Parade cover article with Stephen King

Did anyone catch this Sundays cover article in Parade? What a remarkable man Stephen King is. I recommend it to those who haven't read it yet.

Parade was a very soft porn magazine in the 50s and 60s in England. As schoolboys we chose our barber according to whether they took Parade and we sat intently reading well thumbed copies while we waited.
If very lucky there may have been the odd copy of Health and Efficiency.
I remember that there were occasional articles which had CP in, they either were about youths being birched in the Channel Islands or the Iom, or nubile women being flogged in PoW camps-these were accompanied by lurid drawings.
To be caught in possession of a Parade in the first few years of grammar school meant instant plimsoll or caning.
I presume the current US parade is a rather different publication.

You assume correctly. The USA version is a "free" magazine that is included with many Sunday newspapers. In home, I fear it usually makes a fairly direct trip to the recycling bin, though I will fish it out to read the Stephen King article. Stephen King is certainly an interesting character, and an excellent writer, whom I wish wrote fiction I was interested in reading.

Although King doesn't shy away from various collaborations, he seems to have eschewed the "sellout" tactics of several of his well-known contemporary authors, who use hired authors to write their books and so turn their names into little more than fiction franchises.



Alas! Nothing like that was available in my youth. The best one could hope for was a glimpse at a well-thumbed Playboy filched from a friend's father's secret stash.

For those interested in reading the Parade article online, here it is:

http://www.parade.com/15671/kentucker/summers-best-books-starring-stephen-king/

I have always enjoyed King's work, as well as his insights about the craft of writing. He is a master storyteller, for sure. For a while he was a guest columnist for Entertainment Weekly (yes, I'll admit that magazine is one of my guilty pleasures!). He wrote about aspects of American pop culture including music, film, TV, and fiction. I always looked forward to his entertaining columns. It made you realize he had varied interests and tastes outside of the "horror genre" which we all associate with him.

King also has spanking or whipping scenes in several of his novels. Salem's Lot has one where the actual punishment is not described but it has the cheating wife who was caught by her husband eating standing up because "she was still too sore to sit down."the novel It has a woman named Beverly who is spanked by her husband or male partner, and one passage talks about how "she will be taking her meals standing for the next two or three days." Both these would qualify as abuse to us.
There may be more, been awhile since I read much King.

There was always National Geographic with the occasional picture of bare-breasted women in Africa or the South Pacific...

There was a lot more abuse in Beverly's back story(the stuff set in the 50s) - abuse that everyone in town knew of but turned their back on. And that's what King was writing about with Beverly: a woman who was abused as a child who subconsciously sought out abusive relationships. She didn't like spankings but was damaged in a way that she couldn't recognise, a abused child growing up into a abused woman. She was a success in business (living her dream professional life, the way they all did) but had no control over her personal life.

Other abusive in that book included a father who used to swing a 2" x 4" at his son, and sometimes his son's friends, when he had been drinking. Which was most days.*

The book It (which is hard to talk about because the title is the same as the pronoun you would use to describe the book) is full of great scenes that have nothing to do with horror per se while a horror slowly builds up (will the turtle help?) about a nameless creature that preys on children, but virtually nothing in it applies to on topic subjects. The sole exception to this is the acceptance of corporal punishment in the flashbacks; King shows a time when spanking happened and everyone accepted that spanking happened, but he colours it with enough abuse that it doesn't evoke nostalgia.

Goodgulf

* edited to add that I found a copy of IT online and it seems that I misremember that part. To quote:
These boys were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Henry's kooky father, who didn't much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Victor Criss when the boy dropped a basket of tomatoes he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Butch Bowers had chanted 'I'm gonna kill all the Nips! I'm gonna kill all the fuckin Nips!' when he did it.

Yes, those were at my elementary school in the Social Studies room, and we had free access if nothing else was going on.


Strangely, that Social Studies room was also the only place where we could clearly hear spankings happen in the Principal's office. Nobody thought it strange.

A kid can learn all sorts of things at school.

I absolutely love King though I have not read everything of his (i.e., Dark Tower). His book about the Kennedy assignation is terrific, both as a time travel story and more as a poignant love story. Under the Dome was just ok, but Duma Key was a great supernatural thriller as was Bag of Bones. His collaboration with Peter Straub (Black House?--a follow-up to The Talisman) was also very good. The Green Mile and Shawshank were such great tales too--full of heart. No, he is definitely not just a "horror" writer.

IIRC both of those husbands ended up being killed, so they received their 'just desserts' (for a Stephen King novel anyway) for being spousal abusers.

The one in 'SALEM'S LOT at least had a legitimate reason (marital infidelity) for being upset with his wife, although beating her with the butt of a shotgun was obviously an extreme overreaction. He was more than a match for her young lover while they both were human, but not when the guy returned as a vampire.

In Beverly's case, she was finally able to fight back and escape her husband's intended "whuppin" once a crisis situation galvanized her into action.

IT left me feeling quite sentimental about the inevitable loss of childhood friendships... --C.K.