Stephen King
I'm a wimp, I admit it. Horror movies give me nightmares and scary books leave me freaked out for weeks. I like happy endings. It should go without saying, then, that I'm no fan of Stephen King, right? Wrong.
When I was growing up, movies like Carrie, Christine, and Cujo were big hits with my friends. I never saw them myself (see earlier mention about nightmares), but I knew the stories. Some of my friends went a step farther and read the books, assuring all of us that the books were much scarier than the movies. Their breathless reports were more than enough to convince me that I should stay far away from anything Stephen King had written.
When I was in high school I had grown sufficiently brave to give the film adaptations of Misery and Pet Sematary a try, and having lived to tell the tale, I went so far as to watch The Shining. I didn't find any of them especially frightening--the really scary movies, in my opinion, are the ones that could actually happen to me, and none of those fit in that category--but I still avoided the books. By then it was a well-known fact to me--verified by adults, even--that the books were much, much worse than the movies, truly the stuff of which nightmares are made.
Somewhere along the line I began to poo-poo Stephen King novels as so much brain candy, something like Harlequin romances for the darker set. I'm not sure how I came by this opinion, having never read a word he had written, but it probably had something to do with disdain being much cooler than fear. It wasn't that I was afraid to read the books, you see, it was that I had better things to do with my time.
Fast forward a number of years. I was working a mind-numbing job at a data-entry center and my co-workers and I whiled away the hours listening to books on tape, checked out from the library and rented from the video store. It was during those years that I had my first experience with a Stephen King book. I resisted for the longest time, but there came a point one evening when there was nothing else to choose from and anything, anything, had to be better than sitting story-less for eight hours with only the clack-clack of hundreds of keyboards in my head.
I can't remember now which was the first one I listened to, but over time I gained a healthy, if at first grudging, respect for Stephen King as a writer. He is a master story-teller, and whenever I read or hear his stories, I can't help but wish that I were so skillful a writer. Some of the books he has written (for instance, Bag of Bones, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile) have stayed with me for years, lines and scenes from them popping up in my mind when I least expect them. One of my favorite pieces by him is from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a story called "My Pretty Pony," and I love it as much for his use of the language as for the storyline itself.
When I heard a few years ago, then, that Stephen King was coming out with a writer's manual, I was thrilled. The book, On Writing, is one that I think every prospective writer should read. In the foreward, he writes about a conversation he had with the novelist Amy Tan about how, during interviews and the like, nobody ever asks popular novelists about the language. King writes, "Yet many of us proles care deeply about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper." As I have come to discover, that passion shines strongly through just about everything Stephen King writes, and for that I will always be a fervent fan, no matter how much his words scare the bejesus out of me.