14 True Stories Behind Stephen King's Novels
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11,654 VOTES'A Good Marriage' Was Based On A Real-Life Serial Killer
A Good Marriage is about a woman who has been married to her husband for nearly 30 years. They sell rare coins and everything is pretty okay. That is, until the woman discovers her husband is a notorious serial killer.
King was inspired to write this story after reading about Dennis Rader, better known as the Bind Torture Kill (BTK) killer. Rader's modus operandi is well-explained by his moniker, but he would also mail his victims' ID cards to police. Rader's friends and neighbors never suspected anything, and he was well-liked by his community. Paula Rader had been his loving wife for 30 years and had no knowledge of her husband's heinous crimes.
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21,933 VOTESIt, the story of a sewer-dwelling clown/spider/beast that terrorizes a group of children and then haunts them again as adults, cemented a lifelong fear of clowns in many kids who caught a peek of Tim Curry's portrayal of Pennywise the Clown in the film.
King got part of the idea for the novel when his car broke down one summer day. He took the car to the shop, and when it was fixed, he walked three miles back to the mechanic to pick it up. King's route took him across an old wooden bridge, which caused him to remember an old fairytale about three goats encountering a troll who lived beneath a bridge. Somehow, this fairytale sparked in King the structural device of It.
King was also inspired by the local sewer system of Bangor, ME, the town in which he was living.
"Somebody told me apparently you can put a canoe down into the sewers just over across from here at the Westgate Mall and you can come out by the Mount Hope cemetery at the other end of town. This same guy told me that the Bangor sewer system was built during the WPA and they lost track of what they were building under there. They had money from the federal government for sewers, so they built like crazy. A lot of the blueprints have now been lost and it’s easy to get lost down there. I decided I wanted to put all that into a book and eventually I did. Bangor became Derry."
The idea of an evil clown is also rooted in truth. Serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who murdered 30 young men and boys in the Chicago area in the '70s, performed at children's parties as Pogo the Clown.
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31,582 VOTESThe Shining, arguably one of King's best works, concerns a family that agrees to be caretakers of a hotel in the Colorado mountains over the winter. They're snowed in, trapped in the gorgeous old building. Which is, of course, haunted.
The Overlook Hotel of The Shining was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. In 1974, King and his wife stayed in Room 217 of the Stanley, a room rumored to be haunted. As King slept, he dreamed of his young son being chased around the hotel by a fire-hose.
"I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind."
The Stanley Hotel embraces its immortal spookiness and is now home to an annual horror festival.
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41,394 VOTESIn Pet Sematary, a father buries his dead son in a pet graveyard after realizing that the dead pets there often come back to life. As you can imagine, it doesn't go well.
In 1979, King was a writer-in-residence at the University in Maine when he wandered across an informal pet cemetery where local children buried cats and dogs who got hit on the busy road. King's daughter's cat was one such unfortunate animal.
"I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road, and (I thought), what if a kid died in that road?" King said. "And we had had this experience with [my son] Owen running toward the road, where I had just grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things just came together--on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, and on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back--so that when I reached the other side, I had been galvanized by the idea, but not in any melodramatic way. I knew immediately that it was a novel."
King also states that both he and his wife didn't like the novel, as it was too autobiographical and too bleak. He stuck it in a drawer and tried to forget about it. If not for a contractual obligation, Pet Sematary never would have been published.
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51,481 VOTESIn Misery, an author is kidnapped by deranged superfan Annie Wilkes who forces him to rewrite his novel the way she sees fit. King based Annie, masterfully portrayed by Kathy Bates in the subsequent film, on his own drug problems. "Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave," he said.
The novel was also inspired by the Evelyn Waugh story The Man Who Liked Dickens. In the Waugh's tale, a man holds another man captive and forces him to read Charles Dickens aloud. King said he pondered what it would be like if the man had managed to capture Dickens himself.
Annie Wilkes, nurse by trade, and is suspected of murdering several children under her care. This aspect of her origin story is based on Genene Jones, a former nurse who is believed to have killed as many as 60 children. She would poison them, then try to rescue them to receive praise. Her rescue efforts were not always successful.
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61,188 VOTESCarrie, a novel about a teenage girl who is bullied by her peers and controlled by her very religious mother only to realize she has telekinetic powers, was inspired by a number of things, according to an essay King wrote.
He once had a job scrubbing showers in the women's locker room. Carrie begins in a women's locker room. He later read an article about how ghost sightings might actually be attributed to telekinesis, a phenomena in which an individual can move inanimate objects with the mind.
The character of Carrie, meanwhile, was based on a girl named Tina who attended the same elementary school as King. She was bullied for wearing the same clothes every day. The character of Carrie's mother was inspired by Sandra, a woman who lived in King's neighborhood growing up and once asked for help moving furniture. King obliged, and was struck by the large crucifix hung on her wall.
