Stephen King & Son

With their terrifying novel, Sleeping Beauties, the author and his son Owen join forces to create a new nightmare

- Anthony Breznican

WHAT OWEN KING REMEMBERS is how much time his father spent alone. Typing. Making up stories. Going to dark places in his head and coming out with books about killer cars, shape-shifting clowns, and burial grounds that bring the dead back to life.

That’s just how it was being Stephen King’s son. His mother did it too. When Tabitha King was writing novels, both of Owen’s parents would disappear into that other dimension, hunched in front of a screen—the trance of a writer. They always came back, of course, and most moms or dads leave every day for work. But it was their self imposed solitary confinement that daunted him. Haunted him.

“It was something they did every day, and they did it for hours at a time,” Owen says. “It was kind of scary to look at how much time they spent alone, working at this thing. I didn’t really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.”

It turns out nightmare-making doesn’t have to be a lonely business. Stephen and Owen figured out a way to make storytelling a shared effort by co-writing their new novel, Sleeping Beauties (out Sept. 26). Stephen has collaborated a few times before (see sidebar), though not with Owen, author of the 2013 novel Double Feature, a dramedy about a young filmmaker trying to make a masterpiece. Owen has, however, inspired his father’s work. Stephen has said he studied his own kids like “an ant farm” to glean insight into his many child characters, and it was toddler Owen wandering too close to a busy road that led him to explore every parent’s darkest fear in Pet Sematary.