Illustration by Dominic Bugatto Stephen King, 78, is the pre-eminent horror writer of our time: he is reputed to have sold more than 400 million books worldwide. Not since Charles Dickens has a storyteller held so many readers spellbound. In spite of his detractors (“king of trash”, “sultan of schlock”), King remains an author of towering cleverness, whose fiction appeals to a reading public both popular and serious. Bret Easton Ellis, Colson Whitehead and Haruki Murakami all cite King as an influence; his success and popularity are beyond question. Before he became emperor of the bestseller, King studied American literature at the University of Maine, his birthplace and the setting for many of his novels, among them It , The Dead Zone and the adrenalin-quickening Misery (Penelope Lively’s favourite). The novels are brocaded with references to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson and other maestros of horror-suspense that King read as a student.…