I am fairly confident in saying that I am the only human in the universe to be reading (now or ever) "The House on Maple Street" & Chelsea Handler's Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...and you too! simultaneously, and this is the stuff that feels like it's not whatever this is....
Allow me to explain. There is a phenomenon that all of us have experienced (although you may not be aware that you have experienced it - and if that is the case, once you read this post, you will notice very soon that you have just experienced this again, which will surprise you). It is the phenomenon of acausual meaningful coincidence. Let's say you learn a new word (or rediscover a word into your vocabulary that you don't hear used very often, but newly firmly understand the definition of). Within a very short time of this (re)learning, you will come across this same word again in a completely different context. This will surprise you somewhat, but then you will stumble upon that same word in yet another way (say, the solution to next Wednesday's Wordle), and you are going to be like, "whoa. This is too weird. Like it can't be a coincidence, something is going on here." And yes, what is going on is the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon.
Don't believe me? Do you know what the word "craic" means? No? Go look it up, and then get on living your life and come back once you do believe me. And then I'll finish the post...
In both the (nonfiction) book and the (fiction) short story that I'm reading, we have the matter of siblingicity - a large set (6 & 4, respectively) of brothers and sisters that are all relatively close in age who demonstrate a kind of pack mentality (with various children taking on various roles {protector, confidant, foil} depending on who they may be paired with at the moment, and those roles shifting in time). Although the two works are working toward completely different with Chelsea Handler on a personal journey toward accessing vulnerability and improving her mental health while Stephen King is exploring a house that has a growing alien presence in it,* the depictions of the sets of siblings not only rhymes, but feels like these two sets create something almost archetypal that might be classified as The Modern American Balanced Gendered Large Set of Siblings type. I consider 4 to be a lot of siblings (probably because it's one more than we had, so "whoa, over-do it much?", right?) and ages being that they're likely not at more than 2 different schools.
Myself, my brothers and I are each 7 years apart, so while we are close we never had the kind of pack mentality that I felt in each of these two works. So too families like my Campbell Cousins who were 4, but all boys and also 3 in a cluster then the much younger Michael don't quite mesh with what I saw in these works. The other examples I come up with from literature are the kids in The Chronicles of Narnia who are aged and gendered correctly for this match-up, but from a different era and geography (I'm not sure whether it's their old-timiness or their British-ness, but the set of Peter through Lucy are highly hierarchical with roles defined in a way that is actively worked against in both of the depictions by Handler and King). The only other example I could come up with is David Sedaris's family dynamic, but even though I know of them almost entirely** from one single perspective who is mostly playing it off for laughs, I think that what I do know more often matches up with the other two families considered here than goes off course.
I'm not sure what this all adds up to - maybe I'm just warning us all to be aware of any larger packs of kids as they may well be up to something and because of this unique dynamic have the wherewithal to pull it off. In any cases, my brothers and sisters and all human siblings, this has been a synchronistic reading of a couple of (seemingly) random things that I was just reading.
* my goodness look at the work that this lowly comma is doing - it's absurd really, sitting there trying to balance the gargantuan dependent and independent clauses sitting there on either side of it. Well done, little comma, keep up the good work.
** Amy Sedaris tends not to talk or write much about her family, but has done so over the years occasionally in interviews and live performances I've seen of her, and it helps to give a fuller perspective (although still another very strange and skewed one!) on the overall Sedaris brood.
