FROM THE BUCKET LIST OF STEPHEN KING — Reading Stephen King’s Favorite Books
If I can be one-angstrom of the “King-verse”, I would diligently call off the search party and feature myself on the cover page of Forbes as the next best debutante.
A literature student has an added value of being able to go through an “influencer loop”; for every greatest writers have been influenced by one of their predecessors which I like to call as “Literary Hierarchy”.
Novo Amor’s Halloween and a late night watch party of Reiner’s Misery (1990) had proved to be a delightful combination to compel my senses to go back to the metaverse on a Saturday. Apart from the nostalgic run via Amor’s discography in the background, this immaculate adaptation of Stephen King’s novel was dispersed into the atmosphere with the curious quotient of an introvert in an escape room.
Unlike the millennials, the classic age of literature hardly ever ended up spreading the word or marketing their favorite authors. So, we peek into their TBR closet! And, this habit has brought me into the Stephen King’s upside down.
The question pounds my head, “What really makes a great writer?” Obviously, it is a 3 A.M. introspective session, but having read Doctor Sleep too many times, Misery is just free fall under gravity — the gravity of Stephen King’s fiction.
And, if you thought The Shining vouched you to impolite nightmares, it’s time to reel in the stories that gives pleasure to the King Of Horror himself.
1.) LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.”
Okay! This needs to come with disclaimer.
I still remember how this gory piece of adventure fiction washed away my premonition of not putting up with a security blanket before deciding to read a book in high school. *for real*
We might not even need to dig much into Stephen’s state of mind; this book is a refracted dystopian reality which is open for us to relate, interpret and salvage the possibilities of human civilization when faced with absolute sense of freedom on the back of the wildest adversity.
Re-reading this 1954 classic speaks for the impact it has on Stephen’s work,
“It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands — strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat.”
Stephen King has mentioned Lord of the Flies in his novels, Cujo(1981) and Misery(1987). He has also used the name of the mountain fort of Golding’s allegorical world in Lord of the Flies, Castle Rock, as a fictional town in a number of his novels.
2.) WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams
“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.”
To highlight the abstract concept of “Literary Hierarchy”, Richard Adams’s fantasy novel, Shardik, finds its honorable place in Stephen King’s Dark Tower as a cyborg bear.
Sitting on computer screen while reading fandom wikipedia on Dark Tower series, I found this interconnected road intriguing as both the imagination of Richard Adams and Stephen King sets the idea of co-existence to its worst side. Yet, reading Watership Down is not a face-off.
The genius of Adams compels you to surrender your intuition and practicality to unfold and understand the meaning of this book. Imagine rabbits talking of the fear and challenges of sustainability and masking the downtrodden evolution of man made world, which exploits, suffocates and repeals its natural stance, one by one. Rabbits are in much sense representative of society, but more importantly, they represent the morality, courage, friendship and shaping of our individuality when there is a war of existences.
3.) BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
“Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
Hands down, this is one of the most violent literary piece I have read so far. Blood Meridian is emotionally exhausting. The embroidered cruelty, inhumanity reaching beyond the horizon of imaginable gore and amicably distorted protagonist who is too far out for the readers to reach and yet, finds his place inside the darkest trenches of thoughts.
Loosely based on historical characters from Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession, Blood Meridian is heavily adorned with religious notions, making you despicably justify your sanity (and even God’s, too.)
If there could be a substitute for the expression of hanging by the rendezvous of a jump scare which does not meet the typical status quo of horror, but instill your thoughts to a tightrope and intrude your every move to a free fall of gravity, Blood Meridian should be added to the dictionary!
P.S. : Look out for the Judge.
For all the fellow bookworms and literature enthusiasts, find a complete list of Stephen King’s Favorites here.
