Stephen King is sick, imo. Stephen King was first putting out his books when I was a kid and I started reading them when I was probably in 6th grade or so. Not just a few of them--all of them: The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter, Pet Sematary, Salem's Lot, Christine, Cujo, Misery, etc., etc. I even read Different Seasons (novella collection, one of which is where the movie Stand By Me with River Phoenix came from) and King's lesser known works. Back then, King was a good writer in terms of his storytelling. Anybody who has read The Shining in my opinion cannot deny that the writing is well done.

And then It came out. I was in college by then. I was reading it on a weekend in my apartment. It's a long book, over 1000 pages. I remember it vividly because it was the last Stephen King book I read. The protagonists in this novel are children--preteen mostly boys and one girl. They're fighting evil; they each bring something to the table for the group. The book was poorly edited to say the least--obvious spelling errors and other things that had me shaking my head when I was reading it. But then the scene comes where the little girl gets to make her contribution to the group: being the recipient of essentially a train by these young boys. She "reunites the group" so to speak after a trauma by letting these young boys have sex with her one after another. These are CHILDREN. OMG was I pissed. I literally threw the book across my apartment when I got to that scene. The line had been crossed. I suddenly understood that I was not reading a book by a guy who mines his imagination to write about strange topics and writes about them well. I was reading a book by a fucked up human and he had crossed a line. I never read another Stephen King novel again and I gave away all of his books. I suddenly understood that I could not offer one cent of support going forward to the human who would write that scene. That's all I understood about it then. Now I see other facets: the normalizing of pedophilia, the Satanic agenda, the whole crazy spider thing in that book maybe not being so crazy ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+spider+sculpture&atb=v317-1&iax=images&ia=images ), clowns, etc, etc. So now my question is, "Did Stephen King start out okay and then sold his sold to the devil? Or did he sell his soul to the devil from the start of his writing career?" Either way, no thanks.