One included H.P. Lovecraft. Along with the paperbacks were several horror stories that Stephen's father had written and submitted unsuccessfully to various magazines. These books and writings excited Stephen, and sparked his fascination in writing. In most of king's novels, he never mentioned or included a father for his characters. These instances have been strongly noticed in his novels Christine and Carrie. In the novel Christine, Arnie who is the main character, does not have a very strong father figure. Arnie finds his love with a car he calls Christine. In Carrie, a father was never mentioned. Carrie, the main character, was a tormented child who lashed out in an abyss of destruction. She had an obsessively religious and insane mother. She was never shown love.
King has portrayed much death in his novels do to very traumatic experiences. For instance, When Stephen King was only four years old, he witnessed his friend being run over by a train (Hanson 163). This traumatic experience was only later expressed in his novel The Body. The novel told of a group of friends who were in search of a lost friend, only to find that their friend was killed by a passing train. Another experience was when king was younger, and he had to check if his grandmother was dead on his families" couch. He held a mirror to her nose and discovered that she had indeed passed away (Wilson 37). Other deaths that saddened him were those of Sputnik and Kennedy. Kennedy's death was one of the more tragic experiences. A well known fact to those who follow King's writing is that he has targeted the thing which Sigmund Freud had most notably neglected, the central obscenity; The dark under all our beds, as death (Hanson 163). Until 1979 with having written Pet Cemetery, King had not confronted The Body or the subject of death (166).
Stephen King's years in high school were a bit traumatic. While in school, he was not seen as very popular nor had many friends, and was seen as one of the "outsiders".