What It Is: If you're a Stephen King fan, by now you've learned not to get attached to certain characters. At any point in any particular novel whether front and centre or fleeting characters are very much at risk of suffering their own mortality. What It Means: King is a horror writer. Horror is founded on truth. Perhaps not literal truth, but a grander truth. It reveals human nature in all its many flaws and intricacies. As King himself said: Fiction is the truth inside the lie. This is never more true than in horror. For this reason, King's characters are expendable. In reality, people don't always live even though they're good or just sometimes life randomly chooses to snuff them out. The same goes for characters in King's novels, which makes the experience of reading his stories so much more visceral (and heartbreaking).