Stephen King has written twenty-six novels (including five under the pen name Richard Bachman), five collections of short fiction, one book of criticism, six screenplays, and other short works. According to Stephen J. Spignesi in The Shape Under the Shee...

Stephen King (born 1947) is a prolific and immensely popular author of horror fiction. In his works, King blends elements of the traditional gothic tale with those of the modern psychological thriller, detective, and science fiction genres. Stephen King...

Stephen King was born September 21, 1947 in Portland, Maine, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. Two years later, his father, a merchant seaman, went to the grocery store for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. King's mother was...

Carrie by Stephen King Born in 1947, Stephen King came of age during an era in which many praised the achievements of science but also feared its potential for destruction. The author himself has noted that the tenor of American life at the time lent...

Carrie (1974) is Stephen King's first published novel. King has commented that he finds the work to be "raw" and "with a surprising power to hurt and horrify". It is one of the most frequently banned books in U.S. schools [1] and the film version was...

William Styron's daughter Alexandra debuts with All the Finest Girls (Little, Brown, $23.95), a hauntingly grim, angry novel about a seriously dysfunctional, "love handicapped" family. Her narrator, Adelaide Abraham, is the withdrawn, difficult only child of a well- to-do bit-part actress and a bitter...

Readers of Newtonian Laura Zigman's second novel, "Dating Big Bird," have had reason to anticipate her third, "Her." Well, the wait has ended, and so should the anticipation. Though "Dating Big Bird" was wry, funny, and semi-believable, there is painfully little to recommend...

Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, the perpetrator of NYC2012, just issued a statement that makes it sound like NYC2016 isn't likely--at least not under his leadership. Are we reading too much between the lines? Here it is: "Today ends an 11 year journey not just for...

Fire helmet? Check. Gloves? Check. Axe? Check. Pet oxygen masks? Check.Increasingly, little oxygen masks for pets are becoming standard equipment for firefighters. Hoping to save cats, dogs and other pets caught in house fires, animal advocacy groups and pet-products suppliers are equipping departments all over...

To be sure, [Carrie] is a special kind of fairy tale: it is an adult fairy tale explicit in matters of sex, killing and revenge, and if the young appreciate it, it may be because their tastes have grown ahead of their chronological age. But Carrie is nevertheless a fairy tale: rites de passage, supernatural powers, magic and rites of sacrifice. Since fairy tales feed on such themes, the folktale opus is quite similar the world over. But Carrie, made into a highly popular movie, and thus rendered into a seri...

Poltergeists, psychokinesis (called telekinesis or TK in this book), and religious fundamentalism mix to produce Carrie …, Stephen King's novel that probably holds the record for the number of deaths perpetrated within its covers by a single adolescent. Sin, sex, and the unpopularity of an adolescent girl endowed with TK begin to come together when the naive Carrie is shocked by the sudden onset of her first menstrual period. The fatal results indicate the value of sex education. (p. 76)