What Stephen King Taught Me About Bad Dads

A horror writer, a hospital bedside, and the surprisingly hopeful work of breaking the cycle

Dec 12, 2025

Have had my hands full the last few weeks, with little exciting to report from it: on the frontline of the flu epidemic that is tearing its way across Europe, with around half of both kids’ classes off sick at the moment, and a particularly challenging work project that has swallowed up all the time and headspace normally reserved for the newsletter. Happy to hand over this week to Shihab S Joi, writer of the Fallen Muslim newsletter, who you may remember from an essay on battling bad dad blues last year. We met up recently and ended up talking about fatherhood in Stephen King’s work—a writer I am familiar with from many movie adaptations, but a stranger to on the printed page. He professed his status as a King superfan, so I asked if he’d be interested in writing an essay for the newsletter. I was delighted when he said yes.

“Get the first flight out to London if you want to say goodbye to your father.”

The doctor unreliably informed me that my father had suffered a stroke that led to a haematoma, with brain damage and paralysis now inevitable (spoiler: he’s now back on his feet, calling me fat and bemoaning my failure to live out his weirdly specific desire for me to become a BBC newsreader). As I sat in that hospital room reading to him from the Qur’an (feeling quite the miracle worker like John Coffey in The Green Mile when Dad snapped out of his stupor with the word “ameen” as I finished reciting a verse), my mind kept harking back to the only other time in my life I’d read to him.

It’s not a sweet memory. But as is the nature of recollections regarding someone at death’s door, I romanticised it. Had I been plonked into an episode of Desert Island Discs at that point, I’d have cued up “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens while saying something like, “I remember when I was 10 years old, sat on the veranda of our home in Rampura, Bangladesh, and my father asked me to read to him from my favourite Stephen King book.” What really happened, as with all good King novels, came layered with issues.

A visiting uncle from England had left behind his copy of Salem’s Lot, and my father was most amused to find me behind it. “I thought you only read comics,” he scoffed. He wasn’t wrong. My wishlist from my travelling cousins in England comprised entirely of Spider-Man, Beano and Tintin. My older brother had volumes of Tolstoy and Poe on the shelf, but I could barely hold those giant hardback anthologies in my feeble grasp, let alone hope to understand a word. But this book I loved. The blood and gore. Life after death. The spiritual rot and crisis of faith. I’m glamorising in hindsight, of course—at the time I mostly thought it was brilliant because our family name is Salim and well, this was my lot.

There followed a reading and comprehension test. To correct my pronunciation. To verify I understood the words I was reading—I still don’t know the Bengali word for ‘haphazard’. We even bonded for a second in our mutual failure to comprehend King’s description of a grasshopper “jumping in erratic parabolas.” But then I went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, “What’s cool is there are three types of vampires in this book. It’s kind of like the three types of Jinns in the Qur’an, don’t you think?”

Jinns, being practically demons, hold a strange reverence for Muslims. But my father couldn’t abide by the idea that some two-bit horror writer he’d never heard of could be comparable in any way to the words of the Qur’an, so that paid rest to any further theological discussion. He flicked through the book, the word goddamn jumped out at him—I swear by some evil sorcery—whereupon he decided I could only continue once my older brother deemed it appropriate reading. I hated both of them for that.

But in that hospital chair, nursing the memory from decades earlier, I could only focus on how proud he’d looked as I read it out loud. If I could frame all the moments my father displayed pride towards me, it’d be a pretty bare gallery.

Shihab reading not-Stephen King to his father on his not-deathbed earlier this year

King’s dads are never simple caricatures of evil men. Take arguably the baddest daddy of them all—Jack Torrance in The Shining. King famously loathed Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation because it stripped Torrance of all his humanity. We meet Jack Nicholson’s version as a cold, already-unhinged man predestined to go axe-mad, revealing almost no inner conflict, remorse, or love for his family. In the book, Torrance is an alcoholic desperately clawing his way toward recovery, who genuinely loves his son, Danny. He’s haunted by shame and by the fear of becoming his own violent father. We’re meant to feel sorry for him.

In all the many heart-to-hearts I’ve had with friends and exes about their fathers—be they abusive, absent or straightforward neglectful—there’s always space in their narrative to explain his actions. “He had a bad childhood himself.” “He was from a generation where parents didn’t know how to talk to kids.” “There’s good in him.” “He loved me in his own way.” Or the classic, “He did the best he could.” It doesn’t forgive them, but it does garner pity. One necessary for those of us who’ve been through it to realise we weren’t unloved through any fault of our own, but due to his fragile masculinity.

