My love-hate-love relationship with Stephen King

Stephen King was the first "name" author that I started reading. Before him I would just pick up books because I thought the premise was intriguing or I really loved the cover - or both.

During my teens I became obsessed with the horror genre. I was a regular reader of Fangoria magazine and I would watch as many horror movies as I could - good or bad - I was an easy to please viewer. When I started reading books, King was the obvious choice since I had already seen many of the film adaptations. But his books did not go down easy with the teenage me, they were WAY too long and I often either didn't finish them or gave up altogether. Such was the case with The Dead Zone, which I stopped reading three quarters of the way through and with It and The Stand where I skimmed the last part of the books since I was just tired of reading.

My frustration grew so much that I made a solemn vow - I will NEVER AGAIN read a book over 500 pages in length. I figured any author worth his salt could tell a story, even an "epic" one, in less than 500 pages.

And so it went for a few years, I swore off King's massive volumes and concentrated on shorter, more concise tales. But as I got older, I reconsidered, and decided to give the master of horror another shot. I read Insomnia, Salem's Lot and some of the short story collections like Skeleton Crew and my interest was rekindled. Now as an older reader, long novels didn't scare me off and I had the patience to see them through. I started to see where King was coming from as a writer and what he wanted to achieve with the reader. His are character driven stories (like From A Buick 8 pictured above) that take their time to sink in, but when they do the reader is richly rewarded. I still think his novels are too long but I'm willing to trust him in that he knows how long his novels need to be. I'm now tackling the massive Under the Dome (1000 plus pages!) and I'm in it for the long haul.