Everyone needs a little help every now and then, and the popular, prolific, and critically acclaimed horror writer Stephen King is no different. In a recent tell-all, the King of Horror admitted that he has had a little help coming up with the ideas for his recent books. In fact, for the past 20 years, ever since he was struck by a car while walking down the road in 1999, King has been turning to the popular children’s horror series Goosebumps, written by R.L. Stine, for more than just inspiration.
King says his novel Duma Key is based on Stine’s Ghost Beach, and Dreamcatcher is “basically the same as It Came from Beneath the Sink!, just with a quick run through a thesaurus.” King told reporters, “After the accident, I thought to myself, ‘Why am I doing so much work to come up with all these new ideas, when there are so many good ideas right in front of me? They call R.L. Stine the ‘Stephen King of children’s horror,’ so those stories essentially belong to me anyway.”
At the time of the interview, King had no idea just how true that statement would turn out to be. Just yesterday, Stine revealed that he has been drawing ideas from King’s works for the entire Goosebumps run, meaning that for the last 20 years, King has been penning books based on his own recycled ideas. King based Mr. Mercedes on Stine’s The Haunted Car, which Stine had based on King’s Christine. Furthermore, King’s Doctor Sleep, the sequel to the hit novel The Shining from 1977, drew from the iconic first story in the Goosebumps series, Welcome to Dead House, which Stine confessed was based on The Shining itself, meaning King’s sequel to The Shining is essentially a double retooling of the original story.
Early public comments on these revelations reveal that no one really seems to care whether the two horror heroes’ stories are recycled. It seems if readers are willing to consume books with names like The Tommyknockers or Egg Monsters from Mars, they tend not to be very discerning about the novelty of the subject matter.
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