A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  The pneumonia was caused by the bottom part of his lung not properly reinflating after the accident, and he then contracted a bacterial infection, keeping him hospitalized for weeks, during which time Tabitha reorganized his office. This gave him the inspiration for Lisey’s Story, a tale of a writer’s widow dealing with her grief, which he worked on as he recovered his strength. He was also heavily involved with the adaptation of Lars von Trier’s 1995 Danish miniseries Riget about a haunted hospital, incorporating his own experiences into the single-season Kingdom Hospital that ran from March to August 2004. This marked the first time that he and his wife had officially worked together on a story, with Tabitha providing the plotline for the tenth episode.

  King had never lost his love for small publishers – he maintained the relationship with Donald M. Grant for all seven of the ‘Dark Tower’ novels – and was delighted to help the Hard Case Crime series, set up by editor Charles Ardai. Rather than just provide a cover blurb, King offered to pen a story, and The Colorado Kid became a headline release for the company, eventually leading to a TV series, Haven, from the same production team who mined King’s early novel The Dead Zone for six years of stories about psychic Johnny Smith. His contributions to the mystery field were recognized when he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 2007.

  His creative juices seemed to be flowing: in addition to The Colorado Kid and Lisey’s Story, King wrote the shorter, but very effective, tale Cell, which Scribners decided they wanted to publish ahead of Lisey’s Story. The two books showcased the differing sides of King’s writing in the twenty-first century: Cell is a science-fiction horror story; Lisey’s Story, which he proudly maintained was the best piece of fiction he had written, is a love story with some fantastical elements.

  The Kings continued to split their time between Maine and Florida, and, starting with the novella The Gingerbread Girl, King began to set some of his stories in his new locality, able to bring an outsider’s eye to locations and situations which he was unable to do in Maine. His love of short stories was rekindled when he was asked to be guest editor for the Best American Short Stories 2007, and he increased his output in that area – leading to a new collection, Just After Sunset, in 2008. King was proud that both that collection and his novel, Duma Key, out the same year, won the Bram Stoker Awards in their relevant categories.

  The ‘Dark Tower’ series had been fêted on its completion, with the final volume receiving a British Fantasy Award. In 2007, the circle started to turn again with the start of Marvel Comics’ sixty-issue series that ran for six years, filling in gaps in Roland the gunslinger’s chronology, and retelling some of the key stories from the early years. King kept a weather eye on the stories plotted by his assistant Robin Furth, and scripted, for the most part, by Peter David. The same year, a further ‘trunk’ novel, Blaze, was released under the Richard Bachman name, to support the Haven Foundation, a charity set up to help freelance artists who couldn’t work because of sudden disability or disease. King worked with John Irvine and J.K. Rowling on a two-night benefit at the Radio City Music Hall in New York (‘Harry, Carrie and Garp’) to kick-start the foundation, and all his revenue from Blaze was passed to Haven.

  Joe King had begun publishing stories under the pen-name Joe Hill some years earlier, although his identity was revealed in 2007; he and his father started to team up to write the occasional story, starting with ‘Throttle’, a tribute to Richard Matheson’s ‘Duel’ in 2009, and continuing with ‘In the Tall Grass’ in 2012. Clearly proud of all his children’s achievements, King even noted that, should anything happen to him, Joe would be able to complete his work in progress.

  King returned to an unfinished novel, ‘The Cannibalists’, for his next work, which became the massive Under the Dome, which was released in the summer of 2009. He started hinting that he was thinking about another story in the ‘Dark Tower’ saga around this time, as well as a sequel to The Shining. He decided to work on the former first, with The Wind Through the Keyhole arriving in 2012, and Doctor Sleep – which King noted was a new attempt to scare readers properly – following in 2013.

  Before those, he returned to an earlier fascination – what if someone could prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy? – for his 2011 blockbuster novel 11/22/63, as well as indulging his love of baseball in the novella Blockade Billy, which first appeared in 2010, alongside a dark collection of novellas Full Dark, No Stars. At the same time, he was writing his first comic book series, American Vampire, after its creator Scott Snyder approached him for a blurb, and King asked if he could contribute more fully.

