This chilling novel will haunt you, and make your blood run cold and your heart race with fear.
Nashville Banner

I wasn’t sure at first what to write about Stephen King audio books, so I did a search on the Talking-Book-Store.com website.

I had forgotten that Stephen King wrote The Shining, even though I saw the Stanley Kubrick film when it came out. Everything the Nashville Banner said about it is true—and more.

Cosmopolitan said about the book: "Guaranteed to frighten you into fits…freezing terror...with a climax that is literally explosive!" That is true, and sometimes it is still true even when you’re not watching the movie or listening to the audio book.       

When I visited the hotel in the Colorado Rockies where Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining, I could not walk down the creepy hallways without hearing the floors and the walls whisper to me, without feeling the room move under my feet, without wondering which door would take me out to the snowy maze.

I would not look into any mirrors that day. While I was there, I could not get these images out of my head, or the thought of why the other visitors in the dining room were looking at me in that way.

It ruined my appetite. Everywhere I looked, a crazed Jack Nicholson looked back. Everything about the place was creepy.

That is how Stephen King books, films and audio books go on haunting you long after you’ve finished them.

I am not a fan of the horror genre—not since I was a child, that is. O, how I loved to be scared out of my senses with a book at night and only enough light at my bedside to keep the phantoms away.

Many nights I fell asleep with a volume of Edgar Allan Poe lying on my chest. When I was in Charlottesville the first time, I visited Poe’s dormitory room at the University of Virginia. I’m sure Stephen King has been there, too.   

I’m not a fan of the horror genre now, but I wish I were half the writer Stephen King is. No one knows how to weave a story around you like he does.

When I read something he has written or said about writing, as I sometimes do for the simple pleasure of listening to a master talk about his craft, I am amazed at how hard it is for me to keep from wanting to hear more.

And I will never forget a character like John Coffey, sentenced to death for raping and murdering two young girls, who is willing to give up his own life so that others may live.

I will never write a horror story—I had better leave that genre to Mr. King. But I hope, one day, to write a story half as good as The Green Mile.

You can hear Stephen King talk about his craft in Building Bridges, one of many Stephen King audio books available at Talking-Book-Store.com.

100% of publisher and author profits from Building Bridges will be donated to the National Book Foundation.