If you walk into the “spare” bedroom upstairs you’ll notice a number of book-cases that are tightly packed with books. If you look carefully you’ll notice that there is one author I have a lot of books by, in fact I have a copy of almost everything he’s written and have read them all, most of them several times. You might find it unusual that that author is Stephen King. You may even notice that I look quite a lot like Mr. King (actually, he’s a few years older than I am so I tend to look like he did a few years ago).
There’s a place deep in every human mind that dates back to our earliest ancestors who, while huddled together at night would see eyes gleaming just outside the range of the fire and wonder if those eyes belonged to wolves, or to something worse. It’s the instinct that makes the idea of a ghost in the next room more frightening than the idea of a hungry tiger in that room. Modern people build a high, solid fence around that portion of their psyche. They lock the gate with a strong padlock and throw away the key. Good horror stories break off the lock, throw wide the gate and prod that part of our minds, the part we try to pretend doesn’t exist, with a sharp stick.
One thing I like about Stephen King is the sheer variety of ways he finds to horrify us. We may know that vampires (‘Salem’s Lot), zombies (Pet Sematery) and malevolent clowns who hide in the sewers (It) don’t really exist. While we read these books we can chant to ourselves, over and over, like a mantra timed to the pounding of our hearts “It’s only a book, it’s only a book, it’s only a book” while we pretend that we’re shivering because we’re cold. We’re perhaps less certain about the reality behind a space-ship full of dead aliens who can inhabit human hosts (The Tommyknockers) or a final battle between good and evil after most of the human race is killed by a super-flu (The Stand). Then we find ourselves face to face with the reality that men really DO go insane and embark on a murderous rampage (The Shining), that St Bernards really DO go rabid and attack people in small cars (Cujo), that little girls really DO get lost in the Maine woods (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), and that a woman really COULD get trapped naked and handcuffed to a bed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere after her kinky husband dies of a heart attack (Gerald’s Game). Reading such stories sends an icy finger down our spine as we consider that such a thing actually could happen.
A reader with a vivid imagination can read a good horror story and suspend disbelief long enough to wonder if such things really exist and explore how he or she would handle a similar situation. We can peek behind the door marked “Keep Out”, “No Trespassing”, and “Here There Be Dragons”, secure in the knowledge that after the book is done the door will once again be closed, locked, dead bolted and nailed shut with a chair under the door knob for good measure.
Until the next book.
