MONDAY’S CLASS: I wrote Stephen King’s well-known “What if?” quote on the board and asked students to draw connections between the quote and the stories they read:
“Strawberry Spring” (serial murderer on the loose on a college campus during unseasonably warm weather). “Sometimes They Come Back” (ghosts of the teenaged boys who murdered an English teacher’s younger brother sixteen years ago return from the dead). “Trucks” (all the trucks in the world come to life and enslave the human race). “Grey Matter” (man drinks a contaminated beer and turns into a gigantic carnivorous fungus). “The Boogeyman” (man seeks psychological help for the guilt he feels for letting his children fall victim to the Boogeyman lurking in the closet). “The Mangler” (speed folding machine at an industrial laundromat is possessed by a demonic spirit). “Graveyard Shift” (gigantic mutant rats wreak havoc on factory workers). My class just completed its first week of two with stories from the “master of horror.” Here are the stories I assigned: I love Halloween and wanted to do something “in the Halloween spirit” with my students, so I added Night Shift, Stephen King’s 1978 short story collection, to my textbook adoptions. I’ve successfully used his novels in classes on science fiction, dystopian fiction, and horror.īack in August, while constructing the reading schedule for my short story course, I noticed that Halloween falls on a Monday this year-a class day-and something clicked. In my early years of teaching, I also happily discovered that King does pop up in college classrooms all the time. I was enthralled by King’s writing, yet if someone asked what I read in my spare time, I was quick to mention Melville, but not King.Įventually, I realized that King isn’t a “guilty pleasure” at all, and my fear of “guilty pleasure” embarrassment was one among many universal human fears King actually writes about. When I was an English major in college, I thought of Stephen King as my “guilty pleasure.” He was awesome and popular, but not someone I expected to encounter in any of my literature courses. 
I didn’t initially plan to include a unit on Stephen King in my short story course.
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