Happy Birthday, ‘Uncle’ Stevie

21 September is a huge day in the Author Almanac.

There’s a lot more decision-making behind these posts than “whose birthday is it today?” Which (dead) authors deserve two entries? What happens when a significant date clashes with something else? And, possibly hardest of all, how do you write about an author you love without simply gushing?

Stephen King presents a particular problem.

I was far too frightened to read him when I was younger. Ghosts, witches, and banshees were all very well, but Stephen King came with an 18 certificate, as far as I was concerned.

Then I met Maureen.

Maureen was a big Stephen King reader.

So, obviously, I became one too.

And what followed has been a remarkable lesson in what a writer can make a reader feel.

• King has made me cry (The Dead Zone, Hearts in Atlantis, Insomnia).
• He’s made me laugh out loud (Dreamcatcher, Needful Things).
• He’s made me shudder (Rose Madder).
• He’s made me feel genuinely nauseous (Survivor Type, The Green Mile).
• He’s scared me witless (The Shining, The Raft, The Jaunt, The Dark Half).
• He’s made me afraid to turn the page (Misery). A ‘jump scare’ in a book? This might be his greatest achievement, actually.

And he’s opened doors into kinds of fiction I might otherwise never have discovered (The Mist, Mrs Todd’s Shortcut, From a Buick 8).

That range is what interests me. I could name other ‘favourite’ authors, like Terry Pratchett. But the variety of responses Uncle Stevie provokes can’t be matched by anyone else.

The best writing is like a magic trick. It produces an extraordinary result while making us forget how much craft went into producing it.

We don’t think about narrative construction when we’re frightened by The Shining.

We don’t analyse technique while The Body is breaking our hearts.

We don’t stop to admire the mechanics of suspense when we’re sitting there thinking, I really don’t want to turn this page.

We just feel it.

And remember, I say that as someone who spends huge chunks of their time in ‘close reading’ and analysis.

This, ultimately, is what literature can do. What makes it worth reading.

It can frighten us when we are perfectly safe. Make us laugh when nobody else knows why. Make us grieve for people who never existed. Take us somewhere we didn’t know we wanted to go.

And, sometimes, it can give us something to carry with us.

There’s one Stephen King quotation which means more to me than most:

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

I have a Stephen King tattoo.

It’s Andy Dufresne’s prison number.

I’ll leave it at that.

Because this isn’t really about me.

It’s about what Stephen King has been doing for readers for over fifty years: making the impossible feel possible, the frightening feel real, the ridiculous feel funny, and the human feel important.

That’s why he’s ‘Uncle’ Stevie.

Not because everything he’s written is perfect.

Not because he’s the greatest writer who ever lived. (Shakespeare wants a word, obviously, and he’s holding a sharpened quill)

But because, over the course of decades and a frankly ridiculous number of hardbacks, he has become one of those writers whose books have taught me — repeatedly — just how much a story can do.

Happy birthday, Uncle Stevie.

And thanks for the stories.