A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  As the weeks go past, the Overlook plays on Jack’s weaknesses, as Danny receives increasingly disturbing visions, culminating in Jack succumbing to the hotel’s influence. He manages to break free sufficiently to give Danny a chance to run, and with the help of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook’s chef who can also ‘shine’ and has heard Danny’s telepathic call for help, Danny and Wendy escape before the boiler explodes. Jack is killed and the Overlook is razed to the ground, although its malevolent influence can still be felt . . .

  Although the traditional horror elements are front and centre in this early King novel – enough to worry his publisher that King would be typecast as this sort of writer – reading the novel of The Shining without the image of a grinning Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance makes it clear that the true horrors described are the ones affecting Danny. The spousal abuse, alcoholism and the collapse of everything that Danny holds dear thread through the book: the monster that Tony warns him of looks like his father, the man he should trust implicitly. Although King didn’t recognize the problems in himself at the time, he knew he was channelling the instincts that many parents feel towards their children from time to time. He later realized that a tale of an alcoholic former schoolteacher might be closer to fact than fiction. According to an interview in the Tampa Tribune in 1980, he recalled: ‘I discovered about halfway through that I wasn’t writing a haunted-house story, that I was writing about a family coming apart. It was like a revelation.’

  King had been writing a novel, ‘Darkshine’, set in an amusement park and featuring a child with psychic powers, but this wasn’t gelling (elements of this would eventually surface in his 2013 Hard Case Crime tale Joyland). The setting for The Shining was inspired by a trip that the Kings took to the Stanley Hotel in Colorado while he was working on ‘Darkshine’ over Halloween 1974, when they found themselves the only guests staying prior to the hotel’s clos-ure for the winter. The hotel has a history of hauntings, with the real Room 217 (the setting for a particularly memorable scene in the novel) one of the prime foci. King was the only customer in a bar, served by a barman named Grady, and that night dreamed that his young son, Joe, was being chased through the corridors by a fire hose. Woken with a jolt, he lit a cigarette and by the time he had smoked it, he knew the basic outline of The Shining.

  The book was originally known as ‘The Shine’, inspired by the John Lennon song ‘Instant Karma’ which contains the line ‘We all shine on . . . like the moon and the stars and the sun’. However, it was changed after it was pointed out to King by one of the staff at Doubleday that ‘shine’ had been used as a derogatory word for a black person (a ‘shoe-shine’ boy), and the book featured a black cook.

  It also was quite a bit longer than the published edition. A five-part prologue, ‘Before the Play’, was eventually printed in Whispers magazine, and can be found online; an epilogue, ‘After the Play’, has never been published, but was merged into the novel. ‘Before the Play’ fills in some of the history of the Overlook, which is added to in the novel, as well as revealing the cycle of abuse in which Jack Torrance is caught. Dick Hallorann also makes an appearance elsewhere in the King universe, in the novel IT, which shows part of his life in the 1930s.

  In September 2013, King released Doctor Sleep (see page 148), which picks up the story of Danny Torrance a few years after the explosion at the Overlook Hotel. Charting the period from 1981 to 2013, it reveals the fates of Dick Hallorann and Wendy Torrance.

  There are two very different screen adaptations of The Shining. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie is widely regarded as a classic of the horror genre, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, with Shelley Duvall as Wendy. Kubrick and Diane Johnson penned the screenplay, making many changes to King’s story, much to the writer’s distaste. King himself oversaw a TV miniseries version, based on his own script, with Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay as Jack and Wendy. Directed by Mick Garris, this six-hour series was filmed in part at the Stanley Hotel. It too deviates from King’s novel, but returns the story to the focus of the book.

  There is a third movie, which takes its cues from the Kubrick film: Naughty Little Nymphos 5 is an American porn movie in which the first scene features midget porn star Little Romeo as a Danny Torrance character on a tricycle cycling around for nearly a minute through hotel corridors, before meeting two young girls (Frost and Dyna-Mite) who invite him to come play with them. He ends up having sex with them alongside his ‘father’ (Rick Masters). Even the music veers towards the Carlos soundtrack more than the usual porn fare!

  The Walking Dead producer Glen Mazzarra was hired in April 2013 to pen a screenplay for The Overlook Hotel, a prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining for producers Laeta Kalogridis, James Vanderbilt and Bradley Fischer. King told Entertainment Weekly that he wasn’t sure whether Warner Bros. had the rights to ‘Before the Play’ (which covered the same territory) but either way, he’d ‘be just as happy if it didn’t happen’.

  An operatic version of The Shining will arrive in May 2016. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell are collaborating on the project for Minnesota Opera, which will be directed by Eric Simonson. ‘It’s perfect for opera, when you think about it,’ the company’s artistic director Dale Johnson told the Minnesota Star Tribune. ‘You have a hero who is struggling, a strong mother, both trying to keep the family safe . . . An opera doesn’t have to be all Sturm und Drang. It can be entertaining, and scary.’ King has to sign off on the libretto before production begins.

