Hello, World!

Stephen King’s surname is certainly Dickensian, an apt descriptor of his decades-long reign at the top of America’s pop-literary landscape. At the moment of this writing–January 1, 2020, the dawn of the third decade of the twenty-first century–King has published fifty-two novels and had roughly a hundred or more movie and television adaptations made of his work (not counting gigs like writing the occasional stray X-Files episode). He was the fifth highest-paid author of 2019, with this past year’s adaptations including box office releases It: Chapter Two and Doctor Sleep, as well as the Hulu original series and King-executive-produced Castle Rock. He has sold three hundred and fifty million books in over fifty languages.

So what’s the secret sauce? What makes King the king?

Through this blog, I, Sara C. Rolater, will explore this question by reading King’s fictional body of work in chronological order and writing about the experience. As a source of major mainstream appeal, King and his success might shed light on the Jungian shadow of our culture’s collective unconscious, a force that, in turn, is elemental to King’s successful approach to writing horror. Basically, this blog will look at King from a biographical perspective, a narrative perspective, a psychological perspective, a creative writing perspective, a pop culture perspective, a personal perspective, and pretty much anything and everything in between. 

SPOILER ALERT: Be warned that all of these perspectives will likely entail a copious amount of spoilers for King’s copious amount of fiction.

Questions? Comments? Book deals? Contact scrola@gmail.com.

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