When I logged on to Amazon (on the customer-facing side) today, I noticed a new John Grisham short story, “The Law Student.” The short story is a standalone prequel to one of Grisham’s novels. “The Law Student” is about 5,000 words long.
This seems to be a trend in New York publishing of late: novelists publishing short stories that are either based completely in standalone narratives, or are lead-ins to novel-length works.
I’m personally a fan of short stories, both as a reader and as a writer. I recently finished reading a Tom Clancy doorstopper of a novel from the 1980s: Red Storm Rising. Published in 1987 and weighing in at 725 pages, Red Storm Rising was the perfect thick-spined novel for the mall bookstore era. But Red Storm Rising was also at least two hundred pages too long.
There are many perfectly serviceable story ideas that simply don’t require or justify those massive lengths. Consider, for example, my horror tale Family Secrets. This one came to just under 16,000 words. Technically speaking, Family Secrets is a novelette. You might also call it a “long” short story.
Family Secrets is a very gripping story at 16,000 words, if I may say so myself. I would not, however, have wanted to expand the story to a typical 60,000-word novel length. Family Secrets is based on a nightmare I had back in April. Stories based on dreams, even horror stories, are seldom the stuff of full-length novels.
Needless to say, short stories should be priced appropriately. This is a rule that I always follow. I also place most of my fiction in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, where you can read it for free.
The latest installment of DEADLY BYWAYS is now available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.
Victim Number Eight (Deadly Byways Book 4)
Amazon book description:
The Bywayman has taken another victim.
A Saturday night in January 1982.
The teenage Sharon Asher was supposed to be going on a date.
Instead, her date is murdered at a lonely gas station—and Sharon disappears into the night.
Detective Will Hayworth knows exactly what that means.
Sharon is the eighth person believed to have fallen victim to the mysterious predator stalking the back roads of southwest Ohio. The police have a description of the killer. They have a composite sketch. They even have a possible suspect.
There is only one problem.
They are looking for the wrong man.
While the investigation follows a false trail, Sharon awakens in an underground prison beneath a remote barn. Another captive is already there. And the man holding them has developed a system for keeping his secrets buried.
But Sharon isn’t willing to become just another missing-person photograph.
As the police struggle to find a killer who has spent years hiding in plain sight, Sharon begins looking for a way out.
And inside the killer’s own home, someone else is beginning to realize that something is terribly wrong.
Victim Number Eight is the fourth novel in the Deadly Byways series—a psychological crime thriller set in early-1980s Ohio, where the most dangerous man on the road may be the one no one suspects.
For some of us, Halloween is inseparable from memories of childhood: plastic masks, drugstore costumes, jack-o’-lanterns glowing on front porches, piles of candy, and suburban streets that seemed much darker and more mysterious after sunset.
12 Hours of Halloween takes place on Halloween night in 1980. Three friends—Jeff Schaeffer, Leah Carter, and Bobby Nagel—decide to go trick-or-treating one final time before adolescence brings their childhood Halloween traditions to an end.
They expect an evening of candy, pranks, and perhaps a few manufactured scares.
Instead, they find themselves trapped in a very different kind of Halloween.
A sinister teenager known as the “ghost boy” warns them that they will endure twelve hours of trial. Soon their familiar suburban neighborhood begins to change around them.
Haunted houses. Possessed trees. Restless spirits. And a terrifying figure called the Head Collector, who roams the nighttime streets looking for his next trophy.
But 12 Hours of Halloween isn’t only about monsters.
It is also about that strange boundary between childhood and adolescence—when old friendships begin to change, childhood certainties disappear, and feelings that were once simple suddenly become complicated.
Jeff believes he is falling in love with Leah. His longtime friend Bobby, meanwhile, is becoming someone Jeff no longer completely understands.
And all of this happens during a single long Halloween night.
A Halloween story for the Gen X generation
I wrote 12 Hours of Halloween very much in the tradition of the supernatural stories I grew up with.
If you enjoy the autumnal nostalgia and childhood wonder of Ray Bradbury—particularly stories in which the ordinary world seems only a few steps away from something strange and supernatural—you may find something familiar here.
The setting is deliberately Gen X: Halloween 1980, before smartphones, before social media, and before parents could track their children electronically.
Three kids go out into the October darkness, largely on their own.
And the darkness turns out to contain far more than they bargained for.
12 Hours of Halloween is a coming-of-age story, a supernatural thriller, and a nostalgic trip back to the Halloweens of another era.
With October almost here, this is a good time to take that trip.
12 Hours of Halloween is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. It is also available to read through Kindle Unlimited.