- Photo: Lisey's Story / Scribner
Lisey's Story is about the wife of a deceased novelist who is approached by a mysterious and threatening man two years after the novelist's death. The guy wants all of the late author's papers, and Lisey must figure out why.
King said he was inspired to write Lisey's Story after he was stricken with pneumonia and stuck in the hospital. During this time, his office was renovated and he came home to find his belongings in boxes. He realized this was what his office would look like when he dies.
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Salem's Lot is a novel about a man who returns to his small hometown as it becomes overrun with vampires.
King was inspired to write this novel by the pinnacle of vampire novels, Bram Stoker's Dracula.
One of my high school classes was Fantasy and Science Fiction, and one of the novels I taught was Dracula. I was surprised at how vital it had remained over the years; the kids liked it, and I liked it, too. One night over supper I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the twentieth century, to America. 'He'd probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed,' my wife said. That closed the discussion, but in the following days, my mind kept returning to the idea. It occurred to me that my wife was probably right—if the legendary Count came to New York, that was. But if he were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then? I decided I wanted to find out, so I wrote Salem's Lot, which was originally titled Second Coming.
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9930 VOTESThe Stand follows the survivors of a deadly flu that decimates the majority of the world’s population. King explains that he had always wanted to write an epic fantasy novel akin to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. He found inspiration for such an epic tale when he happened to see a TV program on chemical warfare and was horrified by footage of lab mice dying.
That program, combined with a story King read about a chemical spill in Utah that resulted in the death of several sheep, served as the basis for The Stand.
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10920 VOTESCujo is about a St. Bernard who turns rabid after being bitten by a bat. Despite the silliness of the premise, if you've ever loved a pet, you know how awful it would be to watch your loving cuddle monster turn into an actual monster.
King was inspired by an actual St. Bernard he met in 1977. He met the nasty pooch at a motorcycle shop after bringing his bike to the mechanic. Real Cujo didn't tear King apart, but it did growl a lot at him. The dog's owner said that he was normally never like that. "I guess he don't like your face," King recalled the owner saying.
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11889 VOTESIn Thinner, a man is cursed to lose weight and grows increasingly gaunt. King was inspired to write the story after his doctor told him to quit smoking and shed some pounds. As King lost weight, he wondered what it would be like to keep growing slimmer and never stop.
"I went to see the doctor and he told me 'Listen, man, your triglycerides are really high. In case you haven't noticed it, you've entered heart attack country.' I used that line in the book," King said. - Video: YouTube
Cell is a 2006 novel about an artist who is in Boston when the Pulse happens. What is the pulse? Well, everyone who is using their cell at the precise moment the Pulse occurs turns into a zombie. The artist and a few other unaffected people try to escape the city.
King said this idea came to him while he was in New York City. He saw a man in a suit who was seemingly talking to himself. However, when he got closer to the man, he realized he was wearing a Bluetooth headset. Thus was born the idea for Cell.
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13751 VOTESKing's novel Needful Things is about a charismatic man who opens a bizarre curiosity shop. The prices are low, and some of the items have astonishing, helpful properties. However, store owner Leland Gaunt requires each customer to play a prank on another person in order to snag the item. The town turns to chaos.
King writes that his inspiration for the novel was to take the '80s and cram it into a store:
It occurred to me that in the '80s, everything had come with a price tag, that the decade quite literally was the sale of the century. The final items up on the block had been honor, integrity, self-respect, and innocence. By the time I got home that night, I had decided to turn the eighties into a small-town curio shop called Needful Things and see what happened. I told myself to keep it light and surreal; that if I just kept in mind the Bakkers' doghouse, which had been equipped with heaters and running water, I would be okay. And that's what I did. The book didn't review well. Either a lot of critics didn't get the joke or didn't appreciate it. The readers liked it, though, and that's what matters to me.
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14783 VOTES'Stand By Me' Was Based On King's Childhood
The film Stand By Me was based on King's short story The Body about a ragtag group of kids who find a body in the woods.
King and his brother were raised by a single mother who, when King was 11, moved to Maine to be closer to her family, who could help with the kids. There, King attended a one-room school with only four other classmates. These kids became the characters in The Body.
King also recounts an event that occurred when he was 4-years-old; his friend was struck by a car. He does not remember the incident at all but does remember his mother telling him about that day:
For a long time, I thought that I would love to be able to find a string to put on a lot of the childhood experiences that I remember – a lot of them were funny and some of them were kind of sad – and the people that I’d known and some of the guys that I hung out with that really weren't headed anywhere except down blind alleys. Nothing came and nothing came, and what you do when nothing comes is, you don’t push. You just put it aside… The most important things are the hardest to say. You can’t talk about them because once you start, they tarnish.
