Is There An Age Requirement To Read Stephen King?

 

-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 Stephen King’s work. I’m not saying that there should be a certain age to read this writer’s work. Certainly not. 

But you've got to know this: King operates in the sandbox of emotions and life experience. If you can relate to what a particular character is going through, then that's where Stephen King hooks you.

Suppose you’re seventeen and you’re trying to tackle something like Lisey’s Story, Pet Sematary, or even Gerald’s Game. In that case, you should have some life experiences behind you so you can relate to these middle-aged characters written by a middle-aged man, or at the very least be able to empathize with them. I think Pet Sematary gets lost on readers who have no kids or those who are still in their teens to early twenties. 

At seventeen or maybe even in your mid-twenties to early thirties, you’re not going to be able to understand complex mortality novels like Lisey’s Story and her struggle with her late husband’s absence in her life. Some of us older readers who haven’t lost a spouse can’t even relate. But we can piece it together through the life experiences we have accrued at the time.

Teenagers and younger crowds are more apt to relate to Carrie. The novel doesn’t go over their heads because they are old enough to understand how high school can be hell when you’re the outsider, constantly looking in, or if you just don’t fit in at all. Why? Because we all went through it during our teens. At one point or another in our lives, we’ve been Carrie White to varying degrees.

King reads really well when he writes relatable characters, feelings, and situations that connect us to the story he is telling. If we’re not connected to the characters or subject matter in some way, then the story falls apart and lacks depth. It becomes a book with just words and pages. In other words, there's no emotional response. And that's what books are: an internal response, a journey.

King’s bread and butter over the past four decades is to paint a picture, a story, where you can relate and see the world he has created; to feel it, smell it, and to see it in your mind's eye. However, in many of his works, you need to have some age and life experience to better understand what his characters are going through at the moment. A case in point would be Pet Sematary.

Pet Sematary is a scary book. No doubt. It explores death and how we perceive and cope with it. Published in 1983, it remains his heaviest book on death. The reason that it is scary, at least to me, is that as a parent, you never want to see your kid die. That’s only part of the horror of this novel. Now, if a teen reads this book, they will likely look at it at face value. The book will be about the dead coming back from a place where death holds no court. And they’d be right. But as you get older and revisit King’s work with a much more mature eye, you’ll find a deeper meaning to his work than you did in your younger years. 

Pet Sematary pulls that emotion from you as a parent, and King asks a simple question with this novel: how far would you go to bring back your dead child? Younger people, I don’t think, fully grasp that question or the tone of the book. Perhaps adult readers with no kids at all wouldn’t be able to get what the book is really about. 

The Shining is another example of how it takes an older reader to get Stephen King. On the face, The Shining is about a ghostly hotel. However, the aspect that gets lost in the book for younger readers, those who aren’t married or have kids of their own, is the dynamic between Danny and Jack, and Jack and Wendy. I read The Shining when I was a kid, around 13 or 14, and I found it boring. I still powered through it, but I didn’t get what it was really about. Why? Because a grown man, with a family, was writing about issues that I had no idea about, as it concerned being married with children and having problems with your wife that could end in divorce. 

I was a teenager and couldn’t relate to the characters' struggles with each other at all. The only thing that was relatable to me was the haunted hotel. I knew about haunted places because I had read many young adult books about haunted houses beforehand. So, I got that part: the nuclear family imploding, not so much.

In summary, King is a much better read in most of his work when you’ve got some age and experience on you. I'm not saying you can’t give his books a try if you’re younger. However, it helps if you're older and have had some life experiences, such as marriage, children, a job you dislike, financial struggles, difficulties paying the bills, relationship problems, or internal or external issues. King writes about ordinary people with ordinary problems who are thrust into extraordinary situations. 

Not every King story is like this. A lot of his work is readily available for all ages to enjoy. It helps to understand the context of some of his heavier novels if you are a little older. It certainly helped me because I tried to read Gerald’s Game when I was a late teen, and I was COMPLETELY lost. When I picked it up again in my mid-30s, I got it. I understood it. I got how the gravity of the situation of being molested must have felt for Jessie Burlingame.

When you’re young, you’ll try reading King. And for the most part, you can access his short stories pretty easily in terms of comprehension. Most of his shorts are suitable for all ages and life experiences. Short stories like "The Boogeyman", "Strawberry Spring", "The Man in the Black Suit", "Mile 81", "Rainy Season", "The Road Virus Heads North", and "Night Surf" are just a few of the stories that younger readers can pick up and read with abandon because they are just plain run and gun reads. No significant life experience is required. 

However, I can say this: if you read a Stephen King novel when you were young and were turned off by it, I encourage you to revisit it, because hopefully, now that you’re older with some life experience behind you, you can re-read that book and appreciate it. I guarantee that you’ll see it in a different light and come to understand more than you did when you first encountered it. I sure did.