The controversy surrounding “It” and its shocking, graphic sexual content might have contributed to this decision at the time, but King was also hyper-aware of astoundingly talented fellow horror writers whom he deemed better in a sincerely appreciative vein. In a 1986 TIME interview, for example, King had to say the following about horror author and filmmaker Clive Barker:
“You read him with a book in one hand and an airsick bag in the other. That man is not fooling around. He’s got a sense of humor, and he’s not a dullard. He’s better than I am now. He’s a lot more energetic.”
In the same interview, King seemed hyper-critical about his worth as a writer and hinted that he was done with writing horror after “It.” “I’ve had about three original ideas in my life. The rest of them were bounces. I sense the limitations of where my talents are,” King stated while calling himself “not much of a writer” but “a hell of an elaborator.” Well, even the best writers are intimately acquainted with imposter syndrome and the damaging narratives it can weave in our heads. In King’s case, these self-deprecating statements have little truth to them — something he must have come to realize when he picked horror back up after a while, proving to the world (and to himself) that his prose is best suited to evoking ideas that truly frighten us as a collective, and compel us to delve deeper into the darkness teasing the edge of our visions.
King also shared the core inspirations behind his horror-focused tales, explaining his tendency to focus on personal phobias revolving around “spiders, elevators, closed-in places, the dark, sewers, funerals, the idea of being buried alive, cancer, heart attacks, the number 13, black cats and walking under ladders.” That’s a pretty long list and not an unreasonable one by any means, but King’s novelty as a writer lies in his ability to turn these specific fears into something universal, which everyone can relate to despite a real-world absence of that same fear.
Moreover, phobias are often birthed after they are explored in fiction, a good example being the gnarly, bug-themed typewriters in David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” which instill these perfectly benign machines with a sense of whimsical dread. A similar effect can be observed in King’s novels, where something as mundane as a car or a dog is morphed into a more sinister interpretation of that same object, conjuring nightmarish scenarios that make for really good horror fiction.