{"id":5436,"date":"2016-07-28T13:41:04","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T08:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=5436"},"modified":"2016-07-28T13:41:04","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T08:11:04","slug":"stephen-king-everyday-horror-the-shining-pet-sematary-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=5436","title":{"rendered":"Why Stephen King\u2019s Stories Only Get Scarier with the Passage of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

M<\/span><\/p><\/div>

\ny <\/span>childhood <\/span><\/a>was shaped by stories of espionage and little kids finding secrets behind closed doors, underneath a lighthouse, or beneath the floorboard. I was following Jason Bourne on international adventures before I could solve quadratic equations. In that tender age, the only true fear for the protagonists I was reading was getting caught \u2014 either by authorities, politicians, spies, or by parents. I certainly wasn\u2019t ready for a man named Stephen King to haunt the living daylights out of me by way of a cat and dead baby coming to life.<\/span>\n\nI read <\/span>Pet Sematary<\/span><\/i> when I was 14 and it taught me true fear. The <\/span>book<\/span><\/a>, devoid of any hope whatsoever, found a little cranny in my heart and made its home there. That home has since grown into a mansion, and Stephen King is its architect. <\/span>Pet Sematary <\/span><\/i>is inexplicably macabre, horrifying, and doesn\u2019t rely on jump scares. It\u2019s about a couple who has just moved into a small town in Maine. Suffice to say things soon take a sinister turn. The sinister turns into gut-wrenching terror and the book, by the end, becomes a shattering portrayal of grief.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nGrief is an everyday horror. At 14, I didn\u2019t know its shape. At 30, after having been an intimate companion with grief, I find the very thought of going back to the book chilling. The <\/span>horror<\/span><\/a> hidden in <\/span>Pet Sematary<\/span><\/i>\u2019s pages has not faded, but only grown more potent as the years have passed \u2014 a trend that comes up time and again when reviewing King\u2019s stories.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nA lot has been written about art that becomes dated. Works we read in <\/span>adolescence<\/span><\/a> don\u2019t hold the same charm when we go back to them in adulthood. Hell, I don\u2019t like to go back to the Jeffrey Archers and the Sidney Sheldons and the Robert Ludlums of the world. But with Stephen King\u2019s stories and novels, however, it\u2019s the opposite. They reveal their depths slowly.\u00a0<\/span>\n\n

King\u2019s sentences have the dust and grime of small-town America, his worlds feel lived in, and his characters talk like people do.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nSoon after <\/span>Pet Sematary<\/span><\/i>, I devoured King\u2019s earlier works like <\/span>Desperation<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>It<\/span><\/i>. The everyday horror in <\/span>Desperation <\/span><\/i>was religion, while <\/span>It<\/span><\/i> was entirely about childhood scars coming back to haunt in adulthood; the clown is just a device.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nBut in <\/span>The Shining<\/span><\/i>, King bared his soul. The book has become one with which any modern horror novel is ultimately compared. On the surface, <\/span>The Shining<\/span><\/i> may just look like a story of a family stuck in the haunted Overlook Hotel. More specifically, it\u2019s about the descent into hell of an abusive and alcoholic man, on the brink of <\/span>unemployment<\/span><\/a>, so desperate to carve out a masterpiece, that he doesn\u2019t mind spending a summer in a haunted hotel. Again, the hotel is just a device. The horror is the man. The looming specter of joblessness, rabid alcoholism, and abusive behaviour are running themes in the book. \u201cWe make up horrors to help us cope with real ones,\u201d goes one of his quotes. I\u2019ll be damned if anyone in the present climate says they\u2019re scared of shadows and moonless nights more than an empty bank account.<\/span>\n\nIn Stephen King\u2019s memoir, <\/span>On Writing<\/span><\/i>, he details out the path to publication of his first novel <\/span>Carrie<\/span><\/i>, the death of his mother, and his subsequent descent into drugs and <\/span>alcoholism<\/span><\/a>. King has grappled with joblessness, homelessness, paralysing injury, and substance abuse. His characters are often extensions of himself, and more often than not, they have something to do with the creative arts. All of those experiences found a place in his later works. And all of those are deeply human experiences.<\/span>\n\nI have held the belief that great horror comes from a fight between hope and hopelessness, <\/span>empathy<\/span><\/a> and the lack of it, and all of King\u2019s stories straddle that fine line. He is often considered to be a \u201cpop\u201d writer, and literary snobs often sneer at his leviathan body of work. I would argue that books like <\/span>Bag of Bones<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Revival<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Lisey\u2019s Story <\/span><\/i>have as much literary experimentation and depth as any award-winning book of past years. King\u2019s sentences have the dust and grime of small-town America, his worlds feel lived in, and his characters talk like people do. If that\u2019s not literature, then maybe nothing is.<\/span>\n\nAs someone dabbling in writing himself, much of King\u2019s catalogue, especially his short stories, has influenced my work. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to traumas and shaping stories out of them. I have held close to my heart one of his sayings: \u201c<\/span>Monsters<\/span><\/a> are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.\u201d King has taught me to accept that the monsters inside us are the scariest of all, but above all, they can also be defeated.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nSometimes.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen King\u2019s books reveal their depths slowly. Great horror comes from a fight between hope and hopelessness, empathy and the lack of it, and all of King\u2019s stories straddle that fine line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":293,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[8551,6606,9255,1225,1248,4452,9256,9257,9258,9259,6740,1316],"class_list":["post-5436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-adolescence","tag-alcoholism","tag-bag-of-bones","tag-childhood","tag-grief","tag-horror","tag-liseys-story","tag-monsters","tag-pet-sematary","tag-revival","tag-stephen-king","tag-the-shining"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Stephen King\u2019s Stories Only Get Scarier with the Passage of Time<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Stephen King\u2019s books reveal their depths slowly. 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