// PC GAMER — GAMING
How Stephen King watching a train hit a kid led to Kiefer Sutherland making his videogame horse crap on command: A PC Gamer Causality Chain™
Many of our greatest works are downstream of terrible woe.
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Causality Chain is a series at PC Gamer exploring the unlikely links between history, culture, and videogames.
Humanity has witnessed countless tragedies—but occasionally, through the alchemy of passing time, moments of singular woe can serve as a foundation for future wonders. Depending, in this case, on how broad your definition of wonder is.
Today, we once again chart the curious contours of cause and effect, tracing how a haunting moment in an American horrormeister's early years can ultimately lead to an internationally renowned actor participating in an unconventional form of simulated equine combat.
1951: At "barely four" years old, Stephen King experiences a harrowing episode he'd later share in his 1981 non-fiction book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre1—an episode he himself doesn't remember, but which was later related to him by his mother. One day, he suddenly returned home from playing with a neighbor who lived near the railroad line. He was "white as a ghost," his mother said, and refused to speak until the next day.
"It turned out that the kid I had been playing with had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing the tracks," King writes.
He goes on to insist in the book that, however horrifying it might have been, the incident had no bearing on his interests or habits as an author, as becoming a writer is "a direct result of conscious will" and not something "born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma."
1982: Viking Press publishes Different Seasons2, a Stephen King collection consisting of four novellas. In the third story, The Body, narrator Gordon Lachance—a fiction author—recalls the conflict he and his childhood friends once entered with a gang of greasers over the discovery of the dead body of a neighborhood boy who'd been hit by a train.
Any resemblance to real events is purely coincidental, I'm sure.