Faith Szena Mr. Falkenstein CP English 10 January 5, 2018 Stephen King’s Horror in His Books Stephen King is one of the most famous horror writers in this time. King is a very powerful author whose books are read by many. His fame is due to the amazing ideas he has in his head and from his life experiences. King’s stories are very popular to many people. His stories include many different characters and places. He went through many things in life which is shown in his books. King was very poor most of his early life including his college years. His first book took him many years to write, but life experiences he faced helped him finish his first horror book. The book started as a story called, Carrie which ended up changing his life tremendously. …show more content…
Growing up, King was raised by a single mother after his father abandoned them when King was only 2 years old (Who is Stephen King). One life altering event that occurred when he was young was when he witnessed the death of one of his best friends which is said to have played a role in some of his darker writings (Who is Stephen King). When he was younger he loved to read horror novels and read a collection of short stories written by H. P. Lovecraft that were left behind from his father (Who is Stephen King). After reading these, he realized his life’s calling. Then after watching an alien movie he realized that horror is an emotion that we struggle to overcome (Madison 81). He had always wanted to be a writer at a very young age. He tried writing stories and sending them to magazines, but they were rejected. In college, King published his first short story that was put in the Startling Mystery Stories (Wukovits 28). Also, he wrote his first novel called The Long Walk which he entered in a book contest (Wukovits 28). After being rejected, he was discouraged from sending that book to the publisher (Wukovits 28). King’s college years were not that productive. By the end of college, he hadn’t published any …show more content…
An editor wanted to publish his book, Getting It On, but the company turned it down (Madison 86). Novel after novel was getting turned down. Then one day while sitting in his furnace room, he pulled out an unpublished short story and started to turn it into a novel, but he didn’t like the progress he was making on the novel, so he stopped working on it and forgot about it (Madison 86). Sometime after this occurred, his wife Tabitha found it and urged her husband to finish it and send it to the publishers (Madison 86). The book he sent was Carrie and it was his first published book that became a best seller. After writing more and more best sellers he worked with a comic artist to create a giant-sized comic book called Creepshow (Madison 88) Many of King’s top sellers were turned into movies. King writes so quickly that he started to write under another name and that was Richard Bachman (Madison 89). King writes most of his books in an office he built in his own home (Madison 89). He mostly writes in the morning and does other things for the rest of the day (Madison 89). Stephen’s novels have won many awards including the World Fantasy Award (Madison 89). Today, King is the author of 33 books and dozens of short stories and several screenplays (Madison 89). He has no plans to retire and he feels that writing is a way of staying young (Madison 91). Stephen King is one of the best known and
Introduced by tragedies early in his life, Edgar Allan Poe became one of the most successful writers, poets, and storytellers to ever live. Edgar Allan Poe had the intelligence to do anything he wanted to do, however, the pain of losing his loved ones always seemed to drive him towards a pen and paper. His emotions never failed to show through his writings, which helped the story line touch the readers. Poe became very close to several different women but each would die shortly after he came to love them. This only pushed him to write more emotionally. Poe had a natural talent for putting his real life experiences into a fictional story and making it seem as if it were really happening.
He used rhetorical techniques such as allusion, irony and metaphors. These were all ways of connecting to his reasoning’s by using an element of life or something that we are well aware of. He also used different types of appeals, which were pathos, logos and ethos. Each of these appeals had drawn us into his reading in different ways to connect to our emotions and the most affective was the common logic he brought and his credibility of being a well-experienced person in horror. Common logic is the best way to catch your readers attention because if they understand what you are proclaiming then they can grasp onto your argument. For Why We Crave Horror Movies, King gave both visible common logic and hidden. The hidden had to do with the psychological reasons to why we desire horror movies and how it can release our hidden, evil emotions that we normally keep inside of us. Also, it relieves us of stress to not be in the real world even if it is just for an hour or more. These hidden logic is more of a realization for the readers and come into sense these are the reasons why we truly do crave horror
...among the greatest American authors in history, the books and stories that he wrote showed that he indeed had a lot of potential but was wasted with partying, drinking, and fighting with his wife. F. Scott is a literally genius and is a writer all his own, he had a set of skills that no other author could match. He made have died young but the mark he left on this earth will not be wasted. Future generations will enjoy his books and other writings for years to come.
His legacy influenced a whole new genre of literacy. It influenced not just American but international literature. He was one of the first writers whom developed the genre of detective, fiction, and horror. He is known as the “Architect” of the modern short story. Poe was one of the first critics to focus on style in literary work. Steven King, Clive Barker, and others followed Poe’s footsteps. The genre of horror is bigger than ever today and Edgar Allan Poe was the forefront of this style of writing. French, Italians, and writers in Spanish and Portuguese acknowledge their debts to Poe. If not for Poe, we wouldn’t have all of the great horror and detective films and stories we still read to this day.
