The Glass Floor. Startling Mystery Stories – Vol. 1 No. 6 – Fall 1967.

KING, Stephen.

Item Number: 121487

New York : Startling Mystery Stories/ Heath Knowledge, Inc, 1967.

Rare first published appearance of King. Octavo, original wrappers. Signed by Stephen King on first page of his contribution. Side-stapled digest-sized zines. 130pp. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. Golden Ticket stub to the signing line at the George Mason University Concert Hall dated Friday Sep. 23, 2011 included. King was presented with the Mason Award at the University’s Fall for the Book Festival that year. In near fine condition. Exceptionally rare and desirable.

Long before evil clowns, possessed cars, and haunted hotels, Stephen King was just another young writer collecting rejection slips from literary magazines. Having appeared only in a few pieces in fanzines and self-published offerings, his first professional sale to Robert A.W. Lowndes at Startling Mystery Stories for $35. “The Glass Floor,” written in the summer of 1967 (just before his 20th birthday, by his recollection) follows a character to a monstrous Victorian mansion and a mysterious, walled-up room with a mirror floor. While never appearing in a later collection, King did allow the story to reappear with minor grammatical corrections in an issue of Weird Tales in 1990 and then again in Cemetery Dance in 2012, with a casual nod to its setting with the Mirror Library in Rose Red. King’s debut novel, Carrie, would not appear for another seven years.