A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  There are plenty of connections to King’s other Castle Rock stories, notably The Dead Zone, and the events at the Camber garage resonate in the community for the next decade.

  Like the book, the movie version of Cujo, released in August 1983, is well known even to those who wouldn’t normally bother with what on the surface – and certainly the way that it was marketed – was a horror film. Dee Wallace, best known at that point for playing Elliot’s mother in E.T., was Donna Trenton, with Danny Pintauro as Tad. King was initially invited to pen the screenplay, and deviated from his own plotline more than eventual writer Barbara Turner (using the pen-name Lauren Currier) did. Turner’s screenplay contained King’s downbeat ending, but director Lewis Teague brought Don Carlos Dunaway on board to change it. Although originally against a happy ending, King eventually agreed: the film concludes with Tad surviving his ordeal. Five separate Saint Bernard dogs were used to play Cujo (as well as a German Shepherd in a Saint Bernard suit!).

  Supposedly, a remake of Cujo was in preparation to mark the original’s thirtieth anniversary in 2013; despite an optimistic press release from Sunn Classic Pictures in January that year, nothing had materialized by the summer. The moderator at King’s own website noted that ‘Stephen isn’t involved’.

  The Running Man (Signet Books, May 1982)

  The year 2025, and America is a totalitarian state. Needing money for medicine for his seriously ill daughter, Ben Richards signs up for The Running Man, one of the most dangerous and brutal games produced by the Games Network for the entertainment of the population. It’s a manhunt: the hunted is an enemy of the state who’s given a twelve-hour head start before armed hitmen, known as Hunters, get on his trail. He receives a sum for each hour he stays alive; the same if he kills a Hunter or law-enforcement officer; and a billion dollars if he survives for thirty days. (The record is eight days.) He has to send two video messages each day, or forfeit his fees. Richards sets off, travelling through New York and Boston, gaining help from a gang member – unusual, because the public are paid if they report his location. Richards learns that the shows on the Network are simply a means of pacifying the public, but when he tries to reveal the truth, his messages are altered. Eventually he manages to board a plane, claiming he has explosives, along with the lead Hunter and an innocent woman bystander whose car he hijacked. The Network producer, Dan Killian, offers him a job as lead Hunter, but Richards is concerned of the effect on his family. When Killian tells him his wife and daughter are already dead, Richards takes control of the plane, allows the woman to parachute away, and then aims the plane at the Games Network skyscraper. The resulting explosion kills Killian and Richards.

  Unfortunately far better known for the movie version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Richards, discussed below, than its literary form, The Running Man was the last of King’s pseudonymous novels to be published while he was able to maintain the secret of ‘Dicky’ Bachman’s identity. Like The Long Walk, it takes television’s fixation with game shows to a logical, if grim, conclusion, and was written ‘one feverish weekend’ in 1971 over the space of seventy-two hours ‘with virtually no changes’ – a considerably faster pace than King was used to. Neither Doubleday nor Ace Books expressed an interest in it and it therefore became part of the set of trunk novels that King offered to New American Library.

  When The Running Man was published, King was adamant that he wasn’t responsible for the book. ‘I know who Dick Bachman is though,’ he told Shayol magazine. ‘I went to school with Dicky Bachman and that isn’t his real name . . . That boy is absolutely crazy.’ Twenty years later, he would note that The Running Man was ‘written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing’. When reviewing the first book in The Hunger Games trilogy, he pointed out that both this and The Long Walk predated Suzanne Collins’ books by some considerable time.

  It’s a fast-paced adventure tale that is, as King noted in The Bachman Books introduction, ‘nothing but story and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side’. The tale counts down to some catastrophic event, a device used equally effectively by Michael Grant in his ‘Gone’ series of novels twenty-five years later, but unlike George Dawes in Roadwork, or Garrity in The Long Walk, it’s hard to feel too much for Ben Richards one way or other. He’s a man thrown into a dreadful situation who deals with it as best he can, and for the most part feels like a cipher. However, at least he does get what King called ‘the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending’!

