There is no doubt that he is one of my favorite authors. I just love his prose and characters. But Swati never really got into him. She started off with ‘Christine’ once a very long time ago but I think she got to the fourth page before giving it up. She said it wasn’t her style and I was always sorry about that. She also doesn’t like Heinlein or Pratchett. I guess we don’t share our tastes in books. And that’s ok because I can never sink my teeth into the kinds of stuff she likes. She’s more of a Shakespeare and Milton type of woman. And the modern fiction she likes is along the lines of Frank McCourt and Nicolas Sparks.
With two small screaming kids in the house, there were a few rare moments of quiet a few nights ago and we were discussing authors. I knew she didn’t like horror but since I love the genre I was telling her all my reasons for reading horror. I love feeling scared (safely snuggled in my reading space that is) and I am kinda mesmerized by the occult. I also like the way King writes, his prose is so easy and fluid. One thought gently merges into another without any apparent splicing. Since I was praising him so much, she asked whether Stephen King ever wrote stuff that didn’t have so much horror or bad language. He actually has but the only one that I have without horror is his autobiography, ‘On Writing’, written about a decade back.
Its not really my type of book from him but since I was curious about what makes a writer like him, I did read it when it came out. Since then, its been laying around eating dust at the bottom of one of the countless piles of books lying around the house. To be honest, I don’t even remember much about it except vague flashes of a difficult early life. But it was better than nothing, so the next day I searched around the house and finally dug it out for her.
She doesn’t get much reading time these days since Anya is more than a handful and requires continuous supervision and attention. But she did start reading it and when I came home from work that day, she confided that she actually liked his style. True, it does have some bad language in places but apparently it wasn’t the reason she didn’t read him earlier, it was solely the genre. The language was just another proverbial straw.
Maybe ‘Christine’ wasn’t the best choice to start out King with but, to me at least, it is one of his better works. So now I’m thinking when she’s done with this one, I’ll try to persuade her to start ‘The Stand’, my favorite King.
The movie versions of his books are pure rubbish. There is about as much depth in them as the screen its projected on. So we have never really watched the movies though they are a regular feature on cable here. The fun of Stephen King is not in the story but in the way he tells it. Without his inimitable story-telling and the depth of his characters, his works would never have appealed to me as much as they do.
And now I am hopeful of another Stephen King fan in this house.
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