  Another long-running project finally came to a head in 2012: King was approached in the late 1990s by rock legend John Mellencamp to assist with writing a musical about a cabin haunted by the spirits of two brothers. Progress was slow but steady across the decade, with Mellencamp involving record producer T-Bone Burnett, and King writing the book for the show, which they titled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. Every so often it would look as if it was close to being staged, but the creative forces were keen for it to be right straight out of the gate. Eventually a production was mounted in Atlanta in April 2012, with an album, containing King’s full script, released in June 2013.

  For a man in his mid-sixties, King is showing little signs of slowing down. He contributed a second story for the Hard Case Crime series, Joyland, and while promoting the release of the CBS adaptation of Under the Dome during the summer of 2013, he revealed that he had completed work on the first draft of his next novel (currently titled ‘Mister Mercedes’) and was halfway through the next (‘Revival’). Interest in his work continues: as well as a fourth season of Haven, and the Under the Dome TV show, a new film of Carrie is hitting cinemas not long before the fortieth anniversary of his first novel, with A Good Marriage, based on the novella from Full Dark, No Stars, in front of the cameras ready for release in 2014.

  King dismissed his own work at the start of Bag of Bones as the ‘literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries’. That’s unfair on the body of work he has created – and on his own legacy, as one of the true storytellers of our age.

  2. THE NOVELS OF STEPHEN KING

  5

  THE BASICS OF HORROR: CARRIE TO FIRESTARTER

  Carrie (Doubleday, April 1974)

  1980: an investigation is taking place into a wave of deaths in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, following the prom attended by Carietta White’s year group. Through witness testimony of various kinds, a picture comes together of a troubled child whose telekinetic gifts were displayed from an early age. An outsider among her class at Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School, Carrie is teased mercilessly after her first period, which she simply does not comprehend. Her fundamentalist Christian mother is no more sympathetic, and further antagonism is aimed at Carrie after her teacher, Rita Desjardin, punishes those who teased her.

  Some of her classmates – particularly Chris Hargensen, who is banned from the school prom because she won’t serve the detention punishment – decide to teach Carrie a lesson and humiliate her at the prom. Another classmate, Sue Snell, befriends Carrie and persuades her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the prom. Carrie and Tommy are crowned king and queen, in a rigged vote, and buckets of pigs’ blood, set up by Chris and her boyfriend, are dropped on them from above the stage. Carrie proceeds to kill everyone in the gym, then starts to destroy the town, wreaking her revenge on Chris and her boyfriend along the way. After her crazed mother stabs her, Carrie stops her heart, but Carrie is dying. After speaking to Sue, accepting that she was not involved in the prom incident, she expires.

  Although Stephen King had sold a number of short stories to various men’s magazines, and had penned novel-length stories that had yet to sell, his real success dated from the publication of Carrie. It is dedicated to his wife Tabitha, who encouraged him to complete the story after he had written the shower scene at the start of the tale but then consigned the pages to the garbage, considerin
g he had ‘written the world’s all-time loser’. She was certain that it had a lot of potential, even if he didn’t want to spend time developing an idea which would need more space than a short story could provide. Her advice was sound: the book was bought by Bill Thompson for Doubleday for $2,500; the paperback rights sold for $400,000 enabling King to give up teaching and concentrate on writing.

  According to King’s recollections in On Writing, the idea for Carrie had been sparked by cleaning the showers when he was working as a janitor at his old high school, and reading an article in Life magazine about telekinesis possibly being triggered by the onset of puberty in young girls. The character herself was inspired by two girls he knew while growing up: one was raised in a house with a nearly life-sized, realistic depiction of the Crucifixion; the other was taunted by her high school peers because she didn’t have a change of clothing, and then teased more when she did try to wear a new outfit. Both had died before King wrote the book.

