Lisa Rogak - Haunted Heart

“There was a high premium on keeping yourself to yourself—on maintaining a pleasant exterior—saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you,’ and using your handkerchief even if you’re on the Titanic and it’s going down, because that’s the way you were supposed to behave.”

While being scared out of his wits, he was also studying the technical effects in the films. “I got a little more discriminating in my ability to detect special effects, if not necessarily my sense of taste,” he observed. “Even when the flying saucer appeared to be a Kool cigarette filter tip with a sparkler stuck in it, it looked real to me because I was at a young and very credulous age.”

But he wasn’t too discriminating in his movie tastes: he also loved World War Two movies such as Halls of Montezuma, Sands of Iwo Jima, and Gung Ho!

In fact, the first movie that terrified him wasn’t even a horror film, but one from Walt Disney. After he saw Bambi in 1955, the forest-fire scene gave him nightmares for weeks.

It wasn’t just the movies that scared him; the normal things in everyday life did as well.

Perhaps Steve’s greatest fear was what would happen to him and his brother if Ruth fell ill and couldn’t take care of them. Or worse. It was clear that the relatives didn’t want children. Steve thought he and Dave would end up in foster care or a place like the insane asylum in The Snake Pit .

Steve was learning that the world was a scary place—both the real one and the make-believe one—and as a result, his fears were beginning to multiply exponentially. He was afraid of spiders, falling into the toilet, older kids, what-if-his-mother-suddenly-walked-away-too, everything. He was afraid that he’d die before he was twenty years old. He was also scared of clowns. “When I was a kid, I saw other kids cry about clowns too,” he said. “To me there’s something scary, something sinister about such a figure of happiness and fun being evil.”

Ruth did her part to contribute to her son’s fears as well. “One of the reasons I’ve been so successful is that I was brought up by a woman who worried all the time,” he said. “She’d tell me to put on my rubbers or I’d get pneumonia and die.”

But back in the 1950s, some bona fide fears appeared as well, including a nationwide polio epidemic for which no vaccine existed. Most people refrained from swimming in public pools because of the fear of contracting the disease. And then there were the Russians. The general anxiety about the Communists was pervasive throughout the culture. And the fears of having an atomic bomb fall on your town were amplified with every school air-raid drill, which sent kids scurrying under their desks for protection.

One Saturday afternoon in October 1957, Steve was at a Saturday matinee when suddenly the movie screen went dark. The audience started to make noise, believing that the film strip had broken or the projectionist had switched to the wrong reel, but suddenly the lights came on overhead and the manager walked down the aisle and stood in front of the screen. “He mounted the stage and in a trembling voice, he told us that the Russians had just launched a space satellite into orbit around Earth called Sputnik, ” said King. The United States was supposed to be number one when it came to everything—military strength and technology among them—and so when it was clear the Russians had taken the lead, the nation felt as if it had been punched in the gut.

In addition to warning Steve and Dave about the dangers of catching cold, Ruth King was fond of giving her children advice by offering up pithy sayings such as “You’ll never be hung for your beauty” and “You need that like a hen needs a flag.” After a particularly grueling day at work, she’d caution her children to “hope for the best and expect the worst.”

Though Steve brushed some of the sayings off, two in particular he took to heart, while providing them with a little bit of a spin: “If you think the worst, it can’t come true” and “If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.”

Fortunately, Ruth never said he couldn’t write things that weren’t nice.

Throughout his childhood, Steve continued to write and Ruth continued to pay him a quarter for each story. He wrote his first horror story at the age of seven. Spending almost every weekend and every weeknight sitting slack-jawed in front of a movie screen had begun to affect his subject matter.

“I had internalized the idea from the movies that just when everything looked blackest, the scientists would come up with some off-the-wall solution that would take care of things,” he said. So he wrote a story about a dinosaur that was creating a lot of damage and havoc when one of the scientists came to the rescue. “He said, ‘Wait, I have a theory—the old dinosaur used to be allergic to leather.’ So they went out and threw leather boots and shoes and leather vests at it, and it went away.”

However, all of the movies and comics and horror stories Steve devoured also had a downside: they often caused nightmares. “My imagination was too big for my head at that point, and so I spent a lot of miserable hours,” he said. “With the kind of imagination I had, you couldn’t switch off the images once you’d triggered them, so I’d see my mother laid out in a white-silk-lined mahogany coffin with brass handles, her dead face blank and waxen. I’d hear the organ dirges in the background, and then I’d see myself being dragged off to some Dickensian workhouse by a terrible old lady in black.”

At the age of eight, he had a dream where he saw the body of a hanged man on a scaffold atop a hill. “When the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my own face, rotted and picked by the birds, but still obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me.”

He woke up and started screaming and couldn’t stop. “Not only was I unable to go back to sleep for hours after that, but I was really afraid to turn out the light for weeks. I can still see it as clearly now as when it happened.”

In 1958, Ruth moved the family from Connecticut to West Durham, Maine, a small town about thirty miles north of Scarborough, so she could care for her ailing, elderly parents, who were both in their eighties.

It was her sisters’ idea. The arrangement was that her siblings would offer Ruth food and a place, an old, rickety farmhouse with an outhouse out back. Steve, Dave, and Ruth would share the house and receive spare food and canned goods in exchange for caring for Mama and Daddy Guy, as they were known, who were beginning to have trouble taking care of themselves. Ruth’s sister and brother-in-law Ethelyn and Oren Flaws also lived nearby.

Ruth accepted the offer, and the three settled in West Durham in a neighborhood near Runaround Pond that Steve later described as consisting of “four families and a graveyard.”

Once the family had settled in, Steve discovered he was surrounded by relatives and the family history, exaggerations and gossip characteristic of small towns—including a few good ghost stories. By listening to the tall tales and rumors, he learned that people liked to invent truths where there were none. It was a valuable lesson for a budding writer.

Ruth came from a long line of Methodists, so her children dutifully attended services and Bible school several times a week at the tiny, two-hundred-year-old Methodist church next door to their house.

Fewer than twenty families attended the church, so the parish had no funds to retain a full-time preacher. The church drew on members of the congregation to lead services and preach sermons, a rotating selection that occasionally included Steve, though several times a year when they were feeling flush, parishioners would invite a traveling preacher to conduct services.