by Lisa Rogak
Steve’s mother did forbid him to listen to radio broadcasts of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction stories, but Steve eavesdropped anyway upstairs from his bedroom through a heating vent after he was supposed to be in bed as his mother listened to the radio downstairs. Afterward, he was so scared that he couldn’t sleep in his own bed so he slept under his brother’s.
As his appetite for books grew, a few started to make a huge impression on him. When he read The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss, Steve realized that strange things could happen to perfectly normal people often for no reason at all.
He loved the comic-book series Castle of Frankenstein and bought the new installments every time one appeared on the newsstand.
Steve and his brother discovered E.C. Comics, which stood for Entertaining Comics, in the midfifties. The boys loved the ghosts, zombies, and ghouls that were featured in the bimonthly Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Crypt of Terror. The publisher of E.C. was Bill Gaines, who would create a new kind of comic book in 1956 with Mad magazine. The narrators of E.C. comics would often start with an aside directed at “Dear Reader.” This would later be echoed in Steve’s work with the use of the salutation “Constant Reader” in his stories and novels.
“One of my favorites was when a baseball team was disemboweling the bad guys and lining the base paths with their intestines,” Steve said. “They used his head for the ball, and this one eye was bulging out as the bat hits it.”
Though Ruth was tolerant of her son’s choice of reading material, she hated E.C. comics. She finally put her foot down when he began to wake up in the middle of the night screaming from his nightmares. She confiscated all of Steve’s copies and refused to give them back, so he bought more and hid them under his bed. When she caught him, she’d ask why he was wasting his time with such junk. “Someday, I’m going to write this junk,” he replied.
In addition to reading comic books and writing stories, Steve also loved the movies. When he was living in Connecticut, he watched the Million Dollar Movie on WOR, broadcast out of New York, as much as he could. This nightly program featured a black-and-white movie, usually from the 1940s, that was often repeated every night for a week. Steve was glued to the screen and began to study the structure, language, and special effects in each movie, and he began to apply the lessons he learned to his own writing. “I began to see things as I wrote, in a frame like a movie screen,” he said.
He also saw The Snake Pit, a 1948 movie starring Olivia de Havilland, about a woman who is in an insane asylum but doesn’t know how she ended up there and as a result is driven insane. Steve’s wife, Tabby, later said that the movie made a lasting impression on him: “I think it may have infected him with a belief that you can go insane quite easily.”
Steve agreed: “As a kid, I worried about my sanity a lot.”
He also went to the movie theater as much as he could. He particularly loved the B-grade horror flicks such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and cheesy sci-fi movies like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Though some people enjoy watching horror movies for the schlock value, even back then Steve never denied that he was scared out of his wits by these movies, while continuing to go back for more. “I liked to be scared, I liked the total surrender of emotional control,” he said. “I’d been raised in a family where emotional control was a really important thing. You weren’t supposed to show you were afraid, you weren’t supposed to show that you were in pain or frightened or sad.
“There was a high premium on keeping yourself to yourself—on maintaining a pleasant exterior—saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you,’ and using your handkerchief even if you’re on the Titanic and it’s going down, because that’s the way you were supposed to behave.”
While being scared out of his wits, he was also studying the technical effects in the films. “I got a little more discriminating in my ability to detect special effects, if not necessarily my sense of taste,” he observed. “Even when the flying saucer appeared to be a Kool cigarette filter tip with a sparkler stuck in it, it looked real to me because I was at a young and very credulous age.”
But he wasn’t too discriminating in his movie tastes: he also loved World War Two movies such as Halls of Montezuma, Sands of Iwo Jima, and Gung Ho!
In fact, the first movie that terrified him wasn’t even a horror film, but one from Walt Disney. After he saw Bambi in 1955, the forest-fire scene gave him nightmares for weeks.
It wasn’t just the movies that scared him; the normal things in everyday life did as well.
Perhaps Steve’s greatest fear was what would happen to him and his brother if Ruth fell ill and couldn’t take care of them. Or worse. It was clear that the relatives didn’t want children. Steve thought he and Dave would end up in foster care or a place like the insane asylum in The Snake Pit.
Steve was learning that the world was a scary place—both the real one and the make-believe one—and as a result, his fears were beginning to multiply exponentially. He was afraid of spiders, falling into the toilet, older kids, what-if-his-mother-suddenly-walked-away-too, everything. He was afraid that he’d die before he was twenty years old. He was also scared of clowns. “When I was a kid, I saw other kids cry about clowns too,” he said. “To me there’s something scary, something sinister about such a figure of happiness and fun being evil.”
Ruth did her part to contribute to her son’s fears as well. “One of the reasons I’ve been so successful is that I was brought up by a woman who worried all the time,” he said. “She’d tell me to put on my rubbers or I’d get pneumonia and die.”
But back in the 1950s, some bona fide fears appeared as well, including a nationwide polio epidemic for which no vaccine existed. Most people refrained from swimming in public pools because of the fear of contracting the disease. And then there were the Russians. The general anxiety about the Communists was pervasive throughout the culture. And the fears of having an atomic bomb fall on your town were amplified with every school air-raid drill, which sent kids scurrying under their desks for protection.
