Just Maybe, a Seed of Horror

It could have been the opening of a horror novel, but it was all too real. Horror author Stephen King was severely injured when hit by a minivan Saturday as he walked along a road in his home state of Maine. Thrown 14 feet, the 51-year-old King suffered a broken leg and hip and broken ribs, a scalp cut and a collapsed lung. His body was a veritable “Bag of Bones,” one of King’s recent novels.

A King fan can’t help but recall the travails of the author-hero in King’s book “Misery,” seriously injured in an auto accident and taken in by nurse Annie Wilkes, only to be held captive and tortured until he writes his next book just the way she wants it. The driver who struck King went off the road while tussling with a dog. Another “Cujo”?

The best-selling author underwent five hours of surgery Monday and faces more surgery today. Rehabilitation will take up to a year, but doctors say King will fully recover. As his office notes, all his major injuries were below the shoulders. “Mr. King’s mental state is great.”

Ah, yes. And just what ideas are coursing through King’s overdrive imagination while he is confined, in pain, to a hospital bed? Will he weave a new plot out of this experience? Do demons visit in the night amid the green blinking lights of the medical monitors? Does that doctor seem a little strange? Keep watch at a bookstore near you.