Stephen King Revisited

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...