In “Stephen King Saved My Life”, Robin Wasserman goes on to say that Stephen King was the “king” of all teenagers; An inspiration to adolescence. She relates an embarrassing story from her teenage years to the overall structure of most of his works. In Kings works he made it clear that “evil existed…but…someone [like me], needy and lonely and young, could defeat it”(pg. 1, par. 2). Though his writings appeal so much to preteens and adolescents, he does not even believe in “teen novels”. This brings forth the question of whether he even believes in teenagers period. One would think that King believed that humans go from the magical stages of childhood to the stiff stages of adulthood, as if teenager-hood was some unidentified bridge linking the two stages without interference. Maybe ” ‘teenager’ is simply an illusion created by the dynamic equilibrium of two opposing forces: childhood and adulthood” (pg. 3, par. 1). King is a fan of J.K. Rowling because she takes time to let her characters actually grow up. I believe King regards the whole journey from childhood to adulthood more important than the individual stages. According to Wasserman, the fact that King doesn’t believe in the teen novel makes him a great writer of teen novels. For King, there is no teenage stage. There is adolescence and adulthood; “there is only schoolboy love and adult lust, only the songs of innocence and experience, and dissonance and harmony when the two collide” (pg. 3, par. 3).
Ghia Smith 