Joe Hill: ‘How I escaped the shadow of my father, Stephen King’
It is never easy, being the child of a famous person. It’s harder still for those children that choose to enter the family business – there’s the constant comparisons; the accusations of nepotism; the name. So when Joe Hill, whose father is the American literary giant Stephen King, decided to pursue a career as a science fiction and horror writer, he took a drastic step to escape those pitfalls: he hid the connection completely.
“I lacked a lot of self-confidence as a teenager,” Hill says. “When I went into writing, I had to know that if someone bought one of my stories they’d bought it for the right reasons – that it is a good story – and not because of who my dad is.” For the first decade of his career, Hill (a pseudonym created b… Continue Reading