On the first day of our Stephen King short fiction class, I wore a Monster Squad (1987) “Stephen King Rules” t-shirt. I didn’t have quite enough King-inspired shirts to wear a different one everyday our class met, but it was pretty close, including a couple of shirts I got when I did the excellent SK Tours of Maine Bangor tour, a shirt from Bridgeton Books, and this great Oy shirt I bought after seeing King wear the same one in a YouTube preview reading of Never Flinch (out today!!), as well as specific book-inspired ones, like Out of Print’s IT shirt. (I also did a bit of shopping late in the semester and am confident I’ll be able to rock a new King shirt each day when this class comes around again, hopefully in Spring 2026).  

Few students have chosen to do a clothing or fashion-inspired final project for our short fiction class; in fact, the only one I can think of was a “Children of the Corn”-inspired evening gown sketch from a year or two ago, with a smart and spooky high-fashion aesthetic. But this semester, two students chose a clothing-design route, taking an everyday, wearable fashion approach. 

Madi Pruitt took her inspiration from “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” (in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, 1993). In the story, when Clark and Mary get lost and stumble upon Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, she has a bad feeling about the place and wants to turn back, but Clark insists they press on. In her exasperation, Mary thinks to herself “He wanted to explore, by Christ. And he wanted a souvenir, of course, A tee-shirt bought in the local drugstore would do, one that said something cute like I’VE BEEN TO ROCK AND ROLL HEAVEN AND YOU KNOW THEY GOT A HELL OF A BAND” (347, emphasis original). Madi took this narrative moment and the vibe of the town itself to create her own version of the t-shirt, tie-dyed and bearing the slogan that comes to Mary’s mind, an imaginary souvenir that Clark will likely never get to score—or at least will never be able to show off to anyone outside of Rock and Roll Heaven.

Lauren Ferguson also took a similar clothing-based approach to create something that could well exist within the world of her chosen story, capitalizing on the current college pennant sweatshirt trend to make one for Horlicks University, inspired by “The Crate” (in the Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural, 1980). Her version of the college sweatshirt includes a Horlicks’ pennant, the crate, a chessboard, Henry’s note to Billie, and Charlie Gereson’s glasses. Lauren created each of the individual elements for the sweatshirt from fabric, then applied these to the sweatshirt with heat-transfer material to create the final product. 

In both of these cases, the clothing the students designed and created is grounded specifically within the world of the story, highlighting the characters’ interactions with and perceptions of that place and the horrors they encounter there. These designs (as well as my own shirts) provide a really interesting opportunity to consider how what we wear says something significant about where we’ve been, who we are, and what we love. 

(Page numbers from “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” are from the 1993 hardcover edition of Nightmares and Dreamscapes).