022: My Thing with Stephen King
I have a thing with Stephen King.
The trauma
The first King I read was Carrie. The throwing of tampons, the psychic spells and the scene at the prom made an indelible mark on my teenage mind.
“Perhaps the next one will be less traumatic”, I thought and moved on to Misery where a famous writer, Paul Sheldon, suffers a car accident on an icy road and is saved by his greatest superfan, Annie Wilkes. Annie is a sturdy woman who was severely disappointed by the way that Sheldon chose to kill off her favourite character in his latest book . She uses her girth and strength to, shall we say, “encourage” him to write an alternate ending just for her.
I duly experienced Misery - note the capital M. I’ve also had a profound attachment to my limbs since finishing the book. To make it worse, I imagined Annie to look like the friendliest tannie from my church. Every time that she insisted on giving me a friendly kiss, I winced at the thought of what Annie Wilkes was about to do to me.
In the hope that I will finally “get” him, I tried starting a few more King’s.
Blaze – one of the books that he wrote under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman – and Pet Sematary came and went. I completed neither.
Stocked up on rabid pet and Indian burial ground trauma, I gave him up as a bad job.
“This man is too crazy for me.”, I thought and read some harmless Dan Brown, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer instead.
The trauma redeemed
In my final year of undergraduate studies, my dad and I came to hear of the Exclusive Books warehouse sale where one buys books by weight at a criminally reduced price.
Among the stacks of books we purchased was a copy of The Green Mile. Protagonist John Coffey’s special abilities and his immense pain for the world sang through the pages and it renewed my faith in the author. The movie was also one of the rare cases where it did the book justice. King had gone a long way to be redeemed in my books.
The grossness
I did experience The Green Mile to be a lot more fantasy than horror, though, which meant that the jury was still out on whether King deserved the title of “The King of Horror” for me.
Trying again, I read The Shining in 2017. I write one-line reviews for every book I read. For The Shining I wrote:
“Very well written, but I don't like how I felt when this book climbed right into my head.”
7 years after my last attempt at King Horror, nothing had changed. I still felt the same trauma, but had now added a whole new layer of grossness to the mix.
The acts of the protagonist in The Shining felt so unnatural and demonic. There was a tug of war going on inside me: In one way I felt like I was falling into depths of mania with the protagonist. On the other hand I was feeling like Shelley Duval in the movie, desperately trying to run away from “Heeeere’s Johnny” and his craziness.
This battle had me questioning my sanity. Despite feeling supremely uncomfortable about the book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I asked myself “Why do I feel so intrigued by Jack? Am I also crazy?”
In 2025 I took on his longest ever work. The Stand (The Complete & Uncut Edition) in audiobook format. This was it. Reaffirming my belief from 2011, that if I couldn’t get a grasp on him from this book, it was Game Over. I’d never touch King again.
Naively, I hoped to get through it, without the feelings of grossness seeping into my thoughts.
The Stand is essentially the story of what Covid could’ve been if everyone died. Then, once 99% of the world population is dead, King climbs into the heads of his characters. Cue trauma and grossness - at 1,000+ page scale.
In The Stand the good guys dream of a wise old Christian woman, Mother Abigail, and follow the road to her in Boulder, Colorado. The bad guys dream of, essentially, the devil, in human form as a man named Randall Flagg, who has taken up residence in Las Vegas, Nevada. The good guys realise they need to take on the bad guys and as her last act, Mother Abigail sends a group of them to walk to Sin City, across the Rockies and through the Utah Desert - without any provisions - to make their final “Stand”.
Things happen - apocalyptically - in Vegas and some people live happily ever after...or do they? As a story, it isn’t complex, but throughout many hours of listening, the gnawing feeling that some things should rather have been left unsaid, stayed with me. Inner dialogues of characters contemplating misdeeds of a primal nature shocked through my headphones.
Multiple times, I found myself saying,
“Oh, no.”
Also,
“Gross.”
And mostly,
“Eeuw.”
I could appreciate the story, but I was done with King.
My Thing with Stephen King could be summarized thus:
I find his writing to be gross and traumatic.
Try as I might, I keep coming back to him.
I don’t understand why.
Having now firmly recognized the pattern of trauma and grossness combined with an inability to look away, I committed to never reading his horror again.
Closing the King Chapter
I read his memoir, On Writing, as an epilogue in the King chapter of my reading life. What I found, though, wasn’t a deranged psycho telling us why he loves to traumatize people. I actually found it to be an illuminating experience that led me to understand why I don’t understand him.
Here’s what I found.
Stephen King is wired for horror.
In the first paragraphs of On Writing we learn that he has always been obsessed with horror.
“Never mind sweet; never mind uplifting; never mind Snow White and the Seven Goddam Dwarfs. At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about teenage gangs on the prowl, movies about losers on motorcycles – this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten.”
We also learn that he was traumatized at a young age. He had asked his mother if she had seen someone die.
“…she told me about the one she saw – a sailor who jumped off the roof of the Graymore Hotel in Portland, Maine, and landed in the street. ‘He splattered,’ my mother said in her most matter-of-fact tone. She paused, then added, ‘The stuff that came out of him was green. I have never forgotten it.’ That makes two of us, Mom.”
