Ghost Agnostic

I love Stephen King.

This fact often surprises people. I am not the sort of person you'd think of as being a fan of a horror writer, mostly because I'm not a fan of horror stories. At all. I avoid horror movies at all costs and don't read any horror novels that don't have Stephen King's name on the cover. I hate the Saw films without ever having seen them and I don't like zombies even though I've been a Monroeville resident for nearly seven years now.

And yet -- Stephen King. He is, hands-down, my favorite author. But why? How does an author like King appeal to someone who has a general dislike of horror fiction?

King -- with a literary career spanning 40 years, nearly 50 books, and over 350 million copies of his works in print -- is known as America's Horror-Meister. And yet part of my love for his storytelling may stem from the fact that King may not completely deserve the title. ("You can't even be a 'mister' when you write horror," King commented recently. "They downgrade you to 'meister.'")

The first King novel I ever read -- given to me by my mother when I was a high school student -- was The Eyes of the Dragon. It was not a horror story but rather a high fantasy novel, in the vein of George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan. It took place in the same sort of vaguely-medieval settings that high fantasy novels always seem to take place in, and the story had more to do with magic and family than it did guts and ghosts. True, it did possess some of the trademark darker flares that make up King's style (there's the standard touches of gore and vulgarity, which always strike me as being less about sensationalism and more about King's perspective of the grittiness of life). But for the most part, The Eyes of the Dragon is a fairytale-like fantasy story, less like a horror read and more like a lost volume of Lord of the Rings. (Only, y'know, more interesting; forgive me, but I am not personally a Tolkien fan.)

Speaking of The Eyes of the Dragon, King's magnum opus is also not horror, but rather a crazily epic, science-fiction/high-fantasy blend of a series called The Dark Tower. This seven-book series took nearly 20 years for King to finish and has sold over 30 million copies alone, and was inspired chiefly by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning. (This series is particularly notable to die-hard King fans -- like myself -- for being the series which ties many of King's other works together; there are numerous references to other characters and stories from most of King's other novels.)

Of course, King's written plenty of novels that focus on the things that go bump in the night: 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, It. But King has a very specific interest in horror, and it's not just about cheap thrills. It is, rather, his fascination in what can happen when "the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly."

One of my favorite King quotes is from the dedication in "It," when he says that, "Fiction is the truth inside the lie." King's horror isn't really about gore and violence for the sake of gore of violence, but rather are gateways to the themes he really likes exploring: how hard it is to close Pandora's box once it's opened, why terrible things happen to good people, the thin line between fantasy and reality. (Check out King's memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft to hear him discuss these themes himself.) And, too, themes about love, family, friendship, and God.

Ultimately, King is an optimist. Can an author be a "Horror-Meister" if he's also an optimist? True, King has said, "Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." Sometimes, the monsters in King's books win -- but most of the time, his books are about bad things happening to good people and the good people overcoming in the end. The good guys don't always win (Cujo, Bag of Bones, and one of my favorites -- Duma Key -- have victories that come at a price). But most of the time the good guys do win, possibly because, as King himself says in The Shawshank Redemption, "Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies." It's that, more than anything, that makes me such a King fan -- well, that and the fact that he's a crackerjack storyteller. (A King novel, for me, is the very definition of a page-turner; putting one of his books down when I'm in the middle of a great scene is more or less impossible.)

Last weekend, George Mason University presented bestselling author Stephen King with the Mason Award, for his "extraordinary contributions to bringing literature to a wide reading public." It was part of GMU and Fairfax, Virginia's annual "Fall for the Book" festival, a weeklong community event that celebrates authors, readers, books, and literacy.

I was lucky enough to be there. King came out to give a wonderful speech about his experiences as an author (including a delightfully terrible -- or perhaps terribly delightful -- story about the worst place where he'd ever been asked for an autograph). This was followed up by a Q&A session (when asked if he believes in ghosts, King merely answered that he was a "ghost agnostic"), before he was presented with the award.

For me, the thrill of the evening came towards the end of the speech when he read a new passage from his current project, a novel he's titling "Dr. Sleep." If there's anything more awesomely entertaining than getting to hear your favorite author tell you a story, live and in person, I haven't found it yet.

Whether you're a horror fan or not, the world is frequently a scary place. But by writing about the dark places, Stephen King shines a light on the better things. His novels may be frightening, but they're also full of hope -- which might be one of the real reasons King appeals not just to me, but to his millions of Constant Readers.

That, and the fact that, as my mother says -- the man can tell a story.

(Check back next week for Part Two of this entry, where I'll share some of my favorite, horror-lite King reads.)


-- Post by Ms. B