11 May 2020
Families! Look no further for a source of fears. Having children can change your life-indeed, I think it should-and the changes may include how a writer writes. After he and his wife had their first child the late James Herbert declared that he would never subject children to horrors in his tales again. By contrast, Stephen King and I seem driven to imagine the worst that can happen, perhaps in a bid to inoculate reality against our fears. This produced at least two of Stephen's greatest novels. Pet Sematary grew out of an actual fear, happily proved baseless, for a child.
