Yeah, so this is The One for me. And at the risk of being ridiculed on this forum, here goes nothing.
You know how people are always carrying on about how King writes about their deepest fears? As I've gotten older, I've begun to appreciate that more: he writes about getting old, loneliness, heartbreak, loss, etc. and yes, those things are indeed scary. But as far as his supernatural stuff goes? Yeah, I was scared by a lot of his stuff as a teenager when I first started reading his work. But I never encountered a story where I could conclusively say that he wrote about a latent phobia of mine. Not even IT.
But then he published Nightmares & Dreamscapes. With THIS bloody story. I've always found frogs to be gross and disgusting. I hated those things when I was little. It's a running joke in my family. Growing up we lived in an old house where frogs would get in through the cracks and them jump on me while I slept (swear to God if any one of you laugh at me for writing about this I will be mad as heck but unable to do a damn thing about it). This happened often. Sometimes I'd get fed up and leave my bedroom and go sleep on the couch. But then of course the damn thing would follow me (y'all stopped laughing yet?). It's like they could smell fear. And I always thought to myself "Well, at least those things don't have teeth, cause that would be pure frigging insanity and I would have to move to another planet."
So imagine my surprise that after all those years of reading King, he managed to write a story that actually tapped into a childhood phobia of mine. I was shocked when I read that, not because the story was scary (it was), but because I just couldn't frigging believe he thought of it. I'm not the kind of fan who wonders where a writer gets his ideas: I accept that these people have a gift and I am in for one hell of a ride when I pick up their work. But if there is one story origin I would love to know about, it's this one. Uncle Stevie really threw me for a loop with this.
Writing about it now actually makes me want to go back and re-read it. Kinda. Sorta...