. One evening he listened to the radio adaptation of Ray Bradbury's story "Mars Is Heaven!" That night King recalls he "slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face" (Beaham 16). Stephen King's exposure to oral storytelling on the radio had a large impact on his later writings. King tells his stories in visual terms so that the reader would be able to "see" what was happening in their own mind, somewhat in the same fashion the way it was done on the radio (Beaham 17). King's fascination with horror early on continued and was pushed along only a couple weeks after Bradbury's story. One day little Stephen was looking through his mother's books and came across one named "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." After his mother finished reading the book to him, Stephen was hooked. He immediately asked her to read it again. King recalls "that summer when I was seven, [my mother] must have read it to me half a dozen times"(Beaham 17). Ironically that same year, while Stephen was still seven years old, he went to go see his first horror movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. This is important because Stephen says, " Since [the movie], I still see things cinematically. I write down everything I see. What I see, it seems like a movie to me"(Beaham 17). During this year the biggest event that probably had the biggest impact on Stephen King's writing style was the discovery of the author H. P. Lovecraft. King would later write of Lovecraft, "He struck with the most force, and I still think, for all his shortcomings, he is the best writer of horror fiction that America has yet produced"(Beaham 22). In many of Lovecraft's writings, he always used his present surroundings as the back drop of his stories. King has followed in his footsteps with the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Castle Rock is a combination of several towns that King moved...
