Imaginary Worlds - Stephen King and the Horror of the Ordinary

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Stephen King is often described as a master of horror, but I talked with fans and experts who believe that King is not actually a horror writer. Caroline Bicks (author of Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King), Neil McRobert of the podcast Talking Scared and Kim C. of the podcast The Year of Underrated Stephen King discuss the essential ingredients in his stories besides the scares, from the psychological demons of his characters to the isolation of living in a small town. We also explore how King meticulously crafts language, why so many film adaptations have missed the mark, and his impact on pop culture. You can support Imaginary Worlds on Patreon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, better late than never. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them, and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Neil McRobert is the host of a podcast about horror fiction called Talking Scared. He is also a huge Stephen King fan.

He was very excited when King agreed to be a guest on the show. Actually, he was on the show twice. And then Neil and Stephen King started emailing each other. I don't like to stay my welcome. I get very self-conscious when I email him because I think I don't want to be that guy. But every so often, it'll just drop me a little missive with some, like, little horror anecdote or sometimes a little, he'll send me a story that's in, that's not quite finished yet. I get to read it. So yeah, it's a dream come true, really, for me. Wait, he sends you some of his stories that he hasn't published yet.

On occasion, yeah, he sent me a few things to look at. But, I mean, yeah, it's insane to me because I'm like, you know, everyone says they're his biggest fan, but I will fight anyone in a cage who claims to be a bigger fan than me. So it's an incredible honour. So being such a huge fan and then getting to talk to him, what were some of the questions, maybe some of the first questions you had? Or now that you've gotten to know him, how do you understand his work a little bit differently? So I don't think I do understand it differently. What happened, and this is quite vindicated as well as I had a sort of thesis about King's fiction that I put to him. I basically said to him, does this theory hold water?

And I can give you the theory in a moment. But his response was, it doesn't even leak. And I thought, that's great, right? Because I have long believed that Stephen King is a horror writer nominally only. Obviously, he writes horror. He basically created the modern genre, right? But I have never believed that that is the stuff that really makes his heart beat. I think he writes American realism or sometimes American romanticism.

where the monster is the plot device that kicks the stuff he really cares about into gear. And I put that to him and he was like, yeah, that's exactly how he thinks of his own works. That was nice to hear. The idea that Stephen King is not really a horror writer kind of blew my mind. When I was growing up, the name Stephen King was synonymous with a certain kind of horror. The movies and shows adapted from his books were marketed on their high concept ideas or their standout horror moments, like the prom scene in Carrie. Or Jack Nicholson going crazy in The Shining. Here's Johnny!

Or the evil supernatural clown in It. Hi, Georgey! which was rebooted as a movie franchise and a show on HBO called Welcome to Derry. So if the secret sauce of Stephen King's work isn't the horror, but everything in between, what's in that sauce? With all my years of reading, and I've read every single book he's ever published at least twice, but I still struggle to really articulate what you call the secret source. and I know it has something to do with character, but lots of authors write great characters, right?

But let's say the three books you've mentioned, so Carrie the Shining and It, certainly three of his most famous titles. The horror of Carrie is not the blood. The horror of Carrie is not even the telekinesis. The horror of Carrie is loneliness and objection and bullying and that mother-daughter relationship that is so abusive.

That's the horror of Carrie. The horror of the shining, all right, it's a bit different, The Shining is a full-throated, scary novel. But the horror of The Shining is not the woman in Room 217. It's the alcoholism. It's the furnace, the slight pun intended there, within Jack Torrance and that self-h hatred and the externalisation on his family

and the psychological destruction of a family unit. And it, my favourite novel by a million miles, all of the stuff in it that really matters has got nothing to do with the clown. It's the racism. It's the bullying. It's the prejudice of every stripe that forminates in dairy. And the clown is just an avatar for that. I mean, the book literally makes that explicit.

