Horror fans, get ready for The Vining and The Vining 2: Doctor Tweet.
In the shocking twist you never saw coming, Stephen King, who loves kicking it old-school so much that he famously wrote his novel Dreamcatcher entirely in fountain pen, has finally joined Twitter.
My first tweet. No longer a virgin. Be gentle!
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 6, 2013
The first people King followed? His sons, bestselling author Joe Hill, who placed a distant second behind dear old dad earlier this week in the Goodreads 2013 Readers Choice Awards, and recently debuted author Owen King. After his family, King first followed Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood, who reviewed his latest novel, Doctor Sleep, for the New York Times. He also followed the New Yorker, wherein he’s published, at times controversially, numerous short stories over the years, including the 1996 O. Henry Award-winning “Man in the Black Suit.” Warning: you may never fish again.
Among the 70,000 people who promptly rushed to follow him as word spread throughout Twitter were director Edgar Wright; screenwriter Frank Darabont, who’s been responsible for most of King’s successful screen adaptations including Shawshank Redemption and The Mist; and of course Gaiman and Atwood, who promptly followed back.
King’s social media track record is shaky: though he was famed for writing on a typewriter through much of his early career, he was an early e-book adopter, launching one of the first online subscription models for a novel in-progress. The effort failed, but King’s works have always had a viral quality, most notably evident in the successful social media buildup to the unfortunately lackluster 2011 miniseries Bag of Bones. With the success of Doctor Sleep, a critically acclaimed follow-up to The Shining, it looks like King has decided to gift fans with shorter snippets of wisdom. Hopefully we’ll even get writing advice like the incredibly astute, easy-bake instructions he gives in his memoir Of Writing.
On Twitter at last, and can’t think of a thing to say. Some writer I turned out to be.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 6, 2013
Don’t bet on it. We’re pretty sure that King, a master of just about every genre in existence, will take to Twitter like a Langolier takes to your nightmares—with terrifying relish.
Photo via pinguino/Flickr
