Stephen King is brilliant. He really is, despite being a mainstream media darling. His books are held up as some of the finest examples of modern literature, are taught in schools, and have been made into Academy Award-wining movies. Not bad for a talent written off as just a hack horror novelist in the beginning.
And yet, there is an area of the man's writing that is consistently sick and twisted, even for the guy that gave us Pennywise the Clown, and that is how he approaches sex and its depictions. He is occasionally capable of a tender scene, such when Johnny Smith and Sarah finally spend one night together in the Dead Zone, or Tommy and Sue in the backseat of his car during Carrie. He's even given us examples of fine smut such as Nadine seducing Harold in the Stand, or Rachel soothing Lou in the bathtub with a handjob after a bloody day losing a patient in Pet Semetary.
But in general, whenever sex comes up in a Stephen King novel it's usually bad news, and will probably leave you filled more with crushing lack of faith in humanity than sexual stimulation.
5. Anal With a Handgun in The Stand
In the restored version of the Stand, the pyromaniac Trashcan Man gets a lot more exposition, especially when it comes to his journey from Powtanville, Indiana after he blows up the Cheery Oil Company, burning himself badly in the process, and his eventual arrival in Las Vegas to enter the service of Randall Flagg as a weapons procurer. Along the way he ends up the unwitting company of a young psychopath who goes by "The Kid".
The Kid lives for four things, his fast car, Pabst Blue Ribbon, well-coifed hair, and getting to Vegas to start telling Flagg what to do. His insane behavior gets him and Trash almost killed several times, but the real freak-out is when Trash wakes up one night to find a horny Kid in bed with him rubbing his wang on Trash's thigh demanding Trash jerk him off.
Hoping to get the murderous little midget settled and away from him, Trash complies, but apparently not enough to satisfy The Kid, who starts working the barrel of his gun into Trash's ass as a threat to continue the act. Against his own will, this ends up exciting Trash as well, though The Kid declines to offer any kind of reciprocity.
It's a special kind of prick that invades a man's dirt button with a loaded weapon while getting rough tugged and not even have the decency to offer a reacharound. That guy totally deserved to get eaten by wolves.
4. Electro-rape in Apt Pupil
In Apt Pupil, a preteen boy named Todd discovers a notorious Nazi war criminal living in secret in his small town. Rather than turn him in, he approaches Kurt Dussander in order to learn more about the Holocaust straight from the bastard horse's mouth, threatening him with exposure if he doesn't comply.
Dussander describes in great detail the atrocities committed in the concentration camps over the course of many years, and as Todd grows up the exposure to such inhumane cruelty begins to warp his mind into something dark and evil.
King shows Todd's first wet dream as a teenager. In it, he is an assistant to Dussander in a medical experiment involving a 16-year-old Jewish girl. Dussander orders Todd to strap on an insulated condom that delivers electric shocks from the tip. Todd uses this to rape the girl, slowly increasing the voltage until she is screaming uncontrollably before waking up covered in semen. Speaking of semen...
3. Licking Semen-Stained Sheets in Dedication
Dedication is not one of Stephen King's better short stories, and may in fact be the worse. It's the tale of a black maid who cleans the room a famous, but personally loathsome writer frequently rents. The writer has the habit of compulsively masturbating in the bed, leaving the stained sheets for the maid to clean up since he's apparently too precious to use a gym sock like a gentleman.
The maid, who is pregnant, randomly decides one day that instead of just throwing away the cool and drying spooge, she'll start licking it up instead. In the book, this is apparently some kind of bizarre, magical compulsion she has that will somehow enhance her unborn son with manonaise from the rich, talented, and successful.
Believe it or not, there is a really strange element of science involved with this. Dr. Gustaaf Dekker of the University of Adelaide found in a study that a woman who regularly ingests semen during oral sex finds herself at a significantly reduced risk of miscarriage. The theory is that getting the female body used to exposure to male genetic material makes it less likely that her immune system will attack a fetus baring those traits.
Keep in mind, this only works with the father of the child, so lapping up jungle juice off of a fart-smelling hotel sheet won't really do any good preventing miscarriage, and under no circumstances does swallowing a load give a baby talents or skills. Otherwise groupies would have birthed an army of Hendrixes and Claptons by now. On the other hand, it might explain the elevated level of douchebags in the world.
2. The Incredibly Detailed Child Rape in the Library Policeman
A lackluster novella in Four Past Midnight, the Library Policeman follows an insurance salesman named Sam as he unwittingly falls into a trap set up by a demonic librarian to kill him and assume his identity in order continue her life as a murderer of children. Yeah, it's not really a very deep book, easily the weakest in a collection that already pretty much sucks save for the excellence of the Langoliers.
Sam hates libraries, and as he moves to his final confrontation with the demon we see why in a dream of a repressed memory on a plane. When Sam a little boy, he was returning some overdue books when a, man stopped him outside the library. The man claims to be a policeman, and orders Sam to come with him to pay the fine on his books.
The fine ends up being a prolonged anal rape of the boy, and I do mean prolonged. The grown man forces his massive penis into Sam's ass as he's forced against a wall, all described with intimate detail of almost every thrust for four whole agonizing pages.
It's the sort of thing that if a director put in a film he would probably be cockpunched to death for, but King keeps it going and going and going. It may in fact be the most detailed sex scene in all his work, save one.
1. The Children's Gangbang in It
It is probably the first book in the chronological King bibliography where you can point and say, "Here is where editors stopped telling King to rein that shit in." The novel of a shapeshifting, child-hunting demon named Pennywise is almost 1,100 pages long. Still, it's a good tale about the power of friendship and the strength of childhood imagination. In fact, it's exactly that that helps seven kids overcome an ancient evil.
That being said, apparently overcoming being lost in the sewers can only be done by having six 11-year-old boys sequentially F**k an 11-year-old girl... by her invitation.
Seriously, the gang has just brought about the end (At least they believe so) of a pan-dimensional monster in mortal combat. They've slain something that's claimed thousands of lives in their town in the most gruesome manner imaginable, but suddenly the concept of tunnels is just too much to overcome without a sudden, magical orgy.
And it's all the girl, Beverly's, idea. She realizes that the group needs "bringing back together" and the only way to do that is to lose her virginity in a mass hump session.
To be fair, it's actually portrayed with a lot of love, certainly in comparison to the parade of sexual atrocity that's preceded it on this list, but no matter how many references to affection, bird-watching, lazy days spent reading funny books, or poetry, it's still seven pages of a grade-school group sex session. Its sheer randomness lands it the top spot.
Did I mention the Bill Denbrough, the guy that gets sloppy sixths, is pretty much a transparent stand-in for King himself?