  Although King would experiment with different formats over the years, Carrie is unusual for its epistolary form – the text is made up of excerpts from letters, books, diaries and official reports rather than a strictly linear approach. Some of the places mentioned would reappear in King’s later stories – the laundry where Carrie’s mother works is the same one that possesses the Mangler in the short story of that title. King himself potentially makes an appearance – one of Carrie’s teachers is an Edwin King – and there’s even a possibility that King’s greatest villain, Randall Flagg, is lurking somewhere near: after all, Carrie’s mother refers to the ‘Black Man’ as an embodiment of evil.

  King’s own description of it as a ‘young book by a young writer’ is accurate: there are elements and themes to which he would return regularly over the years (notably in Firestarter and Christine), but its raw power still reverberates forty years later.

  Carrie has lived on in many different media. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is justly famed for its shock ending; it is a moderately faithful translation of King’s text, with some surprisingly lyrical moments, and good roles for Sissy Spacek as Carrie and John Travolta as Chris’s boyfriend Billy. A belated sequel – The Rage: Carrie 2 – appeared in 1998, with Amy Irving reprising her role as Sue Snell; based on the idea that Carrie’s father carried the gene that caused her problems, it wasn’t a success. A TV movie followed in 2002, designed as a pilot for an ongoing series; unsurprisingly, Carrie therefore survived. However, no show was commissioned. A further movie was released in 2013, with Kick-Ass’s Chloë Moretz cast as Carrie. When it was announced in May 2011, King told Entertainment Weekly, ‘Who knows if it will happen? The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not Casablanca, or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book.’

  One of the more unusual versions of a King text was the musical adaptation of Carrie, which has gone down in Broadway history as one of the great disasters. In fact, there is much to recommend in it – the revival in 2012 spawned a cast album showing the potential of the music – but the original production was undoubtedly doomed when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Terry Hands misunderstood the creators’ instructions to use Grease as a template. Instead of the 1950s-set musical, he looked to the ancient Greek civilization . . .

  ’Salem’s Lot (Doubleday, October 1975)

  They say you can’t go home again, but writer Ben Mears is determined to try, returning to the sleepy Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot after twenty-five years. When he was younger, he had a bad experience in the old Marsten House, currently owned by Kurt Barlow, and he’s now back in the Lot to write a book, perhaps about ‘the recurrent power of evil’, although he keeps his cards pretty close to his chest. He spends time with his old teacher, Matt Burke, and gets close to college graduate Susan Norton. And all the while, a plague of vampirism is spreading through the town, affecting the young and the old, caused by Barlow, a master vampire, and his partner, Richard Straker.

  After some persuasion, local doctor Jimmy Cody and alcoholic priest Father Callahan join Ben and young horror fan Mark Petrie in their fight against the vampires. Matt Burke suffers a heart attack; Susan is captured and turned into a vampire, and Mark manages to kill Straker. Father Callahan is caught by Barlow and forced to drink his blood, after his lack of sufficient faith means his crucifix is ineffective against the vampire; as a result he finds himself unable to enter his church and leaves the Lot. Cody is murdered, but Ben and Mark are able to kill Barlow after he moves from the Marsten house to the basement of the lodging-house where Ben has been staying. Ben and Mark go on the run, staying in Los Zapatas, Mexico for a time, but eventually return to Jerusalem’s Lot to burn the town to rid it of the now leaderless vampires.

  One of King’s personal favourites among his early novels, ’Salem’s Lot rewrote the rules for the horror story, pitching the classic tropes into small-town America. It derived from a conversation with his wife in which they wondered what would happen if Dracula appeared in contemporary America. Although they considered that there was a good chance the lord of the vampires would be hit by a yellow cab in New York, King kept pondering the idea of Dracula arriving in a ‘sleepy little country town’. The story of ‘Second Coming’, as ’Salem’s Lot was originally known, sprang from there.

