A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  In 1958 the family moved to West Durham, Maine, so Ruth could be near her elderly parents. This provided some security for the young boys, and they began to become part of the community, although King’s height (he was six feet two by the age of twelve) set him apart to an extent. His reading tastes became more catholic, as he discovered the police stories of Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald (who later provided an introduction for King’s first collection of short stories, Night Shift).

  When his brother obtained an old mimeograph machine, the boys started to produce Dave’s Rag, a newsletter for the neighbourhood that included reviews of films and TV shows, as well as occasional short stories. Selling for 5 cents each, they provided the nascent writer with his first outlet, and once his mother got hold of an ancient Underwood typewriter – whose letter ‘m’ broke off, meaning that, like Paul Sheldon in Misery, he had to fill in the letters by hand on the manuscript – he began to write stories which he submitted to the pulp magazines, none of which sold, although he did receive occasional pieces of good advice about how to present his copy.

  After watching The Pit and the Pendulum, the 1961 horror film based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, starring Vincent Price, King wrote his own sixteen-page novelization of the movie from memory, adding his own touches, and ran off copies for his friends at school. They were happy to pay him a quarter for the story – which King intended to use to swell his own coffers (or Steve’s College Fund, as he later put it) – but the authorities at school were not impressed. He was suspended and made to repay the money, since his teachers and the principal didn’t think he should be reading horror, let alone writing it.

  Ruth worked in the kitchens at a local residential centre for the mentally challenged, while Steve attended first the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School. There he became editor of the school newspaper, The Drum, for which he wrote a couple of short stories, and also created a satirical version of it, The Village Vomit, which got him in as much trouble as his Edgar Allan Poe homage had done at his grammar school. It was also the catalyst for him joining the Lisbon newspaper, the Weekly Enterprise, as a sports reporter. The editor, John Gould, taught the young writer valuable lessons about economy of prose and clarity of purpose. In addition, King began working at Worumbo Mills and Weaving, taking an eight-hour shift in addition to his high-school hours, since he was determined to live up to his mother’s dream for him to follow his brother to the University of Maine. There was a further incentive for keeping his grades up: the Vietnam War was heating up, and those who weren’t in college were being shipped out to Southeast Asia, often, as King wryly observed later, returning home in coffins.

  King’s writing before arriving at university included more than one complete novel: in 1963, aged sixteen, he penned a 50,000 word novella called ‘The Aftermath’, a science-fiction story about an alien invasion in the wake of a nuclear war. He also completed ‘Getting It On’, later published as Rage, as he was ‘coming out of the high school experience . . . Everyone has that rage, has that insecurity. Rage allows people to find some catharsis,’ he commented later. He had kept a scrapbook about the killer Charles Starkweather, some of which fed into the character of the novel’s Charlie Decker.

  King started at the University of Maine at Ororo after graduating from Lisbon Falls in 1966, and from his second (sophomore) year, became involved with the school newspaper, The Maine Campus, for which he provided a weekly column, King’s Garbage Truck, as well as a serial story, a Western entitled Slade. He also started to make professional sales of his short stories, beginning with ‘The Glass Floor’ to Startling Mystery Stories in the summer of 1967 for $35 – and he admitted that no subsequent cheque, no matter the sum, gave him more satisfaction. ‘Someone had finally paid me some real money for something I had found in my head,’ he wrote in an introduction to a rare reprinting of a story that was ‘clearly the product of an unformed story-teller’s mind’. He completed another full novel (‘Sword in the Darkness’, which he referred to as his ‘dirty little secret’ in On Writing) from which only Chapter 71 has ever been published.

  At university, he became involved with student politics, serving as part of the Student Senate, and supporting the anti-war movement, since he believed the US action in Vietnam was unconstitutional. More importantly, he met a fellow English student, Tabitha Spruce; they fell in love, and married in January 1971. This was shortly after he graduated with a B.A. in English, and qualified to teach at high-school level. Jobs weren’t plentiful, and to begin with, he worked at the New Franklin industrial laundry, supplementing his income with the occasional short-story sale. He reworked ‘Getting It On’, and submitted it to Doubleday publishers in New York. Although editor Bill Thompson liked the story, and asked King for numerous rewrites, which the author gladly supplied, he was unable to persuade the editorial board to accept it. He did, however, encourage King to continue writing.

  The Kings’ first two children, Naomi and Joe, were born in quick succession, and Stephen eventually got a job teaching English at Hampden Academy in the autumn of 1971. Even with that full-time income, and Tabitha working at Dunkin’ Donuts, money was very tight, and the Kings were part of what he later called ‘the working poor’: the cheque for the sale of the short story ‘Sometimes They Come Back’ paid for vitally needed amoxicillin to treat Naomi’s ear infection (a few years earlier, another cheque had arrived just in time to pay a court fine). King was also drinking more heavily than he should, believing for a time that all he would ever amount to was a high school teacher who sold half a dozen stories a year. He had written a couple more novels – The Running Man and The Long Walk – but publishers were interested in short stories not novels from him.

  Tabitha continued to support his writing as they moved to a double-wide trailer in Herman, Maine, for which they couldn’t even afford a phone line. To ensure they didn’t spend more than they could afford, Tabitha decided to cut up their credit cards.