Stephen King is one of the most respected and well known men to ever write horror stories, behind Edgar Allen Poe of course. Stephen King is very famous all around the world for his novels such as It, Halloween, Carrie, The Shining, Pet Cemetery, as well as another amazing fifty-nine other novels. I have only read three of Kings books, Carrie, Pet Cemetery, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which I have selected for my book report. Personally The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was my least favorite, I did not find it frightening at all, and a little boring at times. It seemed like a nine year old would not be as intelligent as the the girl in the book and very unrealistic. Not that any of his other books are realistic, just this one did not satisfy me with the amount of horror even though it is classified as a horror story.
evidence of Stephen King being very interest in horror showed in his work in his early
Stephen King began abusing alcohol when he was sixteen years old. He said his childhood was unhappy for his substance abuse. King said he was scared of quitting drugs, he thought that, that would end his career. With the help and support of his family and friends, King continues to maintain his sobriety by attending AA meetings regularly. Though King was drinking in high school, he turned to harder drugs while attending the University of Maine. Stephen King did drugs such as marijuana, speed, and LSD. The consequences of his alcohol and drug abuse finally caught up to him. Just before his graduation, he got caught stealing traffic cones during a night of heavy drinking and was arrested. Stephen King says he dealt with his poverty and depression
Dr. King uses imagery in his writing that makes the audience visualize what he has seen. He knows that the white moderates have strong family values, so he reaches out to them by providing stories about children. There is one story about a little girl who has just seen an ad on television and when she asks her father if she can go, he has to look his daughter in the eye and tell her that ?Funtown is closed to colored children?(King 561). He then goes on to explain about how that forces that young child to grow up to feel inferior and to begin to hate because she has darker skin than the other children do. Then there is another story about the family taking a cross-country vacation and having to ??sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile?? because motels would not accept colored people (King 561). It ...
King owes his success to his ability to take what he says are “real fears” (The Stephen King Story, 47) and turn them into a horror story. When he says “real fears” they are things we have all thought of such as a monster under the bed or even a child kidnapping and he is making them a reality in his story. King looks at “horror fiction...as a metaphor” (46) for everything that goes wrong in our lives. His mind and writing seems to dwell in the depths of the American people’s fears and nightmares and this is what causes his writing to reach so many people and cause the terror he writes about to be instilled in his reader.
One can see many similarities between the two author’s style including concepts such as horror, mystery, and revenge, though each author is able to keep their individual touches. During his time, Poe innovated the genre by being one of the first to write mystery and crime stories. Poe was heavily influenced by the tragic events that occurred in his life including losing his parents, being separated from his siblings, losing his wife, suffering from poverty, and being addicted to alcohol. Unlike Poe, King experienced less tragedy throughout his life and took much influence from the works of Poe and other great authors. Without the works of Poe, Stephen King works would have never been the same and possibly would have not been
We all have cravings, be it for snacks or sweets, there is always something we desire. We crave horror in the same way. In Stephen King’s essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” he argues that people need to watch horror films in order to release the negative emotions within us. King believes that people feel enjoyment while watching others be terrorized or killed in horror movies. King’s argument has elements that are both agreeable and disagreeable. On one hand he is acceptable when claiming we like the thrill and excitement that comes from watching horror movies; however, his views regarding that the fun comes from seeing others suffer cannot be agreed with because the human condition is not as immoral as he claims it to be.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an extraordinary man, and his life helped change the views of others. He was primarily known for his heroic action in the 1960s that deal with the Civil Rights Movement. The literary content in each speech of his is breathtaking. King worked hard on his speeches; from the year 1957 to 1958 he wrote 208 speeches. King uses the literary element pathos in many of his speeches. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines pathos as “an element in experience or in artistic representation...
For such a successful writer, Stephen King really had no secret to his writing style. King has credited free writing for his best ideas. He also has a very down to earth way of looking at his fame. Stephen King would read for four hours, and then he would write for four hours or until he reached 2,000 words. In a Time magazine interview, King called this his nine to five approach and that he, “worked until beer o’ clock.” When asked where his ideas came from, King would often reply, “I have the heart of a small boy. . . And I keep it in a jar on my desk.” Also, he does not have just one particular way of writing horror, and what often sets off the terror in his readers most was the vast amount of detail portrayed.
First, Lovecraft’s use of diversity within his writings and genres was a prime reason for his success as an author. According to “Authors and Artists for Young Adults”, Lovecraft wrote stories from horror fiction to even supernatural fiction. (P. 2) But through further research, it states that he also wrote dark fantasy, gothic fiction, and science fiction. In addition to that, there was diversity in the type of literature he wrote as well, for example, he wrote poetry, short stories, novels, articles, and essays. (P.27) A few examples of his most popular works include The Dunwich Horror (Fiction), The Call of Cthulhu (Short Story), and The Crime of Crimes (Poetry). It is apparent that Lovecraft’s diversity in his genres affected the prompts and topics of his subjects.