  As well as Bram Stoker’s classic novel, which was one of the books that King taught at Hampden Academy, ’Salem’s Lot incorporated a nightmare that King recalled suffering aged eight. The corpse of a hanged man was blowing in the wind, and King realized that it had his face, albeit pecked at by birds – and it then opened its eyes and looked at him, causing him to wake up screaming. Changing the name from Robert Burns (which was written on a placard around the corpse’s neck in his dream) to Hubie Marsten, King used the image for Ben Mears’ strong memory of events in the Marsten House.

  One element of the novel often overlooked is its reflection of the paranoia of the time. King was writing ’Salem’s Lot in 1973, shortly after the revelations regarding President Nixon’s involvement in covering up the burglary at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC, and the web of corruption exposed by the courts, not just within the government, but in the security services. Talking about it in 1980, King commented that he believed ‘the unspeakable obscenity in ’Salem’s Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. In a way, it is more closely related to Invasion of the Body Snatchers than it is to Dracula. The fear behind ’Salem’s Lot seems to be that the Government has invaded everybody.’

  There are strong links to other areas of King’s writing. One of his earliest short stories, ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’, told the tale of events in the town over a century previously; it was published in Night Shift in 1978. Father Callahan became a central figure in the later novels in the ‘Dark Tower’ saga, beginning with Wolves of the Calla, which also provides an indication of the fate of Ben Mears. According to Doctor Sleep, the True Knot pass by the town of Jerusalem’s Lot during their passage across America in the years following the events of the book.

  And, of course, this was the first of many stories by King centred upon a writer. Ben’s writing itself is perhaps not so relevant, but the combination of analysis and imagination that he applies to events helps him to understand what’s happening earlier than others.

  Bill Thompson at Doubleday was offered the manuscripts for ’Salem’s Lot and Blaze as potential follow-ups to Carrie; he decided to go with the vampire story, although he requested various changes from King. Some of the deleted scenes (notably Jimmy Cody’s death by rats rather than knives) were included as extras in a deluxe edition of the book, published in 2005. The book was dedicated to his daughter Naomi Rachel King. (Blaze was eventually published in 2007.)

  ’Salem’s Lot was the first of King’s works adapted for television, in a four-hour miniseries in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper. Although some of it hasn’t dated well, it still provides some shocks, with David Soul called upon to dig much deeper than he was in h
is hit cop show Starsky & Hutch. Changes were made, in particular the nature of Barlow: rather than being a sophisticated gentleman vampire, he became a homage to the Nosferatu version of the vampire, as seen in the 1922 movie. A sequel, Return to ’Salem’s Lot, followed in 1987 with little bar the presence of vampires linking it to the original miniseries, or King’s novel. The story was adapted in seven parts for BBC Radio in 1995 by Gregory Evans, with a framing sequence added of Ben confessing to a Mexican priest. Hellraiser’s Doug Bradley played Barlow in a version that director Adrian Bean wanted to have ‘terrifying psychological realism with no holds barred action and horror’. In 2004, Rob Lowe’s Ben Mears battled Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer as Straker and Barlow respectively in a new TV miniseries; in this version, Ben is a war correspondent, rather than a fiction writer, and Father Callahan has a rather different fate.

  The Shining (Doubleday, January 1977)

  Welcome to the Overlook Hotel. The isolated hotel, in the Colorado Rockies, is the setting for an epic battle for the minds of father and son Jack and Danny Torrance, as five-year-old Danny’s special mental abilities – the way that he can ‘shine’ – are eagerly sought by whatever it is that possesses the hotel.

  Jack thinks the Overlook will be the perfect place to write across the winter months, when the hotel is completely cut off from the surrounding area. His only company should be his wife, Wendy, and his son. Jack can’t handle his drink, and has attacked both Wendy and Danny in the past, but the hotel caretakers aren’t allowed to take alcohol with them, so Wendy hopes that everything will work out. Danny’s psychic powers allow him to see the future, and he talks to an imaginary friend, Tony (who appears to be a teenage version of Danny himself).