• BobTheDestroyer@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

    He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.

    source

    • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, horror writers usually scare easily, that’s where their ideas come from.

      For example, Stephan King is afraid of cars among other things, that’s where Christine and Maximum Overdrive comes from. (Ironically, he also almost died being struck by a car. I doubt that alleviated his fear.)

      • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Misery was about his drug addiction. Drugs were the superfan. They’re always there to celebrate your victories and always there to rip you to shreds at a moment’s notice.

        • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Well, that and the fact he had incidents with at least two crazy super-fans, one who actually broke into his home, where only his wife was present.

          He also met Mark David Chapman a few months before Chapman killed John Lennon where he told King he was his biggest fan.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        cars are a bafflingly rare fear honestly, they’re 3-ton vehicles that regularly whoosh past people at high speeds and have no actual mechanism to prevent being driven by drunk people other than them not wanting to risk being arrested

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          🕴️👉

          You don’t drunk drive because you fear being arrested.

          I don’t drunk drive because I fear killing someone since the cops would never arrest my non-black ass.

          We are not the same.

      • Laser@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        Ah well. non-euclidean geometry was kind of their quantum physics: a super fancy and mysterious scientific thing that intrigued everyone but only few understood.