One Saturday afternoon in October 1957, Steve was at a Saturday matinee when suddenly the movie screen went dark. The audience started to make noise, believing that the film strip had broken or the projectionist had switched to the wrong reel, but suddenly the lights came on overhead and the manager walked down the aisle and stood in front of the screen. “He mounted the stage and in a trembling voice, he told us that the Russians had just launched a space satellite into orbit around Earth called Sputnik,” said King. The United States was supposed to be number one when it came to everything—military strength and technology among them—and so when it was clear the Russians had taken the lead, the nation felt as if it had been punched in the gut.
In addition to warning Steve and Dave about the dangers of catching cold, Ruth King was fond of giving her children advice by offering up pithy sayings such as “You’ll never be hung for your beauty” and “You need that like a hen needs a flag.” After a particularly grueling day at work, she’d caution her children to “hope for the best and expect the worst.”
Though Steve brushed some of the sayings off, two in particular he took to heart, while providing them with a little bit of a spin: “If you think the worst, it can’t come true” and “If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.”
Fortunately, Ruth never said he couldn’t write things that weren’t nice.
Throughout his childhood, Steve continued to write and Ruth continued to pay him a quarter for each story. He wrote his first horror story at the age of seven. Spending almost every weekend and every weeknight sitting slack-jawed in front of a movie screen had begun to affect his subject matter.
“I had internalized the idea from the movies that just when everything looked blackest, the scientists would come up with some off-the-wall solution that would take care of things,” he said. So he wrote a story
about a dinosaur that was creating a lot of damage and havoc when one of the scientists came to the rescue. “He said, ‘Wait, I have a theory—the old dinosaur used to be allergic to leather.’ So they went out and threw leather boots and shoes and leather vests at it, and it went away.”
However, all of the movies and comics and horror stories Steve devoured also had a downside: they often caused nightmares. “My imagination was too big for my head at that point, and so I spent a lot of miserable hours,” he said. “With the kind of imagination I had, you couldn’t switch off the images once you’d triggered them, so I’d see my mother laid out in a white-silk-lined mahogany coffin with brass handles, her dead face blank and waxen. I’d hear the organ dirges in the background, and then I’d see myself being dragged off to some Dickensian workhouse by a terrible old lady in black.”
At the age of eight, he had a dream where he saw the body of a hanged man on a scaffold atop a hill. “When the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my own face, rotted and picked by the birds, but still obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me.”
He woke up and started screaming and couldn’t stop. “Not only was I unable to go back to sleep for hours after that, but I was really afraid to turn out the light for weeks. I can still see it as clearly now as when it happened.”
In 1958, Ruth moved the family from Connecticut to West Durham, Maine, a small town about thirty miles north of Scarborough, so she could care for her ailing, elderly parents, who were both in their eighties.
It was her sisters’ idea. The arrangement was that her siblings would offer Ruth food and a place, an old, rickety farmhouse with an outhouse out back. Steve, Dave, and Ruth would share the house and receive spare food and canned goods in exchange for caring for Mama and Daddy Guy, as they were known, who were beginning to have trouble taking care of themselves. Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law Ethelyn and Oren Flaws also lived nearby.
Ruth accepted the offer, and the three settled in West Durham in a neighborhood near Runaround Pond that Steve later described as consisting of “four families and a graveyard.”
Once the family had settled in, Steve discovered he was surrounded by relatives and the family history, exaggerations and gossip characteristic of small towns—including a few good ghost stories. By listening to the tall tales and rumors, he learned that people liked to invent truths where there were none. It was a valuable lesson for a budding writer.
Ruth came from a long line of Methodists, so her children dutifully attended services and Bible school several times a week at the tiny, two-hundred-year-old Methodist church next door to their house.
Fewer than twenty families attended the church, so the parish had no funds to retain a full-time preacher. The church drew on members of the congregation to lead services and preach sermons, a rotating selection that occasionally included Steve, though several times a year when they were feeling flush, parishioners would invite a traveling preacher to conduct services.
Hanging on one of the walls of the parish hall was a poster with the words METHODISTS SAY NO, THANK YOU. At Sunday school, children would dutifully learn their Bible verses and recite them from memory. For their efforts, they were rewarded with unadorned miniature crucifixes that the children could paint as they desired, deciding for themselves whether to add the bloody thorns on the hands and feet.
“I listened to a lot of fire and brimstone as a child,” Steve said. “Part of me will always be that Methodist kid who was told that you were not saved by work alone, and that hellfire was very long.” One story he heard that described the afterlife was about a pigeon that flies to a mountain made of iron to rub its beak on the metal only once every ten thousand years, and the time it took the mountain to erode is the equivalent of the first second of hell. “When you’re six or seven years old, that kind of stuff bends your mind a little,” he said, readily admitting the images from church have long influenced his stories and novels.
