Stephen King’s success is intrinsically linked with the rise of mass market paperbacks—Professor Carl Sederholm explained why during his P. A. Christensen lecture.
Mass market paperbacks—those small, cheaply made books that are found at drugstores, airports, and newsstands—have officially been discontinued. This news disappointed Professor Carl Sederholm (Horror, Popular Culture, Literature and Film) because these novels played a significant role in his youth and in his professional life, which he noted in his Christensen Lecture on March 5, 2026. During this lecture, titled “Stephen King and the Horror Paperback Boom,” Sederholm discussed the way that, over the course of his career, Stephen King breathed new life into this dying form of the novel.
The History of Paperback Horror
The mass market paperback industry began in the midst of World War II, a time fraught with confusion and chaos. People were looking for “inexpensive diversions, and something they could easily ship to troops overseas,” Sederholm said. The solution? Small, cheap, paperback books.
These novels didn’t retain the same scholarly repute as hardcover books, so they could get away with addressing “edgier, transgressive subjects in ways that were not only disreputable or scandalous but also seemed appealing at times to readers,” Sederholm said. Because of the books’ wide audience and availability, they had a “democratic quality,” which allowed them to focus “on broad consumer interests, rather than on class-based notions of taste.”
In the late 1960s, the horror genre made its way onto the pages of these books and started the “horror paperback boom,” as Sederholm called it. Horror paperbacks became “so popular that one could hardly avoid them.” Readers were drawn to their colorful, shocking cover images and alluring titles. The books opened readers up to “multiple questions concerning the bounds of life and death, hope and fear, the monstrous and the human.”
Horror paperbacks like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist were adapted to film during this time. This increased the books’ popularity and created a market for more sensational horror stories—a market in which Stephen King flourished.
The Role of a King
Stephen King, now a household name, published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974, and its success quickly established him in the industry. As he continued to write bestsellers, the books were published as hardcovers with more regularity, reflecting his success and popularity. But he often returned to the world of paperback to “mark a new beginning, to experiment with a new concept, or to start a new publishing strategy.”
At the height of his career, King occasionally published under a pen name: Richard Bachman, who exclusively wrote paperbacks. He kept the identity secret for a long time; he wanted to see if Bachman could become a paperback star in his own right, without the Stephen King brand to carry him to success. The Bachman books also allowed King to write for writing’s sake, experiment with the craft he loved, and find the freedom to “explore a much darker side of his personality,” Sederholm said. These paperbacks “granted King the freedom to explore new ideas or approaches, things arguably outside of his well-established brand.”
King has continued to experiment throughout his career, particularly with his 1996 novel The Green Mile that was published serially as six paperback originals. This book gave King an opportunity to transition to a tone that was more hopeful and more humane, bringing the recognition that “the king of horror was actually a pretty good storyteller,” Sederholm said. While King could have “sold millions of hardback editions of The Green Mile, he wanted to release a series of bestsellers that also reinvigorated the paperback form.” The novel didn’t bring back the glory days of the mass market paperback, but it reestablished “the paperback as a convenient, fun, and portable way of passing time with a memorable story.”
Recent King paperbacks are reminiscent of the hardboiled detective genre: One of these novels, The Colorado Kid (2005), is unique because its mystery remains unsolved. His goal was for readers to “focus on the journey more than the conclusion,” Sederholm said. “King includes an afterword that argues mystery, not closure, was always his purpose with this novel.” King suggests that his readers need to become more comfortable with unanswered questions, considering the frequency with which they encounter them in their everyday lives.
King’s “long-standing interest in the paperback form,” as Sederholm put it, proved useful to him during his career. King utilized the mass market paperback format time and time again to give his work—and the medium—new life. In doing so, he reminded readers that even familiar formats can be continually reinvented.
Access all of BYU’s P. A. Christensen Lectures here.