Influenced By

FEBRUARY 2, 2015 INFLUENCED BY A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books , the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask. —Jaime Clarke STEPHEN KING © James Leynse KELLY BRAFFET: When I was a teenager in Pennsylvania, there was this series of very coveted summer programs that only the Super Super Smartieswere accepted into called the Governor’s School. There was one for pretty muchany discipline you can think of, including creative writing; I applied everyyear I was eligible and was declared an alternate every year. It was one of the two greatest frustrations of my teenaged life: my inability to get into Governor’s School, and my inability to get that one dark, tortured beautiful guy to fall in love with me. Now I’m a published writer, and the last I heard of Dark and Tortured, he was a heroin addict who beat his girlfriend, so I think it probably all turned out for the best. Anyway, as one of the standard questions during the Governor’s School application interview, you were asked to name your favorite writers. The first year I answered honestly: John Steinbeck and Stephen King. “Really,” the interviewer said dryly. All I remember about him is that he had glasses, and he very clearly thought this whole picking-Super-Smarties-for-Governor’s-School thing was an enormous pain in his ass. “And what do you like about Stephen King?” His characterizations, I said, and the vividness with which he captured the world around him. The snap and crackle in his language; the way he built tension. I think it was a fairly good answer, given that I was sixteen, but— as I’ve said— I didn’t get in. The next year, the interviews were done by the exact same bespectacled killjoy, only this time, when he gave his opening remarks before dragging us into his office one at a time, he actually said, “So when I ask who your favorite writer is, you probably shouldn’t say Stephen King.” Shameful little sheep that I was, I didn’t, even though it still would have been the most truthful answer. (Perhaps even more so, because that was the year that I discovered the Dark Tower series, the first three books of which will go down forever on my Best Books Ever list.) I’m sure I said Steinbeck again, and probably also added Fitzgerald, both of which were also truthful answers in their own way, but I still didn’t get into the goddamned Governor’s School, and I still loved Stephen King. If King himself ever reads this, I can only say that I truly hope that his many years of facing up to this kind of bullshit will enable to dismiss that petty little man as the third- rate, embittered, closed-minded loser that he was. If the petty little man himself ever reads this, I hope he’s ashamed. Not just because we were kids, and he was stepping all over our burgeoning abilities to know what we liked and why, but also because he has deprived himself of the joys of King’s massive, and vivid, and wildly imaginative body of work. For instance, he’s never read The Body , which was my introduction to Stephen King and also to the modern coming-of-age story. With its effortless leaps in time, its mix of nostalgia and pain—how can those two ever be truly separated?—and its wrenching evocation of death and friendship and adulthood, that book said something about being twelve that I recognized as true even when I actually was twelve, and which has remained true ever since. He’s never read The Stand , in all of its messy vastness: my favorite kind of apocalypse story, the one where the horror is tempered with hope, and also a perfect portrait of the vast spectrum of human nature. He’s never read The Shining and experienced the tense claustrophobic grandeur of the Overlook Hotel, never watched from the inside as Jack Torrance’s sanity leaks slowly out of him, but his love for his family never does—a trick and a half, if you ask me, since we all know (via cultural osmosis if by no other means) how Jack Torrance ends up treating his family. He’s never read the fantastic King. He’s missed the magical alchemy that happened when King joined Straub, and created the wonder that is The Talisman—the scene where poor Wolf strains and howls in the Box is one of the saddest and most horrific moments I’ve ever experienced in fiction. Sometimes the worst happens, and we have no choice but to live through it, and endure it. He’s never read The Gunslinger or experienced Roland’s strange, dying world, with all of its eerie, perfectly chosen evocations of our own; he’s never suffered along with Eddie Dean as he kicks heroin and falls in love in The Drawing of the Three (in my opinion, the best of the Tower books, by far). He’s never met Susannah, the Girl at the Window, and he’s never experienced the joy of watching a younger, perfectly drawn version of the jaded, trampled Roland that we know so well fall in love with her. I could go on. King has written prolifically and massively, and anyone who’s open- heartedly read even a fraction of his work can surely engage in a lengthy argument about the relative merits or demerits thereof, and it’s true that—as with any writer—some of his books are more successful than others. And certainly, there will be people out there who have read and genuinely dislike his work, for one reason or another. But his insane, curve-blowing success isn’t a fluke. People love his books because he loves the people in those books, and can convey that love convincingly on the page. Even as he tortures them and feeds them to vampires and locks them under airless bubbles of alien origin, he loves them. I always get the sense, reading him, that he tortures them to see how impressively they’ll rise to overcome the horror, and that his characters generally seem to do it so well speaks to something good and strong in us. RYAN BOUDINOT: I’d have to say the first writer whose work suggested a model for what I wanted to write was Stephen King. I started reading his work when I was in fifth grade, with his collection of novellas Different Seasons . I was totally shocked, especially by the novella “Apt Pupil,” which was the most evil thing I’d ever read. I kept reading his books, and by the time I was in eighth grade had read everything he’d published up to that point. It’s fair to say that his gore and supernatural elements rubbed off on me, but I also think there was something going on underneath his tropes that shaped how I think about characters. I grew up in a rural part of Washington state, and King resonated with me because he didn’t condescend to characters who live in similarly rural places, mostly in Maine. I don’t remember a lot of the violent ends his characters meet, but those moments when his characters are kind and tender to one another remain with me. The Stand is one of the most beautiful reading experiences I’ve ever had, full of empathy and human connections, and I thought about it a lot when writing Blueprints of the Afterlife . I think King’s greatest strength is his talent for coming up with an incredible premise. Writer gets in car crash, is rescued by a psychotic fan. Guy gets a job as a caretaker of a haunted resort hotel in the off-season. Girl discovers she’s telekinetic after she gets her period. I’ve always loved how King can take such a premise and run like hell with it. VICTOR LAVALLE: My earliest influence would have to be Stephen King. I didn’t come up in a household that read terribly much. There was the Bible, which was read often, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was used only when I had a book report due. In pre-Wikipedia days the Britannica sure did the trick. The pre-internet version of cutting and pasting was simply copying, verbatim, entries by hand! We knew how to cheat the right way when I was young. My mother and grandmother were smart people, but not big readers. I had an uncle who read a lot of non-fiction but he didn’t live with us and what he brought with him when he visited was always over my head. The latest book by Kissinger was hardly fun reading for a nine or ten year old. So I came to Stephen King in much the same way I’m guessing lots of people did: he was popular. It was easy to get his books, either at the library or a cheap paperback in the local pharmacy. I was a little intimidated by the size of his novels so the first book of his that I read was, I believe, a collection of stories called Skeleton Crew .

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