  Encouraged by a friend to try to write a story from a female perspective, King had begun work on a tale about an outcast girl who developed powers that allowed her to strike back at her tormentors. After getting a certain way into the story, he hit a mental roadblock, and threw the pages away in disgust; however Tabitha was interested in what he was writing, retrieved them, and read it through. She told him that there was something there worth pursuing, and offered to help him with the details of female high school life that King was unaware of.

  Once Carrie was complete, King sent it to Bill Thompson at Doubleday, and carried on with his normal routine – but one afternoon in the spring of 1973, he got a message from the school office to say his wife was calling. Because the Kings no longer had a phone, Bill Thompson had had to send a telegram, and Tabitha had used a neighbour’s phone to call her husband. Doubleday was going to buy Carrie. ‘Is $2,500 advance ok?’ Thompson asked. It wasn’t enough for King to retire from teaching to become a writer, but it was a start.

  The $400,000 for which the paperback rights to Carrie were sold to Signet – out of which under his contract with Doubleday, King would receive half – was another matter. The phone call on Mother’s Day in May 1973 meant that Stephen King was no longer a high school teacher who wrote at evenings and weekends. It was the start of Stephen King’s forty-year-long career as a full-time writer. As Bill Thompson’s telegram confirming the original deal concluded, ‘The future lies ahead.’

  2

  LIVING THE HIGH LIFE

  Stephen King’s mother Ruth sadly didn’t live to see the fruits of her son’s success. She was aware of the sale to Doubleday, and the changes that the paperback deal would make to the Kings’ lives, but by that stage she was already suffering from uterine cancer, which was confirmed in August 1973. The Kings moved to southern Maine to be near her during her final few months, and King worked on his next novel, a vampire story then known as ‘Second Coming’, but eventually published as ’Salem’s Lot, in a small room in the garage. By this
stage he was starting to drink more heavily.

  King sent Bill Thompson a draft of ‘Second Coming’ alongside Blaze, a homage in part to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which he had written in the early part of 1973. Thompson felt that the vampire story had more chance of success; Blaze didn’t see print for over thirty years. In the aftermath of his mother’s death in December 1973, King wrote Roadwork, one of his bleakest stories, as well as the short story ‘The Woman in the Room’.

  Doubleday bought ’Salem’s Lot in April 1974, with New American Library this time paying half a million dollars for the paperback rights. Wanting a change of scenery, the Kings moved to Boulder, Colorado that autumn (apparently chosen at random by opening an atlas of the USA and stabbing a finger at the page). This would eventually provide the background for King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel The Stand. While there, King worked on a story based on the Pattie Hearst kidnapping, ‘The House on Value Street’, but couldn’t make it work. He also toyed with an idea about a boy with psychic powers in an amusement park (‘Darkshine’) but found the location wasn’t conducive to creating suspense.

  A Halloween trip to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park was the trigger for King’s next novel. The hotel was packing up for the winter, and the Kings were the only people staying there. King’s imagination started working overtime, and within hours he had come up with most of the key beats of ‘The Shine’ – or, as it was renamed, The Shining. His anger when three-year-old Joe had ‘helped’ his dad by scribbling on the pages of his manuscript was channelled into the story: for him, writing about something bad happening meant that it wouldn’t happen to him in real life.

  King wasn’t concerned about being labelled a horror writer: he considered it a compliment, and believed that there was a long lineage of great writers in the field. When Bill Thompson heard the plotline of The Shining in January 1975, he did express his worry about literary ‘typecasting’, but King was adamant that this was what he wanted to write.

  Once The Shining was complete, King looked once more at ‘The House on Value Street’ but inspiration still failed to strike. A news report about a chemical-biological warfare spill, on the other hand, reminded him of ‘Night Surf’, a short story he had written a few years earlier about a group of teenage survivors of a terrible flu, known as Captain Trips. The two together formed the core of what many still regard as King’s finest novel, The Stand, which he worked on – regarding it as his ‘own little Vietnam’ because it seemed to be never-ending – in Boulder, and then back in Maine when the Kings returned there in the summer of 1975. They bought a house in Bridgton, where he tried to work on other projects, including early versions of Firestarter and The Dead Zone.

  The Kings met Kirby McCauley at a publishing party in the winter of 1976, and the literary agent soon took the author on as a client – initially for some short stories, and then for all of his work. It was the right time for King to make this move: Carrie was released as a movie by Brian de Palma in November 1976, and the success of the feature film added to King’s growing reputation, which was heightened further when The Shining was published early in 1977.

  Another new King book was published that year, but only a tiny handful of people were aware of its authorship. Annoyed at the perceived wisdom that an author could only release one book in a year, or else the sales of the new one would eat into the untapped potential of the previous release, King decided to offer his ‘trunk’ novels – the ones which he had written and put away – direct to New American Library. King insisted that NAL use a pseudonym on the cover (originally it was going to be Guy Pillsbury) and ‘Getting It On’, now retitled Rage, was published as by Richard Bachman in September 1977.

