Stephen King once said to William Peter Blatty: ‘you know, in a way, you’re my father.’ For years, I had misremembered King saying this to Richard Matheson. This seemed to make more sense, both due to the seismic influence Matheson has had on King’s life and work, and because King has not always had the highest opinion of Blatty. Take this excoriation of the Exorcist author in King’s Danse Macabre:
“[Terry] Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent…forever, if we are lucky.”
However, The Exorcist (both book and film), along with Rosemary’s Baby and Thomas Tryon’s The Other, initiated the horror ‘boom’ of the seventies, which in turn highly benefited King following the release of his first novel Carrie in 1974 and its film adaptation two years later. In this sense, as well as the fact that King’s real father abandoned him and King does not have much good to say about him, perhaps Blatty is King’s literary father. 
Whether it is Blatty, Matheson, Stoker or any number of King’s other influences who could claim the throne of his literary father, there is only one person who could call herself his ‘mother,’ and that is Shirley Jackson.
From his very first novel, Carrie on, Jackson’s influence is apparent. The first instance of the telekinetic Carrie using her powers comes when she drops stones on her house as a child. This mimics exactly the actions of Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson’s seminal haunted house novel and a significant influence on King.
In IT, Bill Denbrough thinks ‘whatever walked in Community House walked alone,’ which mirrors Hill House’s celebrated opening paragraph of which King has said there are few, if any, finer in the English language. In the same novel, we find graffiti outside one of the dead kids’ houses which reads ‘come home come home come home.’ This is a reference to the striking scene in Hill House where Eleanor reads ‘HELP ELEANOR COME HOME’ on one of Hill House’s walls.
Similar references to Jackson are dotted throughout King’s works. The ultimate culmination of this is his 2002 miniseries Rose Red. Rose Red can be seen as a loose remake of Hill House, as it follows a group of psychics investigating the purportedly-haunted eponymous house. Once more, the film’s female protagonist (a young autistic and telekinetic girl called Annie) causes stones to drop on her house as a child when angry.
Ironically, although only a loose remake, Rose Red is far closer to Hill House than Mike Flannigan’s recent Netflix adaptation, which has barely anything in common with Jackson’s book despite beginning and ending with its opening paragraph. King himself has commented on this, saying that despite not ‘usually car[ing] for this type of revisionism’ he loves the adaptation, and considers it ‘[c]lose to a work of genius.’ I would have to agree – the fact that it is only marginally related to Hill House aside, it is an outstanding work of television. (Flannigan’s follow-ups, The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Fall of the House of Usher ingeniously adapt multiple Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe works simultaneously; doing so for James is especially impressive, given that his superb weird works outside of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ are often neglected.)
If Blatty paved the way for King due to his role in the ‘Horror Boom,’ Jackson, along with Matheson, Ray Bradbury and others was integral more generally to his career for focusing weird fiction on the ordinary people and settings that are so synonymous with King’s work. Hill House aside – as a psychic investigation of a haunted mansion is hardly ordinary or everyday – Jackson’s works frequently feature an irruption of the odd (the ‘almost supernatural,’ as she once put it) into mundane settings. Jackson’s own mother, Geraldine, was a lifelong critic of her daughter’s choice of marriage, parenting style, physical appearance, and even writing, once lamenting her focusing too much on ‘[her] demented girls.’ Yet it was these often mentally-troubled female characters, and Jackson’s psychologically-acute portrayals of them, that came to make her work so distinctive and influenced writers such as King.
Like King, Jackson was a New England writer. However, she was an outsider, being born in California, living for a time in New York, and then moving to various places in the region before settling in North Bennington, Vermont. A key facet of King’s work is the isolation and tribalism of small New England towns. In ‘Salem’s Lot, Ben Mears is told that ‘you’re the stranger in town until you been here twenty years.’ This is especially significant in Ben’s case as he actually grew up in ‘Salem’s Lot, and is returning to write a book about it. Despite this, he is held with suspicion by the locals, something which becomes problematic when a series of murders, initiated by the vampire antagonist of the novel, occur.
A number of factors would isolate Jackson during her time in New England. Her focus on her writing was not seen as befitting a housewife and mother, who should have been prioritizing her children and the career of her husband, the academic Stanley Edgar Hyman. (This despite the fact that Jackson outearned Hyman and ultimately became the family’s breadwinner.) She was criticised by other housewives for her perceived slovenly ways. Jackson’s at-times odd behavior, such as referring to herself as New England’s ‘only practicing witch,’ claiming to live in a haunted house, joking that she had been responsible for the leg break of publisher Alfred Knopf, dyeing guests’ food green and conducting tarot readings exacerbated people’s negative perceptions of her. There was also the accusation – which, to be fair, was not entirely inaccurate – of Jackson being a bit of a snob and looking down her nose at her new New England neighbors.
