Life of a cave dweller

All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, ‘Why are you reading that useless junk?’)

Stephen King, in his introduction to Michel Houellebecq’s study of H.P. Lovecraft, may have intended this as a defence of ‘useless junk’ — a charge often levelled at his own work, usually by those who have not read much of it. But it also describes an authorial motive that Orwell (whose categories were ‘sheer egotism’; ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’; ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’) seems to have missed.

King has published 63 books since 1974, which suggests a positively Paleolithic, or perhaps Platonic, enthusiasm for the cave. And his best-known subjects — haunted hotels and cars, telekinesis, adolescent cruelty, torture, things from beyond the grave and worse — make you wonder what kind of life he’s hiding from.

The main facts, competently enough recounted in this book, are that King’s father walked out when Steve (as Lisa Rogak tells us he prefers to be known) was two. He grew up, mostly in Maine, poor and devoted to horror films, comics, rock and roll and, above all, John D. MacDonald, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Dreiser, and similar pulp writers, whom he continued to champion over ‘respectable literature’ while taking his degree in English.

He became moderately radical, took drugs, was declared unfit for service in Vietnam, and read and wrote constantly. He had several menial jobs, got married and became a high school teacher. In 1973 his wife fished the manuscript of Carrie out of the bin.