10 Fascinating Stories Behind Stephen King's Most Famous Books

1. CBS Footage Of Test Mice Convulsing & Dying Inspired King To Write The Stand

Tell a fan that you're only ever going to read one Stephen King novel, and The Stand is the book that they'd mostly likely tell you to take up. It's arguably King's magnus opus; in scope, only The Dark Tower comes close to matching its sheer ambition and magnitude. Not only that, but it is definitively King in every way; the all-American characters caught up in a situation they can't control, the desolate landscapes, the vague, shape-shifting villain...

The plot sees a devastated United States in which 99% percent of the population have been wiped out by a deadly virus known as "Captain Tripps." The survivors, immune to the virus, must band together to make their final stand as they set out across the barren country towards an inevitable confrontation with a terrifying embodiment of evil.

So where did King get the idea for The Stand, with its premise that begins with a virus escaping a secret lab and dooming society? Well, from an episode of CBS's 60 Minutes.

That's right: sitting down one evening to the TV, King watched a special on chemical warfare and it sparked his imagination. "I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less," he said. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep. These were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured."

The Stand was also written to be an epic in line with J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, albeit set in the modern world with Las Vegas standing in for the land of Mordor. You gotta hand it to King; the man really knows how to combine influences like a total pro.

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