I admit to reading Stephen King late. I’ve seen many movies inspired by his novels, but I’m only now reading the books and I’m amazed at how much mastery of the art of storytelling they contain. That he has a good number of bestsellers, that at the age of 75 he has 66 novels, several collections of short stories, screenplays and essays and a fortune of 600 million dollars, shows how literature is a career for “heirs” in the United States. And these phenomena are not always judged seriously. They can highlight the inconsistencies of a world that ranks athletes, movie stars, rockers and writers as if they all came from the same well.

Vivien Lyra Blair: from little Princess Leia to collaboration in the thriller ‘The Boogeyman’, inspired by the story of Stephen King

Since the publication of Carrie (1974), which was a total success, he has not stopped coming up with stories that destabilize the tranquility of the recipient and destroy it at the cost of surprises in which suffering and death are inevitable attacks. We all remember the image of a teenage girl dressed in white bathed in pig’s blood, as a joke of her colleagues, at the prom. And a telekinetic explosion with which he takes revenge. Sissy Spacek was nominated for an Oscar for that performance.

Since then, King’s forays into mysterious, cruel, and infamous events have multiplied, using an unstoppable creativity that has led him to abound in what I call “human terror,” explorers of evil and derangement. It is worth asking if the ultimate capacity for destruction does not come from a sick psyche – where would be the political leaders, the great warriors who did not hesitate in beastly attacks on humanity? Or maybe the will to cause harm is a matter of degrees: to nature, to animals, to others like us. There’s a lot of that in King: A farmer getting his adolescent son’s cooperation in killing his wife in order to inherit some land happens, with little conflict.

Since Carrie… he hasn’t stopped coming up with stories that destabilize the listener’s serenity.

“Supernatural Terror” is a powerful bastion: mobilizing spirits, abodes with their own breath, dogs emerging from the shadows, corpses rising are decisions that have legendary foundations and are given a contemporary accommodation. He investigates the reasons why children in the city are maimed or disappear, suggesting that there is “something” strange behind these problems.

Just a few years ago, Stephen King chose police territory. His hero is a retired police inspector, who can’t stop his calling and is still active behind a killer who runs over helpless people in a Mercedes Benz. Following the trilogy he wrote to give impetus to that inspector, I see his technique of creating characters (never done in the first pages, but building as the story progresses), his direct, colloquial style so that the reader does not stop at the prose, he is already moving forward pulled by an argument, always overpowering. Many novels are interspersed with short literary cores—characters who want to be writers, who are avid readers, who attend workshops at the university—and even pay homage to many of their colleagues by mentioning their works.

King was appointed to the Nobel Prize funds. He who thinks he is only a commercial author is mistaken. (OR)