Stephen King has sold over 350 million books by writing about monsters, but the real horrors in his work come from alcoholism, domestic violence, isolation, and the ordinary cruelties people inflict on each other. The supernatural is window dressing. The human damage is the point.

This episode traces King from his impoverished childhood in Maine through his struggles with addiction, the accident that nearly killed him, and his emergence as the most commercially successful American novelist of his generation.

• He threw his manuscript of Carrie in the trash before his wife retrieved it and told him to finish it
• He was so deep in addiction during the 1980s that he barely remembers writing Cujo
• He was struck by a van in 1999 and nearly died, then wrote about the experience in his memoir
• He has published over 65 novels, most set in Maine, creating an interconnected fictional universe