Stephen attended fifth and sixth grades in the Center Grammar School, a one-room schoolhouse a few doors down from his own. Because he had repeated the first grade, he was not only the biggest kid in the class but also the oldest. Despite his childhood illnesses, he’d shot up to a height of six foot two by the age of twelve.
West Durham was so small that it lacked a library, but once a week the state sent the Bookmobile to the town, a mobile library in a big green van. To Steve, it was a vast improvement over the library in Stratford, Connecticut, where he had only been allowed to check out books from the children’s section, most often Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys novels. With the Bookmobile, patrons could take out three books a week, and the kids could borrow books from the adult section. While browsing the adult shelves, Steve discovered several police-procedural novels by Ed McBain. A few pages into the first one he took home, a scene described the cops interrogating a woman standing in the doorway of her slum apartment dressed in nothing more than a slip. The police turn away and tell her to go get dressed, but instead she pushes her breast toward them, saying, “In your eye, cop!”
“Immediately something clicked in my head,” said Steve. “I thought, that’s real, that could really happen, and that was the end of the Hardy Boys and all juvenile fiction for me.”
From McBain, he progressed to Edgar Allan Poe and John D. MacDonald, running through the classics of horror, crime, and speculative fiction. Soon he was always the first in line when the Bookmobile rolled back into town.
As he had done back in Connecticut, Steve spent many Saturday afternoons sitting in the dark at the movies, and the Ritz Theater in Lewiston was one of his regular haunts. Since he was so tall for his age, the ticket clerk tried to charge him the adult price. He got in the habit of tucking his birth certificate into his pocket so he could verify his age.
As time passed, Steve began to retreat more into his books and movies. Even though the family was together with little chance of splitting up again, life at home was harder than in Connecticut, especially for Ruth.
For nearly a decade, the Kings had lived on very little cash, subsisting on barter and whatever their relatives could spare—a bag of groceries here and some hand-me-down clothes there. In summers, the farm’s well would inevitably dry up and they’d have to tote water from Ethelyn’s house a half mile away. Their own house had no bath or shower, so in the winters the boys would take a bath at their aunt’s house, then walk home through the snow, their bodies still steaming.
Steve would later compare their life to a sharecropping arrangement, where his mother worked long hours for little reward. “Those were very unhappy years for my mother,” he said. “She had no money, and she was always on duty. My grandmother had total senile dementia and was incontinent.” Ruth used an old wringer washing machine to do the laundry, and when she hung the diapers on the clothesline in winter, her hands started to bleed because the combination of the lye and the cold water dried out her skin. She had still not learned to drive a car and so was always dependent on others around her who did.
An unspectacular intimacy with death no longer so familiar to most Americans also characterized Stephen’s formative years. This became especially true once the Kings moved back to Durham. In rural Maine of the 1950s and ‘60s, families still dealt with their dead at home, instead of relying on a funeral home. Besides, most residents didn’t have the money to pay for an undertaker. Steve had seen a number of dead bodies—mostly elderly relatives laid out at his friends’ homes—along with the body of a man who had drowned in a pond in Durham.
In the late 1950s, the saga of Charles Starkweather captured the attention of the American public. With his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, the nineteen-year-old Starkweather went on a rampage, killing eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming—including Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and sister—over two months in the winter of 1957–58. Starkweather was caught, tried, and executed in 1959, and Fugate was sentenced to life in prison and paroled in 1976.
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sp; Young Steve was fascinated and revolted by the serial killer and started to keep a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about Starkweather’s exploits. He’d sit for hours, staring at the photos of the condemned killer, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. As usual, Ruth thought it wasn’t something her eleven-year-old son should be following so closely.
“Good God, you’re warped,” she told him when she found his scrapbook. But as he explained to his mother, he studied Starkweather so that if he ran into someone with the same deadened eyes on the street, he’d be able to recognize the killer and stay far away. But he realized even at that early age something else was at play.
“There’s always the urge to see somebody dead that isn’t you,” he said. “That urge doesn’t change because civilization or society does, it’s hardwired into the human psyche, a perfectly valid human need to say, ‘I’m okay,’ and the way I can judge that is that these people are not.
“To me, Charles Starkweather was totally empty. I was examining the human equivalent of a black hole, and that’s what really attracted me to Starkweather. Not that I wanted to be like him, but I wanted to recognize him if I met him on the street and get out of his way. You could see it in his eyes, to a degree. There was something gone in there. But I also understood that it was in me, and it was in a lot of people.”
But something else was behind his fascination with Starkweather. “There was a little voice inside my head that said, ‘You’re gonna be writing about people like this your whole life, so here’s the starting line, GO!’ ”
On the surface, Steve’s childhood looked similar to other boys’ lives in the 1950s: he hung out with his friends, tinkered with cars, and listened to rock and roll. The first record he owned was an Elvis Presley 78 with “Hound Dog” on the A side and “Don’t Be Cruel” on the flip side. He wore out both sides of the record playing it over and over. “It was like finding something that was very, very powerful, like a drug,” he said. “It made you bigger than you were. It made you tough even if you weren’t.”