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 my favorite author.
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.
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.
-ET
