| "The Glass Floor" | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Short story by Stephen King | |||
| Country | United States | ||
| Language | English | ||
| Genre(s) | Horror short story | ||
| Publication | |||
| Published in | Startling Mystery Stories | ||
| Publisher | Health Knowledge, Inc. | ||
| Media type | |||
| Publication date | 1967 | ||
| Chronology | |||
| |||
"The Glass Floor" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the autumn 1967 issue of Startling Mystery Stories . [1] It was King's first professional sale. [2] [3] [4]
Charles Wharton visits Anthony Reynard, the recently widowed husband of Wharton's sister Janine, in his Victorian mansion, the appearance of which unsettles Wharton. Reynard tells Wharton that Janine died by falling off a ladder while dusting the mansion's East Room, breaking her neck. When Wharton asks to see the room, Reynard refuses, telling him the door to the room has been plastered over. When Wharton protests, Reynard's elderly housekeeper Louise explains that the East Room – which has a floor made entirely out of mirror glass – is regarded as "dangerous".
At Wharton's insistence, Reynard gives him a trowel and allows him to reopen the East Room, refusing to watch. Upon entering the room, Wharton is quickly disoriented by the mirrored floor; fancying that he is standing in mid-air, he panics and calls for help. Reynard finds Wharton's body lying in the middle of the room; he removes it using a pole hook, leaving a small pool of blood on both the floor and ceiling. As he prepares to once again plaster the East Room shut, Reynard wonders "if there was really a mirror there at all". [2]
King wrote "The Glass Floor" in the summer of 1967 at the age of 19 as a sophomore. [2] [5] [6] King was inspired to write the story when "...for no reason at all I began to wonder what it would be like to stand in a room whose floor was a mirror. The image was so intriguing that writing the story became a necessity." [7] It was the first of several submissions over the course of two years to magazine editor Robert A. W. Lowndes to be accepted for publication. King earned $35 (equivalent to $320in 2023) for the story, marking his first professional earnings from writing. [2] [5] "The Glass Floor" was first published in the autumn 1967 issue of Startling Mystery Stories. It was later republished (with some minor amendments) in issue #298 of Weird Tales in autumn 1990 and in issue #68 of Cemetery Dance in December 2012. [1] [5] [7] A copy of the Starling Mystery Stories issue is held (with other papers of King's) in the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine. [8] In 2020, it was published as part of the trade hardcover Best of Cemetery Dance 2. [9] In 2020, "The Glass Floor" was included in a deluxe edition of Night Shift published by Cemetery Dance Publications. [10]
Michael R. Collings described "The Glass Floor" as "derivative, depending upon Poe and Lovecraft for its situational and atmospheric horror", while regarding it as an improvement on the "workaday prose" of King's earlier work. Reviewing King's second professional sale, "The Reaper's Image", he noted that King "allow[ed] the mystery of the Delver mirror to develop its own power rather than imposing a mystery upon the characters, as he had done in 'The Glass Floor'." [11] Collings describes the mirrored floor from the story as an example of King's "fascination with the deadly effects of 'machines'", noting that "human responses rather than the artifact itself generate the specific horror". [11] Collings and David Engebretson suggested that "the reader can see reflected the potential Stephen King was about to fulfill". [4] Darrell Schweitzer described "The Reaper's Image" as "quite similar to 'The Glass Floor', but [...] told more skilfully". [12] Joseph Maddrey described the story as "an Edgar Allan Poe pastiche". [10] George Beahm also regarded "The Glass Floor" as "derivative", but judged it to be "a first effort that requires no apology". [13]
Revisiting the story after 23 years in 1990, King described the first several pages as "clumsy and badly written - clearly the product of an unformed story-teller's mind" but judged the climax to be "better than I remembered" with "a genuine frisson ". [2]
Rocky Wood notes two seeming factual errors in the story: Reynard's mansion bears the date 1770 but is contrastingly described as "Victorian" (1770 being part of the Georgian era) and "Revolutionary War vintage" (the American Revolutionary War lasting from 1775 to 1783). [3]
Stephen Edwin King is an American author. Widely known for his horror novels, he has been crowned the "King of Horror". He has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery. Though known primarily for his novels, he has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections.