  There is also a game based on the book, apparently created with assistance from Stephen King. It’s a free download available at http://micro.brainiac.com/contest-games.html and won the first Microgame Design Contest in 1998. One player is in control of the Overlook Hotel; the other is the Torrance family.

  Rage (New American Library, September 1977)

  Charlie Decker is ‘getting it on’. The Placerville, Maine high school senior leaves a meeting with the principal, at which he’s been expelled from school for violent behaviour, and takes a gun from his locker. Shooting two teachers, he then takes his algebra class hostage, and in the hours that follow, encourages them to reveal secrets about themselves, which leads to them inevitably turning on each other. A sniper shoots Charlie, but he survives because the bullet hits his locker padlock. Eventually, after one of the students is badly beaten up, Charlie releases them and is shot by the police chief, before being committed to an institution until he is deemed safe to be released.

  Rage wasn’t initially released under Stephen King’s name – it was credited to Richard Bachman, King’s pseudonym of choice, which he used for publication of various of his ‘trunk’ novels (so called as he consigned them to a trunk), books which he penned early in his writing career but which, for assorted reasons, weren’t published. After Bachman’s identity was revealed, Rage was the first of the four Bachman Books, (described as ‘Four Early Novels by Stephen King’) published to coincide with the release of Thinner, which was also written as by Bachman.

  However, Rage is no longer in print ‘and a good thing’, according to King himself. The author asked his publisher ‘to take the damned thing out of print’ following reports that Michael Carneal, a Kentucky boy who shot at a group of his classmates when they were praying before school on 1 December 1997, killing three and injuring five more, had a copy of Rage in his locker. King believed it was an influence, both on Carneal and on others. It’s worth noting that Jim Carroll’s book and subsequent movie The Basketball Diaries, in fact, was the book most often linked with this incident, and the later Columbine massacre, by the newspapers at the time. In a keynote address to the Vermont Library Conference, VEMA Annual Meeting on 26 May 1999, King discussed the rise of such violence and its links to literature and society, and explained the ‘relief rather than regret’ he felt when he authorized the book’s withdrawal. Even before then, in his introduction to the second edition of The Bachman Books in 1996, he expressed his concerns abou
t the links between something he had written and someone committing murder – Jeffrey Lyne Cox cited Rage as an influence on his high school spree in April 1988, as did Dustin Pierce a year later. These links he discusses specifically in his Kindle Single book Guns, published in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

  A few years later, after the murders by Cho Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech in 2007, King admitted in a piece for Entertainment Weekly that ‘in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing – including a short story called “Cain Rose Up” and the novel Rage – would have raised red flags, and I’m certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them’. King started work on Rage in 1965 – aged just seventeen – although he didn’t finish work on it until seven years later. When he was preparing it for print, he updated the contemporary references, in the same way that he would later do with the revised version of The Stand.

  At the time of its publication, King was pleased with Rage, and didn’t want it to ‘become a book the parade had passed’ since it didn’t fit with his new profile as a horror writer. Although he had complied with various editorial requests regarding Getting It On (the book’s original title), Doubleday had eventually turned it down prior to their purchase of Carrie, and Elaine Koster, his editor at paperback house New American Library, agreed that it could be released under a pseudonym ‘to go out there and either find an audience, or just disappear quietly’, as King noted. He refused to allow it to have any publicity linking it to his name. Originally submitted as by Guy Pillsbury (King’s grandfather’s name), King withdrew it when word spread at the publishers that he was the author; it was quietly resubmitted as Rage, under the Richard Bachman name.

  There are no supernatural elements to Rage; had Doubleday published it, it’s feasible that King might not have become as associated with horror, at least initially. ‘In the long run, the monster would have come out,’ King commented to Douglas E. Winter in 1984. In some ways, it’s a forerunner of his later books: the horrors of Misery and Gerald’s Game, in particular, derive from real-life fears and situations, and while Rage is clearly the product of a young author learning his craft, it hints at some of the grandeur to come from King. That said, his decision to withdraw it from general public availability must be respected.

  According to Stephen Jones’ authoritative book on King adaptations, Creepshows, Rage was adapted for the stage in Los Angeles in 1990, although there is no indication of scripter or stars. No film version has been made.

  The Stand (Doubleday, September 1978; May 1990)

  When a lethal man-made virus, nicknamed Captain Trips, wipes out the vast majority of the human race, the stage is set for an epic battle between good and evil. Groups of survivors congregate around two people: Mother Abigail, a 108-year-old Nebraskan, who encourages the creation of a Free Zone settlement in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, a supernatural evil being, who attracts similarly minded people to him in Las Vegas, Nevada. Each is aware of the other with Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross setting a bomb that kills or wounds members of the Free Zone; this prompts a group of survivors to head to Vegas to confront Flagg. Unlike in the rest of the continental United States, there is power in Vegas, and Flagg’s men are stockpiling weapons to assert their supremacy over what remains of humanity. However, when one of Flagg’s followers brings in a nuclear bomb, the Hand of God detonates it, apparently destroying Flagg and his followers – although, as the extended edition makes clear, Flagg simply arrives somewhere else. When a baby conceived after the outbreak of Captain Trips is born and survives, the human race has a chance at a future – if it can learn from its mistakes.

