Diversity in Fiction: Stephen King & Disabilities

Diversity is a hot topic in the writing industry right now, in both the traditional and self publishing spaces. If you’ve kept up with writing advice columns, or follow other writers on social media, you’ve heard the debates. There are arguments for and against people writing certain types of characters, rules around what certain characters should be or not be, discussions of stereotypes and so on.

While it can be a complex field to navigate, there’s a form of diversity I’ve found that’s overlooked, even by authors with plenty of LGBTQ representation and racially diverse casts. Though it’s a form of diversity that’s mentioned, it often seems to be tagged on towards the end.

To my mind, only one mainstream author has actually tackled this form of diversity in his work, and done so naturally - though Stephen King has taken flak for certain character portrayals, he remains the only major author to include disabilities in his stories and characters. I’m sure there are other writers tackling this overlooked form of diversity, but I can’t name them off the top of my head (which should be telling).

In at least three of Stephen King’s books I’ve encountered a character in a wheelchair. In two of these stories, the characters are major (and in one of the two, the character in the wheelchair is the protagonist).

In The Cycle of the Werewolf, Marty, a boy on the edge of his teens in a small town, attempts to discover who the local werewolf is. The original book is a novella, but the film adaptation, Silver Bullet, expands Marty’s role considerably, making him the hero of the piece. In addition to being one of my favourite films to watch at Halloween, Silver Bullet is also the only film I know where the protagonist has a significant disability: Marty is in a wheelchair.

It’s my opinion that the story treats Marty’s disability with nuance. While his mother worries that his disability could hurt him in life, his best friend and uncle, Uncle Red, believes in Marty - he doesn’t see Marty’s disability as ruining Marty’s life, but as something Marty can overcome. To him, there’s much more to Marty than “him not being able to walk,” and, while Marty’s disability plays an important role in the story, particularly in regards to his bond with his uncle, there are also plenty of instances where Marty functions as a character beyond his disability. 

Ultimately, Marty is a little boy trying to solve a supernatural murder; he goes through the typical pre-teen struggles of having a crush and disagreeing with his best friend; like any little brother, he quarrels with his big sister; and he has the same hopes as any kid, looking forward to seeing his uncle or being apart of the town’s local fair and fireworks show.

Silver Bullet offers a solid story about a character with a disability, showing that Marty can still be human or save the day despite an inability to walk. However, Stephen King includes disabilities in his other stories too. In It, many of the kids have disabilities of some kind. Ben has asthma, needing an inhaler, and I suspect that Richie may have ADHD or something similar. In The Stand, Stephen King even allows somebody who likely has Down Syndrome, or something similar, act in a heroic role (despite the disability, the character in question is able to spy on the “bad guys” before returning with important information, making him a crucial participant in the fight against evil). The Stand also features a character who is deaf - again, despite his condition, this character contributes greatly to the forming of a new society, even acting in a leadership role.

I’m not saying Stephen King is perfect, but he’s tackled the issue of disability in fiction in a way I haven’t seen other authors attempt. What’s more, he was including these characters in his work decades ago, before mainstream media was even focusing on the issue of diversity.

Whatever his faults, Stephen King remains ahead of other authors in portraying disabilities, whether physical or mental, and with a surge in rep for gay, trans, or Black characters, it may be time to focus on the overlooked issue of disabled characters in stories - it’s something for us to consider, and I have to thank Stephen King for exploring this form of diversity when nobody else was.