One of my favorite things about teaching is that I never teach the same class twice. I have been teaching Stephen King’s fiction for years now, in a wide range of formats (including an upper-level author seminar, general education literature courses, and this 3-week short fiction course), but it’s always different. 

In some cases, that might be because I’m teaching different books or stories. There are so many excellent ones to discuss and I never get too settled in on using any one book over and over. Night Shift (1976) has been a staple in my short fiction class, but the other featured stories are always in flux. The current class is the first time I have used Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993) as a core text and there are lots of stories there that I’m enjoying sharing with students for the first time, including “The Night Flier,” “Popsy,” “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” “The End of the Whole Mess,” and one of my all-time favorites, “Rainy Season.” 

But even when the books are the same, the students are different: they respond to the same stories in different ways, they have a different collective relationship with one another that shapes and steers our discussions, and they have different frames of reference, knowledge, and interests that they bring to their interpretations of the stories. I always come to our class discussions with a few big takeaways in mind, including connections and questions that I want us to consider, but the students drive the course of our discussions. I have never had the same classroom conversation twice, and in every single class, I love having the chance to learn from the students just as much as they learn from me. 

One theme that has emerged in different ways over the last couple of iterations of this short fiction class is music. I love music but I am not a musician myself, I have zero technical expertise, and most of the specialized terminology and theory is far outside my frame of reference. But in these last two course offerings, I have had students who don’t just love music, but are musicians and creators themselves, in both their playing of multiple instruments and their work with music technology tools. Last year, a student created a piece based on King’s 1408 (in the 2002 collection Everything’s Eventual) that played around with intervals in interesting ways to create a sense of mood and dissonance that complemented the tone of the novella itself and Mike Enslin’s horrifying experiences in the cursed room. I have another student this semester who is taking his own musical approach to a King work; it’s in the early stages, but I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. 

In another surprising musical turn that has opened lots of exciting doors in this iteration of the class, on the first day of class, one of my students, Madi Pruitt, asked me if I knew Ice Nine Kills, a horror-inspired heavy metal band. I did not, and diving into their discography has been a really excellent parallel rabbit hole experience for me. So far, I have enjoyed Every Trick in the Book (2015) and The Silver Scream (2018), and I’m currently soaking up The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood. Songs with specific King connections include “Hell in the Hallways” (Carrie), “IT Is the End” (IT), “Enjoy Your Slay” (The Shining), and “Funeral Derangements” (Pet Sematary), and their Undead & Unplugged: Live from the Overlook Hotel (2020) was recorded at the Stanley Hotel, which inspired King’s novel The Shining (1977). I’m still new here but I’m loving every minute and I will be living in this soundscape for the foreseeable future. 

Today’s reading and discussion also prominently features music, as well as the interconnections between the music, the performers, and their cultural memory/legacy/legend, with “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. After framing the discussion with an overview of nostalgia (and the nostalgia trap), the uncanny, and the story’s references to Ray Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven!” (1948) and The Twilight Zone (original series, 1959-1964), I invited students to choose one of the musicians featured in the story, do some quick internet research, and find a song for us to listen to, so that we could experience a student-curated soundtrack of our reading experience and the story’s horrors. As always, the students took our conversation in interesting and insightful directions, talking through what it would look like to have this story retold with more contemporary musicians who died too soon, the roles in Rock and Roll Heaven that those musicians would play, and the ways in which this revision would engage nostalgia for a different time and in a different way. 

The horrors are always changing but somehow still the same, there’s always another song to sing, and my students are constantly providing me with a new perspective and raising interesting new questions. I’m spending my days reading Stephen King, listening to horror-inspired heavy metal, and enjoying the excellent conversations and creative work of these amazing students. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the best job in the world.