In Stephen King‘s 1984 novel Thinner, a chunky lawyer named Billy Halleck is cursed to drop extra pounds till he dies.
Unlike Halleck, the celebrated horror creator recognized for Carrie, Firestarter, Misery, The Shining, The Stand, IT, Pet Sematary, Cujoc, The Dark Tower, The Green Mile, and numerous different classics has slightly extra management over his weight loss program, which doesn’t embody one very particular delicacy: uncooked oysters.
That’s proper, the person who has scared readers foolish for over half a century cowers earlier than the common-or-garden bivalve most frequently loved on the half shell with cocktail sauce or a brilliant Mignonette.
Why bestselling horror creator Stephen King would not eat uncooked oysters
Indeed, King would not take care of any edible foodstuff with “slippery or slimy,” qualities, he admitted throughout a 2013 interview with Bon Appétit. “I don’t eat oysters. It’s horrible, the way they slither down your throat alive.”
The ironic half is that King hails from Maine the place contemporary seafood is…properly, king.
“When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster,” he wrote in a 2022 piece for Literary Hub. “Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell.”
King wasn’t too keen on his mom’s “haddock baked in milk” both, stating: “I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.”
Still, you’d suppose the thoughts behind a few of the most sickening and grotesque monsters ever conceived—whether or not it is Pennywise or the Tentacles from Planet X—would have a stronger abdomen.
He would not dismiss all seafood, although.
“There’s a long-running joke that I married [my wife] Tabitha because we were poor, and she came with a typewriter,” he instructed Bon Appétit. “But it’s really because of the fish that she cooked for me.”
Growing up, he consumed lobster frequently. The crustaceans had been so plentiful and low-cost, nevertheless, that he acquired sick of it after some time.
“My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls,” King recalled in his Lit Hub piece. “Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”
On the sweet side of the spectrum, King confessed to Bon Appétit that his preferred pre-writing treat was cheesecake, describing it as a “mind meals that should “have a creamy texture to it.”
