Stephen King

7 Pages 1688 Words

tened to
the radio adaptation of Ray

Bradbury’s story “Mars Is Heaven!” That night
King recalls he “slept in the doorway,

where the real and rational light
of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face."8 Stephen

King’s exposure
to oral storytelling on the radio had a large impact on his later writings.


King tells his stories in visual terms so that the reader would be able
to “see” what was

happening in their own mind,somewhat in the same fashion
the way it was done on the

radio.9 King’s fascination with horror early
on continued and was pushed along only a

couple weeks after Bradbury’s
story. One day little Stephen was looking through his

mother’s books and
came across one named “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.” After
his mother finished reading the book to him, Stephen was hooked. He

immediately
asked her to read it again. King recalls “that summer when I was seven, [my


mother] must have read it to me half a dozen times."10 Ironically that
same year, while

Stephen was still seven years old, he went to go see his
first horror movie, The Creature

from the Black Lagoon. This is important
because Stephen says, “ Since [the movie], I

still see things cinematically.
I write down everything I see. W...