Of course, in so long and varied a career, there are exhilarating highs, a few bewildering lows, and many unexpected diversions. Nat Cassidy, author of this year’s Mary: An Awakening of Terror, put it best, describing King as his “mother tongue.” He is not just a writer he is an industry, an aesthetic, a genre of one. I have interviewed hundreds of horror writers from all across the genre’s wide spectrum, and when asked for their inspirations and their gateways to fearful fiction, so many leap immediately to King. But for millions of readers and writers, he is our North Star, our Southern Cross.

Such prolificacy has often led to sniffing criticism from those who consider him “merely” a horror writer (as if horror is anything “mere”). Almost everything he has ever written has been optioned or adapted for the screen, in some cases several times. King has regularly published two or three books per year, a stream of words that flows incessantly west towards Hollywood. He arrived during a resurgent interest in all things frightening–following the success of Ira Levin's Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971)-and quickly set about reshaping the genre in his own image. Since the publication of his first novel Carrie, just shy of fifty years ago, King has held dominion over the landscape of horror.

There will probably never be another author like Stephen King.

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