Stephen King

by Rocky Wood

Update to The Uncollected, and the Unpublished section

  This section updates material in The Uncollected, and the Unpublished section of the Fourth Edition of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.

  The Glass Floor

  The Glass Floor was reprinted in Cemetery Dance magazine (issue #68, 2012), along with King’s Introduction from the Fall 1990 Weird Tales issue. Back issues are easy to obtain from www.cemeterydance.com.

  The Leprechaun

  In 1987 King attempted and abandoned Phil and Sundance (see separate section following), which seems to be a working out of the same story-line as The Leprechaun.

  Maximum Overdrive

  Asked on 7 December 2012 at UMass Lowell if Dysart’s Truck Stop (actually Dysart’s Truck Stop & Restaurant) in Bangor, Maine was an inspiration for Maximum Overdrive, King confirmed it was.

  People, Places and Things

  King owns the sole known copy of the collection, which he re-discovered in his papers in 1985. However, partial photocopies of the ‘Second Printing, 1963’ version circulate freely in the King community. It is thought that less than a dozen original copies were ever printed.[xxx] In 2013 King confirmed he wrote the ‘Forward’ (sic): ‘I wrote it. It was only a paragraph or so, kind of a Twilight Zone lead-in.’[xxxi]

  The Poems - Update to The Dark Man

  The Dark Man (1969)

  This poem was first published in the University of Maine literary publication Ubris for Fall 1969 and was reprinted without changes in a small magazine, Moth, in 1970 (in both publications the poem is credited as ‘Steve King’), along with two other King poems. Its next publication was not until The Devil’s Wine, nearly three and a half decades later, in 2004. This may be explained by the fact that this poem serves as the basis for one of King’s most significant characters, Randall Flagg, the anti-hero of The Stand and a key opponent for Roland in The Dark Tower Cycle. In 2013 King allowed the short poem The Dark Man to be published by Cemetery Dance in a mass market form for the first time, in The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem, with the illustrations of Glenn Chadbourne the centerpiece – after all the poem is two pages long, and there are over 70 pages of illustration!

  The Plant

  In 2000 King updated the first version of The Plant – the original version was published by King’s Philtrum Press as a signed, Limited Edition and provided as a Christmas gift from the Kings in 1982, 1983 and 1985. The new version was released it on the Internet via his official website, www.stephenking.com. This followed the phenomenal success of his serial novel The Green Mile (at one point it held six places of the top ten on The New York Times bestseller list) and of Riding the Bullet. After the latter was released on the Internet on 14 March 2000 it was quickly downloaded more than half a million times! Both these successes prompted King to try The Plant as a subscription based offering on the ‘Net.

  After six parts The Plant folded its leaves again, with the story still unfinished. The first five parts, issued from July through November 2000, were charged on an ‘honor’ system, where the buyers downloaded the text and were expected to send in their payment. The last part was given away from 4 December by King as a Christmas gift to his readers and, presumably, as a small apology for stopping the story mid-stream, again! King also announced the six installments had formed the first part of the novel, with that part to be known as Zenith Rising.

  All six parts were once available for download for $7.00 but are now free at http://www.stephenking.com/library/novel/plant:_zenith_rising_the.html[xxxii].

  Something Wicked This Way Comes screenplay

  The first three paragraphs are revised to read:

  The screenplay of Something Wicked This Way Comes is held in Box 1010 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. Written permission from King is required to access this work.

  In an interview with David Chute (published in Take One for January 1979 and reproduced in Feast of Fear[xxxiii]) King talks of having written this script, saying: “…I felt more divorced from the source material. I loved the book, and I think that of all the screenplays I’ve done, that was the best. But in spite of loving it I was a little divorced from it, where I wasn’t with my own book.”

  On 7 December 2012 King told students at UMass Lowell this was the first screenplay he ever wrote. He wrote it as practice and to see what it was like to write in that form, “I’d been writing novels full time for about a year and a half and I thought to myself I want to learn how to write movies. I want to try it anyway, so I got a book – it was about writing screenplays and I read it and it was bullshit. But at the end it had a sample screenplay from The Twilight Zone. It showed me what the form was and that wasn’t bullshit, that was something real that I could … so I took the Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes and I wrote a screenplay and I learned what I was doing – it wasn’t for anybody but me. And a little while later I wrote a book called The Shining.” King retired from teaching and took up full-time writing in May/June 1973 and dated a manuscript of The Shining on 16 December 1974. From this we can glean that the Something Wicked This Way Comes screenplay was written in 1974.