Bad dads in King’s books range from drunken losers to sadistic bastards (and quite often both). Their children live in terror or resentment, the desperation to gain their father’s validation, if not love, forever bubbling beneath the surface. Take poor Teddy in The Body (most will know it as its movie adaptation, Stand By Me). His father, a WWII veteran suffering PTSD, once held Teddy’s ear to a hot stove to leave it “pretty much melted”, yet Teddy’s loyalty to his dad remains painfully deep —he insists his father is a hero, even though everyone else in town sees him as a dangerous headcase. Or Donald Elbert, aka Trashcan Man in The Stand, whose father lays out a selection of implements and forces him to choose what he’ll be beaten with. Trashcan Man picks the ball-peen hammer, his internal logic as a child believing that choosing the hardest weapon will somehow earn him his old man’s respect. And that’s before King delves into the disturbing arena of controlling sexual abuse, experienced by Jessie Burlingame in Gerald’s Game, Selena St George in Dolores Claiborne and, for those who know King better through the movies, Beverly Marsh in IT.

All of which does leave one thinking: well, my dad wasn’t as bad as that! I suffer from an affliction that’s a version of imposter syndrome, but given that term has a very definite meaning, I’ve updated mine to “tragic upbringing syndrome,” whereby I feel my tales of fatherhood neglect are tame, affected even, especially compared to the stories of abuse I heard in my junkie years from heroin addicts coping with childhood trauma. The only time Dad laid a finger on me—a foot to the arse, to be precise—was one time I was being a prick to my mother. What’s difficult to comprehend is how this made me act out against my mother even more. I can only assume in the hope he’d strike me again so I could enact whatever revenge fantasy I had brewing, but he never bothered with me after that. All I achieved there was to make my mother sad.

When I think of my father’s neglect, the scene that replays on a loop is the empty chair in the front row I’d reserve during my many stage performances. Even though there weren’t any ball-peen hammers involved, it still lands hard. My father was never a King villain—more a side character who wandered in every few chapters, said something hurtful, then disappeared without noticing the scar he left behind. His programming came from his own father: if you praise children, you will spoil them. Instead, tell them how their best effort could always do with being better (never, of course, realising that’s read as: “you’re not good enough, son”). Many King kids aren’t afraid of ghosts as much as they are afraid of their dads’ disappointment, rage, or indifference.

At the risk of looking back through prose-tinted spectacles, I daresay as a child I preferred being shouted at than being ignored. Those instances gave me a connection I craved, regardless of how poorly they were conducted. Silence is a huge King theme. It’s not only what you hoped your father said—“I’m proud of you,” “I’m sorry”—or what you wish you could say to him—“I need you,” “I’m scared”—but what’s left unsaid in the name of secrecy that speaks volumes. In Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, the secrets the kids hold onto grow into the demons that consume them in adulthood. There are many instances in The Shining where you wish Torrance would just let Danny know what he went through with his own father, to share the truth behind why he broke his son’s arm, which only makes Danny withdraw, keeping his powers a secret from his dad—not out of disrespect, the way Torrance reads it, but out of instinct: silence as self-protection.

But King also gives us fathers who want to do the right thing and fall short anyway. Louis Creed in Pet Sematary, trying to undo grief through sinister voodoo. Eddie Kaspbrak’s stepfather in IT, over-controlling him in the name of protection. Others are cast as father figures, as we see with Ted Brautigan slipping into the role so tenderly to fill the absence of Bobby’s dad in Hearts in Atlantis. For those of us who needed a Ted in our lives, it echoed those times we saw fathers of friends or movie dads like Steve Martin and wished, “Why can’t mine be as easy-going, understanding and fun as him?” King helped me recognise my father’s emotional incapacity without turning it into a moral failure. That not all bad dads are malevolent, merely that they are under-resourced and unevolved. Our fathers didn’t know better. We do.

Shihab with his father, trying their best to fill the space between them

There came a point, without me realising until much later, when I no longer needed my father. To show me affection. Look after me. Ask me how I am. Much like King’s kids, I got by thanks to my chosen family—not my biological one. King repeatedly shows how children can stay strong when someone stands by them—The Body and IT being the obvious examples, but as you can also see in the recent adaptation of The Long Walk. For all Jack Torrance’s torturous struggles in trying to be a good dad, Danny’s real father figure was Dick Halloran, the humble cook who helped the young boy (literally) shine. In my teenage rage years, where I regularly fought with my father in the mistaken belief I could change his mind, older relatives would tell me I ought to be grateful to the man. Had he not brought me to England, I wouldn’t be this spoilt posh school-educated upstart. Part of that was true: were it not for my private education, it’s unlikely that I, a boy who left Bangladesh at the age of 13, should have such a Victorian carriage-trade timbre to my accent, or slip on the technicolour western dreamcoat with such ease. For these things, I don’t credit my father, but my drama teacher. My English teacher. And much like God, ones I’d never met yet were always present. There for me. David Bowie. The Prodigy. Stephen King. They were my Hallorans.