The clown is a metastasization of the horror of American life. Perhaps one of the most qualified people to answer this question of what's in the secret sauce is Caroline Bix. What's the secret sauce, right? So that was the question that drove, it eventually became my book, Monsters in the Archives. Besides writing Monsters in the Archives, my year of fear with Stephen King, she is also the Stephen E. King chair in literature

at the University of Maine. When I got the job, they said, you know, you're never going to meet Stephen King. He has nothing to do with this. Don't reach out to him. So I'm like, all right, too bad, but it's a great opportunity still. Four years into the job,

I got a call from him at home, just out of the blue. I was like, And we struck up a really nice working relationship. I invited him to our campus. He talked to our students. He was such a lovely human that I thought, you know what? I have a sabbatical coming up.

He's just collected all of his manuscripts and attached it to his home in Bangor. And they hadn't let anyone in yet. And I thought, I would love to explore how he crafted these moments that were still stuck in my head. Like, how did he do it? Why are the stories? why is the literature and the language sticking in my head 40 years after I've read it. That's how I pitched it to him and to Tabitha, his wife, and they agreed to let me be the first one in. When Caroline read through early drafts of King's novels and short stories,

she was surprised by how often he pulled back from the horror if he thought it came at the expense of character development. Like, she read an early draft of Salem's lot, which is widely considered to be. be a very scary novel about vampires. There are some gruesome scenes in that first draft that are just like horror, what, wool, like, it was hideous. He really was backing off of some of those more gruesome details in the future drafts and leaning into the psychological drama, the relationships between the characters, the struggles that the characters were facing with their own humanity.

Carrie. I mean, Carrie in the first draft that I saw, she's an alien. She grows horns. She takes pleasure in killing all of her classmates. She has no emotional depth to her. Carrie endures because we feel badly for her. Like as he was recrafting her, he really leaned into that, like showing her humanity. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, I remember when I was taking screenwriting classes, they said, you know, like if you see a character, like, if you see an alien used a disintegration race, and then somebody just completely dissipates. It's like, wow, that was really gross. But if you see a character stubbed their toe, you're going to be like, ooh, you know, like there's something that's kind of,

like there's a relatability about that, that sometimes smaller is bigger. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. She says another really crucial aspect in King's writing is the way that he creates a believable sense of place. Yeah, that sense of like these places that everybody knows and where,

communities gather and when they start to become, you know, infected or start to reflect the rot that's happening in the community. That's what he does so well. One of my favorite conversations with him was when we were talking about his move to Durham, Maine when he was 11. So a lot of people just assume he olds lived in Maine, but he didn't. Like his, he was born in Maine. And then his father left the family when Steve was two. And he never saw him again. So it was his older brother himself and his mother. And they moved all around America for nine years, just trying to make ends meet. Like, he moved all over. And it wasn't until he was 11 that he really lived in Maine. And Durham, which is a very rural community about 25 miles outside Portland, is what he based Salem's lot,

the town of Salem's lot on. And we had such a great conversation because I didn't realize that was the first time he'd really put down roots in Maine. And 11, right, what a formative age that is. And it just gave me so much insight into why he has so many 11, 12, year old characters, right? And they're so well written. And they're so connected to their towns. And when he was talking to be about the move there, he said he hated it at first because he didn't like how remote it was. And they said, then I just fell in love with it. I said, I just fell in love with the town. Little by little, I fell in love with it. That gave me so much insight into, first of all, what Salem's lot really at his heart is about. It's really a love letter to his hometown. And also how a place can traumatize you, but also you love it.

And you want to save it. Well, in terms of the specificity and the groundedness, that's so interesting, too, when you think about, like, if you're going from one town to another, I mean, in a way, they're all the same. Yeah. So, I mean, I almost wonder when he did arrive in Maine, did he know that's where he was going to stay? Or did you just think this was another town?

And then two years later, he'd be in California. Yeah. That's a great point. Like, how did he know this was it? I mean, part of it was that his mother was had returned. This was where she, her parents were living. And so she returned to the town to take care of them in exchange for free housing. And so according to Steve, he was like, she hated it.

