Stephen King and the Horror of the Ordinary

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Eric Molinsky (1:00)

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molinsky. Neil McRobert is the host of a podcast about horror fiction called Talking Scared. He is also a huge Stephen King fan. He was very excited when King agreed to be a guest on the show. Actually, he was on the show twice.

And then Neil and Stephen King started emailing each other.

Neil McRobert (1:28)

I don't like to stay in my welcome. I get very self-conscious when I email him, because I think I don't want to be that guy. But every so often, it will just drop me a little missive with some like little horror anecdote or sometimes a little, he'll send me a story that's not quite finished yet and I get to read it. So yeah, it's a dream come true really for me.

Eric Molinsky (1:47)

Wait, he sends you some of his stories that he hasn't published yet?

Neil McRobert (1:50)

On occasion, yeah, he sent me a few things to look at. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's insane to me because I'm like, you know, everyone say that they're his biggest fan, but I will fight anyone in a cage who claims to be a bigger fan than me. So it's an incredible honor.

Eric Molinsky (2:06)

So being such a huge fan and then getting to talk to him, what were some of the questions, maybe some of the first questions you had, or now that you've gotten to know him, how do you understand his work a little bit differently?

Neil McRobert (2:21)

So I don't think I do understand it differently. What happened, and this is quite vindicated as well is, I had a sort of thesis about King's fiction that I put to him.

I basically said to him, does this theory hold water? And I can give you the theory in a moment, but his response was, it doesn't even leak. And I thought, that's great, right? Because I have long believed that Stephen King is a horror writer, nominally only. Obviously, he writes horror, he basically created the modern genre, right? But I have never believed that that is the stuff that really makes his heart beat. I think he writes American realism, or sometimes American Romanticism, where the monster is the plot device that kicks the stuff he really cares about into gear.

And I put that to him, he was like, yeah, that's exactly how he thinks of his own works. But that was nice to hear.

Eric Molinsky (3:17)

The idea that Stephen King is not really a horror writer kind of blew my mind. When I was growing up, the name Stephen King was synonymous with a certain kind of horror. The movies and shows adapted from his books were marketed on their high concept ideas or their standout horror moments, like the prom scene in Carrie.

Or Jack Nicholson going crazy in The Shining. Or the evil supernatural clown in It. Which was rebooted as a movie franchise and a show on HBO called Welcome to Derry. So, if the secret sauce of Stephen King's work isn't the horror, but everything in between, what's in that sauce?

Neil McRobert (4:22)

With all my years of reading, and I've read every single book he's ever published, at least twice, but I still struggle to really articulate what you call the secret sauce. And I know it has something to do with character, but lots of authors write great characters, right? But let's take the three books you've mentioned, so Carrie, The Shining and It, certainly three of his most famous titles.