  The rights to The Running Man were sold before the world knew that Bachman was Stephen King, albeit at a higher price than would normally be charged for a book by an unknown writer. The eventual movie was actually the second attempt to film it: a 1985 version, directed by Rambo’s George Pan Cosmatos, starred Superman’s Christopher Reeve as Richards, but after the director was fired, production was shut down. Andrew Davis, later responsible for the remake of The Fugitive, was appointed to direct from Steven E. de Souza’s script, with Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as the lead. (King didn’t hold back on his opinion of the casting: his Richards ‘is about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get’, he wrote in 1996.) Two weeks into shooting, Davis was replaced by Paul Michael Glaser, the former Starsky & Hutch star. The film quickly lost anything beyond a superficial resemblance to King’s original, and the poster proclaimed the movie was based on a book by Richard Bachman.

  When he was coming to the end of his term as Governor of California in spring 2011, Schwarzenegger claimed that he had been approached about remaking The Running Man. However, despite the film regularly appearing in lists of top ten science-fiction films that should be remade, nothing has yet appeared.

  Christine (Viking Press, April 1983)

  Christine is a bitch who destroys friendships and takes lives. But she’s not just some girl – she is a 1958 Plymouth Fury, whom teens Arnie Cunningham and Dennis Guilder spot in a dilapidated state outside the house of Roland D. LeBay. Arnie falls in love with Christine and, despite Dennis’ advice (after he has a worrying vision while sitting inside the car), he buys her. He hires space at a local garage run by small-time crook Will Darnell, and starts to repair the car. Dennis is concerned when he learns of the car’s bad history after LeBay’s death (LeBay’s wife and daughter died in the car), and becomes even more worried about his friend – as Christine’s appearance improves, so does Arnie’s. He becomes overconfident, rude and cocky, increasingly starting to resemble LeBay. He begins to date newcomer Leigh Cabot, but she doesn’t feel safe around Christine – and Christine doesn’t like her. When Christine is attacked by a gang of thugs, she starts to repair herself, and then wreaks vengeance on the gang. Arnie is suspected but always has an alibi. However, his relationship with Leigh suffers, and she begins to date Dennis. When Arnie learns of this, they realize they need to destroy the car before she kills them – and this might restore Arnie to normal. As they do so, LeBay’s spirit tries to prevent them, and arranges for Arnie and his mother to die in an accident. Four years later, Dennis reads of a strange car-related death, and wonders if Christine is now coming for him . . .

  Readers were of course unaware of Stephen King’s double life as Richard Bachman, and most didn’t know of the small press edition of the first ‘Dark Tower’ book The Gunslinger, so the arrival of Christine marked the end of an eighteen-month wait for a new King novel (the four-novella collection Different Seasons appeared in 1982). Part of the delay was caused by the problems King had with writing Christine: structurally, the book is unusual, with two first-person narrated sections sandwiching a third-person portion. King couldn’t find a way to deal with Christine’s murderous spree except as an omniscient narrator, and freely admitted that the odd format ‘nearly killed the book’. However, looking back in 2011, he claimed that he had the most fun writing Christine of all his novels to date.

  King’s love affair with rock music comes to the fore here – the fronti
spiece of the book contains page after page of copyright notices for permission to quote from different lyrics, with an apposite quote from rock and roll at the top of each chapter. He had to pay for these permissions himself but he could afford to – for Christine, he worked out a new contract with his publishers where he received a $1 advance, but a much higher percentage of the royalties.

  King was inspired in part by the 1977 movie The Car – in Danse Macabre, he discusses one of the key scenes from that film in which the title vehicle, which is of course demonically possessed, pursues a couple of cyclists through Zion State Park in Utah, blaring its horn and eventually running them down. Around the same time that film came out, King had been wondering what would happen if his car’s odometer began to run backwards – would the car get younger? Both ideas fed into Christine, although King upped the stakes by having his possessed car blazing with fire while on its hunt. The novel is very clear that Christine acts the way she does because of Roland LeBay’s influence the man’s rotting ghost is a key character. ‘I couldn’t seem to keep him out of the book,’ he later noted. ‘Even after he died he kept coming back for one more curtain call, getting uglier and uglier all the time.’

