A half-century of horror: Stephen King’s first novel was published fifty years ago this month
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where JR and I help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics. This is lesson 669, so that means you can find the full transcript and lesson exercises at PlainEnglish.com/669. That is thanks to JR, the producer.
If you’ve been with us a while, you know how this works. We start with a story in the news, something going on in the world. And then we pivot, and I show you how to use an English expression.
Today, we’ll start by taking a look back at—and I can’t believe this—fifty years of Stephen King books. I read them when I was a kid—and I’ve committed to read another one soon, to see how I like them now. Stephen King, if you don’t know, is one of the world’s highest-selling authors and his name is synonymous with horror and thrillers. And he has been publishing books for half a century; that is just incredible.
In the second half of today’s lesson, you’ll learn how to use the English expression “come together.” You might know the word “come.” You might know the word “together.” But “come together” has a very specific meaning. And you are going to learn that in just a few minutes.
But first, let’s start today’s story about Stephen King.
Stephen King has been terrifying fans for 50 years
A young girl has a mysterious power to start fires with just her mind. Though she can control it as a small child, she struggles to control the fires as she gets older.
An evil clown hides in a sewer and lures a small boy looking for a lost toy.
An author is in a horrible car crash, only to be rescued by his “biggest fan.” As she nurses him back to health, she becomes controlling and forces him to write a story the way she wants it to go.
These are the plots of “Firestarter,” “It,” and “Misery”—and they’re just three of Stephen King’s 77 books. His first, called “Carrie,” was published fifty years ago this month.
In “Carrie,” a girl is taunted in school and abused by her mother. She discovers she has telekinetic powers—meaning, she can control events around her with just her mind. And soon she begins to use those powers to take her revenge on those around her.
In the early 1970s, Stephen King was a high school teacher in Maine. If you picture a map of the United States, Maine is the state that sticks up in the upper-right hand part of the map.
While he taught English, King wrote fiction in his spare time; his first published work was a short story called “The Glass Floor,” which was published in a collection of stories in 1967. He wrote the first pages of another story, but was unsatisfied with how it was coming together . He threw the pages in the trash, where his wife found them. She wanted to know what came next in the story and she encouraged him to keep writing.
And that is how “Carrie” was born. The book sold moderately well in hardback and got good reviews. But sales really picked up when the paperback was released and that is when Stephen King found real success in publishing.
The rest is history: The name “Stephen King” is now synonymous with horror, and the author eventually became one of the best-selling fiction writers in all of history.
Many of his stories take place in Maine, where he settled and has lived most of his life. The fictional town of “Derry, Maine” is the setting of many of his novels. Some involve a connection to the Boston Red Sox, the nearest baseball team. Stephen King often sits in the seats at Red Sox games with a book to read or a notebook to scribble in—and references to the team pop up in his books.
How to describe a Stephen King story? Not all of them involve the supernatural. Not all involve terror. Here’s how the author himself describes his writing. He said his stories involve things that are inexplicable—things that can’t be explained. And in some of his stories, those are vampires, ghosts, or frightening superpowers. But in other stories, disease, violence, and human evil are the things that can’t be explained, even if there’s nothing supernatural about them.
Stephen King says that his stories are about “the intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life.” When writing, he starts with a “what-if” scenario: “What if an alcoholic writer was stranded with his family in a haunted hotel?” That question became “The Shining.”
Some of his stories anticipated real-life events. A 1977 novel called “Rage” describes a school shooting. Actual school shootings in the 1980s and 1990s were similar, and the perpetrators said they were inspired by the book. King decided he didn’t want “Rage” to be published anymore, out of fear that it might inspire further shootings. “Rage” is one of the few Stephen King books that is out of print.
Another creepy parallel: The 1978 novel “The Stand” was about a deadly influenza pandemic. The influenza strain was developed as a weapon, but it escaped from the lab accidentally. A security guard spread the virus to a gas station attendant, who spread it to family members. Before long, it couldn’t be contained. A majority of the world’s population was wiped out ; those few who survived divided into warring factions.
“The Stand” is 1,153 pages—King’s longest. It is also one of his most famous. It sold over four million copies. It was adapted into two different television series, a comic book series from Marvel, and it inspired an album from the heavy metal band Metallica.
“The Stand” was not unusual in this way. A lot of King’s books have been adapted to other media. “The Shining,” starring Jack Nicholson, and “The Shawshank Redemption” are the most famous movies based on Stephen King books. But “Misery,” starring Kathy Bates as the crazed nurse, is my favorite Stephen King story on the big screen. “11/22/63” and others were adapted into miniseries.
Stephen King isn’t afraid to play with the art form. Many writers will stick to novels and short stories. But King has gotten creative not only with the stories, but also with the way he tells them. “The Green Mile” was a novel-length story released in six slim paperbacks, each one released a month apart over half a year.
“Desperation” and “The Regulators” are two long novels that were released at the same time. These two books are mirror images of each other, two parallel universes experiencing the same story. They have a lot of the same characters in common. “The Regulators” was published under Stephen King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman, though his identity was not a secret when the two books came out.
Stephen King is 77 years old and not slowing down. He released a collection of four novellas in 2020; novels in each of 2021, 2022, and 2023; and he will publish a collection of short stories later this year.
He has won more awards than I can list here, but they include the Edgar Award for best mystery novel, several Bram Stoker awards for horror stories, and the National Medal of Arts, the United States’s highest government award for artists. Barack Obama presented him with that medal.
His 77 books have sold between 300 and 400 million copies.
Jeff’s take
And many of those copies wound up on my bookshelf as a kid. I really liked them as a teenager. The first Stephen King book I read was “Firestarter,” about the girl who could start fires with her mind. In fact, I remember where I was when I was reading a lot of these books, that’s the kind of impression they made on me.
My parents took the family to Paris when I was fourteen—I was reading “The Tommyknockers.” I remember it to this day; it had a green and black cover. Every night, I couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel from our activities so I could read that book. All day, as I wandered through the Louvre and the Musée D’Orsay, all I could think about was the book I was reading.
For my birthday one year, I got two hardcover books—”Desperation” and “The Regulators.” They were released at the same time and they went together; the books were like two branches of the same story. They had a similar cover design. And I got them in hardcover—I can remember exactly what the covers looked like. And I remember reading them both that summer in my childhood bedroom.
“Needful Things” was one of my favorites—that was about a store that would sell you anything. It just came at a high price.
And then I kind of lost interest. My tastes in books and literature changed. Right around when I graduated from high school, I stopped reading Stephen King books. Years went by and I didn’t pick one up.
Then I read a book called “11/22/63”, that’s the date on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The premise of the book is that someone has the chance to change what happens on that day—and see how the world would be different. I liked it, but it wasn’t enough to bring me back into the Stephen King world.
But I did pick up a book recently—this will be the first Stephen King book I read in Spanish. It’s called “The Outsider,” so I have that to look forward to.
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