  In his first two novels, King had wreaked destruction on small towns. In The Stand, the scale is magnified a million-fold and in its pages there is plenty of death and devastation, as well as moments of reflection and sheer horror (Larry Underwood’s progress through the Lincoln Tunnel is still one of the creepiest pieces that King has ever written). Although King originally sat down to write a fictionalized version of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, he found himself drawn to reports of a US Army nerve-gas experiment in 1968 which killed 3,000 sheep in Utah; a line he heard on a Christian radio station that ‘Once in every generation the plague will fall among them’; and the post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. As the structure of the book might suggest, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world of Middle-earth also influenced him: ‘I wanted to do Lord of the Rings with an American background,’ he explained. The Patty Hearst connection remained: Randall Flagg dimly remembers that he was involved with her kidnapping.

  The Stand took around sixteen months to write, during which time King experienced writer’s block – after creating the characters in the two communities, he wasn’t sure where to go with them, but eventually realized he needed a further catalyst to move the plot forward. This became the explosion in the Free Zone, and once that was written, the rest of the book took a mere nine weeks to complete. King also mentioned that while he was writing it, he saw a copy of Terry Nation’s novelization of his BBC television series Survivors on the shelves, and thought that someone else had already covered the same territory – however, while the starting point may be similar, the two stories are very different.

  The book King finally completed was simply too long for his publishers. Doubleday insisted that a third of the book’s 1200 pages had to be removed or they couldn’t publish it, and gave him the option of choosing which to lose. King exercised that right, but restored much of it twelve years later for a revised edition (also rewriting a number of other scenes, shifting some of the characterisation along the way). Many King readers find the original version to be the best of his early books: pared back to its essentials at times, it has a constant forward momentum that draws you in.

  It’s a key book in King’s work in other ways: Randall Flagg is the key antagonist in the Dark Tower sequence of stories, as well as appearing in Eyes of the Dragon and Hearts in Atlantis. He first came to King in 1969 when he wrote a poem called ‘The Dark Man’, which was finally published in July 2013 (see page 227). There is a whole section within the fourth ‘Dark Tower’ book, Wizard and Glass, where Roland and his ka-tet (a group of four people allied together) visit the world affected by Captain Trips (or one extremely similar). Like ’Salem’s Lot, elements appear in an earlier short story – ‘Night Surf’ mentions a superflu nicknamed Captain Trips.

  Both before and since the TV miniseries adaptation of The Stand, there has been talk of a movie version, but no big-screen script has yet materialized. The sweeping nature of the story demands more time than even a three-hour movie can provide, as George Romero, King’s partner on the Creepshow movie, realized, although screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, who had worked with John Boorman on his proposed version of The Lord of the Rings, did produce a screenplay that might have worked. Warner Brothers did not agree, and didn’t proceed.

  A 1994 TV miniseries was produced for ABC television, with King writing his own screenplay for Mick Garris to direct. The eight-hour, four-part drama used the original version as its source material, although some elements of the backstory for Captain Trips were derived from the expanded edition.

  Subsequent to that, Warner Bros. and CBS Films announced a feature-length adaptation, with Harry Potter director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves potentially involved. They were replaced in late 2011 by Ben Affleck, who admitted a year later that he and his team were having scripting problems. After Affleck signed up to play Batman in the second Man of Steel film in August 2013, Scott Cooper was hired by Warner Bros. to re-write and direct the project.

  The Stand has also been adapted for the graphic medium, across thirty-one issues (or six graphic novels) between 2008 and 2012. It was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by Mike Perkins, overseen by King.

  The Long Walk (Signet Books, July 1979)

  Amerika, the near future: the new national sport in the former America is ‘The Lon
g Walk’, a brutal marathon that begins at the Maine/Canada border, and continues down the East Coast until only one walker is left. And that means left alive. One hundred teenage boys compete for the prize of whatever they want for the rest of their lives; the other ninety-nine are killed along the way. The Walk is televised, and it continues for as long as it takes. Food is provided every morning, and water is available from soldiers at any time – but nothing can be taken from the spectators on pain of death.

  Raymond Davis Garraty is one of the Musketeers, determined to win the event, but as the days go by, he sees everyone around him succumbing to madness, falling below the 4 mph minimum speed, or otherwise falling out of the race. Soon just three teenagers are left: Garraty, Stebbins (a quiet, introspective young man who simply wants to be accepted by his father if he wins), and Peter McVries. And even the eventual winner cannot believe it is all over when his last compatriot collapses and dies – there will always be another runner somewhere ahead of him . . .

  The second novel published by Richard Bachman was in fact Stephen King’s first completed book, written while he was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966–1967. Its bleak outlook offers no chance of optimism: it’s clear that there will be no winners from this Long Walk, since even the winner will have experienced much worse things than they can ever have thought possible. Hailed by the American Library Association as one of the best hundred novels for teenagers written between 1965 and 2000, The Long Walk’s influence can be seen on more recent dystopias such as The Hunger Games.