Someone already posted that his dad ran away. Sounds like his uncle or grandfather.
en.wikipedia.org
King was born in
Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. His father, Donald Edwin King, a traveling vacuum salesman after returning from
World War II, was born in Indiana with the surname Pollock, changing it to King as an adult.
[10] King's mother was Nellie Ruth King (née Pillsbury).
[11] His parents were married in
Scarborough, Maine, on July 23, 1939. They lived with Donald's family in
Chicago before moving to
Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
[12] King's parents returned to Maine towards the end of
World War II, living in a modest house in Scarborough. He is of
Scots-Irish descent.
[13]
When King was two, his father left the family. His mother raised him and his older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. They moved from Scarborough and depended on relatives in
Chicago, Illinois; Croton-on-Hudson;
West De Pere, Wisconsin;
Fort Wayne, Indiana;
Malden, Massachusetts; and
Stratford, Connecticut.
[14] When King was 11, his family moved to
Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. After that, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.
King says he started writing when he was "about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories... Film was also a major influence. I loved the movies from the start. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time."
[15] King was a voracious reader in his youth: "I read everything from
Nancy Drew to
Psycho. My favorite was
The Shrinking Man, by
Richard Matheson — I was 8 when I found that."
[16] King recalls his sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living: while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, he discovered a box of their father's books: "The box I found that day was a treasure trove of old Avon paperbacks... The pick of the litter, however, was an
H. P. Lovecraft collection from 1947 called
The Lurking Fear and Other Stories... I was on my way. Lovecraft—courtesy of my father—opened the way for me."
[17]