The Kings of Fiction

After Owen has finished and the applause has died down, it's Stephen King's turn.

He has never done a reading with his wife and son before.

"This is bliss for me," he says.

He's a tall, thin man of 60 with big hair and a wide grin. Owen gets his height from his dad and the roundness of his face echoes his mom's. Later in the day, the three Kings sit side by side for an interview about writing and family. Owen's wife, Kelly Braffet, is there, too (naturally, she's a published novelist as well).

The only King writer missing is Owen's older brother, Joe, who writes under the name Joe Hill, and who, his mother says, was kept at home by a combination of work and being the father of three boys. The Kings' oldest child, Naomi, is a Unitarian Universalist minister who channels her storytelling impulses into sermons.

When the King children were growing up in Bangor, Maine, Joe invented a kind of literary tag that he and Owen used to play. One of them would write for a certain amount of time, Owen says, and then the other would pick up the story "and then you'd go on until you'd created an ungodly mess, because you never planned anything when you started."

Reading and writing, he says, were in the household air: "From the time we read 'Kidnapped' out loud I was hooked." With both parents writing and succeeding at it, he knew -- as a lot of aspiring writers don't -- that it could be a paying job. Besides, "I wasn't all that good at anything else."

His childhood can sound idyllic, but there was at least one dark side to deal with: his father's alcoholism and drug addiction. By the late '80s, Stephen King was in bad enough shape that Tabitha organized an intervention. Owen was 11, she recalls.

Does he have memories of that period? "None that I'd probably want to get into," he says.

Fair enough, but he's a writer. Might he be able to milk it for material, at least?

The Kings laugh. "Undoubtedly, undoubtedly," Owen says.