It amuses me, a little bit, that the first Stephen King novel I ever read was the one least sunk in the supernatural.

I don't think I was aware, really, of how much of Stephen King's work was built into our pop culture when I first picked this up out of my grandmother's book pile during a "camping trip" when I was twelve or so. I hate camping, always have, but as a child, your interests in such things mean much less to your parents. Regardless, camping with my grandparents was actually hanging out with them in their tiny RV in a park filled with other old people in RVs. Just me and a bunch of 65+ couples. That's the dream.

So naturally I read anything and everything I could get my hands on to stave off a neverending stream of good-natured, but incredibly boring conversation. Ta-da! (This was also the summer I discovered my grandmother had a taste for smutty bodice rippers, but that's another story)

There was something about the set up of Dolores Claiborne that I was immediately drawn into, though King's easy prose can also be credited. The confessional style wasn't unfamiliar to me, though I had yet to really get into my current interest of crime novels. One of my favorite childhood series, The Animorphs, was also written as if telling the audience secrets with growing tension and maturity of content. Completely different tone and genre, but ultimately similar (in my mind, anyway).

One very specific thing I remember about this novel over fifteen years later is Dolores' youthful fascination for her future husband's forehead. Why? God only knows - the laws of attraction are a mystery to me even at the advanced age of twenty-nine.

And when [Joe] asked me to the Junior-Senior Prom, I said yes, and I got my chance to touch his forehead, and it was every bit as smooth as it looked ... Accourse I found m'self touchin a lot more than just his forehead before too many more weeks had passed and that was where I made my mistake.

And down the rabbit hole we go.