100 Confessions: The Authors that Drive Me

(12)My love of writing stems from two very different writers: J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King. One's a high-literature writer, one's a pop writer. One wrote fantasy, one writes horror. But both are people who specialize in writing stories of hope. Stephen King may seem an odd choice.

Here's an excerpt from "God in Popular Culture" by Andrew Greeley:

"You're writing religious stories," I accused Stephen King at a Literary Guild cocktail party in New York.
"Of course I am," he agreed. "Most people don't believe me, but that's exactly what I'm doing."
"Anyone who writes about hope," I continued, "is writing about religion."
"Absolutely. Sometimes I wish I was Catholic like my wife. You people have great images of hope. But you almost have to be raised with them."
Thus my theory of sociology of religions was summarized and validated in a brief exchange of dialogue.
King writes stories of hope, maybe only a little hope--as in Cujo in which things got better, not much, but a little better--but still hope. In his non-fiction study of horror literature, King contends that the appeal of the field to readers is that they are scared stuff but still survive and thus experience a hint that one does survive, no matter how great the terror.