Pages 9 - 23: Fear the Familiar

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This has always been one big thing that SK can do and others can only attempt: he can scare the crap out of us in broad daylight.  He does it by making the familiar, the things we can touch, turn against us in the most realistic way.

This began all the way back in Carrie, his very first.  The opening scene -- Carrie being tormented by her fellow female students, pelting the terrified girl in the shower with tampons and chanting "Plug it up, Plug it up!"  The fear and horror we experienced wasn't about gray-skinned monsters with flat heads and rivets, or vampires with bad European accents and painted-on widow's-peaks.  These are about the things that really scare us: mob rule and public torment in Carrie, the weird old stranger who lives  in down the block in Salem's Lot, dying suddenly and inexplicably from something simple, something as common as the cold ("I TOLD You I Was Sick!") in The Stand...

And now, here, a couple of new ones show up, right at the beginning of the Big New Book.  There's the headache that comes on, so hard and fast it's like getting hit by the car.  It's nothing, the doctor says, Just a headache.  You'll be fine.  But that voice in the back of your aching head says, What if it's not?  What if it's someting awful?  What if I'm really sick, what if  there's a huge hairy TUMOR swelLing in my brain?  That really terrifies us, much more than any widow's peak, and it's right here, right on Page 22.

This is why we love this guy.  Because he knows was scares us, the real things that scare us, and he just will not let them pass.