  The Stand Screenplays - Update to Unproduced Movie Screenplay

  Considering the varying timelines for the different versions of The Stand it is interesting that King chose to set this particular script in 1985 (the superflu outbreak begins in Arnette on 16 June 1985 and the nuclear explosion in Las Vegas occurs on 5 November 1985). Various sources note that King began writing scripts for a movie version of The Stand as early as 1979. In an interview for Starburst magazine (#54, 1982), King said, ‘George optioned The Stand which is a very long novel. I’ve done a couple of drafts and I’ve still got a screenplay that’s the size of The Bible.’ And, in an interview for denofgeek.com (the interview was conducted in 1983 but posted on the website in 2007) King confirmed the screenplay was for George Romero. So, in 1983 he said, ‘I’ve done two drafts of the screenplay … and I’m gonna go back this summer and do a third draft.’ This properly dates the screenplay.

  Stories from Journals - Update to The Evaluation

  This is a part manuscript only. There are twelve single pages. The notation heading it in King’s handwriting reads ‘The Evaluation’.

  In this America Under Siege tale a psychologist, Dr. Peter Judkins, prepared to evaluate Edgar Roos at the Crown County Mental Hospital in New York. Roos had been arrested after killing nine people that day, two with a butcher’s knife and seven with a shotgun. The murderer had left his will in a locker.

  Initially uncommunicative and sitting strait-jacketed and chained to an oak chair that was bolted to the floor, Roos told Judkins he might talk if Judkins took off a Band-Aid covering a shaving cut! The fragment ends at this point.

  Edgar Roos was a slender young man, weighing about 150 pounds. He had a narrow face, glossy black hair and wore glasses. The killings had earned him the nickname ‘The Commuter Killer’. All we really know of Dr. Judkins was that he had been married for eleven years. There is only one other character of note, a technician wearing an orderly’s uniform, Hector Alonzo. He was to video and audiotape the interview and had also provided Dr. Judkins with the key to the locker in which Roos had left his will.

  Judkins was assigned to evaluate Roos because the psychologist on call that week, Livermore, had just had his gall bladder removed (we are left with the uneasy impression that this might turn out to be bad luck for Judkins, and good luck for Livermore). Seven other psychologists were affiliated with the Crown County Mental Hospital.

  The Crown County Mental Hospital is in ‘the smallest county in the State of New York’. There is also a Crown City in the County (confused yet?) and the Crown City High School and Crown City YMCA are mentioned.

  A magazine article from September 1990 in which King discusses this story was brought to my attention in 2013[xxxiv]: It’s the dance again, the art of skipping along the precipice without falling in. And you do it by telling
stories, says King, stories with “one little thing” – the innocent thing with a twist of evil that defines the danse macabre. / So now there’s this story he wants to write “about this guy who’s a shrink in maybe upstate New York. His job is to evaluate people who’ve been brought in by the police for one thing or another, and he has an interview with this guy who’s this mass murderer. That day, he’s killed seven or eight people, and he’s been captured. And he sits down with the shrink, and he’s wearing leg irons and everything and he says to the shrink, ‘I see that, uh, you’ve got a Band-Aid on your neck. What’s that for?’ And the shrink says, ‘Well I cut myself shaving. Let’s talk about you.’ And the guy says, ‘No, let’s talk about the Band-Aid. I’ll talk to you if you’ll take the Band-Aid off and show me that you really did cut yourself shaving.’ So the shrink, who’s used to odd requests from crazy people, takes the Band-Aid off, and sure enough there’s a little scab on it, and the guy says, ‘OK. I did it because I found out that almost everybody in the world isn’t real. They’re just stuffed people. They’re just, like, teddy bears. All they are is dressing for these awful Masters that run everything.’ And the shrink says, ‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ and sends the guy away.” / King’s voice drops to a whisper. “Then, when he’s left alone in his office, he takes the Band-Aid off again. He scrapes off a little bit of makeup and pushes in just a tiny bit of stuffing. And he puts the Band-Aid back on. / “It’s just that one little thing, but I think it would work,” says King. “It’s those little off-kilter things …”

  Typical of King, the story is already fascinating by the time it stops abruptly after only a few pages. It seems unlikely that King will again pick up this particular storyline, but it would seem certain that the reader would be in for not a few chills, spills and twists if he did!

