Stephen King’s ‘Apt Pupil’

Being a human fascinated by the grotesque these days is nothing you’d be ostracized for. Heck, a woman can marry a serial killer on a witness stand. We are all deviants these days, privately or not so. We are all depraved to some extent but it’s easier to find love now even if you are. Apt Pupil is about a boy who was depraved in a time when family life was stable, there were no wars, no slavery, just apple pie lives. I think it’s a great feat that Stephen King was able to make his deterioration into psychosis so slow and so elegant. I probably would have made him too similar to that boy from A Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wakeup call to parents of sociopaths or psychopaths to acknowledge fully that even if you want to believe the opposite (because no matter what the evidence says, your child has never been this person he’s accused of being), if the facts are staring at you point blank, don't shield your child or yourself from reality, find help for them. I think we ought to as a society push for psychiatrists to be more accessible in schools so that children with such thoughts know where to seek proper help because let’s face it, a guidance teacher would not be helpful in this case. I think best of all, Apt Pupil makes us aware that psychosis is an impending trap for people who are afflicted with these thoughts. Without an author’s name, I would have sworn it was Sidney Sheldon’s. It’s incredible how King mastered Sheldon’s genre while never waning in his own.