Stephen King Revisited

  By: Matthew McConkey, X: mcconkey78    IT was Stephen King's most successful commercial novel to date. The book was #1 on The New York Times best-seller list for 14 weeks in 1986, 10 of those weeks consecutive. The novel was one of the most complex, horror-inducing works King has ever written. Nothing the author has written since has come close to the scale of what King created. There is a profound complexity of interwoven characters and events that crisscross each other in a way that would even make Charles Dickinson proud. IT has become the gold standard for literary modern horror today.   King's novel spawned a TV miniseries on ABC in 1990, and in 2017 and 2019, IT came to the big screen in two installments: IT Chapter 1 and IT Chapter 2 . Those two studio films, when they hit theaters, combined to gross $1.175 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, proving that the market and the hunger for IT and its titular villain, Pennywise, were fertile...

-Matthew McConkey “My nephew, Jon Leonard, dug around in my old stuff, a lot of it unfinished and long forgotten. He made a photocopy of one particular six-page fragment with a note attached, saying it was too good not to finish. I read it and thought he was right. Those first pages were written when I was thirty. I finished it when I was seventy-five.”- SK The Answer Man is a novella that was unpublished until King decided to include it in 2024’s You Like It Darker. It’s a supernatural-esque tale that doesn’t go overboard on the unseen. King does a great job of making this story feel like it could happen in the real world. When I was reading it, I swear it felt like a story from The Twilight Zone .  The story centers on Phil Parker, a young lawyer in Depression‑era New England, who chances upon a curious roadside booth. A man—the “Answer Man”—offers to reveal Phil’s future for a modest fee. As Phil returns over the decades, each insight seems to guide him toward success, love, and...

By Matthew McConkey You know, I hate saying that Stephen King’s early stuff is certifiable classics. I do. Why? Because it implies that he’s not written anything else to that standard since then that has been as good. This is totally untrue, of course, because the man has put out some of the best stuff in his career later on in his life. But damn, the beginning few novels were just amazing, weren’t they? So, here’s another certifiable classic novel that I think is one of King’s top self-books. It has everything in it that makes you want to keep turning the pages. It involves time loss, love loss, a man with the ability to foresee the future, a crazed murderer haunting the town of Castle Rock, and a political monster on the rise to the Oval Office. Yeah, this is all in one book. With all that is going on inside the pages and in this man’s life (John Smith), there is a question at the root of it all. And King asks us, his Constant Readers: If you could see the future and meet a man who w...

  -Matthew McConkey  One October night, I was with a friend and his daughter around my outdoor fireplace, discussing a multitude of subjects: Sports, TV shows, movies, and then books and authors came up. One author, in particular, was Stephen King .   My friend’s daughter knew that I was a student and Constant Reader of his. At seventeen, she was very curious about his books and stories and had even read some of his work. A few of the books she read, she didn’t fully understand, and put them down a quarter of the way through.  She told me that they were too "adult" for her. From there, she asked what I thought his best books were, scariest, and so forth, and what I would recommend from him. Most of all, she wanted to know why he was so difficult to read. I answered all those questions honestly. But then I got into this tangent about her last question on why King was so hard to read. I went into this notion of how old you really ought to be when you read Stephe...

  By Matthew McConkey  There are times in Stephen King’s work when the book has a message to give. In Needful Things, King showed us how much we as people could sell practically our souls to gain material possessions that aren’t in the end what we thought they were. In IT, King’s message was that it was okay to be afraid, as long as you knew that you had to be brave and face the monsters (physical or mental) no matter what. In The Stand, the message was loud and clear: we are the creators of our destruction and demise. Cujo is another novel by King that conveys a powerful message: We are the sum of our decisions. That message is on full display in a novel that King himself admits that he doesn’t remember writing very much. But I’ll bet that he was thinking about more than just a dog with rabies. On the surface, Cujo is about a St. Bernard that is bitten by a rabid bat and contracts rabies, slowly going mad as he chews people apart who cross his path. There’s more to Cujo in th...

By Matthew McConkey "The Fifth Step" , published in  Harper’s  magazine in March of 2020, was eventually collected in King's collection, You Like It Darker , in 2024. The story blew me away, simply put. Why? Because it harkened back to King’s earlier work. There was a certain, unexpected conclusion to the short that I literally never saw coming, and I had to re-read the last few paragraphs to make sure I had actually read what I thought I had.   This story, reminiscent of Stephen King's work, begins simply. You get an image in your mind of Harold Jamieson, a 68-year-old retired NYC Sanitation chief engineer who is just taking his life seemingly one day at a time in his advancing years. While sitting on his favorite bench in Central Park, reading a newspaper, a man sits down at the other end, much to Harold's annoyance.  This stranger strikes up a conversation with the old man and wants to pay him to listen to what he has to say. Harold waves off the money and li...