“I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”
There’s something about Stephen King’s writing that gets to
me. Yes, he has a very grim view of the world. The darkness in his universe is pervasive, but that's how King gets us to long for the light.Perhaps I feel this way because I am intrigued by the religious imagery that permeates many of his books. In an interview with NPR, King said the following about his belief in God:
"I choose to
believe it.... If you say, 'Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no
evidence of God,' then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing
the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all
these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work
together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent
design. But, at the same time, there's a lot of things in life where you say to
yourself, 'Well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar,' and you have to
wonder about that guy's personality — the big guy's personality.”
His mesmerizing 11/22/63 demonstrates this peculiar tension between the beauty of creation and the beasts with human nature. Men love their children while they beat their wives. People with the best of intentions inadvertently pave roads to hell. A winsome, religious small town hides perversions and excesses simmering beneath the surface. These things stubbornly persists because something powerful
and purposeful is shaping the course of human history. The past protects even moments of great tragedy as the world unfolds in ways that may be far better than we realize. That does not mean, of course, that we have to like it.
