
t -bone burnett and for years he played guitar
in a charity rock band with other authors called
the rock bottom remainders he just seems to love
the act of creating in any form he really does
so when we pull back and look at the whole picture
the legacy is just it's undeniable It's not just
the sales or the movies. It's his commitment
to combining this incredible, realistic detail
of everyday life with these wild, imaginative
genre ideas. And at its heart, so much of his
work is really about family, marriage, memory.
It's telling that when you ask him what his favorite
of his own novels is, he doesn't pick one of
the big horror ones. Which one does he pick?
He picks Lisey's Story. Why that one? Because,
he said, it was the one where he felt he got
closest to writing about the secret world of
a long marriage. For him, capturing that internal
truth was the most difficult and most rewarding
excavation he's ever done. And his peers see
that. David Foster Wallace praised his deadly
ear for the way people speak. And Sherman Alexie
said that growing up on a reservation, he always
identified with King's characters because King
always writes about the underdog. The bullied
kid, the overlooked person fighting back against
these huge forces. The person striking against
something much bigger than themselves. Whether
that something is a sewer clown or just high
school society. To bring it all home, King himself
said that the real test for him, for any story,
is to ask himself, if I've told the truth about
the way real people would behave in a similar
situation. That's the whole game. So after looking
at this vast, terrifying, and deeply human body
of work, we have to leave you with this question
to think about. Is Stephen King's greatest achievement
not the horrors he created, but the unflinching
human truth he uncovered while searching for
monsters? Because that's the difference, isn't
it? A jump scare lasts a second. But that feeling
of recognizing yourself in a character's fear
that lasts forever. The scariest thing is always
the mirror. Something to think about until our
next deep dive.