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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and very pleased this week to be joined by Caroline Bix, whose new book is Monsters in the Archives My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Now, Caroline, this is rather a scholarly book, and you start out as, you know, a highly credentialed Shakespeare

specialist, and you've changed track to write about Stephen King. I can imagine the kind of

undead spirit of Harold Bloom emerging from your closet to shake. Yes, the last laugh is on Harold Bloom.

But a lot of people would say Stephen King doesn't deserve academic study.

What is it that makes you think, you know, actually he really does?

Right.

Well, I went into this project, as you say, I'm a Shakespearean, so I was bringing my Shakespearean eye,

but I was drawn to doing this project because in 2017, I took the position of the Stephen E. King chair in literature at the University of Maine. And I was living in Boston. I was tenured at Boston

college. I had my career all set up. But I'd always loved Stephen King from the time I was 12, 13. He had a huge impact on my imagination.

When I took the position of the Stephen E. King chair, I was told you're never going to meet him. Like, don't even make any contact with him. I was like, fine. You know, I'm happy to just teach Shakespeare and get to do this wonderful work as the chair and have an endowed fun to support the public humanities. And about four years into the job, I got to call at home. Hey, it's Steve King. And that started a really lovely working relationship. I invited him to come speak with our students. He's a

graduate of the University of Maine, I should have said. I started to see he's not scary at all. He's

a lovely, generous human being. He came and spoke a couple times to my students. And then I had

a sabbatical year coming up, and I had another Shakespeare book in my head that I could have written.

But they had just collected, he and his wife Tabitha, had just collected all of their manuscripts that they had, and collected them and attached them to their home in Bangor, which is iconic.

And they hadn't let anyone into the archives yet. And I thought, well, this is fate.

This is something larger telling me something.

So I asked them if I could be the first one in there.

And if I could just focus in on reading those five books that had scared me so much when I was a teenager.

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