(And that’s why indie authors have to spend so much money on Facebook ads—and worry endlessly about AI)
The other day I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came upon an ad for an indie-published military science fiction series.
The ad was slickly produced with AI video that was only available to movie studios a few short years ago. The ad promised tales of drone swarms, planets in peril, and gritty space marines!
Hoo-rah!
I was curious. And so I exited Facebook and did a little research on the author using Google. I also searched for his books on Amazon.
He was the author of a five-book space marine saga.
Hoo-rah!
As soon as I returned to Facebook, Meta’s algorithm continued to show me ads from this same author.
But that wasn’t all. Meta also had now identified me as someone interested in space marine stories (hoo-rah!)—probably because of my Googling and my searches on Amazon.
For the rest of the day I was served more ads for indie-authored space marine sagas. They all had the same exact tropes.
A planet in peril!
Terrifying aliens!
Drone swarms!
Space marines!
Hoo-rah!
But no discussion of mind-numbing sameness in indie publishing would be complete without mentioning the romance field. Indie romance authors now write almost exclusively in hyper-focused niches: hockey romance, billionaire romance, enemies to lovers, cowboy billionaire romance, etc. (And that’s without delving into the really weird, hyper-focused romance niches, which I don’t care to mention here.)
There is an indie author who openly copies the Jack Reacher novels. I mean—openly copies them to the point of borderline plagiarism. The hero of these novels behaves exactly like Jack Reacher, all the way down to Reacher’s famous black coffee habit.
Indie publishing was supposed to provide room for creative freedom and literary diversity. (I mean that word in its best, truest sense.) But then the indie author “gurus” convinced indie authors to pick a narrow lane, and mass-produce the same kinds of books written by other authors working in that same lane.
This has made most of indie publishing both tiresome and mediocre. The market is filled with “me-too” offerings that capitalize on prefabbed packages of tropes.
This must bore the bejesus out of readers. I mean—seriously—how many books of the exact same kind does the market really need?
It has also made indie authors highly dependent on an increasingly complex, ridiculously expensive PPC ad ecosystem. Most authors working inside constricted trope lanes have little space to differentiate themselves. They must therefore rely on the brute force of high-bid, pay-per-click advertising. Many indie authors are spending more than half their revenues on Meta and Amazon ads. Some indie authors are outright underwater because of high ad spends.
That path is not for me. Whether you like my storiesor not, each one of them is mine. I would never write by committee with “beta readers” (one of indie publishing’s most ridiculous concepts). Nor would I ever want to churn out repetitive stories to a trope standard. If I’d wanted to march in lockstep with a specific, clannish little group, I would have stayed in the corporate world.
But there’s another problem with the lemming-like approach so common in indie author circles. Many indie authors are fretting about the threat from AI: software penning novels—whiz bang!—with a handful of prompts.
The best way to yield literature to soulless AI is to make each story a soulless, standardized product. Yet that’s exactly what so many indie authors are doing nowadays.
I am drawn to foreign locations. Some of you know that I’m an avid, lifelong student of foreign languages.
At the same time, travel involves many unknowns. There is a lot that can go wrong… especially if you encounter supernatural entities at your destination.
That’s the idea behind my Terrifying Travels series.
The most recent addition to the series is THE WITCHES OF HARMONY, which involves restless 17th-century spirits in the fictional Greater Boston town of Harmony, Massachusetts. Check it out on Amazon.
Amazon book description:
Some business trips are better left unbooked.
Bill Preston has spent years traveling the country for his job, working trade shows in convention centers from one coast to the other. So when he’s assigned to an industrial expo in Harmony, Massachusetts, he expects another routine week on the road.
Then a coworker warns him about Harmony.
He won’t say exactly what happened there. Only that he never wants to go back.
Bill soon discovers that Harmony is a picture-perfect New England town with a history no one wants to discuss. There are whispered stories about witches who escaped the Salem trials—only to meet a more terrible fate in Harmony.
There are warnings not to go outside after dark.
And there are things in Harmony that only certain people can see.
Bill considers himself a rational man. He doesn’t believe in witches, ghosts, or ancient curses.
But something in Harmony has noticed him.
And before this business trip is over, Bill may discover that some places never escape their past.
The Witches of Harmony is a supernatural horror tale of haunted history, business travel, and a New England town with a secret it has been keeping for more than three hundred years.
It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.
Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.
The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.
And he really wants to come inside.
That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.
Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”
In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.
At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.
Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.
That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”
I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.
“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.
You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.
If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…
You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.
Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.
If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”
And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.
Seth Godin has written an uncharacteristically scathing piece on the Hobbesian state of Amazon advertising. His basic thesis is that Amazon’s reliance on PPC ad revenue has created some perverse incentives.
