Bangor, Maine ? Owen King may share his father’s liberal politics and fervent support for the Boston Red Sox, but the two break ranks when it comes to ghouls, vampires and other denizens of the dark side.

There’s no hint of the supernatural in King’s debut novella and short stories. Nor is there any mention that the author is the younger son of horrormeister Stephen King and novelist Tabitha King. Instead, the title tale in “We’re All in This Together” is an imaginative and absurdly humorous tale of political partisanship run amok, laced with quirky characters whose bizarre behavior offers an object lesson in the perils of zealotry.

The book jacket purposefully makes no mention of the author’s parentage and contains not a word of accolade from Stephen King, long known for his generosity in trumpeting the books of others.

To Owen King, 28, this reflects a desire to cut his own path and see his work accepted or rejected on its merits. But an even stronger motive, he says, is to dispel any assumption that he is writing in the same genre as his dad.

Author Owen King, 28, son of author Stephen King, wants to cut his own path and see his work accepted or rejected on its merits.

“I don’t think it’s fair for Stephen King fans to be deceived, and I know I’m a Stephen King fan,” he says in an interview outside the Bangor Public Library. “The last thing I want to do is to present something as ‘Stephen King, Part II,’ and have it be something that’s a big disappointment.”

Despite his family’s fame and wealth, King attended public schools and enjoyed as close to normal a childhood as possible for someone born to the privilege and advantages he enjoyed. Bangor, a city of 31,000 that’s rich in history and short on glitz, was the ideal place for a kid looking to sidestep celebrity. King gravitated toward the family business of writing while in high school, working on the student newspaper and contributing to the literary magazine. His older brother, Joe, 33, also has dabbled in fiction and has collaborated on a screenplay with Owen. The only sibling as yet untouched by the writing bug is sister Naomi, 35, whose career has evolved from restaurateur to Unitarian minister.

King acknowledges that his book is grabbing more attention than would a first-time effort by a writer without comparable lineage, but he seems to have made a conscious effort not to capitalize on his father’s fame.

“I think the model that I look at is someone like Jakob Dylan, whose dad is obviously every bit if not more famous than mine,” King says. “He’s a guy who sought to build a career on his own, doing something that’s a little bit different than what his father does.”

After receiving his undergraduate degree from Vassar College, King went on to a Masters of Fine Arts program in writing at Columbia University, where he met his fiancee, novelist Kelly Braffet. The two now live in an apartment in a deconsecrated Catholic church in Brooklyn, N.Y.