How Stephen King unlocks our imagination with every scare

When I was a teenager I spent a few summers painting houses. Since the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman it’s important to clarify: I didn’t kill people, I just painted houses. One of these summers I remember particularly well. I was painting houses in the estate where I lived, and for my break I’d go home, eat a sandwich and read From a Buick 8, by Stephen King.

If you asked 1,000 people to nominate the best Stephen King book, I doubt a single one would suggest From a Buick 8. Not that it’s a terrible book – far from it – there are just so many more obvious choices. And yet this is one of my favourites. It is the story of a boy whose father is killed in a road traffic accident. The boy begins to spend time at the local police barracks, becoming friends with the cops his father used to work with. The cops let the kid in on a secret, a secret about a mysterious car they have in lock-up.

If I open From a Buick 8 now, I travel back to that summer. In my memory three months are condensed into a single day. I’m on the couch reading, our cat sitting beside me. Apart from the cat, the house is empty, but it feels full. I don’t know where everyone is, but I know they’ll be back soon. It is warm. There is a square of sunlight on the carpet by my feet. My step-dad is still alive. My cat is still alive. When I finish work I’ll get the Dart to meet my friends. I’ll have six cans in my bag, fresh batteries for my discman and a head absolutely plastered with Brylcreem. Rereading this book is the closest I’ll ever get to time travel. Does that make it the greatest Stephen King book? No. But also yes.

Immediate comfort

The summer of our Leaving Cert we went to Cyprus. I brought with me a small bag, in which an inordinate amount of space was set aside for my hefty copy of The Stand. Owing to the blackout nature of my drinking at that time, I remember very little of the holiday. Three things stand out: falling off a moped, sitting on a boat while someone old enough to know better used a Super Soaker to pump vodka down my gullet, and reading The Stand by the side of the pool.

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A few months later, The Stand pops up again. The morning after the debs, my friends and I – bleary-eyed and sobering up – took the morning bus back to the city centre. We said our goodbyes, but before heading to Tara Street for the last leg of the journey home, I went into that big old Virgin Megastore that used to be on the quays. With my last bit of cash I bought the TV movie version of The Stand. It was so long it came on three VHS tapes. I have no idea why I did this; all I know is that when I finally got home and shed my crumpled rented tux, I felt extreme and immediate comfort when I pressed play. I fell asleep on the couch watching Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald try to survive the end of the world, and that was that – secondary school was officially over.

Some years before, I read Different Seasons and it was like somebody wedging a wad of Semtex in my brain and lighting the fuse. How could a book be so good? And really it was four books, three of which were made into films with altered titles – The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, and Apt Pupil. When I finished reading Apt Pupil I was shaking and disturbed. I remember thinking clearly: “There is no way I should have been allowed to read that.” Set in the 1970s, it follows the deranged relationship between a teenager and his neighbour – a former Nazi war criminal now living under a false identity. It goes to some thoroughly dark places. On the last page, King expertly describes a scene of horrific violence and chaos with very few words. I wondered why they don’t put age-restrictions on books, like they do for films.

Scary creations

The only consistently recurring nightmares I ever had were the result of reading Misery. In these nightmares I was chased by Annie Wilkes, the psychotic antagonist who imprisons author Paul Sheldon and forces him to write a story just for her. At the end of the dream I would open a door and see Annie standing in front of me with a shotgun. Each time, without fail, she would raise the gun and shoot me in the face, waking me up. Until this point in my life, still young and impressionable, I genuinely believed if you died in your dreams, you died in real life. It took being repeatedly and brutally murdered by one of Stephen King’s scariest creations to show me that wasn’t true. Thanks Annie.

If I now pick up my warped and sun-yellowed copy of Skeleton Crew and flip the pages in front of my nose, a strange yet familiar chemical floods my brain. I breathe deep that comforting mustiness and smell the beach, old sun cream and the sea. Tiny grains of French sand are still lodged deep by the book’s spine. I first read this on a family holiday and I don’t know what age I was, but I must have been quite young. It is a collection of short stories, and one in particular sticks out. It was about a heroin-smuggling doctor who becomes marooned on a desert island, along with a healthy supply of his own product. With no food and no sign of rescue, he gets high and begins to lose his mind. He eventually amputates one of his feet and eats it to survive. Things go from s**t to worse and he ends up lopping off numerous body parts to eat and stay alive. Both legs, ears . . . you get the picture.

It is an absolutely disgusting story, and I loved it.

I cannot separate in my memory the story from the experience of reading the story for the first time. These books feel like artefacts in the museum of my memory. I read most of these books when I was young, and perhaps that’s why I hold them so dearly. Perhaps in the chemical maelstrom of my teenage brain something in these stories was seared forever.

The film adaptation of Dreamcatcher remains my second-most disappointing cinematic experience of all time (sitting a fair distance behind Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which will take some beating). With three friends and a backpack jammed with snacks, I was first in line at IMC Dún Laoghaire on day one. My dead cat could have puked up a better film. Sometimes I think all the terrible films made of great Stephen King books influence his detractors more than the books themselves.

Talent

Around that time I read a lukewarm review of Dreamcatcher (the book), and thought: “Well of course you didn’t like it. He didn’t write it for you, he wrote it for me.” He writes for his constant readers, a point many people fail to see. He is called things like an industry unto himself. A literary juggernaut ploughing relentlessly onward. An automaton churning out books for cash. But he’s just a guy telling stories. This always happens. Why do I feel the need to defend his work?

Here is the cold, hard truth: he is obscenely talented. What he conjures is extraordinary. How does he do it? It goes beyond the technical. In fact, he has actually told us exactly how he does it in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and yet he’s still the only one who can do what he does. On the old editions of his books I used to read, there was a quote from the Guardian on many of the front covers. It said, “The greatest storyteller since Charles Dickens.” At the time I thought it was a strange thing to say, but with hindsight I can see the truth in it.

Here’s what happens when reading a great Stephen King book – you stop reading words and instead begin to see. It’s like a guided hallucination. Of course, this is essentially what all reading is, but nobody administers the drug as potently as grand-shaman King.

Years pass, life goes on, and still I enjoy his books.

Stephen King didn’t just give me access to his imagination; he gave me the key to unlock my own.