Like it was a loss of independence for her. And he said, you know, she basically stayed there till the cancer got her, which unfortunately happened quite young. So I think, yeah, that question about like, how do you know that this is going to be your hometown, you know? It was also the place where he discovered his father's cache of HP Lovecraft novels in his aunt's attic. So even though he never saw his father again, he got introduced to H.P. Lovecraft through his absent father, right, leaving behind these books. So it's also like there's so many ways that that place became important to him. It's interesting because, you know, when you think about like, when you think about your hometown, typically you associate your hometown with your family, your parents. And yet he had one parent who abandoned him and then the other died tragically young. So it seems like at the same time, the town itself becomes kind of larger. it seems in his mind, maybe? And then that's also where we get a sense of this darkness in the town. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, he described, you know, he didn't talk a lot about his mom. And that was one of the things was, you know, I told him I was not going to be, you know, prying into places he didn't want me to pry into. Like we were going to keep this mostly about the language. But if he wanted to tell me stories, obviously that was great. And he knew I'd be including them. So the fact that this is a place that had awful memories associated.

with it, but also really lovely memories. Like he made his best friend. He met his best friend there when he was 12. They started writing together. He had a lovely teacher. He loved his teacher. Like he started to really build connections with that community. But it was during that conversation when he said this line to me that I was like,

this was incredible line. He said, you come to Maine through rock. He famously hates it if you dig too much beneath the surface. of his metaphors. But I was like, I couldn't resist. I'm like, Steve, what is that? Like, that's beautiful. What does it mean? And he was like, well, you know, Maine is a rocky place in a lot of ways. He said, it's the weather, it's the landscape, but he said it's also the people, right? The people are rocky. And he knows, he understands the main mindset that makes it hard to know people. And the one hand makes communities close-knit, but also means people keep their distance also

from each other and don't old's look out for each other, which is the lesson of Salem's lot and it. And a lot of these small Maine communities can also be kind of nasty. Stephen King's stories are famous for being set in Maine. And even if they're set elsewhere, he's often writing about remote places instead of major cities. As a British fan, Neil McRobert, thinks that there's something uniquely American about the way King writes about these small towns. the epic scale of America and then this small town in the middle of all of that epic scale. I mean, that goes back to like frontier stories. And then when you look at that through a horror writer's perspective,

all you think is what's the weird stuff happening in that town that no one knows about? And that's why, weirdly, that's why Children of the Corn is possibly my favorite King short story. So Children of the Corn takes place in a made-up town called Gatlin, Nebraska, because King's obsessed by Nebraska. And there's this married couple driving down this innocuous stretch of highway in Nebraska and they break down, or haven't they hit a kid, and then they go into a town to report it, and they are massacred by all of these children,

who it turns out have slaughtered everyone over the age of 18. And it's like no one knows, because the nearest town is like, you know, 20, 30 miles away, and no one's come to check. And what could happen in these places is so ripe for a horror writer's dark. view of the world. Well, that's fine. I was actually going to just ask you, like, how does he handle horror differently than

other writers? But, I mean, I guess you just kind of answered that. I mean, I don't think he does necessarily handle horror differently. I think what he was doing for a lot of his career, someone in the early books, and I think he'd be open about this is he was taken a horror trope and Americanizing it. I mean, Salem's lot is an overt and avowed attempt to answer the question of what would happen if Dracula came to a New England town in the 1970s. That's what he literally set out to do.

It's why it was... Salem's Lot was going to be called Second Coming because it was going to be Dracula comes again. But then you go to The Shining, it's Hillhouse. It's just Shillard Jackson's Hillhouse put in a hotel. Christine is the cursed object. You know, he was going through the supernatural playbook. So putting the horror aside,

this is how Neil sees Stephen King's place in American pop culture. I think King is the dark, Yin to Stephen Spielberg's bright yang. Spielberg and King certainly are the foundation of my romanticised idea of an American adolescence. And I think King and Spielberg are the flip sides of that, the dark and light of it. And sometimes one is light and the other.