The company used to focus on delivering the optimal product listings to consumers at the lowest prices. All of this was powered by Amazon’s internal search engine.
This process is known as organic discovery, and it benefited both buyers and sellers.
Organic discovery still exists to a certain extent on Amazon. But now there is something more nefarious and complicated in the mix. Amazon now makes about a billion dollars per week from search ads. PPC (pay-per-click) ads litter every available space on Amazon, including the top of your search results. Because these ads are now so plentiful and prominent on Amazon, anyone who sells there must engage in PPC advertising.
This of course includes new entrants to a particular market, but not only new entrants. Established players must also now invest substantially in defensive advertising on the platform.
Consumers don’t benefit from this excessive ad competition. On the contrary, they end up paying higher prices (because sellers must now recoup high ad costs in product pricing), as well as more limited and shoddier product lines. This is what Seth Godin calls “the Amazon tax”. “Amazon,” declares Godin, “is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.” Make of that what you will.
About a decade ago, I read a review of Mary Miller’s 2014 novel, The Last Days of California, in a print magazine. The reviewer, a book critic whom I knew by name and trusted, highly recommended Miller’s novel.
I was skeptical. The Last Days of California is a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story. I was a middle-aged man. Not long before that, a young woman in my social circle had recommended John Green’s emotional teen novel The Fault in Our Stars. Against my better judgment, I had purchased The Fault in Our Stars and tried to read it. I was unable to finish—not because The Fault in Our Stars was a bad book, but simply because I was the wrong reader for it.
Nevertheless, I ordered The Last Days of California from Amazon. The book promised to be not only a coming-of-age story, but also a story about the dynamics of 21st-century family life with a little bit of the culture wars mixed in. I was intrigued.
I’m glad I took a chance on The Last Days of California. It turned out to be a wonderful story, even though this is the kind of book I rarely read. (My personal reading tastes veer more toward Michael Connelly and Lee Child.)
But the collective readership of Amazon and Goodreads does not agree with me—at least not the ones who are leaving ratings and reviews. At the time of this writing, The Last Days of California has a 3.5 cumulative average on Amazon and a 3.4 cumulative average on Goodreads.
If I had consulted the online peanut gallery, I would have skipped Mary Miller’s book entirely. Fortunately, by 2014 I already knew the truth about mass online review venues like Amazon and Goodreads.
The Last Days of California, by Mary Miller (Amazon product page, 8/25/2026)
In 2012, it was discovered that John Locke, a bestselling indie author famous for his Donovan Creed series, purchased reviews from review farms. He personally compensated some other reviewers.
Black hat practices like that are harder to carry out in 2026. (There was a widespread backlash over the John Locke scandal, and Amazon took some steps to penalize outright review scammers.)
But gray hat practices persist in the publishing industry. Major publishers and imprints retain lists of friendly reader-reviewers, who can always be counted on to give a particular author a 5-star review. Indie authors are not far behind. Most know better than to specifically compensate for reviews, but there are still indie authors who will raffle iPads for their reader-reviewers. That sends a message—and broadcasts certain incentives. Continue reading “Online book reviews and ratings: take them with a large grain of salt”
This morning I received an email from a co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment. In the subject line of the email, she informed me that she wanted to option the movie rights to one of my books.
The immediate problem? The book won’t be released for another month. It is currently listed on Amazon as a preorder. I haven’t sent out review or ARC copies. Nor do I use so-called “beta readers.” So unless the co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment somehow gained access to my personal files, there is no way she could have read the book in question.
The email also came from a Gmail account. Gmail accounts have unfortunately become synonymous with this kind of scam email in recent years. I say “unfortunately” because in the past, Gmail was regarded as one of the more reputable email services.
Scam emails are nothing new on the internet, of course. As far back as the late 1990s, many of us would receive scam emails claiming to represent the Nigerian lottery. All we had to do was forward our banking information so that the lottery officials in Lagos could deposit the amount that we’d won. So easy!
But AI enables internet scammers to personalize their messages. Authors—most of whom have their contact information online—have become salient targets. A scammer can set up an AI agent that scrapes book descriptions from the internet. Then the same AI can craft and send emails that seem semi-legitimate.
I was (very) briefly fooled by one such scam earlier this year. I received a Gmail message from an author in one of the genres in which I write. He claimed to have read one of my books and greatly admired it. In this case the book had been out for a while and found some readership. That was the first element of believability.
The scammer also did not purport to be Stephen King, John Grisham, or another celebrity author well known to the general public. The impersonated author had received some media attention in the United Kingdom, but would generally be unknown to American audiences or people who are not avid readers.
