Introduction

As someone now in her mid-40s, I have referred to Stephen King as the constant man in my life for a number of years now. I first learned of him when I was around 12 years old, and when sleeping over my cousin’s house we watched the movie Stand By Me. As the credits rolled, and I saw it was based on the novella The Body by Stephen King, I thought, I’ve got to track this book down.

I can’t remember exactly whether Different Seasons, the collection which included The Body, was the very first or just one of the first King books I read. Memory is funny like that, and especially mine when it comes to books. I know I very quickly read a bunch of King books all in a row, but some of them I have absolutely no memory of, I just know I read them. I figured, as it’s been over 30 years since I read some of these books, and I have a shocking memory anyway, it was worth re-reading the King books I had, getting any books I was missing, and doing a full chronological read of all of his books. This blog is me documenting this journey.

The first thing I did was use this list to figure out which of King's books were missing from my bookshelves. Turned out I was only missing around 6 or 7, so I tracked down those I could from bookstores (e.g. Firestarter) and ordered what I had to from the US (e.g. Secret Windows). 

I then tried to figure out which on the list I remembered reading, and that quickly fell in a heap due to my aforementioned poor memory. I mean, I remember reading Firestarter when I was a teen, but remembered absolutely nothing about it, and then there were ones like Cujo which I *think* I hadn't read and had only seen the movie, but I couldn't be sure. And then there were ones I know I definitely had never read, as I bought the books in the 90s as they were released but never cracked them open. So this exercise was quickly abandoned. I had to read everything, in order, before I could tick it off the list.

Starting with Carrie, this blog will be a way for me to try and remember my thoughts on each book as I go, wherever and whenever this journey ends.

After committing to this, a slight spanner was thrown in the works when a Facebook group I'm a member of decided to spend 2024 doing a reading challenge of his short story collections. So, these are not being read in chronological order, and instead 1 collection is being read each month in 2024 in line with the group's schedule.

Okay, I think that's all the background! Well done if you've read this far. I hope you enjoy the rest of the journey 😊

Sidebar: Apologies if you came here thinking this was a blog about the musical The King and I. I just thought it was a fun title for my blog, and no doubt by now you’ve learned you’ve been deceived if the musical was the reason you came. I’ve never actually seen The King and I, so am poorly placed to write about it.