On the Darwinian Appeal of Stephen King

What do King's 400 million copies say about our evolved taste in stories?

For avid readers, are there ever any books as important as the books you first fixed on in middle school and high school? Certain books, certain authors, throw an overlong shadow across your life, mostly thanks to their ability to transport you away from your awkward teenage self. Tolkien endures so well, despite his clunky prose, in part because he was so essential to the thirteen-year-old us. For others, that bitter old propagandist Ayn Rand holds a similar place of honor. Steinbeck or Stine, Atwood or Irving, some writers just linger.

Me, I’ve been an avid reader of Stephen King since I was fourteen. I’ve loved his ability to grab you by the lapels and toss you down a rabbit hole of his own making. Used to be, I could open a King novel and disappear for six hours. Few writers I’ve read since have been as absorbing.

And along with the rest of the world, I’ve always thought that King’s appeal must rest on his ability to infect us with a case of heebie jeebies. Certainly, that’s how Hollywood tends to read him, and that’s the drum the marketing folks try to beat. Puzzling to me, as I don’t care for other horror writers, and I’ve never really understood the appeal of horror movies. But what if, counterintuitively, King isn’t really a horror novelist at all?

Hoping to parse out the secret to his appeal, I began this post intending to analyze the first page or two from five or six different King novels. I expected to find that he introduced his “problem / solution” dynamic right away. As a writer, it’s axiomatic that it’s better to jump into the meat of the story as soon as possible. Whatever you’re really writing about, give it to us as soon as you can. In a murder mystery, you put the body on page one if you can. And with King’s brand of horror, you’d expect the monsters to come at you front and center. In Salem’s Lot, if he’s writing about vampires, shouldn’t we see a vampire first thing? In The Shining, shouldn’t the ghosts in the hotel pop up immediately? And so on.

But the vampires, the ghosts, the psychic abilities, those elements don’t typically show up until much later in King’s novels. And I would argue that this is because his books aren’t primarily about the horror. The problems his characters are navigating only deal tangentially with the supernatural. Instead, King’s books are about something else entirely.