Fright Rags Launches Stephen King Collection T-Shirt Line

Steve Barton |

Jan 20, 2011

If there are any horror authors out there who deserve their own t-shirt lines, we’d say Stephen King would be at or near the top of the list, and obviously Fright Rags agrees as they’ve just launched the “King Collection” line of tees.

With artwork from Pet Sematary, Night Shift, The Dark Half, and Skeleton Crew, the King Collection became available this week from the Fright Rags website. Per Ben at Fright Rags, this new line will pay homage to the cover art that inspired me and countless others growing up, and we have worked closely with the original artists to recreate their vision in every detail.

Wonder how the collection came about? Ben’s blog post “Judging a Book by Its Cover“, which he posted last May, explains. Here’s an excerpt, and below that you’ll find a peek at the t-shirts themselves:

I spent probably as much time at the library when I was a kid as I spent at the video store. The main reason was, of course, to do research for homework. We had this really cool old church at the top of the hill down the road from my house that served as the local library. It had the old parish cemetery right on the grounds, and was even said to be haunted…

Even at as early as 8-9 years old, I could be most found in either the occult section or the horror section of books at that library. It was around that time that I heard of Stephen King. It was the mid-80s and King was arguably at the height of his popularity, so his name was everywhere…so were his books. And how beautiful they looked…

What I did mostly was just simply gaze at them. I’d arrange them on my floor and stare at the covers like they were Picassos or Van Goghs. I was so entranced by them and the type of imagery they evoked in my mind (Did Cujo really look like that? Was Christine that bad ass of a car?) that they told me the story themselves. It was the idea of the books, and what they had waiting inside, that captured me. And it all came from the eye-catching covers that I couldn’t ignore.