When I was 9 years old, long before I read Great Expectations, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or anything at all by Louisa May Alcott, my favorite author was Stephen King. 

How and why I first latched on to King remains something of a mystery to me, but I suspect that I had been exposed to the ceaseless series of screen adaptations of his books that were being produced throughout the 1980s. Back then, the movie versions of The Shining, Stand By Me, and Misery were forever being shown on television.