The first piece of "grown-up" fiction I ever read was when I was about eight or nine years old, and it was given to me by my father, Charles Armson. It was The Dead Zone by Stephen King, and a more disturbing introduction to the real world you could not imagine; the main character was tortured - tortured - beyond belief, and most of the secondaries were either neo-Hitlers or slick child-murderers. Yet the thing resonated with a kind of primitive sense of dignity and fundamental self-belief, both within the content and the application, that fascinates me still now (and is beautifully recreated in the David Cronenberg film adaptation, if you're stuck for something to rent one of these cold June nights). I spied him reading it for a day or two and then watched him put it down once finished with a sigh of contentedness that made me have to look into it. I asked him if I could read it and he acquiesced, God bless him. The caveat was that I not tell my mother lest he get in the shit - turns out, me reading books with thin rivulets of blood dripping down the front cover wasn't really going to make much of a difference. (My Dad had talents, but staying out of trouble with my Mom was not one of them.)
So of course on it went from there. I started at the beginning, as anybody with an awakening desire to tell stories would: first of course was Carrie and all its angst and brutality (of the physical kind, yes, but more emphatically the mental: High School is Hell, indeed). Then Salem's Lot, a book which in an almost casual fashion displays vampires as they are meant to be displayed - as truly terrifying, in case you were wondering, Meyer - while also managing to be a commentary on small-town Americana, young and doomed love, and writer's block. Not bad for a one-dimensional "hack", as some of King's more effort adverse critics still call him.
Then of course there is The Shining. Thanks to Kubrick's version of the film, a cultural phenomenon, and rightly so - the director's madcap cahoots with Jack Nicholson, and terrorising of Shelley Duvall, created an astounding piece of film literature, cold to the touch and brimming with malevolence. But Nicholson - as Jack Torrance - is not playing the same character as the one spelt out in the book. Torrance in Stephen King's original text is not this obviously insane person with the manic grin - the guy you wouldn't trust with your lawnmower, let alone the keys to your hotel for six months. In the book, he's a decent man, who's got problems, most explicitly his alcoholism - in King's words, "it's the hotel that bends him back and forth until he breaks," and Lloyd the barman is sent specifically to tap that up. In the film it just looks like an obvious progression.
Anyway. I'm losing focus and time is running short. After these three novels I have just talked about (plus The Dead Zone of course, which was published not long after) I was sold, is what you need to know. And no, it's not just about the gore and the grime, though, sure, that has a lot do with it. No it's about the beauty of the man's endearing, almost welcoming, prose, and his poise. And what he means, in this world of shit. Often when I get into one of his stories - and it doesn't happen all the time - I get to thinking about my Dad. There's unspeakable things happening, and I'm thinking "I bet Pops would get a kick out of this."
I can't think of a better commendation.
