by Andie Anderson

Created on: June 02, 2008

Stephen King comes to mind when I think of writers who have mastered the horror/suspense genre. He writes from a room in his mind that many fear to enter. I think alot of the demons that are characters in his stories come from his own fears and it's almost a kind of personal therapy when he writes his stories.

One of the fears Mr. King had was that his "number one fan" would 'do him in'. He tells of the story of having a picture taken with a fan of his writing and finding out later it was Mark David Chapman who had just murdered singer John Lennon. His popular story and movie, 'Misery' starring Kathy Bates and James Caan is based on his fear of the 'super fan'.

Many of his stories deal with abandonment issues that may have been related to the truth that Mr. King's father left the family to start a new life elsewhere. I bet his father was kicking himself years later when Mr. King became famous. The stories Mr. King writes always start with a sentence that grabs the reader's interest and then creates the needed suspense to read on and see what the outcome is. Mr. King has a dry wit to his story telling.

My husband told me he had gone to a few of his lectures at the University of Maine years ago and said that the author had sometimes a foul mouth but it was his way of getting a message across and that there was an ironic humor to his stories as well. His stories can be poignant and moving like 'The Green Mile' or 'The Shawshank Redemption' where the protagonist survives and the saying proves true, "if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger".

Mr. King stated that he got the idea from his story, 'The Shining' from his experiences in an old hotel in Colorado. He will admit that he has seen spirit entities and is dead serious about it, it isn't just his playing up the suspense of his seeming obsession with the unknown.

Two writers who had an impact on Mr. King were Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft. Horror wasn't always a popular genre and it wasn't until Stephen King wrote the book, Carrie that it really took off in popularity, sorta the right time, the right stuff, and the right story. There is a story about how Mr. King's fate in writing could have changed if his wife hadn't fished out of the trash his manuscript of 'Carrie'. She was a proponent in him getting it published and gave him the needed constructive criticism to change a few aspects of the story from a woman's point of view. In this story of a unpopular girl who after her first period she becomes

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