Editing Stephen King (section)

=== Themes ===
When asked if fear was his main subject, King said "In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts."<ref name=":ParisReview"/> 

Joyce Carol Oates said that "Stephen King's characteristic subject is small-town American life, often set in fictitious Derry, Maine; tales of family life, marital life, the lives of children banded together by age, circumstance, and urgency, where parents prove oblivious or helpless. The human heart in conflict with itself—in the guise of the malevolent Other. The '[[Gothic fiction|gothic]]' imagination magnifies the vicissitudes of 'real life' in order to bring it into a sharper and clearer focus."<ref name=":Oates"/> King's ''The Body'' is about [[coming of age]], a theme he has returned to several times, for example in ''[[Joyland (King novel)|Joyland]]''.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Flood |first=Alison |date=January 22, 2013 |title=Joyland by Stephen King -- review |work=[[The Guardian]] |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/22/joyland-stephen-king-review}}</ref>

King often uses authors as characters, such as Ben Mears in ''[['Salem's Lot]]'', Jack Torrance in ''[[The Shining (novel)|The Shining]]'', adult [[Bill Denbrough]] in ''[[It (novel)|It]]'' and Mike Noonan in ''[[Bag of Bones]]''. He has extended this to breaking the [[fourth wall]] by including himself as a character in three novels of [[The Dark Tower (series)|''The Dark Tower'']]. Among other things, this allows King to explore themes of authorship; [[George Stade]] writes that ''[[Misery (novel)|Misery]]'' "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death" while ''[[The Dark Half]]'' "is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Stade |first=George |date=October 29, 1989 |title=His Alter-Ego is a Killer |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/lifetimes/king-darkhalf.html}}</ref>

Introducing King at the [[National Book Awards]], [[Walter Mosley]] said "Stephen King once said that daily life is the frame that makes the picture. His commitment, as I see it, is to celebrate and empower the everyday man and woman as they buy aspirin and cope with cancer. He takes our daily lives and makes them into something heroic. He takes our world, validates our distrust of it and then helps us to see that there's a chance to transcend the muck. He tells us that even if we fail in our struggles, we are still worthy enough to pass on our energies in the survival of humanity."<ref name="NBA"/> In his acceptance speech for the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, King said:<blockquote>"[[Frank Norris]], the author of ''[[McTeague]]'', said something like this: 'What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth.' And that's always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation... We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular."<ref name="NBA">{{Cite news |date=2003|title=Stephen King Accepts the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters|work=[[National Book Foundation]] |url=https://www.nationalbook.org/tag/stephen-king/}}</ref></blockquote>