  Although Doubleday wanted a new King novel for early 1978, King knew that The Stand wouldn’t be completed in time, so offered them a collection of short stories, culled from the many that he had been selling since 1967. Night Shift was a surprise hit for the publisher in February, although they were less surprised at how well The Stand sold when it was published seven months later.

  Perhaps if some of the senior executives at the publishing house had treated King better – after all, he was one of their best-selling authors – then the very publicized split that occurred soon after might not have happened. King felt that Leon Uris and Alex Haley were treated much better, whereas it seemed as if Bill Thompson had to remind them who King was every time he visited the office.

  Another factor that weighed against Doubleday was their treatment of the manuscript for The Stand. The book that King delivered was 1,200 pages long; their presses could only cope with a book two-thirds that size. King was told that 400 pages needed to go; either he could do the edit, or they would. The author understandably carried out the work himself, keeping the material, and eventually reworking it into the revised edition of the story that came out a decade later.

  The Stand was the final story King owed Doubleday under his contract, and he was determined to get a better financial deal for the next books. He asked for an advance of $3.5 million; Doubleday refused. With McCauley as his agent, King went to NAL, and made a deal with them. Since they were only paperback publishers, they sold the hardback rights to Viking.

  After all of the difficulties over the negotiations, the Kings decided on another change of scenery. They crossed the Atlantic to England, complete with new arrival Owen, who was born in February 1977, and rented a house in Fleet in Hampshire. Although the move wasn’t the creative jolt King had hoped for, he did meet fellow author Peter Straub, and the two fantasy writers agreed to collaborate on a book when they were both free. The proposed year-long sabbatical in Britain lasted only three months, and the Kings bought a new home in Center Lovell, Maine.

  In September 1978, King started a year teaching at his old university in Maine, renting a house near Route 15. His lectures at his alma mater formed the core of his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, which was commissioned by Bill Thompson for his new publishing house, Everest, after he had been fired by Doubleday. The Kings’ home, and its proximity to traffic, led to a family tragedy when Naomi’s cat was killed, and inspired King’s most gruesome novel, Pet Sematary, which he wrote and then put away, not intending to publish it.

  Another story about which he hadn’t thought for a long time also resurfaced when the Kings looked in the cellar of their Bridgton home: King had been fascinated by Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’ at university, and it had prompted him to write both a poem, ‘The Dark Man’, and a couple of short stories about a gunslinger named Roland. Little realizing how central to his fiction this fantasy Western would become, he sold the stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  While working on The Dead Zone and then Firestarter, King’s addictions started to get worse, as he was now mixing in circles where cocaine was freely available. In interviews as well as in On Writing, he freely admitted that he was writing stories with paper stuffed up his nose to prevent bleeding, and that there weren’t many hours of the day when he was fully functional – hungover until 2 p.m. and then drunk from 5 p.m. till midnight.

  The stories continued to flow. ’Salem’s Lot became a well-reviewed TV miniseries in November 1979, shortly before the Kings bought a house in Bangor, Maine, which, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be haunted. Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining, and although he consulted with King on a number of issues, he didn’t use the author’s own screenplay, or remain faithful to the core of the book. Cujo appeared in hardback, and local small press publisher Donald M. Grant presented the first of his lavish editions of the ‘Dark Tower’ series with The Gunslinger in 1982. King’s trunk novels The Long Walk, Roadwork and The Running Man were all published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, each slipping beneath the radar of the fans who were keen to buy anything with the Stephen King name on it.

  King enjoyed the luxury of spending time with his children – he and Joe both recall watching laser video discs (early DVDs) together of Close Enco
unters of the Third Kind and Duel – and he was able to indulge his older son during the filming of Creepshow, an anthology movie based on five of his short stories directed by George A. Romero, released in 1982. Joe played young Billy, the reader of the E.C.-inspired comic book in which the tales appear, while King had a chance to stretch his acting muscles playing the lead in ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’. Not the author’s finest hour, perhaps, but it led to a tradition of King – like Hitchcock, or Spider-Man creator Stan Lee – making a cameo appearance in stories based on his work. He was also able to indulge his whims, buying the local Bangor radio station WACZ in 1983, renaming it WZON, and providing a solid diet of rock music.

  While Tabitha’s own writing career started to take off, King had a final tussle with Doubleday over the release of funds they owed him. To make a clean break, King gave them Pet Sematary, which he had believed would never be published. As well as Donald M. Grant, he worked with small publishers Land of Enchantment on Cycle of the Werewolf, which had originally been intended as a calendar.

  He hoped to continue the Richard Bachman pen-name as an outlet for other writing, but when Thinner was published in late 1984, an enterprising librarian, Steve Brown, became convinced that Richard Bachman and Stephen King were one and the same, despite King’s regular protestations. Investigating the copyright pages of the earlier books, he discovered that mistakenly King’s name had been linked to Rage. He wrote to King, expecting a denial, but instead got a personal call from the writer inviting him to talk about what to do next. As a result, King went public with the news in February 1985 and provided a foreword for an omnibus reprint of The Bachman Books later that year. The collaboration with Peter Straub finally saw print at the same time as Thinner. In The Talisman both writers consciously imitated the other, as much for their own amusement as anything else.