Skeleton Crew is a short story collection by American writer Stephen King, published by Putnam in June 1985. A limited edition of a thousand copies was published by Scream/Press in October 1985 (ISBN 978-0910489126), illustrated by J. K. Potter, containing an additional short story, "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", which had originally appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, and was later incorporated into King's 1987 novel The Tommyknockers. The original title of this book was Night Moves.
Night Shift is Stephen King's first collection of short stories, first published in 1978. In 1980, Night Shift won the Balrog Award for Best Collection, and in 1979 it was nominated as best collection for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award.
"Gray Matter" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the October 1973 issue of Cavalier magazine, and later collected in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.
Joseph Payne Brennan was an American writer of fantasy and horror fiction, and also a poet. Of Irish ancestry, he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and he lived most of his life in New Haven, Connecticut, and worked as an Acquisitions Assistant at the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University for over 40 years. Brennan published several hundred short stories, two novellas and reputedly thousands of poems. His stories appeared in over 200 anthologies and have been translated into German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. He was an early bibliographer of the work of H. P. Lovecraft.
Dennis William Etchison was an American writer and editor of fantasy and horror fiction. Etchison referred to his own work as "rather dark, depressing, almost pathologically inward fiction about the individual in relation to the world". Stephen King has called Dennis Etchison "one hell of a fiction writer" and he has been called "the most original living horror writer in America".
"Paranoid: A Chant" is a 100-line poem by Stephen King originally published in the 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew.
Wildside Press is an independent publishing company in Cabin John, Maryland. It was founded in 1989 by John Betancourt and Kim Betancourt. While the press was originally conceived as a publisher of speculative fiction in both trade and limited editions, its focus has broadened since then, both in content and format.
"The Reaper's Image" is a horror short story by American writer Stephen King, first published in Startling Mystery Stories in 1969 and collected in Skeleton Crew in 1985. The story is about an antique mirror haunted by the visage of the Grim Reaper, who appears to those who gaze into it.
The Fourth Book of Jorkens is a collection of fantasy short stories, narrated by Mr. Joseph Jorkens, by writer Lord Dunsany. It was first published by Jarrolds in 1947. It was the fourth collection of Dunsany's Jorkens tales to be published. It has also been issued in combination with the third book, Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey, and two uncollected short stories, in the omnibus edition The Collected Jorkens, Volume Two, published by Night Shade Books in 2004.
"The Blue Air Compressor" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in January 1971 in Onan.
Michael Robert Collings is an American writer, poet, literary critic, and bibliographer, and a former professor of creative writing and literature at Pepperdine University. He was Poet in Residence at Pepperdine's Seaver College from 1997 to 2000.
According to books by Tyson Blue, Stephen J. Spignesi, and Rocky Wood et al., there are numerous unpublished works by Stephen King that have come to light throughout King's career. These allegedly include novels and short stories, most of which remain unfinished. Most are stored among Stephen King's papers in the special collections of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, some of which are freely accessible to the library's visitors. However, others require King's permission to read. Additionally, there are a number of uncollected short stories, published throughout King's long career in various anthologies and periodicals, that have never been published in a King collection.
The Neil Gaiman Reader: Essays and Explorations is a collection of essays on fantasy and horror writer Neil Gaiman and his works, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. It was first published in hardcover and trade paperback in 2007 by Wildside Press.
"Man With a Belly" is a short story by Stephen King. It was published in Cavalier in December 1978.
"The Night of the Tiger" is a short story by Stephen King. Originally written in the 1960s, it was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in February 1978.
"I Was a Teenage Grave Robber" is a short story by Stephen King. It was first published in the fanzine Comics Review in 1965; a rewritten version was published in 1966 under the title "In a Half-World of Terror". It was King's first independently published story.
"For the Birds" is a short story by Stephen King. It was originally published in 1986 as part of the short story collection Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?.
People, Places and Things is a short story collection by Chris Chesley and Stephen King, self-published in 1960.
"The Hotel at the End of the Road" is a short story by Stephen King. It was self-published by King in 1960 as part of the collection People, Places and Things.