The email, moreover, seemed genuine. The content of the message suggested that its originator had indeed read one of my books and was at least familiar with the basics of the theme and plot.
What did I do? I replied. I thanked the author for having read my book and taking the time to send me an email. I made a vague promise to check out one of his books. I assumed that would be the end of the matter.
But then I received a reply only hours later. The slightly famous author wanted to know details about my writing process. How did I come up with my brilliant ideas, and develop them so beautifully?
At this point, my built-in BS detector went off. On a hunch, I checked the author’s website. The author maintained a blog and his most recent post indicated that someone had been impersonating him and sending out fake emails in his name. So that was that.
When authors are targeted, such frauds are usually long plays. The aim is to gain trust, and then convince the dupe to spend a large sum of money on a specious PR agency or promotional scam—which will inevitably be based in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or South Asia.
How many authors are fooled by such scams? Well, I replied to one such email once. Spend a week in any writing forum on Facebook, and you’ll spot a post by at least one individual who declares—breathlessly and not nearly dubiously enough—that John Grisham or Stephen King has emailed them to ask them what they’re working on. I suspect that most would-be victims smell a rat before sending money. But phishing scams in general still have a success rate of 2.7 to 5 percent, according to recent statistics.
Once again, it is important to keep in mind how AI has changed the nature of scamming. It is no longer necessary for tricksters to rely on lowest-common-denominator contrivances like overseas lottery claims. A clever scammer can now personalize a phishing scam for each one of us. And with AI, he can do that at scale.
This new landscape of online fraud has affected my behavior. I don’t give my personal email address out to anyone new anymore under any circumstances. When I absolutely must give out an email address as a consumer, I use one of several throwaway accounts that I have developed and set up solely for such purposes.
The email address on my author website likewise is a throwaway account that I use as a buffer. If I determine that an email sent to this account is legitimate, I will then reply via my regular author email address. (Note: I did not reach this stage of trust with the aforementioned scammer who claimed to be the British author.)
And I haven’t even mentioned the most pernicious email scam of all. There are millions of AI agents on the internet that are trying to break into our personal email accounts every minute of every day. Their aim is to use our email accounts to gain access to our banking information. Or—in lieu of that—to use our email accounts to send out more scam emails to more unwary souls.
Which brings us to email marketing. During the initial internet boom of twenty-five years ago, an entire cottage industry developed around email marketing. The B2B and B2C online marketing spaces are filled with claims that email marketing is still just as profitable as it was in 2001 or 2005.
The writing and publishing world is filled with vendors and consultants whose business models are based on email marketing. “Build your mailing list!” they declare, as they attempt to sell you a system for luring potential readers through a labyrinthine email funnel.
If you’re selling or marketing anything legitimately, an email list is probably still worth having and maintaining. But it’s also important to realize that the online environment has changed since 2001 or 2005. I know many adults who have eliminated email entirely, relying instead on their smartphones and text messages (game-changing innovations that did not exist in 2001 or 2005) for all online communications.
When every other email message is a scam, we’re all just a lot more wary of email.
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
No cell phones. No GPS. No cameras everywhere. People hitchhiked. Strangers disappeared. And a lonely road could take you somewhere you never intended to go.
DEADLY BYWAYS is my new six-book series of character-driven crime stories set against the dangerous roads and hidden places of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The first book, THE DUNGEON, is set in 1979.
All six books will be released during the second half of 2026.
THE DUNGEON is available now on Kindle and in Kindle Unlimited.
There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.
This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.
Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.
The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Beverly gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)
I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.
When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.
That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.
A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.
As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.
These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:
The Woman in Crosley Tower is a new title for preorder in my Uncanny Ohio series. It’s a novella of about 24,000 words. The novella will be released on June 26, 2026.
This horror/dark fantasy story is based on a single question: What would happen if a woman disappeared inside a building in the University of Cincinnati during the summer of 1987, and emerged 39 years later?
There is a lot more to it than that, of course. This is a story for fans of parallel world stories, and tales of liminal zones (like the “backrooms” urban legend). And since much of the story is set in 1987, there is also a generous portion of Gen X nostalgia, an element which is rapidly becoming part of my “brand”.
The Woman in Crosley Tower will be initially released in digital-only format (Kindle). For those of you who like to read on paper (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course!) the title will be released in a combined volume with several other Uncanny Ohio titles later in the summer/fall.
Also, The Woman in Crosley Tower will be in Kindle Unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. So you can read it there if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published.Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from myfavorite author.
Original hardcover dust jacket for It, 1986
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
Stephen King on the cover of Time magazine, 1986
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
