Influences Presentation Notes

• King’s Influences were:

o   Peter Straub

o   HP Lovecraft

o   Raymond Chandler

o   Ross MacDonald

o   Robert Parker

o   Dorothy Sayers “wrote the clearest, most lucid prose of our century.”

o   Ralph Ellison

§  This list came from an encyclopedia about Stephen King that was written by George W. Beahm in 1998

• Peter Straub writes horror like King. Stephen King said of his book Ghost Story “The terror just mounts and mounts.”
• HP Lovecraft writes Sci-fi which is an element that King incorporates into many of his novels
• Parallels between Carrie and the Salem Witch Trials

o   Ingebretsen points out, “…very interesting comparisons between the social/religious/psychosexual morass of the Salem witchcraft trials and Carrie, Stephen King’s novel of a teenage girl who responds to the torments of her religiously fanatical mother and her cruel, sex-obsessed classmates with an explosion of telekinetic fury” (Bulkeley).

§  This quote is from a review of Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King by Edward J. Ingebretsen

• When I read an author’s writing I can’t help but wonder, what made this person write like this? Well, one answer to this question is that a writer is often influenced by other writers. Stephen King is no exception. Stephen King was influenced by: Peter Straub, HP Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Robert Parker, Dorothy Sayers, and Ralph Ellison. These influences are listed in Stephen King from A-Z, which is an encyclopedia about Stephen King and his works written by George W. Beahm. Ok so, I know what you’re thinking. Those are a whole lot of influences. Well, I’m only really going to talk about two of them. The first is Peter Straub. He’s a horror writer like Stephen King, and King said about Straub’s book Ghost Story, “the terror just mounts and mounts.” So obviously, King thinks very highly of Straub if he allows Straub to put his quotes on the cover of a novel. I actually went through and compared Straub’s sentence structure to King’s and found that King and Straub have a similar usage of Adjectives. The second influence that I want to talk about today is HP Lovecraft. Now, we all read at the beginning of the year part three of Call of Cthulu. This introduced us to the sci-fi element of HP Lovecraft. Stephen King also relies on sci-fi elements in his horror novels. When I compared King and Lovecraft on a structural level, I found that King and Lovecraft both use a lot of nouns. I also found that all three authors had similar usage on the use of prepositions throughout their works. While these two individual authors have had an important impact on King as a writer, there are far more that I would have loved to discuss if there had been time. Any questions?