Stephen King’s son has burning ambition to be author in his own write

Joe Hill didn’t want to ride on his father’s coat tails as a writer, so he invented a name and went out on his own, says Ed Power

Joe Hill is talking about The Secret. “I didn’t want anyone to know my father was Stephen King,” says the bestselling horror novelist, born Joseph Hillstrom King. “When I was in college and wanted to be a writer I abandoned my last name and wrote as Joe Hill.”

Hill maintained the fiction as long as he could. Not because he was ashamed to be the son of American popular literature’s answer to Charles Dickens. He worried that, were his family connections public knowledge, any success he might achieve would be tinged by the suspicion it had all come too easy.