Ok, so this isn’t actually an ode.  It’s not going to be a poem and it certainly won’t be lyrical, but I thought the title sounded cool, and so I dedicate this post to the man who made me want to become, not only a writer, but a novelist.  So this is my ode—that’s not really an ode—to Stephen King.  Up until my sophomore year of high school, I wasn’t much of a reader.  My sister would actually beg me to read, when all I really wanted to do was play tennis and basketball.  And then my English teacher at DeSales decided that we were going to read Stephen King all year, thinking that his books would actually get high school kids to read, which they most certainly did.  AND we even had great discussions about them…Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (which became a movie I believe everyone on the planet has seen, and one of my favorite all time movies), and The Body (which became a movie called Stand By Me).  Those were only two of the stories we read that year, but as soon as I started reading, I couldn’t stop.  After that year of school I went on to read, and devour, every Stephen King book he’d ever written.  They became more than just books to me.  My junior year, over Thanksgiving, we were on vacation in North Carolina and I came across an ad in a magazine to join the Stephen King Library.  In the middle of the ad was a red, hardcover, leather-bound copy of Pet Sematary, a Stephen King book that I had yet to read.  And I could order it for only $14.95!  It wasn’t just because I hadn’t red it yet.  The “red version” of the book jumped out to me and I HAD to have it.  All I had to do was send in a check, (thanks mom and dad, you get this one and I’ll take it from here) plus shipping and handling, which came out to $18 and change.  A few weeks later I had the red, leather-bound, hardcover book in my hands, and I felt like an eight-year-old at Christmas.  It was so much different than reading the regular version, although the words were all the same.  And the “red version” didn’t even have cover art.  But that only made it more magical.  The second book came a month later, The Shining.  I placed it on a shelf right next to Pet Sematary and the collection began.  The collection was a dream for me…for one day I wanted my own books to stand on a shelf, side-by-side, for someone else to collect.  The red books had a classic “look”, embossed as they were with gold lettering.  They had a smell of old books even though they were new.  And they traveled with me from my old home, to my first apartment, to my second apartment, to a house, then to my first house, and now to my second house.  The red books are always the first things that I unpack.  All of my other books, which I love, are on bookshelves either in the basement or in my office upstairs, but my Stephen King Library stands in the living room beside the fireplace, all by themselves, all 20-something of them (the last several years they stopped sending the red version and instead started replacing them with the regular novels, which I don’t include by the fireplace because they aren’t red, or leather-bound!).  Every time I look at those books, even still, I’m inspired to write.

It goes without saying that I didn’t want my young kids to touch my Stephen King Library.  It’s not that I had to tell them to stay away from them.  They just didn’t seem to care, or even notice them.  But lately, I’ve noticed them looking.  Sitting there and staring at them.  My son would occasionally sit on the small bench beside the book case and start flipping through one of them randomly, which I thought was cute.  It was as if something had drawn him to them as well.  And then a few weeks ago I was cooking in the kitchen.  I looked into the living room and my son and daughter had taken every red book from the shelf and stacked them in about four piles on that bench.  I started to say something but stopped myself.  They were being so careful, respectful, and they even put them back (not in the right order, but that’s okay).  My daughter, who is just learning to write her name, has even taken to sitting there and flipping through them.  Perhaps these books will play a part in my kids wanting to read.  Perhaps not.  But it’s interesting all the same.  And I’ll make them wait until high school to read them, if they ask to.  But thank you Stephen King for forging my writing career years ago, for planting the seeds to tell stories.  You are the only writer out there who can just obliterate genre lines with every novel.  It drives me crazy when people refer to Stephen King as a Horror novelist, which he certainly can be.  But he is so much more.  He’s what every writer strives to be.  Free of boundaries.  He’s a story teller, plain and true.