Stephen King Horror Gallery Trivia Quiz

First published in 1978, "The Stand" followed the lives of survivors of a pandemic on an even greater scale than Covid-19, as they battled not only to survive but to defeat the forces of evil that had been unleashed. Later editions were expanded versions of the original.

This was my personal introduction to Stephen King's work, quite by accident, arriving as the 'Book of the Month' from a club that required one to opt out of receiving each book. As I read the first chapter I kept cringing and saying "Yuck!" but I kept turning the pages and couldn't put it down. By the end I was a full fledged fan of Stephen King.

The image of the masked bear should have pointed you in the direction of a book about a highly contagious disease.

"Christine" is about a car of that name, a 1958 Plymouth Fury, the pride and joy of a teenager named Arnie. There was just one problem: Christine was possessed by something evil, and didn't hesitate to maim or kill anyone she saw as a foe. A backwards-running odometer gave her the means of repairing any damage that she herself suffered.

The image is of a 1950s-era Chevy, but should have allowed you to think of this 1983 book starring a car.

Who wouldn't like to go back in time and right some wrongs of history? When English teacher Jake Epping discovered a portal to the past in his friend's diner, he thought of trying to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy on "11/22/63", and used the portal to make multiple attempts to change history, with varying results. Though he sometimes spent years in the past, when he returned to 2011 (the year this book was published) only a short time would have passed on each sojourn.

The clock from the Birdseye Diner in Vermont should have made you think of the diner with the portal.

High school student Carrie White was unhappy both at home and at school in 1974's "Carrie", one of King's early efforts. The group of students who tormented her, and who carried out a mean prank against her at prom were unaware that she possessed telekinetic powers, and came to regret their treatment of her. In most cases they had little time left to them to dwell on that regret, however.

The image of the rack of prom dresses was meant to make you think of that unfortunate prom night.

The "Pet Sematary" of this book, first published in 1983, led to another burial ground with a darker history. When the Creed family cat was killed by a truck, an elderly neighbour showed Louis Creed this former Mi'kmaq cemetery, which had the power to resurrect animals - even people - buried there. Church, the cat, came back but was not a docile family pet any longer. Even so, when two year old Gage Creed met a similar fate on the road, Louis tried to revive his son in the same way. You can guess that this did NOT go well.

The picture of the neighbourhood cat might have led you to think of this book.

First published in 1981, "Cujo" was about a big, cuddly, friendly St Bernard dog of that name - at least that's how he started out. After being bitten by a rabid bat, Cujo was transformed into a killer who trapped a woman and her small son in their car in a horrific sort of siege with little hope of rescue.

The image of my cuddly toy St Bernard represents the original, friendly Cujo.

The protagonist of 1987's "Misery", Paul Sheldon, was a writer, and it has often been suggested that Stephen King based Sheldon on himself. Sheldon was a romance novel writer who had just killed off his main character, whose name was Misery Chastain, when he was involved in an automobile accident in a remote area. Annie Wilkes, who came to his rescue, just happened to be his "number one fan", and she was unhappy about the death of Misery. Annie, though she nursed Sheldon back to health, also held him prisoner, insisting that he bring Misery back to life somehow.

The typewriter should have made you think of a character who was an author.

"Thinner" was published in 1984 under King's Richard Bachman pseudonym. It dealt with the problems that an overweight man named Billy Halleck brought upon himself when he hit an old Romani woman with his car, killing her. Well-connected enough to avoid legal punishment, he could not avoid the curse put upon him by the woman's even more elderly father. Billy began to waste away, becoming ever thinner, and tried to find a solution to his woes.

The travellers' caravans in the English countryside were meant to point you in the direction of the Romani curse.

"It", published in 1986, is a hefty tome of over 1000 pages, but compelling enough to make it hard to put down. The plot revolved around an ancient monster haunting the town of Derry, Maine and the efforts by a group of kids, who called themselves the Losers' Club, to defeat it, both as children and years later as adults. One of the ways It manifested itself was as Pennywise the Clown, who would easily be enough to instill an abiding fear of clowns in anyone who met him.

The clown on the door is meant to evoke Pennywise.

"Needful Things" was first published in 1991. In it, a man named Leland Gaunt opened a shop called Needful Things in Castle Rock, Maine, and started to sell people those things which they most desired - or so they thought. Rather than charge high prices, Gaunt required purchasers to perform some prank against their neighbours, placing them in a trance-like state to ensure cooperation. Things escalated, of course, and Castle Rock paid a higher price than originally expected.

One of the desired items was a particular baseball card, which the photo of my own greatly prized Duke Snider card was meant to bring to mind.