Most of our articles are going to be about what inspires our work here at American Pulps, the rest will be drink recipes. This isn’t a drink recipe.
I wasn’t a huge Stephen King fan as a kid, probably because I tried to read The Shining in 8th Grade for a book report in English class and hadn’t even gotten to the part where they move into the Overlook Hotel by the time the report was due. I knew that he was a Red Sox fan because he was shown on TV watching the games at Fenway from time to time, I liked that about him but I could say the same about Doris Kearns Goodwin (love Team of Rivals by the way).
As a kid I always liked the movies The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me not knowing they were originally novella’s from the same Stephen King book, Different Seasons. After I found out that they were based of his work I decided to give him another shot and got a collection of short stories, Everything’s Eventual. I instantly fell in love with his work after reading The Death of Jack Hamilton, The Man in the Black Suit, and especially Riding the Bullet.
After seeing the light I hoarded as many King books I could get my hands on, which was easy being from New England where his work is in every thrift store. Not to mention my parents living room which had a ton of his old books. One of them being Night Shift, a collection of his early short stories he sold to magazines.
Fast forward a few years; I moved to Los Angeles, got more serious about my writing, and started a pulp fiction zine with a friend called Shit Show Pulps. Talking to John about some of King’s work, he mentioned the Night Shift stories quite a bit. I still hadn’t read the beat up copy I swiped from my Ma and decided I should start reading those while I worked on the short stories for our magazine.
When I say Night Shift inspired us I mean it truly inspired a lot of the early stuff we put together. At least for me anyway, I can’t speak for John but we were very much in the same place as King was as he wrote those stories. This collection is mostly his work for men’s magazines like Cavalier Magazine, Adam, and Penthouse which inspired Shit Show Pulps in the first place. Not to mention it was a young, hungry and unknown Pre-Carrie Stephen King who was writing them. He writes about this time in his book On Writing which is a must read for any aspiring writer I might add.
From Night Shift here’s some short stories that we still talk about often.
Sometimes They Come Back is a premise that we love for a few supernatural thrillers we’ve been noodling. The thought of being haunted by your old high school bullies is great. And when I mean bullies I mean classic Stephen King bullies, they killed the protagonists brother. The Man Who Loved Flowers, I am the Doorway, Grey Matter are all great and part of King’s Dollar Babies for film students that we thought about working into a screenplay (before Shit Show was even an idea). If you’re a film student, click on the Dollar Babies link and see if anything grabs you. You might be able to get rights to a King story for a dollar.
Children of the Corn is also a classic from this collection, I’ve played around with a few small town thrillers and this along with You Know They Got a Hell of a Band from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection have been huge inspirations. The Ledge is amazing. It is so intense and it only takes place at one location, on a ledge. Great story telling.
You really can’t go wrong with any of these, they’re all fun reads. As I was reading them a few years back, something clicked and a whole lot of ideas poured out of me. If you’re a writer and you’ve got writer’s block read something, it’ll come back. Or it won’t and something better will replace it.
Anyway, long live the King.
