In the (Dead) Zone

It's weird, people think of Stephen King as a guilty pleasure.. I almost feel guilty that I never enjoyed him as a guilty pleasure as much as some people do. I want/wanted to be one of those people who read his books as a guilty pleasure, you see. They loomed up on my horizon, as a little kid, as a fascinating teenage thing to be into, those massive well-worn tomes, full of edgy, slightly illicit material. And I did read his short story collections, and a nonfiction book of his about the horror genre. But somehow I never made it to the books that he's known for, especially the early ones. In high school I got _Needful Things_ from the library, and it was okay, maybe, but I never felt like I was in that Stephen King "zone" that I imagined the teenagers of my imagination had been in. I almost read it like a chore, like a book on a school reading list. It was on my guilty pleasure curriculum I guess, and thus not much of a guilty pleasure after all.