As I say, wired for horror.
King connects horror and humour
He was traumatized by his caretaker, Eulah-Beulah, in a slightly comical way:
“Eula-Beulah was prone to farts – the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell ‘Pow!’, critics hold few terrors.”
This shows me that his relationship with grossness isn’t strictly “I want to horrify you”. He seems to have a permissive attitude towards the collision of the grotesque, funny, horrifying and mundane. And he surfaces it by the way of jump scares and sudden exclamations that make you go, “Sis man. Stop it.”
King is serious about his craft
In On Writing, King clearly states how serious he is about his craft.
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
A large part of On Writing is dedicated to how he does not come lightly to the page. In a gift to any writer, he articulates his process clearly.
I love it when someone has a firm opinion on something that is integral to their craft. Here’s King on the use of adverbs:
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s – GASP!! – too late. I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions … and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences: ‘Put it down!’ she shouted.‘Give it back,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said. In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions: ‘Put it down!’ she shouted menacingly. ‘Give it back,’ he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’ ‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said contemptuously. The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones.”
He then proceeds to talk about adverbs for many pages and justifies why “he said” is always a better alternative to “he ejaculated”.
He finally concludes with this aphorism:
“All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.”
On Writing is filled with anecdotes like this that indicates he has found clarity about what tools work for him. That clarity only comes if you’ve spent a lifetime grafting and grinding. Like only a serious writer who doesn’t come to the blank page lightly could.
I am not his ideal reader
This is arguably the most enduring insight I've come to regarding King and why I feel like I just don't "get" him.
When King writes, he has the image of his ideal reader in mind. He writes to take them places. He does not pander to those who do not want to buy what he has to sell.
Here is what he has to say about his ideal reader.
“Someone – I can’t remember who, for the life of me – once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, ‘I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?’ Call that one person you write for Ideal Reader. He or she is going to be in your writing room all the time: in the flesh once you open the door and let the world back in to shine on the bubble of your dream, in spirit during the sometimes troubling and often exhilarating days of the first draft, when the door is closed. And you know what? You’ll find yourself bending the story even before Ideal Reader glimpses so much as the first sentence.”
His Ideal Reader is his wife Tabitha, a fellow horror writer and enthusiast. He writes with her reactions in mind. He wants her to chuckle at his dark humour and gasp at his plot twists.
Contrast this with my ideal writer. He/she crafts literature that forces moral and psychological engagement. Some of my favourite novels like The Count of Monte Cristo and Jane Eyre constantly ask you to take a position on people’s motivations and then promptly destabilises it. These are the types of books that you think about years later on a random Tuesday.
King does something similar in that he uses fear and disgust rather than moral judgement. So, I don’t mind so much that he gets into my head, I just don’t like what he does once he gets in there, as I noted in my one-line review of The Shining.
Combining his innate attraction to horror with a rigour for his craft, something amazing happens: he can go places with words that sets him apart in the horror genre. And he crafts it to a very specific reader. To him, this process is like breathing. He can’t not do it.
I’m not saying I’m the Stephen King of Data Science, but I can relate to this desire to just sit with something that interests you for hours and hours. In my very first blog post, I wrote about how I got my start with data by writing up cricket matches. That led me to draw up charts and teams whenever I got a chance. During off periods at school, when other kids would kick a ball, I’d be happily tapping away at my calculator while playing imaginary matches of cricket on paper. It never felt like effort. Others could simply not fathom why I found it to be “fun”. I couldn’t understand how they couldn’t understand.
So, as someone who is not his “ideal reader”, I don’t think I will ever understand how he reaches the places he explores. I simply know that I am not wired for horror in the way that he is. He might find visceral horror funny, but it has me hugging myself, rocking in the corner.
And yet...
Despite this, every time I hear of a new Stephen King novel, I am intrigued. A rabid family dog (Cujo), a time traveller who tries to prevent JFK’s assassination (11/22/63) and a mysterious signal broadcast over the global cell phone network that turns the majority of his fellow humans into mindless vicious animals (Cell) all sound like stories that I need to explore.
Why?
Ultimately, On Writing couldn’t answer that question.
After finishing On Writing, I thought King and I were simply different beings attracted to different things. At least now I could appreciate why he goes so hard.
I left it at that.
Perhaps I wasn’t destined to know.
A few months later, though, an answer came. Not surprisingly, through running.
The Endurance Artist
On this blog, I’ve written a lot about the Comrades Marathon. It’s become an obsession. I’m a part of the cult (already entered and training for the 2027 edition). No other race has captured the attention of an entire country’s running community quite like it. It is advertised as the Ultimate Human Race. And while it is an immense physical challenge, it is nowhere near the toughest endurance challenge on earth. That title must surely go to the Barkley Marathons.
The Barkley is a deliberately absurd, nearly impossible 100-ish mile ultramarathon through the mountains of Tennessee.
Here's the race in a nutshell:
Around 40 runners are invited each year through a deliberately secretive application process.
