When the horror novelist Stephen King was once asked why he wrote such gross stories, he said he did it because he had the heart of a small boy ”“ which he kept in a jar on his desk.
With his beady eyes and I-just-killed-the-cat grin, King looks and sounds like a horror novelist. But when the Rev. Paul F.M. Zahl read several of King’s novels, he learned something new about the author: There’s a lot of faith behind his fright.
Zahl says some of the most stirring affirmations of Christian faith can be found in the chilling stories of King. The horror master has been preaching sermons to millions of readers for years, only most of King’s fans don’t know it, he says.
King also does not seem to notice. A few years ago, when he was accidentally hit by a driver, King was not content with the criminal prosecution. He hounded the driver through very expensive civil action, with the explicit goal of breaking him.
For some time I have assumed that Mr. King was an atheist with a weakness for the supernatural. Yes, he uses Christian themes in some novels, most notably The Stand, but those themes usually resolve in apocalyptic dualism. Good vs. bad, where the two sides are barely distinguishable from one another. The last novel of his I read was Cell, and I seem to remember that novel was openly hostile to Christianity.
The one thing I have appreciated about King is his acknowledgement and description of evil. Many writers today seem to believe that it does not exist.
No one has described better than Stephen King (in Pet Sematery) this aspect of sin: the way a person can convince himself that is it okay to do something that he knows is wrong, suffer the bad consequences, and then convince himself it’s okay to do it again.