  Weeds

  Weeds was originally published in Cavalier (a men’s magazine) for May 1976 and reprinted in Nugget (another men’s magazine) for April 1979. In Cavalier the story is listed in the Index as Weeds but the headline to the story, spread over two pages, reads: ‘More Than a Green Thumb … Will Be Necessary to Stop the Weeds: A chilling new story by the author of Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot.’ When questioned about the title in 2012 King replied, “That “more than a green thumb” stuff went above the title. It was a come-on.”[xxxv] This confirms the title as simply Weeds.

  It has never been reproduced in text format in a King collection and it is far from clear why. It is certainly a far better story than some of the ‘pulp’ fiction stories that King did allow into his collections, such as Night Shift, published in 1978. King clearly has a fond spot for the story itself but perhaps as the years passed found the text version less and less capable of meeting the tone set for each of his short story collections? Alternately, perhaps after Creepshow was released in 1982 King no longer felt a need to republish?

  Whatever the answer to why it had not been collected, King relented to a degree, agreeing to allow Weeds to be reprinted in Shivers VII, an anthology edited by Richard Chizmar and released by Cemetery Dance in 2013.

  New Unpublished Stories:

  Mr Mercedes

  This novel, due for publication on 3 June 2014, first came to public attention when King mentioned the manuscript and title while talking to students at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, Massachusetts on 7 December 2012. According to a press report[xxxvi]: ‘Many of his best book ideas occur come to him as mutated observations of real-life happenings, King explained, including a recently completed 500-page manuscript that focuses on a suicidal police officer six months into his retirement, who receives a letter from a gloating killer. “I wanted to write it as a short story, and end it with the cop putting the gun in his mouth. But now, instead of a 12-page short story, I've got a 500-page manuscript -- because the thing just grew.”

  From the publisher: ‘Following the phenomenal success of DOCTOR SLEEP, a No. 1 international hardback bestseller, Stephen King has written a riveting cat-and-mouse suspense thriller about a retired cop and a couple of unlikely allies who race against time to stop a lone killer intent on blowing up thousands. / Retired homicide detective Bill Hodges is haunted by the few cases he left open, and by one in particular: in the pre-dawn hours, hundreds of desperate unemployed people were lined up for a spot at a job fair in a distressed Midwestern city. Without warning, a lone driver ploughed through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes. Eight people were killed, fifteen wounded. The killer escaped. / Months later, on the other side of the city, Bill Hodges gets a letter in the mail, from a man claiming to be the perpetrator. He taunts Hodges with the notion that he will strike again. Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing that from happening. / Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. And he is indeed preparing to kill again. / Hodges, with a couple of misfit friends, must apprehend the killer in this high-stakes race against time because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim hundreds, even thousands. / Mr Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.’

  Phil and Sundance

  In April 2013 a man tried to sell what he said was an 82 page manuscript for a “novella that SK wrote about 1987”. He claimed he came to own the manuscript for Phil and Sundance because he “was the lucky recipient of a make-a-wish foundation wish to meet Stephen King when I was thirteen years old.” He also published a scan of the first page. When queried King responded, “It's legit, all right, but it's hazy--All I remember is that it was about little people…”[xxxvii]

  The scanned page starts Chapter One – ‘Phil and the Thing on the Stairs’ and we immediately discover it is a Derry story (Phil is attending Mary Deere Elementary, which is not mentioned elsewhere in King’s fiction). We learn that Phil is ten and ‘big’ – a few kids call him ‘Fatso’ but, because he is likeable, most kids just called him by his name. Phil does not like broccoli, phys ed, the thirteen year old kid from across the street who had once beaten him up, or a certain breed of birds: “He didn’t like crows[xxxviii]. Bad luck. You poked the sign of the evil eye at them – his dad had taught him that …”

  After some ‘negotiations’ the manuscript was purchased by one of King’s publishers – Cemetery Dance. King then authorized a copy be released to me for review in this book. Later, his personal assistant posted this at the official website’s message board: “I’m glad to hear Cemetery Dance was the one to obtain it as we trust them to do the right thing. I’ve known about the manuscript for quite some time as we have a copy in our files although we don’t have the complete manuscript – ours end at page 101 but it is mid-sentence although there are other unnumbered pages that may continue it.” So, there are clearly two versions in existence. However, it is very unlikely King will ever complete the work. The review below is from the 82 page manuscript.