The course is unmarked, mostly off-trail, and changes every year. GPS isn't allowed. You navigate with only a map and compass.
The "100 miles" is closer to 130 miles (210 km) in reality, with almost 20,000 m of elevation gain. That’s like climbing Everest up and down twice (and then some) from sea level through mountains covered in razor sharp briars
Instead of checkpoints, runners must find hidden books and tear out the page matching their race number as proof they visited each location.
You have 60 hours to finish five loops. Completing just three loops earns the tongue-in-cheek title of a "Fun Run."
The start time is secret until an hour beforehand, announced by the blowing of a conch shell. The race officially begins when the race director lights a cigarette.
Most years, nobody finishes. Since the race began in 1986, only 20 people have ever completed it, with 26 total finishes because a handful have done it more than once.
In 2024, Jasmin Paris became the first woman ever to finish, crossing the line with just 99 seconds left before the 60-hour cutoff.
The race director that conceived this brutal race that “eats its young”, is named Gary Cantrell. He also goes by his mysterious alter ego, Lazarus Lake, or simply, Laz. His philosophy consistently emphasizes that the qualities separating exceptional endurance athletes are persistence, resilience, patience, and the willingness to keep going when everyone else stops.
With that in mind, he conjured up the idea of the backyard ultra. The premise is simple: a 4.167 mile (6.4km) loop that starts on the hour, every hour. This results in a 100 miles every 24 hours. The madness continues until only one runner completes a loop. Everyone else gets tagged with a DNF (Did Not Finish). A backyard answers the question, “who can continue longest?” And the answer, as of October 2026, is staggeringly high. The record is currently jointly held by Belgian runners Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert, who ran 124 laps (516.7 miles or 831.5 km) at the Backyard Ultra World Team Championship. That's more than 5 days of running. Insane.
Now, how does this all relate to Stephen King?
As I was listening to Laz's life story in Jared Beasley’s biography, The Endurance Artist, it emerged that the premise of the Backyard Ultra aligns almost precisely with the plot of Stephen King’s The Long Walk. While the ever mysterious Laz claims that the format of the Backyard ultra emerged serendipitously, the similarities between the two are undeniable:
The Long Walk | Backyard Ultra |
Last person remaining wins | Last person remaining wins |
Fixed minimum pace (in the book, 4 miles an hour. In the 2025 movie, they dropped it to 3 miles an hour) | Fixed maximum time per lap (1 hour) and a fixed distance to cover (4.67 miles) |
No finish line | No predetermined finish |
Every competitor eventually fails except one | Every competitor eventually drops except one |
Mental endurance becomes more important than speed | Mental endurance becomes more important than speed |
The stakes are, of course, slightly different. In a Backyard Ultra, failure simply means your race is over. In The Long Walk, if you get three warnings for dropping under the minimum pace, you’re shot on the spot.
Having heard many good things about The Long Walk, I put a temporary hold on my resolve to “never read King again”. How could I not, if it touches on my beloved world of endurance “sport”?
The Long Walk – and a surprising epiphany
Recall that I mentioned Richard Bachman at the start of this post. Bachman was a fictional writer that was in fact Stephen King in disguise.
The Long Walk is one of the first Bachman books and was actually written before his first novel, Carrie, was published.
Today, The Long Walk is credited to Stephen King, with a footnote “writing as Richard Bachman”.
The introduction to The Long Walk is titled The Importance of Being Bachman, wherein King explains the origins of his pseudonym. Bachman was conceived of as a way to get him to publish more books in a time when publishers didn’t believe an author should publish more than once a year. As the introduction unfolds, though, it becomes clear that Bachman was way more than this.
To King, Bachman was supposed to be a way to explore themes beyond the scope of his normal ideas. He describes the Bachman state of mind as
“…low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair”.
When his name was connected to Bachman, he decided to kill off the pseudonym, as the mystery around the name was broken. He uses the introduction to describe why it hurt him so much.
This hit particularly hard:
“The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there’s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives.”
As I reflected on these paragraphs, I finally found the answer to why I keep coming back to King:
We all have a desire to explore horror (to differing degrees), but we need someone who can take us on the journey. Most of us can see the potential of a storyline like Pet Sematary where dead animals come back to life. Where we fail is turning it into a psychological episode that seeps into the crevices of our psyche.
And here’s the thing that dawned on me:
Even Stephen King needs that someone.
He needed it so badly, that he created a whole new author to explore the topics that were too dark and morose for his own author name.
That’s why Richard Bachman existed.
No wonder he was angry when had to kill him off. Where can he go without that outlet?
Ultimately, there is something in the way that he writes that reflects back at us our deepest desire to express horror, but simply can’t.
Somewhat reluctantly, I have decided to integrate this shadow into my being. I have now officially sworn off any big proclamations when it comes to King.
I am still not his ideal reader and I know that when I read him again, I’ll feel grossed out, abhorred and shocked to the core. He crafts the world of horror in a way that no one else (that I’ve read) can and - despite the trauma - I’m better off for visiting his world every once in a while.
So, after a very, very long walk with the man, I have made my peace with that.
And that – as it turns out – is my thing with Stephen King.
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