So This Is It

Whenever I saw Stephen King’s novels on bookshelves, I looked right past them. That old adage about covers aside, the visual vernacular of King always screamed gory, corny, and loaded with cheap thrills. Dark colours and creepy illustrations, paired with the author’s name in a dominating font, suggested predictable offerings, anodyne adrenaline spikes — a sort of automated user experience. “Junk food for the mind” was how it read to me.

As a kid, I fell into the trap of being a “serious” reader. Jane Austen fed my adolescent romantic fantasies. Dickens was there for any coming-of-age needs. I also forced myself to consume a few far too adult contemporary titles, selected for their golden awards stickers. Precocious, pretentious, I was doing my best to have no fun. And while I eventually loosened up, horror always seemed horribly beyond good taste.

You’ll imagine my surprise, then, when two different bosses, on separate occasions, brought up Stephen King, with esteem coming out of their ears. I’ll give their names, so you’ll understand my bewilderment: John Irving (the one who writes those dense tomes) and Justin Trudeau (the one who was prime minister for almost a decade).

Irving, an inveterate storyteller, often regaled me with tales of his friends and fellow literary luminaries, with King featured not infrequently. Through these stories, I came to learn that the two authors’ mutual respect ran deep.

Trudeau, who holds a bachelor’s degree in English, would spontaneously quote lengthy verses of centuries-old English poetry while preparing for big speeches. When I once asked him to name a favourite writer, he didn’t pause before declaring King near the top of the list.

I still harboured my prejudices, but I was starting to feel a bit red-faced about it.

Last summer, I took a sabbatical from federal politics. For seven gruelling years, my reading diet had been oversaturated with headlines, white papers, tax policy, and quantitative reports on economics — macro and micro. During the break, my brain went offline for two solid months. When I was ready to reboot, I asked one of my favourite reader friends, Dan, to recommend something smart but not taxing: “Stephen King.” With that, it was officially time to face my fears.

Reader, how wrong I had been. Yes, there were gory scenes that made me squirm. But the richly developed characters were so vivid that I felt their presence when I walked through life between chapters. Each twist, earned with careful plotting, resonated deeply and rewarded my attention. My God, the books were satisfying, mixing triumphs with tragedies and yielding fist pumps and gasps. Like all great literature, these deceptively simple stories proffered profound insights, the kind that help make sense of the broader chaos of existence.

Most recently, I finished The Stand (the unabridged, doorstop version), revered as King’s best by many critics. It’s the tale of a post-apocalyptic, post-plague America fractured by two competing visions for society. One leader seeks order through fear, looming under the gaudy lights of Las Vegas and killing suspected offenders without trial. Another, elderly and frail in body, draws people together to do the messy and imperfect work of cooperation. This isn’t the ham-fisted allegory it appears, largely because much of the action revolves around the plague survivors. Each character grapples with the pushes and pulls of King’s good-and-evil dyad, where bad deeds offer a release from uncertainty and pain and where goodness can feel like weakness and loneliness. As readers, we question the strength of our own principles and empathize with those who end up vulnerable to malevolent forces. We are with the survivors in the mire of desperation, searching for a light of any kind when lost in the frighteningly unfamiliar.

Storytellers have long asked us to embrace the anti-hero and to contend with the horrors encountered along life’s journey — whether through Catholic confessionals, heady philosophy, or a data centre’s worth of wellness podcasts. King’s novels are a particular salve, I think, because they offer a distinct sense of right and wrong, of virtue and wickedness.

Today it can feel as if the magnet that guides humanity’s moral compass has been atomically corrupted. That’s probably why I’m finding myself so drawn to books that delve into the courage required to be good and explore the struggle to resist our worst impulses.