They were fresh air and security blanket in one they were not only an acknowledgment that evil existed (you needed only meet my gym teacher to buy that) but an assurance that someone like me, needy and lonely and young, could defeat it. After that day, the books I loved became the books I lived on. If the Losers Club could defeat knife-wielding bullies and a monstrous sewer clown, I reasoned, then surely I could take a stab at surviving the junior high cafeteria. Or at least not to quit school and get a job at the Gap. The actual, non-allegorical, non-pithy truth: Stephen King saved my life strictly in the sense that after an especially humiliating junior high school afternoon (acid-washed jeans, a chair puddled with red paint, you get the rest), it was re-reading It that persuaded me not to run away and join the circus. I like the way it feels true, if only in the same way a pig’s blood-covered girl slaughtering her prom-mates with psychic rage feels true-which is to say, absolutely and not in the slightest. I like the pith of it, not to mention the melodrama. I say this so often-especially lately, having spent the last two years working on a horror novel and fielding the inevitable questions of how and why-that it’s become somewhat of a catchphrase. Robin Wasserman: Stephen King saved my life. She is the author of many YA books, including The Seven Deadly Sins Series, The Book of Blood and Shadow, and the Cold Awakening trilogy. Wasserman’s latest novel, The Waking Dark, contains a premise Gurdon might chastise: One morning, five seemingly unrelated murder-suicides take place in a tiny Kansas town.
In her essay for this series, she explains why King’s books are loved best by teenagers-even though, while they are often about teenagers, they are not really written for them-and makes her case for why, when it comes to kids’ books, darkness should be visible. Stephen King’s dark, violent books not only helped her endure her personal childhood miseries, they hooked her on reading and made her want to write professionally. Like most Young Adult authors, Robin Wasserman had a crucial literary model growing up.
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