Imagine you are young child can you get given a new picture book for your birthday the book is called Charlie the Choo Choo and it features a train. To cover looks a little different the train isn’t like Thomas
the Tank Engine, its colours are little different and its face not as friendly. You turn the pages and begin to read. That night he struggled to sleep and when you do the terrible vision of the train of the from the book gives you nightmares. Who would right the children’s book with the intention for it to cause nightmares? As you might have guessed it was Stephen King. The book originally appeared as a book-within-a-book in volume 3 of King’s epic saga The Dark Tower. It was ascribed to the author Berryl Evans.
At a convention King’s enterprising publishers decided to create some copies of the book as a promotional item. Cheekily, they even put a quote from Stephen King on the cover saying that if he wrote a children’s book it would be like this one. While it is unclear if anyone was duped into thinking Beryl was a real person and author, the not-really-a-secret information that the book was in fact written by Stephen King himself was revealed when the book went into a wider publication in 2016.
While I can’t imagine many parents wanting to buy the book for their own children, I can easily imagine Stephen King fans wanting a copy. I mean there is a dark humour to the notion of a deliberately nightmare inducing book for children, so having a copy might give some people a little thrill. In case anyone is wondering I do not own a copy. I am not that kind of person.
So where might this idea for such a book have come from? King his head a dark history of his own which is well documented in his autobiographical books On Writing and Danse Macabre. As a child he witnessed a friend being killed by a train and perhaps related perhaps not fell in love with horror fiction. King has also had well documented battles with alcoholism, and was involved in a near fatal car accident as an adult. But maybe it stems from somewhere else. King suffers from triskaidekaphobia, which is the irrational fear of number thirteen.2 I’ll certainly give him a pass on that given my own completely irrational fear of jewellery.
However, it’s one other quirk which interests me; every day before he begins writing which he does in
the very early hours of the morning king eats a piece of cheesecake. He refers to it as his brain food.1 Maybe some poor digestion led to a nightmare of his own which he converted to book form? That’s pure speculation and just me having a little bit of cheeky fun, but I cannot think of any rational explanation why you would want to induce nightmares in children. On the few occasions my own children experienced them, it was awful for me as a parent.
Maybe we should look at this another way and recognise that the story was never meant to be read to children, nor was it intended to be published. Perhaps instead of wondering about King, we should instead ask why the publishers thought it was OK to print, or if the mere fact a book might sell
a lot of copies and make some money is enough reason to publish it if it may cause harm.
This post is part of my Great Moments in Literature series. To make sure you don’t miss the next Great Moment in Literature, please subscribe to my mailing list below.
1 https://firstwefeast.com/drink/2014/01/surprising-food-booze-habits-famous-authors/maya-angelou
2 https://archive.bookstr.com/list/8-really-strange-facts-about-famous-authors/
Robert New 
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