Since his near-death experience, my father has become softer in a way. He no longer answers the question he asked me before I can open my mouth, only to vehemently disagree with the response of his own construct. Now he actually listens. Turns out there’s not much that matters that I need him to know anymore. It’s nice that we finally have a dialogue going, but we’ll always be on different ships, with navigation maps that don’t match.

If I had to put a date on when I began to forgive my father, it’d be around the time my third child was born. I suddenly saw him for what he was: an old man set in his ways. All those years I’d spent wanting him to change seemed pointless, unkind even. What good would it do me to make a man in his twilight years realise he’d got it wrong his whole life? It was around then I’d have read King’s Doctor Sleep. There’s no fitting way to wrap this up than with the book where Danny Torrance grows up to face his biggest demon—his father Jack. We meet Dan as much of an alcoholic as Jack, until he reconciles his issues with the ghost of his father, gets sober, breaks the cycle, and becomes the man Jack couldn’t be. That’s the forgiveness.

I’m ashamed to admit Doctor Sleep was the last King book I read through fully—perhaps, as a man ages, his need for role models lessens when he himself becomes one. This hit home during an exchange between me and my son, after I worried I might not be giving him his due attention, after a new child had entered the picture.

“Hey, how about I order a basketball glove and a ball so we can play catch in the back yard?” I suggested, channelling the trope of the Norman Rockwell father tossing a baseball to his grinning son that you’ll never find in a Stephen King book, only you just knew that’s the interaction those kids dreamed of.

“Sounds boring,” came the response. “Why do you want us to do that?”

“So we can, you know,” I said sheepishly. “Bond.”

“We’re doing that now, aren’t we?” he asked, blowing my brains out for the umpteenth time in Halo.

What can I say? Turns out “the best I could do” really was good enough.

3 things to read this week

“Get Your Kid A Watch” by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic. It’s that time of year when your older children might well be asking for their first phone. If I’m catching you on the cusp on making a decision (and one that you really won’t be able to go back on) I’d implore you to take a few minutes to read this take on why the smartwatch is a better path forward than the smartphone, with the writer sharing that “with devices on our daughters’ wrists, our children feel a part of the world of portable, personal technology, even as the devices offer them just modest access to that world. They’re connected, but also free of the social-media posting and scrolling that is the real cause of anxiety about kids and phones.”
“Pity the Eighth Grade Parents” by Kera Bolonik in New York Magazine. And I thought getting kids into a good kindergarten was tough. This is a brutally clear-eyed tour of New York City’s public high-school application maze—hundreds of schools, dozens of admissions pathways, lottery numbers, grade cut-offs, tours, essays, auditions—and how it quietly rewards parents who have the time, know-how, and money to navigate it. One mum describes it as “trying to explain what an anxiety attack feels like with someone who has never had one before,” and the piece is full of those stomach-dropping moments that make you grateful for any system that’s simpler, fairer, or at least more humane.
“Examining the Only Child Stereotype” by Amanda Ruggeri in New Scientist. A right-to-reply from the TNF mailbox, as journalist and newsletter subscriber Amanda Ruggeri shared a response to last month’s essay on having a second child. Amanda rightly pointed out that “while the idea that siblings will be friends forever is lovely, and while it certainly can work out that way, you just have to survey a small sample of families to find that this very often isn’t the case, that siblings can be one another’s first bullies [and] research-wise, there’s no good data that the existence of siblings makes children feel less lonely, either in childhood or as adults.” Grateful that this newsletter is being read by great writers who are much closer to the data than I am, and can take the time to reply to keep us all well-informed.

A fresh Good Dads Club drop

Just in time for Christmas: a new set of goodies for Good Dads Club, our clothing collaboration with Far Afield. These garments are now manufactured in Portugal and this time include a grey sweatshirt to get you through that long, cold winter, whilst proudly flying your dad flag. As ever, all profits go to The New Fatherhood Therapy Fund, helping dads across the world get on-tap access to mental health support.