I’ve grown up on Stephen King’s writing. It all started with a book report. As a lonely kid with no real friends at first, I felt pretty lost in life. I didn’t have a favorite band, never read a single issue of Tiger Beat, and fashion was a foreign language to me (I wore sweatshirts with kittens in hot air balloons on them until middle school). I can’t remember how old I was when my teacher assigned me my first book report, but I know I was young. Young enough that when I went to my mother’s bookshelf and grabbed a book at random, I didn’t know what I was in for. My mother loved to read horror and I distinctly remember her paperbacks from Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft. The book I had chosen to read and write up was Stephen King’s Thinner.

I got some interesting looks from my teacher that year.