It's not always King is dark and Spielberg is light. They flip reverse sometimes. But I think what King specifically does, that Spielberg does, is he takes the very ordinary and erupts it. He writes about how everyday people really do react to the inexplicable, in a way that very few people have managed to do. Which reminds me of Stranger Things. The influence of Stephen King and Stephen Spielberg on that show

overlap seamlessly. But Spielberg is a filmmaker. He works in a visual medium. King is a fiction writer. So in terms of that secret sauce, what kind of language is he stirring into it? Kim C. hosts a podcast called The Year of Underrated Stephen King. She's a huge fan of his now. But when she was growing up,

I had never read King in my life because I was a snobby little lit kid, an English major who thought genre fiction. Oh, I don't read genre authors. No, thank you. After getting an MFA in literature, Kim was feeling burnt out from all that literary fiction. So one day, she grabbed a collection of Stephen King's stories from her mother's bookshelf. And I felt within 10 pages, all of grad school was wrapped up for me in those 10 pages. Everything that you would want to teach somebody about fiction was in those 10 pages. And I know that's perhaps a bit dramatic, but it felt that way.

What we have here, subject matter aside, is someone who deeply understands how to hook the reader, how to provide gorgeous character details, how to show versus telling, which is what you want as the first rule of fiction. He's always been outside of the horror genre. He just uses horror to highlight this chamber of horror's reality. But another cool thing about King's writing is he loves to use brand names, so specifically American. brand names and his fiction all over the place. He won't say, I went to the bathroom to get a pain reliever. He says, no, I pop to Advil.

He also does this with music. And so when he mentions these artists and that specific album, talk about a time capsule. So it's a treasure trove. It's a treasure trove for American life and specifically small town rural America. Caroline Bix says that King's language may seem simple. on the surface, but he is incredibly artful in the way he chooses words. And Caroline is also a Shakespeare scholar. In fact, she thinks that King and Shakespeare have something in common. They write for the ear as much as for the eye. For example, there's a phrase in the novel Pet Cemetery,

Dead is better. You can actually hear Fred Gwyn say it with a very strong main accent in the 1989 film adaptation. Well, sometimes that is better. The person you put up there ain't the person that comes back. But when Caroline was reading early drafts of the book,

she saw that King had originally written, death is better. He crosses out death and writes dead, right? Dead is better, dead is better. That's like the iconic phrase of that novel. And that just had a sonic quality to it, this way that is echoing in your head, just like Shakespeare's language, right, echoes in your head. They're both meant to be heard. You know, one of our first conversations was about what I was seeing

in terms of his sound, attention to sound of words, which I really didn't think I'd find. And he said to me, yeah, he said, I'm always paying attention to how words are clanging on the reader's ear. Like, it's really to him kind of the primary sense. Yeah. So I want to ask you, though, about dead is better. Dead is better than death is better. Why does that, um, kind of kind of clang in your brain, as you said. Right, right. I mean, and I have to say, I'm just going to go back. So the first day I went into the archives, I found this incredible draft of Pet Cemetery.

It was like the second to last one with all of the copy editor's sticky note questions to him and his responses. And that's where I saw his, like, talking to the copy editor and just explaining his word choices. And one of my favorite margin notes, I saw him writing to the copy editor. He was trying to explain why he wanted to keep Rachel saying shh, shh, shh, shouting instead of shh, shh, shouting. The copy editor had whited at the U.H to make it shh. And Steve wrote, you know, the sound of that particular stutter really is shah. Say it out loud, you'll see. And I loved that.

So I thought, say it out loud, you'll see. So I would invite you, like say out loud, dead is better. Dead is better. You have to say it out loud, right? Dead is better. Dead is better. Death is better. Death is better doesn't have the same, you know, internal rhyme, first of all, dead, better. So it's not going to echo, right? It's not going to stick in your head in the same way. It's just better. And it is, that's the line that I found out he still, Steve himself, returns to like when he thinks about that book. That for him is really the moral center of that book. Caroline was also fascinated to discover that an early draft of The Shining was broken into five acts with Roman numerals, like a Shakespearean tragedy. For him, he was thinking of it as a play with stage sets that would rotate.

And it's actually one of his most claustrophobic novels because it never goes beyond the grounds for the most part of this hotel. And he just keeps bringing you back to the same stage sets, the same rooms over and over again. And it's part of what builds up as what is so horrifying about it. It's just like little Danny, who's the five-year-old, who's the main character, who has these psychic visions, is able to see, he sees a vision of a woman in a bathtub, right, with her hand dangling over the tub. Again and again, he sees this bathroom scene. And it starts to build until it actually becomes real, and it is his mother in the bathroom being attacked by his father. You know, like, it could really happen. Your daddy might try to kill your mommy.

