Shooting for realism, Stephen King discussed the idea for “Survivor Type” his next door neighbor, who was a retired doctor. Finally, when my wife asked me what I was laughing at one day when we were eating hamburgers on the back deck, I decided I ought to at least take it for a test drive. This idea was so utterly and perfectly revolting that I was too overawed with delight to do more than think about it for days – I was reluctant to write it down because I thought I could only fuck it up. I started to wonder if a person could eat himself, and if so, how much he could eat before the inevitable happened. The idea of a human being eating the body of another human being is fundamentally obscene, and a guaranteed shock in any piece of literature – from the Bible, to Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal,” to Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series.īut, naturally, Stephen King’s mind took the concept one step further: it’s abominable for a person to eat another person, but what if a person went about eating their own flesh? In the notes section of Skeleton Crew, the author reflects that he was randomly thinking about the idea of cannibalism one day, and “ muse once more evacuated its magic bowels on head.” He explains, Like serial killers, cannibalism is a terrible and shocking thing from real life that doesn’t really need any extra dressing up by horror writers.

(Image credit: Shudder) What “Survivor Type” Is About

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