I first encountered Stephen King at the public library in Castine, Maine, in 1979. I was 12 and had never read any horror fiction before, but I was drawn to the cover of Night Shift, his first collection of short stories. It featured a hand half-wrapped in gauze with eyes on its fingers and palm, staring out at me. That was scary, but it was the sixth tale, “The Boogeyman”, that stoked my deepest fears: Lester Billings is telling his psychiatrist about his three small children who, one by one, had been killed in their cribs by a monster living in their bedroom closet. By the end of the story, it’s clear that Lester’s negligence and cowardice put them all in harm’s way, and that his wife was helpless (or absent) when the monster came for them.
I’d been an anxious little kid who stuck close to my mother and to familiar places whenever possible. “The Boogeyman” exploded the equation I’d clung to in those early days and tucked away in my subconscious for safekeeping as I got older: mom + home = security.
And yet I continued to devour King’s stories and to let a posse of his monsters shamble into my imagination: the woman in Room 217, Danny Glick scratching at the window, little Gage Creed, covered in his own grave-dirt, coming for his mommy. But the Boogeyman reigned supreme. I still can’t sleep next to an open closet.