Like that's the core horror of that novel is that your family might get destroyed. The mother in the first draft does get killed by Jack. And when I talked to Steve, he was like, yeah, and I was going to kill Danny too. I was like, what? You were going to have Danny die? Like, Danny's five. He's the little kid. He's the main character. And they was like, but that was too bleak. I decided that was too bleak. And he said, I just couldn't do it to them.

When Kim C. was binging through Stephen King's books, she came to this realization. He loves a happy ending. Many might argue with that, but King really delivers on the reading experience. And he pays out. He's a slot machine who nine times out of ten is going to give you a nice little payout

for that readerly investment, and that's why we keep coming back every time. I asked Kim whether Stephen King's writing has evolved over the years. She says the quality is the same, but the content has shifted. So, for example, early 80s, tons of popcorn scary books, right? He has been typecast a little bit, and he doesn't care.

He doesn't want those checks to bounce. He started his career writing to keep the lights on, right? He came at it really, really hungry. And so the 80s are just fun and excess and terrifying books that have even scary or film adaptations. And then you get to the 90s, where suddenly King is as a, is as successful as anyone can be. And yet, he continues to write about women and domestic violence. And suddenly the books aren't scary.

They're strange. And the short stories have a lot of mixed genre elements in them. And then he's working on this Dark Tower saga, which is this amalgamation of all kinds of genres. It's like His Lord of the Rings. In the later early 2000s, King is healing from personal injury. So suddenly his characters are healing from personal injury. and they're trying to overcome the pain of their injury and also starting completely over from like a hypothetical death,

almost like a metaphorical resurrection. She also gives him credit for being open to change with the times. When you go back and you read 80's King and he's talking about someone's breasts or talking about sexual stuff, it doesn't age well. But the good part is that he advanced as good artists do. You grow, you develop. And so in the early 90s, suddenly we start getting a focus on women as survivors, women as victims and then victors.

In Dolores Claiborne, Rose Matter, as well as Gerald's game, these are women who have survived sexual trauma, physical abuse, and they are running from it for the longest time, and then they stand and face it. And that bravery is something to be celebrated. And I don't think that it is discussed enough. Because those are the books that don't get a lot of readers because they're not seen as horror, Eric. And so that's the other big hurdle we have to deal with. There is one aspect of his writing that she thinks is stuck in the past. A lot of characters in King's novels are kids.

But the nature of childhood has changed. When kids ride their bikes today, they have tracking devices in their pockets. And there have been many articles about how young people are more risk-averse than previous generations. So I think it is interesting with what the new generation, specifically Jen Z and John Alpha, will do with King's work because they're looking at characters who really looked and operated in life in a very different way. There was full autonomy, total resilience, total independence, no tracking, no internet. I am curious how it's going to translate, but I think the whole. heart of King's characters and their character journeys will stay with whoever invests their time

into his work. A good adaptation can help attract new readers to his work, although the history of Stephen King adaptations is not exactly stellar. Kim thinks a lot of filmmakers and studio execs just think of him as horror IP. They change the character journey. They make change the character journey. They make changes to King's story in a way that the payout for the characters, no one cares. Because you put all your money into the theater experience. You put it all into CGI or makeup that didn't age well or special effects. But when they get it right, the creators maximize the character journey, even if they make changes. For example, there's a new series on Amazon Prime based on the novel Carrie. And the show takes place now.

in the age of social media bullying. We tried to help her. She was out of her mind. We filmed her. Does she really think she was dying? I mean, that's rough. Why didn't you tell me? Why on earth would I tell you?

The creator of the show is Mike Flanagan. He directed two movies based on Stephen King's novels, Gerald's Game, and Dr. Sleep, which is a novel that followed the character of Danny from The Shining as an adult. Even though the movie studio had the rights to Dr. Sleep, Mike Flanagan wanted to get Stephen King's blessing because he knew that King hated Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining. I mean, Kubrick's movie has been widely praised as a work of cinema,

but King has said that it's all horror at the expense of character development. Neil McRobert agrees. I think The Shining only works if you love that family and care about them deeply and understand that they care about each other. Whereas Kubrick just made a cold artifact of a film. He pinned it down under glass and killed it. In my opinion. Another thing that frustrates him is that when some filmmakers try to pay homage to King,

he thinks they're not really thinking about his books. For example, Stranger Things is much more evocative of the movies, or the adaptation of it and the things that have come since from that, than it is of it itself. because, I mean, I'm not a fan of strange of things, I just say up front. To me, it's such an anodyne, empty calorie version of what King did with it. It never feels true, whereas it feels so painfully true about youth and young manhood and girlhood.

