What is Stephen King's biggest fear?
Now, at 72 years old, his biggest fear is losing his mind to dementia and Alzheimer's. He's spoken about how since he's a writer, he needs a sharp mind. His biggest fear is not being able to create and share his work. As Stephen King told NPR a few years ago, "That's the boogeyman in the closet now.
He suffers from triskaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13. “The number 13 never fails to trace that old icy finger up and down my spine. When I'm writing, I'll never stop work if the page number is 13 or a multiple of 13; I'll just keep on typing till I get to a safe number.
It's not the evil clowns, the ghosts, or monsters that make King's books so scary, but their firm link to the society we live in. He uses three of the most basic literary devices — foreshadowing, callback, and payoff — to achieve his scare. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
SCARED FOR THE LIFE
-From his early age, Stephen was scared of many things. He was scared of dark, snakes, rats, spiders, psychotherapy, deformity, closed-in spaces, choking, death, flying and so on. He wanted the light to be on so that he could sleep in the night. Not an easy life for a child of a 4–5-year-old.
Fear of the unknown is universal, but it seems to take form most commonly in three basic human fundamental fears: Fear of Death, Fear of Abandonment or Fear of Failure.
The top 10 fears found in the 2022 survey suggest that Americans' fears center on five main topics: corrupt government officials (number 1), harm to a loved one (numbers 2 & 4), war (numbers 3, 5, & 10), environmental concerns (numbers 6 & 9), and economic concerns numbers 7 & 8).
Fear is the emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first.
As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend's death.
Millions of people in the world, including prolific horror writer Stephen King, have an irrational fear of the number 13. The phenomenon is so widely reported, it even has its own hard-to-pronounce name: triskaidekaphobia.
One of those places just happened to be the novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King, which he also cites as being King's scariest book ever.
Is Stephen King afraid of spiders?
It's not his only fear. King is also afraid of flying, spiders, therapists and choking. A lot of these anxieties form inspiration for his work.
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