  He chose the Plymouth Fury because of its sheer mundanity: ‘it’s not a car that already had a legend attached to it’, he explained. Perhaps its lack of distinguishing marks explains why he posed for his author photo on the first edition with the wrong car, a 1957 Plymouth Savoy rather than the 1958 Fury. It might be a rarity in the real world, but in the Stephen King universe, a Plymouth Fury (which of course might be Christine herself) appears in IT, driven by Henry Bowers’ mad father, as well as in 11/22/63. In the revised version of The Stand, Stu Redman and Tom Cullen find an abandoned Plymouth Fury – and the key is initialled A.C.

  Christine – or rather, John Carpenter’s Christine as it was properly known – hit movie theatres very soon after the book was published: the rights were sold even before publication, and filming began soon after the book hit the bestsellers chart. Carpenter, best known for his horror movies Halloween and The Thing, had previously tried to adapt Firestarter, but without success. His version of Christine, with future Baywatch star Alexandra Paul as Leigh, Keith Gordon as Arnie (replacing Kevin Bacon, who was originally offered the role) and John Stockwell as Dennis, was scripted by Bill Phillips.

  However, to the annoyance of many King fans, Carpenter and Phillips altered some of the fundamentals along the way. A prologue, set in 1957, sees Christine on the production line, clearly ‘bad to the bone’ from the very start. Roland LeBay still sells the car to Arnie, but his ghost isn’t part of this story – Carpenter later confessed that this was a mistake on his part, and may have contributed to the film being less effective than it could have been. However, Bill Phillips later used the image for a series of drink and drive advertisements in the US. Twenty-three Plymouth Furies were bought to be used – and in many cases totalled – by the production. Although the film is slated by many, it’s a major step above a lot of the King-based movies of the period, and deserves viewing.

  Pet Sematary (Doubleday, November 1983)

  Doctor Louis Creed moves with his wife Rachel, their children Ellie and Gage, and the family cat, Winston ‘Church’ Churchill, to a new home near Ludlow, Maine from Chicago. Their new neighbour, Jud Crandall, warns them to be careful near the busy highway that passes their home. The elderly Crandall becomes friends with Louis and shows him the local ‘pet sematary’, although Rachel prefers not to think about death if she can. When Church is killed, Crandall shows him the ‘real’ cemetery, a Micmac burial ground; to Louis’s amazement, Church returns to them, although he’s not the pleasant cat he was before.

  When Gage is run over, Louis decides to try to resurrect him, despite both Crandall’s warnings and a ghostly visitation from a dead student telling him not ‘to go beyond’. He isn’t even put off by tales of the forest creature, the Wendigo, or sight of it as he takes Gage’s body up to the burial ground. Rachel and Ellie are away visiting Chicago, but head back after Ellie has a nightmare, having to drive after missing their connection. It’s too late: Gage has returned, possessed and murderous. He kills Crandall, and then his mother when she gets to the house. Louis gives both Gage and Church an overdose, then takes his wife to the burial ground, convinced that he waited too long before interring Gage there. That night she returns . . .

  Two King novels in one year? As so often is the case in such situations, the dual treat for King fans wasn’t because the author was being extraordinarily prolific, but because of contractual negotiations. To release funds that they were holding, Doubleday required a book from King to complete his contract with them, so King reached into his trunk for one of the few books that hadn’t by now seen print under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, dusted it off, tidied it up and sent it in.

  Pet Sematary was written in 1979, while King was teaching at the University of Maine in Orono for a year. The Kings’ house was beside the busy Route 15 and numerous pets were killed under the wheels of the passing vehicles – enough for the local children to create a pet cemetery, in which Naomi King’s cat Smucky was buried after it was hit by a truck on Thanksgiving Day 1978. When young Owen King nearly became a casualty, his life only saved when his father managed to grab his leg and yank him away from the road, King wrote the novel, with a strong debt to the classic W.W. Jacobs short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (the endings are very similar). The tale also reflected contemporary concerns in Maine over the rights of the Native American tribes; the Micmacs, whose burial ground is covered by the pet sematary in the book, were fighting for compensation for the loss of their lands.