But the other one I'd throw at you is Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass. Yep, Mike Flanagan again. Besides his Stephen King adaptations, he made an original mini-series on Netflix called Midnight Mass. which was not based on a Stephen King story, but it felt like it was. We tend to dislike mysteries. You feel uncomfortable, not knowing. Midnight Mass is the greatest Stephen King story that he didn't write.

And Midnight Mass is all of the King stuff. It's the community, it's the small town, it's the human intrigue, which is sometimes darker than the supernatural overtones. It's very, very, very New England. So I would say Midnight Mass is born out of the novelistic tradition where a stranger things, I think, is born out of what people think Stephen King is. You could say the same thing about Widows Bay,

which just won a bunch of Emmys, including Best Comedy. It's a horror comedy that is deeply influenced by Stephen King. I interviewed the production designer of Widows Bay in a recent episode, and he told me that one of the reasons they hired him for Widows Bay was because he was the production designer on Midnight Mass, and Stephen King himself praised both of those shows on social media. But there's other things. I mean, there's like video games. Now you see a lot of King influences. Alan Wake, which is all about an author protagonist, opens with a quote from Stephen King.

Seeing the book brought back my fight with Alice. I didn't like it. And I didn't like the guy's smug face on the cover either. There's also a video game series called Silent Hill, which has similar vibes. Silent Hill, yes, again, small town, spooky things going on. And again, the nature of the horrific in Silent Hill, which is always, I mean, years since I played the first game. And there are references in universe references to King's work in Silent Hill. But there's something in the monstrosity of Silent Hill that feels very King.

The psychological component of the monster as an externalisation of inner turmoil is very king. That's something King brought to horror. in a big way, which is like the horror is quite often an externalization of some inner torment, or it gives face to, gives shape to, or refracts an inner torment. I think Silent Hill does that grotesquely. This is our apartment building, but it looks like some kind of nightmare. There is one way Stephen King leaned directly into his own legacy and the adaptations of his works.

In 1977, he established the Dollar Baby program. Any aspiring filmmaker could apply to get permission to adapt one of his short stories. The cost was $1, and there were a few conditions. They didn't get the rights to the story, just permission to adapt it. And they couldn't make money off their films, but they could show them at festivals and use them as calling cards in the industry. Even though the Dollar Baby program ended in 2023, the impact is still being felt today. I saw videos of former recipients talking about what a great opportunity it was and how much it meant to them.

And one of the early recipients was Frank Deribont. Deribont used the program to make his first film, which was an adaptation of Stephen King's short story, The Woman in the Room. King was impressed, and he gave Darabont the rights to adapt another of his stories, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Now, Frank Darabant didn't think he was getting the rights for free. He wrote a check to Stephen King for $5,000, but King never cashed it. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office disappointment. It was nominated for Oscars, but didn't win any.

Now it is considered a classic. In fact, it is currently number one on IMDB's list of the top 250 movies ever made. Deribont went on to direct the Green Mile, which was an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, and he developed the TV series The Walking Dead, which was not based on a King story, but many people have pointed out the influence of King. And long after the Shawshank Redemption came out, Stephen King mailed that $5,000 check back to Frank Daribond with a note that read

In case you ever need bail money love Steve. The secret sauce of Stephen King has become an essential ingredient in a lot of pop culture that we consume but it has been watered down and mixed in with other things. It's always worth going back to the source

and tasting how well it goes with a story that eats your heart out. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Neil McRobert, Caroline Bix, and Kim C. Also, thanks to all of the listeners who requested a Stephen King episode when I did my call-out for episode ideas earlier this year. And if you like this episode, please let people know about it on social media or in real life.

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