However, by far the biggest isolating factor was the publication of her story ‘The Lottery’ in the New Yorker. This iconic American tale, which depicts an annual ritualistic sacrifice in a small New England town, garnered a nationwide backlash in which the New Yorker lost more subscribers than at any other time in its history. Although partly inspired by her and Hyman’s unhappy time in New Hampshire, as Jackson was living in Vermont at the time of publication many Vermonters took it as an attack on them. The perception was of a snobbish fancy New York author moving to a small New England town and depicting its inhabitants as a bunch of backward, superstitious yokels.
. This was not helped by the fact that as The New Yorker did not indicate which pieces were fictional and non-fictional, there were a significant number of people who assumed that such practices still occurred in New England. The magazine and Jackson received letters asking in which places the lotteries might be observed. (That people might want to witness such spectacles seems to confirm the misanthropic premise of the story.)
Towards the end of her life, Jackson became severely agoraphobic. Her final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, sees the two female protagonists (Mary Katherine ‘Merricat’ and Constance Blackwood) at odds with a town which openly despises and antagonizes them. You don’t have to be a psychologist to speculate where Jackson got her inspiration from.
Stephen King also does not always have the most flattering portrayal of his home state of Maine. King’s Maine (both the actual state and King’s various invented locales such as Derry, Castle Rock, Jerusalem’s Lot etc.), are filled with racists, homophobes, religious fanatics, alcoholics, and sexual predators (‘sex preeverts’ as one character calls them). We read of murder, domestic violence, infanticide, corruption, embezzlement, among many other unsavoury occurrences. King also frequently mocks the New England or Yankee accent (which he once joked is one of the worst in the world), such as in Pet Sematary:
“Will you accept a collect call from Mrs. Louis Creed?”
“Ayuh,” Jud said.
“Pardon, sir, is that yes or no?”
“I guess I will,” Jud said.
There was a doubtful pause as the operator translated Yankee into American.
Despite all this, King is almost universally adored in Maine. In large part, this is because of his and his wife Tabitha’s altruistic work through their charitable arm (The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation), helping to renovate the Bangor Public Library, build a local little league field, and giving numerous other donations. King is also, frankly, single-handedly responsible for driving tourism to Bangor. As well as the wonderful SK Tours, travelers can see numerous inspirations for King’s work in the city, as well as his stunning home. For as much as King may depict the negative aspects of Maine, it is his explication of its more charming features that have driven countless people to it.
However, there is also the crucial factor that, as a local and lifelong resident, King’s airing of Maine’s ‘dirty laundry’ is perhaps seen as more palatable than when it is done by an outsider. Another big inspiration on King was Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, a bestselling book that exposed the seedy underbelly of a New England town. (King often refers to’Salem’s Lot as ‘Peyton Place meets Dracula.’) As scandalous as Metalious’s book was, her status as a lifelong New Hampshire resident prevented the same kind of ire that Jackson endured.
Jackson’s influence on King may seem at once strange, as in certain respects they are quite disparate authors. Jackson’s works are often a lot more subtle, oscillating between the supernatural and literary while frequently not offering a resolution. Take a story like ‘The Daemon Lover,’ in which a woman spends her wedding day looking for her fiancé, only for no-one to have heard from or of him. Whether she is mentally ill or there is some kind of wider conspiracy is never definitively revealed. King on the other hand is overtly supernatural and, at times, his attempts to rationalize the irrational can falter, with longer horror novels like It or Needful Things suffering disappointing denouements because of it. (In the recent adaptation of IT, King was able to poke fun at himself for this, playing a grumpy shopkeeper who castigated the books of King’s acolyte, Bill, as he doesn’t like their endings.)
Also, as much as King can depict the negative aspects of New England, he is ultimately as a writer and person optimistic, with a belief in the general good of humanity, and with good either ultimately triumphing in his works or its failure to do so (in bleaker novels such as Pet Sematary or Revival) being seen as lamentable. Jackson on the other hand was a known misanthropist – as one of her characters once put it, ‘people really are very unkind.’ Jackson herself once said that while she ‘like[d] many people’ she did not think highly of humanity generally, and that she ‘hate[d] this whole human race as a collection of monsters’ leading her to wonder why she would ‘want to save the bastards?’ Such attitudes would not come as a surprise to anyone who has read Jackson’s fiction, in which we can read such stories as ‘One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts’ in which a husband and wife spend the day doing good and horrific deeds respectively, and then casually agree to swap the following day, or ‘Renegade,’ in which the people of a small-town blithely suggest increasingly horrific and barbaric ways for a woman to stop her dog eating a farmer’s chickens.
Yet despite these differences, Jackson’s foregrounding of ordinary life and people, and her ability to siphon the horror from small towns, explain precisely why she had such an impact on King, and can thus be considered his literary ‘mother.’
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