  However, on completing the book, King felt that it was too strong for publication, a view shared by his wife Tabitha. The hardcover dust jacket suggests that it was a ‘story so horrifying that he was for a time unwilling to finish it’, and King had told Rolling Stone in 1980 that ‘it’s worse than The Shining or any of the other things. It’s too horrible.’ That reputation may have been part of the reason that the book sold three-quarters of a million copies in hardback alone, somewhere around double the usual sales for King’s work. (It also revealed the existence of The Gunslinger, as described on page 155.)

  ‘I couldn’t ever imagine publishing Pet Sematary, it was so awful,’ he said in a podcast for The Times in 2007. ‘But the fans loved it. You can’t gross out the American public, or the British public for that matter, because they loved it too.’ Annie Gottlieb’s review in the New York Times sums it up: ‘Through its pages runs a taint of primal malevolence so strong that on each of the three nights it took me to read it, both my companion and I had nightmares. Reader, beware. This is a book for those who like to take their scare straight – with a chaser of despair.’

  Perhaps it’s not too surprising, given the prevalence of horror in the late 1980s, that Pet Sematary was snapped up for the screen, but King had some very specific conditions for the prospective producers. Laurel Entertainment’s Richard P. Rubinstein had to make the film in Maine, and that financing should, if at all possible, come from someone who would ‘agree with me that [King’s] screenplay ought to be shot with no changes’. Although it was hoped that George A. Romero would be at the helm, in the end circumstances dictated that Mary Lambert (then best known for working with Madonna on her ‘Like A Virgin’ video) was the director when cameras rolled in 1986. Dale Midkiff played Louis Creed with Denise Crosby – about to head to Hollywood to star in Star Trek: The Next Generation – as Rachel, and The Munsters’ Fred Gwynne as Jud Crandall. The ending was reshot to make it more graphic, although a lot of the footage of the puppet used to represent Gage in the final scenes had to be cut before the Motion Picture Association of America would give it an ‘R’ rating (rather than the ‘NC-17’: No One 17 and Under Admitted) which would be the kiss of death for the movie’s potential audience).

  A sequel, uninspiringly entitled Pet Sematary II, followed in 1992. ‘I read the script – or as much of
it as I could stand,’ King told Fangoria. Lambert returned, but couldn’t achieve similar success a second time around. A remake of the first film has been discussed periodically since 2010, but nothing is yet in production.

  BBC Radio 4 broadcast a six-part dramatization in 1997, adapted by Gregory Evans. Playing on the benefits of the audio medium, it’s by far the most chilling rendition of this already chilling work to date.

  Cycle of the Werewolf (Land of Enchantment, November 1983; Signet, April 1985)

  The town of Tarker’s Mill has a problem: each month there are unexplained animal deaths, mutilations or murders. On New Year’s Day, Arnie Westrum is the first to die; on Valentine’s Day lonely spinster Stella Randolph follows suit. Both recognize that the killer is a huge wolf. A drifter is killed in March, wolfprints found in the snow beside him. On April Fool’s Day, eleven-year-old Brady Kincaid becomes the next victim. In May, the local Baptist Minister, Reverend Lester Lowe, has a dream about preaching to a congregation of werewolves – and he himself is one. When he finds the janitor eviscerated, he realizes that he is the werewolf. Diner owner Alfie Knopfler is June’s victim, after watching the werewolf transform in front of him. The town’s July 4th fireworks are cancelled, but wheelchair-bound eleven-year-old Marty Coslaw is given some by his uncle – and uses them to put out the eye of the werewolf when it attacks him. After Marty is sent to stay with relatives, his story of a werewolf is discounted by the town constable; however the policeman soon has reason to believe in a werewolf when he becomes the August victim. The next month, the wolf attacks a pen of pigs; at Halloween, Marty spots that Reverend Lowe, who he’s seen for the first time since the summer, now sports an eyepatch. Lowe moves away after receiving anonymous letters, but in November can’t control himself from killing a man in Portland. He returns to Tarker’s Mill, and then receives a letter that Marty has signed. It’s a trap, though: when the werewolf arrives on New Year’s Eve, Marty dispatches it with two silver bullets his uncle has made.