How Stephen King became Horror Royalty

Stephen King’s horror endures for a lot of reasons, but if I had to pick a roundabout thesis it would be this. His stories endure because he fuses everyday American realism with mythic, cosmic menace. And he renders it all through a relentlessly readable prose and deeply inhabited characters. And…and I say all of this as someone who has never fully *loved* his work. Let’s get into it.

To be clear, I do respect King as one of the all-time greats, and I always have a bit of a begrudging “are you serious” look on my face when fans of my fiction tell me something I’ve written reminds them of the master. It’s a compliment I don’t necessarily trust because…well.

That said, I have devoted quite a bit of time over the years to better understanding what fuels King’s writing and makes his legacy so undeniably iconic. I’ll break down some of my findings with you all today.

First, King’s core engine is how he combines ordinary life with encroaching disturbance. Many of his stories (at least the most foundational ones) have a rather mundane baseline. Derry, Castle Rock; these places have family routines, blue-collar jobs, little league, and all the other trappings of a tactile world King fondly remembers from his onward life, almost always in unglamorous detail so as to make it all the more believable.

That’s when King typically allows for the intrusion of the uncanny. His horror rarely arrives as pure spectacle but rather it seeps through sewer grates and storm drains and hotel corridors and basements and in the woods and on back roads and even inside TV sets. He lets one, paltry detail ring false and then stays with it. He scales dread by making it local and upsettingly specific.

The effect is that his readers accept the supernatural events in his stories far more readily. After all, the ordinary is so concretely realized that the unreal aspects that creep in feel like plausible extensions.

Next, I think King’s greatest talent (at least the thing about his work I always find masterful and compelling) is his character-first methodology. He understands how empathy is the conduit for fear, which is why his characters are given so much painstaking detail and attention.

He clearly has a fondness for the “everyman” (the gender-neutral term for that word escapes me…everyperson?) whether they’re a nurse, teacher, cop, writer, or of course child. And his characters are flawed but recognizably decent. So the horror matters more because it hits people we believe in.

I also love his approach to deep interiority. He wields close-third and first-person POV with a sort of free-indirect drift. Which just means that we experience the characters’ shame, habits, and bodily discomforts in rich detail where other writers often settle on mere thoughts and gestures and exposition. Conversely, King lingers on embarrassments and petty cruelties in order to better humanize.

And yes his villains often have the most texture in his stories. They’re bullies, abusers, zealots, even institutions, all of them psychologically credible even before they become supernaturally monstrous. I especially enjoy the way he builds up these threats to justify his found families, as groups are forged by shared ordeals, thus providing emotional stakes and a thematic counterforce to the seemingly unstoppable evils of the world.

So far, we’ve covered a lot of the more obvious hallmarks of King’s signature style. But digging a little deeper, there’s also plenty to be said about his moral cosmology and how he treats the cyclical return of “evil.” In King’s worlds, the sins of a town don’t go away easily. Violence and bigotry recur, occasionally through alternating timelines.

King really likes to mirror this concept with the tension between childhood and adulthood and how these two different worlds of personhood clash and become one another. The child is often better equipped to perceive the dark truths of their surroundings where their adult counterpart essentially forgets all about it (sometimes by choice). For King, memory is both a weapon and a wound. It can bruise as easily as it can be a bruise.

These “dark truths” manifest themselves in all kinds of recognizable ways. Addiction, work obsession, systemic/institutional racism, economic pressure, religious hysteria…King doesn’t hold back on how the issues of the day and rot underneath the ordinary can be amplified by supernatural forces that are even more difficult to understand and reckon with.

And this all works as a foil to his empathetic characters because this means “hope” in a King setting comes with a tangible, meaningful cost. Courage, love, and friendship can absolutely win the day in his stories, but not without some kind of sacrifice or scarring. That said, King’s skill at endings is…complicated…but we can agree that he typically writes conclusions that are more earned than they are neat.

There’s so much more I could unpack, as this barely scratches the surface of what makes King, King. His sneaky prose style, his braided structure, his affinity for delayed reveals, humor as misdirection, and yes even his weaknesses, particularly his baggy middle sections and (again) his admittedly wobbly endings. But boiling it all down, King excels at people over plot and metaphor that rides shotgun. His writing makes America feel like a living, bleeding person and uses his stories to ask what its flawed people will lose or become when the darkness takes them over.

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The artwork for this journal entry is something I illustrated for one of my newest short stories, Housekeeping for the Dead, which we released on Cetera Magazine earlier this month for our themed “October of Horror.” It’s a quick, neat little horror tale about a housekeeper at a hotel who keeps finding the same dying woman in each of the rooms she cleans. A few people have compared it to King, which I think is generous at best.

I do have another short story that will appear in a forthcoming anthology, though I can’t yet announce who the publisher is and all that. I can only say for now that it is absolutely the most “Stephen King” story I’ve written yet. And trust me, I’m not trying to brag because I much prefer when my stories can’t be so easily compared to anyone else’s…makes me think another fun name for this column would be “First Novel Problems.”

Thanks for reading, and hit me up in the comments if you have any thoughts of your own on King’s work and what it means to you as a reader and/or writer.

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