  Chapter One – ‘Phil and the Thing on the Stairs’. We learn that Phil Wentworth (who lives in Derry) is home sick, one of a long list of things he doesn’t like. He is ten, tall for his age, overweight and attends Mary Deere Elementary. He thinks himself a coward and, when he hears creaks on the stairs, imagines a killer is coming for him – only to find it’s his sister’s Siamese cat, Bill. We learn a little about Phil’s parents (his father works at McCracken Ford, owned by the father of Phil’s thirteen year old bully neighbor; and his mother works at Derry Business Machines – his dad is superstitious and both parents have many favorite sayings, which Phil calls ‘weirdisms’).

  Chapter Two – Bill and Sundance. We learn that Phil likes a lot of things too, but like all big kids most of these were not good for him, particularly fast food and pizza. He liked watching TV, staying up late and Big-Time Wrestling, even though his father said it was fake. He liked tacos, which made him fart, which in turn irritated his older sister, Dina (who was 14 or 15). Among the things he liked some were good for him: ‘Although he wa
s cautious about who had (sic) admitted it to (some people would laugh and say you were a pantywaist), he liked school, especially math and geography.’ He also liked Song and Dance Interpretation, although the square dance unit had proved he was a nerd – ‘a beefy sonofagun who had to alamand (sic) left and dosy-do right with a partner who was three inches shorter and sixty pounds lighter than you.’

  Phil awoke from a nightmare by falling out of bed. Realizing he had slept for a while he decided to check the time, ‘And that’s when the weird stuff really started.’ The clock was by the window and, looking out, he saw Bill (the Siamese cat), ‘murdering Sundance’. Sundance turns out to be a ‘Teeny’, ‘barely six inches high’, a miniature humanoid from a species ‘nearing extinction’ from the depredations of ‘Bigs’, particularly birds. ‘The tribe’ to which he belonged was desperate – suffering from a recurring cycle of disease (‘The Spots’) and a bad harvest, their Council had decided on a ‘Lone Foray’ - a member sent ‘for the food and herbs they so badly needed.’ Sundance was the third to draw a lot for the Lone Foray – the young man and young woman before had never returned. Sundance had found food and herbs and was dragging them on the sledge back to ‘the Den’ when the cat struck.

  Delving into Bill’s mind we find he is astonished to find he’s stalking a Teeny. ‘Hard to believe but absolutely true. Of course he had heard the birds talking, saying there was a tribe of them somewhere about, but Bill put little stock in what birds said, even fairly intelligent ones like robins … Bogie, his grandfather, had told him a great deal about Teenies once, a long time ago, when Bill was just a kit. Bogie had said that once there had been a great many Teenies in the world, and that it was a pity they were getting so thin … No cat ate anything better than a Teeny.’ We learn that Siamese think of ‘Humes’ as their pets and go to great lengths to conceal their true nature as killers and appear amenable, all the better to ‘train’ or ‘domesticate’ us! We get an insight into the secret world of pets – for instance Persians thought of mixed breed cats scornfully as ‘Hash Cats’; that the cat equivalent of the Humes’ Bogeyman was ‘Dripslobber, the supposed Queen of the Dogs’. When Bill had enquired of his grandfather at the pet shop where he was born and sold to the Wentworth family, if Teenies were ‘Leper-Cons’, Bogie denied it: “That story was made up by dogs, and passed on, I’m sorry to say, by cats almost as stupid as they are … The word is even wrong … The right one is Leprechauns. Leprechauns are small creatures – creatures, not Humes or animals – that are supposed to live on the other side of the big water the Humes call the Ocean.” Amongst the rumors Bogie had heard about Leprechauns is that “Old Man Splitfoot lets the leprechauns live forever if they will steal a Hume baby and replace it with a troll-baby …” Bogie goes on to tell Bill if he ever comes across a Teeny to kill it quick as they can be dangerous when cornered.