In Stephen King’s 1984 novel Thinner, a corpulent lawyer named Billy Halleck is cursed to lose weight until he dies.
Unlike Halleck, the celebrated horror author known for Carrie, Firestarter, Misery, The Shining, The Stand, IT, Pet Sematary, Cujoc, The Dark Tower, The Green Mile, and countless other classics has a little more control over his diet, which does not include one very specific delicacy: raw oysters.
That’s right, the man who has scared readers silly for over half a century cowers before the humble bivalve most often enjoyed on the half shell with cocktail sauce or a bright Mignonette.
Why bestselling horror author Stephen King doesn’t eat raw oysters
Indeed, King doesn’t care for any edible foodstuff with “slippery or slimy,” qualities, he admitted during a 2013 interview with Bon Appétit. “I don’t eat oysters. It’s horrible, the way they slither down your throat alive.”
The ironic part is that King hails from Maine where fresh seafood is…well, king.
“When people think of Maine cuisine, they tend to think first of clams and lobster,” he wrote in a 2022 piece for Literary Hub. “Never cared for clams myself; they always looked to me like snot in a shell.”
King wasn’t too fond of his mother’s “haddock baked in milk” either, stating: “I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.”
Still, you’d think the mind behind some of the most sickening and grotesque monsters ever conceived—whether it’s Pennywise or the Tentacles from Planet X—would have a stronger stomach.
He doesn’t dismiss all seafood, though.
“There’s a long-running joke that I married [my wife] Tabitha because we were poor, and she came with a typewriter,” he told Bon Appétit. “But it’s really because of the fish that she cooked for me.”
Growing up, he consumed lobster on a regular basis. The crustaceans were so plentiful and cheap, however, that he got sick of it after a while.
“My mom was on a perpetual budget, and she’d buy day-old (or two-day-old) lobster at the IGA in Lisbon Falls,” King recalled in his Lit Hub piece. “Some of those bugs were still moving, but not that many. She made lobster rolls, and there was often a pot of lobster stew simmering on the stove. She’d hide it in the oven if someone came visiting because, in those days, lobster stew was “poor food.”
On the sweet side of the spectrum, King confessed to Bon Appétit that his preferred pre-writing treat was cheesecake, describing it as a “brain food that must “have a creamy texture to it.”
