In a rare interview for Parade magazine marking the release of his new novel Joyland (check out our review here) and the upcoming TV adaptation of Under the Dome, literary legend Stephen King talked about the the scary stories he loved as a kid.
“I grew up in a house where we didn’t have a TV until I was 10,” King told Parade.“We couldn’t afford one. Books were what we had... and the radio. My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.” He also recalled collecting Classics Illustrated comics, “which were also fairly bloody. I still remember the Oliver Twist one... there was blood all over that thing. Comic books were the closest we had to a visual medium.”
King went on to reveal that he's seen the first two episodes of Under the Dome, the CBS series adapted from his novel. “It looks good,” he said. “It’s not exactly like the book. It’s like a pogo stick: It hits big set pieces in the book, then bounces in its own direction. So that’s fine. You know what’ll happen is the purists who loved the book will probably scream, ‘Well, this is different and that isn’t there…’ But I think most people are going to like it. I hope they will.” (Check out preview footage from the series here.)
He also discussed his views on the hot-button issue of guns and gun control, as covered in his essay Guns (available as a Kindle single), and working with John Mellencamp on the musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County,which we cover in this article.