Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with StephenKing

Choice of a path

murtagh — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:25:19 -0800

Could someone please explain these lines from Stephen King's The Tommyknockers? "For want of a shoe, the kingdom was lost... for the choice of a path, the ship was found."

Help me name that anthology of horror stories!

bijou — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:08:05 -0800

It's time for another round of "Name That Book!" Looking for the title of a compilation of horror stories from the 1980s or 1990s. This is what I remember:

I read it when I was somewhere between the ages of 11 and 13 (I think; I was a precocious reader, so it could have been earlier), which means it was published by 1998 at the absolute latest. Since the copy I read was fairly old when I read it, I'd guess that more realistically it came out between 1980 and 1995.

I remember several stories: one was about a neverending traffic jam as a metaphor for hell; another was about a man who lived alone and whose apartment was infested by cockroaches; and another was about a man who used a hammer to smash the hands of the old teacher who had hit him with a ruler when he was a child. I think Stephen King wrote at least one of these three stories, or another one of the ones that appeared in the book, but I could be wrong about that.

Who said this? Was it Hitchcock?

sciurus — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 05:26:07 -0800

Who said "There is nothing more frightening than a closed door."? I seem to remember an attribution to Hitchcock, but that may be apocryphal. Also, my recollection of the quote may be a paraphrase.

Calling all Dark Tower fans! What gift do you give a member of your ka-tet when they leave?

platinum — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:50:22 -0800

A close friend of ours is moving away in a few days and I'd like to get him a token of our friendship to take with him. I know he's a huge fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so I'm trying to come up with a symbolic object or phrase from the books that would be meaningful. I read the books myself a while back, but am terrible at remembering details and I won't have access to them in the next few days to look anything up. Any ideas?