Stephen King has spent decades giving us fictional nightmares to enjoy from the safety of a sofa. The terrifying clown in the sewer. The haunted hotel slowly driving a father to madness. The telekinetic teenager with a bucket of pig’s blood and a very bad prom night. They are all deeply disturbing, brilliantly crafted and, crucially, entirely fictional.
The kind of horror you can shake off by morning, aside from a lingering and completely reasonable fear of clowns that many of us will carry to our graves. But one of King’s novels crossed a line that even he could not ignore, not because of what was in the book, but because of what started happening in real life decades after he wrote it.
