Children of the Corn

Stephen Edwin King was born in Durham, Maine, in 1947. King is the youngest of two children, and he was raised by a single mother after his father abandoned the family when King was two years old. Although his mother worked hard to support her family, King’s early life was characterized by financial hardships and loneliness. As an escape from these challenges, King began reading voraciously at a young age, especially stories that might have been considered inappropriate for young readers because of their horror themes and violent content. Golding’s Lord of the Flies and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear and Other Stories were fast favorites and strongly influenced his writing. The Lurking Fear collection is a group of 12 horror stories that combine graphic violence, suspense, the supernatural, and themes of good and evil. Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of stranded boys whose makeshift society descends into anarchy and violence, with cultic overtones. When King created the fictional town of Castle Rock, a location that appears recurrently in his fiction, he took the name from the boys’ mountain fort in Lord of the Flies. The influence of both works is clearly traceable in “Children of the Corn.