To the world he is regarded as a conduit of horror, to his fans he is distinguished as one of the greatest influence on modern literature. Author Stephen King is a man who bears many titles and labels by readers and critics. Much like how an artist forms clay into his or her creation, the works of Stephen king recrafted by his experiences in life and his own personal findings of life. One such creation of King is The Shining.
In order to understand where the influences of Stephen King coe from, one must understand his past. Stephen King was born in Scarborough, Maine on September 21, 1947. He was the son to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury and Donald Edwin King (Rogak 8). Hardship in King’s life began as a young boy when his father walked out on his
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His philosophies can be seen through how he writes, what he writes, and his characters. To begin, King uses his writing to create fear and tension in his readers. His interest in horror began as a young boy, “ The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also Exhilarated”(Greene). These feeling are what inspired King to write the iconic scene, “At the far end of the concrete ring, Danny heard the stealthy crackle of dead leaves as something came for him on its hands and knees. At any moment he would feel it 's cold hand close over his ankle...”(King, Stephen 423).This gives the reader the same feeling the King felt as he watch Bambi. The growing tension of impending danger, and the fear of the demise of a character. Those emotions had such a large impact of King that he enjoys creating the same feelings for his writers throughout The Shining. Regarding Kings use of dark imagery, George Beaham, an author of several books on King and his books, states, “As a child, Stephen King saw and felt too much for his age... Consider how sensitive children generally are: they don 't have a way to edit. To filter. To take a critical stance on an experience around them. I would say that the reason why these images come out so powerfully in his fiction is because as a child he had no way to filter” (Rogak 23). “The Women in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas filled belly rising out of the cold ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island” (King, Stephen 319-220). The descriptions of the scene are used to scare the audience with disgustingly vivid imagery. These images show the lack of filter King has in his writing. This can be related back to the fact that he began writing as a child, a time when most people do not have a filter, and King must have continued to write without a