Opinion | Long live the King of horror: A ‘constant reader’ muses on Stephen King’s 75th birthday and his new book, ‘Fairy Tale’

My induction into Stephen King’s cult of Constant Readers (the nickname for his biggest fans) happened at the Coles bookstore in Toronto’s Yorkdale mall one summer’s day in the late 1970s. I was about 12, a voracious reader since the age of four but inclined to encyclopedic non-fiction works on sharks, minerals or warfare. This being the 1970s, I was also a budding expert on cryptozoology (the study of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and other legendary creatures), UFOs, haunted houses and the Bermuda Triangle.

Having scoured the store for suitable titles and come up empty, I drifted to the horror fiction section, where I’d recently bought a novelization of the movie “Grizzly,” a “Jaws” rip-off about a — you guessed it — man-eating grizzly bear. As I stood scanning the rows of lurid paperbacks emblazoned with monsters, bloodthirsty vixens and gleaming butcher knives, I kept returning to a minimalist grey cover containing a single image, no bigger than a silver dollar, of a faceless boy, centred beneath a few lines of text, including the title — “The Shining” — and the author’s name, Stephen King. The plot synopsis — Danny Torrance, a boy with psychic powers, is trapped with his family in a haunted, snowbound hotel — tweaked my imagination, maybe because, like Danny, my father worked in a hotel. I bought the novel, read it at my friend’s cottage and 40 years later I’m still reading (just about) every book King releases.

That’s a lot of books. Since the publication of “Carrie,” his debut novel, in 1974, King has released over 70 works of fiction, several under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, and even a few non-fiction books. His oeuvre also includes fantasy, sci-fi, suspense and detective fiction, but King will be remembered primarily as a horror author, the man who dragged a disreputable genre slashing and screaming to the front of the publisher’s catalogue and the suburban bookstore.

With the beloved Maine author turning 75 on Sept. 21, an appraisal of his work and influence is in order.

King’s broad cultural impact is much documented. The movie adaptations are legion and have grossed billions, while pop-culture institutions from “The Simpsons” to “Stranger Things” are rich with allusions to his work. So saturated is our collective pop-consciousness with King’s fictional characters, from Pennywise the clown to pig-blood-drenched Carrie White to the axe-wielding Jack Torrance, that we reflexively drop their images into digital memes knowing that everyone will get the joke.

It’s true that horror fiction had hit the bestseller list before “Carrie,” but King almost single-handedly dragged it several steps up the literary ladder, both in the eyes of the public, critics and even many aspiring authors. He reinvented and reinterpreted tired genre tropes and characters — the vampire, the haunted house, the Devil — for a wised-up, pop-savvy readership no longer scared by rattling chains in a Gothic castle. He brought sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll to horror, along with an underrated literary sensibility. When King won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, many older cultural gatekeepers were horrified to see the award go to a mere genre writer. King’s legion of Constant Readers, many of whom occupy posts in universities, media and publishing houses, didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Dig beneath the cultural macro-level, though, and you’ll find even more evidence of King’s influence spreading like a benevolent kudzu weed. While preparing to write this piece, I spent some time perusing my collection of pre-1977 horror paperbacks. What stood out for me was how short most of them were. Of the three megahit horror novels of the late pre-King era — “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist” and Thomas Tryon’s “The Other” — only “The Exorcist” tops the 300-page mark. The works of Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury, whom King cites as prime literary influences, top out below the 300-page mark, while H.P. Lovecraft, the controversial grandaddy of contemporary horror, only wrote two very short horror novels. Right into the 1970s, horror novels tended to be long on plot and short on characterization, though “The Other” and “The Exorcist” pointed in the direction of a denser, more character-driven type of horror fiction.

It was Stephen King — and to a lesser degree, Anne Rice in her Vampire Chronicles — who blazed the trail for the horror doorstopper, works overflowing with character detail, interior monologues, flashbacks, subplots and enough minor characters to demand a list of names at the front of the book. King’s novels, with few exceptions, are long, with a few sprawling over a thousand pages. The popularity, especially of the longer works (“The Stand,” “It,” “The Tommyknockers”) convinced many a publisher and aspiring author to go long or go home. The length of King’s novels, though not always warranted, is a testament to the seriousness which he brings to the genre.

I would argue that King’s greatest innovation is his use of children and young adults as protagonists. It’s not as though young people were absent from horror fiction and film before 1974. But before King’s groundbreaking works, children, if they appeared in horror fiction and film at all, were usually villains — “The Turn of the Screw” and “Village of the Damned” come to mind — or the passive receptacles of evil, as in “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” or victims to be protected by adult guardians, as in “The Birds.”

King is the great American novelist of childhood. No author since Dickens has so consistently and artfully brought to life the sheer exhilaration and terror of childhood. He takes us inside a child’s troubled imagination, shares their dorky jokes and brings to life their outsized dreams for the future. Children know they are vulnerable, King reminds us: their fragile psyches are minutely attuned to the adults who care for them, adults who often reveal themselves as monsters, literally or figuratively. King recreates that drama from the inside out, from the child’s point of view.

Those fictional evocations of childhood, especially in “It” and “The Body” (beautifully adapted to the screen as “Stand By Me”), are also drenched with a nostalgia for those endless summer days before the internet, days spent riding bikes, reading comics and, admittedly, dodging the local bully and the odd mongrel dog. As the massive popularity of “Stranger Things” reminds us, there is a hunger for stories set before digital technology swallowed youth culture in its voracious maw.

King has unofficially marked the occasion of his 75th birthday with a new novel entitled “Fairy Tale,” a work of dark fantasy narrated by the kind of sensitive, troubled, smart-alecky kid the author stamped on our imaginations decades ago. He began the novel by asking himself a question at the beginning of the long COVID pandemic: “What could you write that would make you happy?” The answer is “Fairy Tale,” though the question could just as easily be changed to, “What could you write that would keep your Constant Readers happy?”

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