Stephen King is an interesting follow on the site formerly known as Twitter. When not posting about politics or his latest literary find, he’s ranting about the state of the world and making observations that position him as a sort of elder statesman in the horror community. A recent tweet by the Master of Horror mentions a bygone era of salacious magazines that harkens back to his early career: “Hey, do you guys remember that supermarket tabloid that used to have stories about BatBoy? Man, I loved that shit.”
The world-famous author is likely referencing publications like The National Enquirer and similar periodicals that used to grab eyes in checkout lanes with claims of Elvis sightings and alien encounters. Frequently inspired by the world around him, King has his own literary brand of tabloid journalism with Inside View, a rag that has been appearing in his work for decades.
‘The Dead Zone’
Inside View began its life in one of King’s early classics, The Dead Zone (1979). This political thriller follows Johnny Smith, a teacher who awakens from a four-year coma with a disturbing ability to see into the past and future. When news of his powerful gift makes its way outside of the hospital, it peaks the interest of a sleazy periodical. Richard Dees, a journalist for Inside View approaches Johnny at his home with a lucrative offer to exploit this ability in a salacious column filled with parlor tricks and outsized predictions. Smith and his father summarily dismiss Dees and throw him off of their porch, valuing their privacy over a lifetime of lucrative infamy. But with this one interaction, an entity was born.
Inside View would become a fixture in King’s interconnected literary world and continue to appear in his novels and short stories for the next 45 years.
‘Freaks’
But to truly understand the genesis of this fascinating magazine, we need to go even further back in time. King has always been fascinated by oddities and opens his first non-fiction work, Danse Macabre, with memories of childhood nightmares. In the first chapter, “Tales of the Hook,” King tackles the concept of monstrosity by exploring fascination with carnival sideshows and the impact of Tod Browning’s disturbing 1932 film Freaks. While much of this section would be considered problematic by today’s standards, it was an uneven contribution to early conversations about disability and acceptance. King also seems fully aware of the salacious nature of this exploitation. In a treatise on horror, he’s examining the concept of otherness and our tendency to fixate on physical differences as a way of reifying the social hierarchy. He insists, “it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.”
King credits The National Enquirer with sparking his own interest in monsters and even admits to being an occasional patron. In a footnote following a mention of the tabloid, he confesses, “I buy it if there’s a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin.” While King may cast slight judgment on the authors of these exploitative stories, he does not shame the readers themselves. He describes these stories with a mix of reverence, bemusement, and childish wonder. These grainy photos of alien autopsies, flesh-eating dogs, and grotesque physical anomalies once sparked his imagination and introduced a young horror fan to elements of the macabre that would inform his prolific writing career for decades to come.
While King’s work has always centered on the exploration of monsters, both fantastical and human, he dove head-first into this interest with his third short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993). Akin to a curio shelf of horrific objects, this assortment of 23 unnerving tales features a number of dangerous oddities and unexpected monsters. Subjects range from a massive finger growing out of a toilet and a pair of murderous wind-up teeth, to bat people masquerading as powerful businessmen and killer frogs raining from the sky. His introduction – King’s beloved way of speaking directly to his Constant Readers – mentions freakish tales from paperback compilations of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, a publication he fondly remembers devouring in his youth.
Rather than factual evidence, it’s belief that seems to interest King most. In a subtle nod to the climax of his magnum opus It (1986), King muses on the power of believing in myths like poisonous gas at the center of tennis balls and the ability to sever a shadow by piercing it with a stake. Similar to urban legends that shape our interactions with the larger world, King notes the importance belief in these imaginative legends has had in his own life. “This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.” Rather than cast a baleful eye on journals that traffic in the sensational, King’s collection highlights the power of believing in the “unseen world all around us.” His introduction concludes with an invitation to suspend disbelief and venture into a world where anything is possible.
‘The Night Flier’
Given this fantastical focus, it’s no surprise that Nightmares and Dreamscapes features King’s most overt exploration of Inside View. The collection’s fourth story “The Night Flier” follows Dees, now a veteran reporter, on the trail of a “vampire” traveling the country in a small private plane. It’s a grim story with a true crime feel and a fascinating approach to vampire lore. The titular pilot may wear the black cape made famous by Bela Lugosi, but he has a hideous face with two large, bore-like fangs that puncture the necks of his victims and cause their blood to spurt out like crimson guisers. Dwight Renfield is not an elegant killer, but a ripper-like psycho leaving grisly crime scenes and dismembered corpses in his wake – the perfect subject for Inside View.
Rather than focus solely on the monster himself, King spends just as much time exploring Dees’s own ethical code. Far from the ambitious hack that once knocked on Johnny Smith’s door, this Dees has been curating the publication’s scandalous content for decades. He operates on the iron-clad directive to never print anything he believes and to never believe anything he prints, an interesting subversion to King’s earlier introduction. I won’t spoil one of the collection’s best entries, but “The Night Flier” plays with the price of disbelief as Dees is forced into a world where the stories he’s been spinning for decades might actually be real.
‘Doctor Sleep’
King presents Nightmares and Dreamscapes as the concluding chapter in a trilogy of short story collections and it does feel like the end of an era. The author’s next literary phase is much more experimental, playing with formats, bending genres, and moving further away from the hallmarks of classic horror. Inside View remains a constant, but the author’s perspective seems to gradually shift. Tess, the heroine of his 2010 rape-revenge novella “Big Driver,” chooses not to report her assault in part because she fears the magazine would blame her for the crime. In Doctor Sleep (2013), Abra’s mother keeps her daughter’s psychic abilities a secret for fear that, like Johnny Smith, she would become fodder for the tabloids. This shift may have something to do with King’s own time recovering from a near-fatal highway accident. During his lengthy recovery, the world-famous author may have imagined pictures of his own mangled body appearing in publications willing to disregard ethics in favor of a massive payday.
Though mentions have decreased since the ’90s, King has not stopped writing about Inside View. Billy Summers (2021) and Fairy Tale (2022) both include references to this fictional tabloid. Inside View also makes an appearance in You Like It Darker, now available. The eagerly anticipated collection revisits Cujo, another Castle Rock story from King’s early catalog.
King’s intro for Nightmares and Dreamscapes extols not only the virtues of short stories, but also their ability to save the world. “Good writing–good stories–are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable. I can only speak from my own experience, of course, but for me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.” With the world seeming to come apart at the seams, perhaps it’s time to renew our faith in the fantastical, suspend our disbelief, and once again venture with King into the world of the seemingly impossible.
‘The Night Flier’