Happy 75th Birthday, Stephen King
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Today is the 75th birthday of Stephen King – the master of horror, the “king of horror”, writer of many things besides horror in fact. He’s also been a film producer and director, TV and movie script writer, is a philanthropist – a husband and father too. He’s been involved in comic books, is a member of the band The Rock Bottom Remainders and has contributed journalism and non-fiction, all sorts of writing on all sorts of subjects. But will forever best be known for The Shining and Misery, Pet Sematary, The Dark Tower series, The Stand, It, and – depending on your level of interest – a dozen or more titles.
There’s The Dead Zone and there’s The Green Mile and maybe you’re there for all of it, or just some of it – but even if you’ve never read a Stephen King title you know about his books and his influence, you must have seen a King adaptation on the big screen or streaming at home; perhaps you didn’t even know when you were watching The Outsider or 1922 or Doctor Sleep or In The Tall Grass or Stand By Me or The Shawshank Redemption that you were participating in one of the many worlds built by Stephen King.
One day I’ll write an essay about all that he means to me – I’m still working that out. But today I wanted to celebrate his birthday. I’ve recently dipped back into the world of King, though to say that suggests I left. And I never really left. It had just been a while since I’d been between the pages of one of his books.
In the last couple of years I’ve built a King collection from scratch. I gave away the many titles I’d collected as a kid – finding room on the shelves for other things. A couple of years back I decided it was time to re-collect and, er, re-Kindle (in some cases I bought up the e-books too). So I’ve bought up everything I could find.
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