Author Stephen King's lasting impression
By Erinn Figg
Get Out
Feb. 2, 2003

Last year, reigning spook scribe Stephen King horrified his fans even more by announcing his retirement.

Don’t worry, he assured us, he’s still got a few projects in the works — his latest is a children’s pop-up book version of his novel “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.” And, of course, he’ll finish the last three books in his “Dark Tower” series.
After that, King revealed in several interviews with the press, we’ll be on our own. Perhaps someday his unpublished manuscripts — which King said he plans to keep cranking out — will be unearthed after his death, but that could be his fans’ only hope for future King fixes.

According to the author, he’s on the brink of getting stale. Critics couldn’t agree more. His last novel, “From a Buick 8,” didn’t exactly get rave reviews. Headline writers, yours truly included, had a field day with it: “King’s running out of gas” we trumpeted in 48-point type.
I’m a devoted Stephen King fan who sadly concedes that, yes, maybe the guy could use a long vacation. But has he lost his touch? Depends on how you look at it.
I’ve got my own story to tell about Stephen King. Then you can tell me whether he’s lost his touch. In the grand style of the master himself, let’s start it this way:

In 1975, a woman in Omaha, Neb., gave birth to a monster.
He was wild and dangerous, and nothing in his path was safe. He tore through houses, ripped up flower gardens and demolished furniture. Victims in the small subdivision where the monster lived often sported bite marks and bruises from his frequent attacks.

This monster was my younger brother Paul. To this day, my mother still refers to him, albeit fondly, as “the worst child born to man in 1975.” Because, you see, Paul was born with serious mental challenges. To put it simply, his eyes and ears weren’t quite connected to his brain. Unless we spoke slowly, the English language dissolved into gibberish in his head. Letters of the alphabet cavorted and flipped before his eyes. Numbers taunted him. Excessive activity whirled around him in a blur.
For Paul, the world was utterly incomprehensible, and his confusion unleashed a rage we could barely contain.

His outlook, according to the many specialists my parents took him to, was bleak. They used words like “sedatives,” “borderline retarded” and “homes for special kids,” but my mother was steadfast in her conviction to try to give him a normal life. Child psychologists warned her Paul would never even make it to high school and encouraged her to help him, as he got older, to focus on a career that required use of his hands rather than his brain.

Paul is three years younger than I am. When I was a kid, I had no sympathy for him. I simply thought he was a royal pain in the ass.
I quickly learned, however, that if I wanted to save my favorite doll from getting her head ripped off or keep my room from being completely destroyed, I had to get the monster under control. During Paul’s tantrums, my parents sometimes had to tie him to his bed, but I could usually calm him down by telling him a story. Often these tales were recounts of book plots.

I think I was 13 when I read “The Talisman,” a joint effort by Stephen King and author Peter Straub. It’s a wonderful book about a boy named Jack who goes on a heroic quest to save his dying mother. He learns to flip into another world, makes friends with a werewolf and has pages and pages of adventures. A perfect plot to soothe the savage beast.
It worked. Paul couldn’t get enough of it.

“The Talisman” became part of a daily routine for me and Paul. He was too proud to let me actually read it out loud to him, but every day he’d anxiously await my play-by-play of the book’s events.

Until one day when everything changed.
It was summer. I was just discovering boys, and my friends and I had spent the afternoon chasing them around the local mall. It was late and raining when I got home. I was tired and wet, and all I wanted to do was curl up somewhere with my book. I looked everywhere for “The Talisman,” but couldn’t find it. As I passed Paul’s room, I noticed his door was open a crack. I peeked in.

There he was. Sitting on his bed, bent over the book, brow furrowed, a finger tracing every word in painful concentration. He couldn’t wait for me to get home, so he was trying to read it himself.
No, I take that back. He was reading it himself.

We didn’t see Paul the rest of that night. I didn’t see “The Talisman” again that year. It took Paul forever, but he read every word of that book. And when he finished it, he turned it over and started it again.

After he finished it the second time, Paul asked me, “What else can I read?”
What the heck? I gave him King’s “The Stand.” It’s a huge book, even in paperback. Throw it hard enough and you could hurt somebody with it. But I knew it would deliver. It had the same magic, the same thrilling good-versus-evil plot, the same characters that stay with you, long after you’ve finished the book.
Paul finished that book, too. Eventually.

I probably don’t need to tell you the somewhat cliché ending to this story: Once Paul started reading at home, as slow and painful a process it was, he started reading at school. And once he started reading at school, well, you can imagine the once-unimaginable progress he made.

During my 31 years, I have never encountered irony more beautiful than this: The king of horror taught my brother that words are nothing to be terrified of.

Paul is 28 now. He has read every book Stephen King has ever written.
Many years ago, some of Tennessee’s finest child psychologists said Paul would never make it to high school. Last year, with help from a special program for learning-disabled students, he graduated from the University of Tennessee at Murfreesboro with a degree in universal studies. He is currently training to be a school counselor to mentally challenged children.

If you were to drop in on Paul today at his little apartment in Tennessee, you’d find that original copy of “The Talisman” by his bed. It has no front or back cover and is held together by rows and rows of masking tape. If you touched it, I’m pretty sure it would turn to dust. It’s a well-traveled book: no matter where he’s living, Paul keeps it near him. He doesn’t talk much about it, but I think it’s his own personal talisman, reminding him of a time when his world was a constant battle — until an author came along and helped him win it.

Has Stephen King lost his touch? Not in my family. I believe the wonders he’s worked have only just begun.n