Of all the accolades lauded upon Stephen King by emcee George Stroumboulopoulos in his opening remarks at Thursday night’s Canon Theatre event, one resonated with a power that sent waves of affirmative nods through the crowd. The reason King is so beloved, Strombo said, is because his work introduces so many young people to the joys of reading adult fiction.
Talk about hitting the nail on the head. If there had been time to do a survey, probably at least half the crowd would have named King as their guide into novel-length treatments of such heavy themes as family disintegration, alcoholism, death, first love, power politics and adolescent angst, all wrapped in magnificently plotted tales of vampires, plagues, psychopaths, ghosts, children in peril and murderous clowns and cars.
King certainly played that role in my reading life. I came to reading at an early age, but throughout my childhood remained committed to non-fiction, cramming my mind with books on cave men, dinosaurs, space travel, rocks and minerals, jungle animals, polar bears, fighter planes, battle ships, famous battles and ancient kingdoms.
Yes, I was that kid.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love a good story or that I hadn’t taken a crack at writing a few tales of my own. In Grade Four I even wrote the opening chapters of a semi-autobiographical novel about a school trip to South America cut short by a spectacular plane crash in the remote regions of the Amazon River, a crash that suspiciously killed off the teachers and students I was currently harbouring a grudge against. My friends and I escaped unscathed from the wreckage and swam through piranha-infested waters to safety, only to find ourselves besieged by dinosaurs in a jungle kindgom “lost to time” — and heavily borrowed from the 1933 version of King Kong.
I read the odd YA novel and compilation of myths or ghost stories but until I was 12, story, character and narrative action were the purview of film and to a lesser degree television. I had also discovered the counterfeit joys of movie novelizations movies (Grizzly, Day of the Animals, Star Wars) but those paperbacks simply replicated the cheaper effects of their source films. These were pre-VCR days — I needed a narrative fix until the next movie opened at the Yorkdale cinemas.
Film novelizations brought me to the horror section of my local Coles bookstore often enough to familiarize me with Stephen King’s early novels. The plot descriptions sounded interesting enough and I loved the covers, but since the novels weren’t based on any movies I’d seen I wasn’t willing to blow half my allowance on unproven commodities.
Then in the summer of 1978 I picked up a used copy of The Shining during a trip to a friend’s cottage. The plot grabbed me early. Desperate family man Jack Torrance is offered a job caretaking an isolated and possibly haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains for the winter; his son sees into the future and the future is bleak; bring on the ghosts.
I soon surrendered to the novel’s complex but tightly paced plot. But what was up with all the internal monologue, back story, Gothic symbolism and long descriptions of the hotel and the mountains? Did I really need to know what Jack Torrance was thinking? The novel demanded a level of mental commitment that challenged my movie-drenched senses. I had to pay attention but by doing so the novel delivered emotional pay offs and sustained moods that no film I’d seen could match. Scenes seemed to play out in my imagination in real time and with a vibrancy that obliterated my immediate surroundings. When I put the book down to eat a meal or go for a swim, the doomed Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel faded into the background of my consciousness without losing any of their living intensity. The novel also scared the living bejesus out of me.
Without knowing it, I was being initiated into the uniquely immersive power of literary fiction (and poetry and memoir, for that matter), an immersion that achieves its power precisely through the level of attention, commitment and personal associations brought to the work by each reader. That initiation would eventually lead me to authors whose works largely forgo narrative thrust to explore deeper levels of characterization, style and experimentation but without King’s novels to open the gates I can’t say I would have attempted the journey.
Strombo was right. Stephen King is the author who taught a lot of us how to read.
Shelf Absorbed is James Grainger’s running colour commentary on the world of books.
