by Lisa Rogak
In 1978, he decided to give back to his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono, by teaching for a year. It was his way of thanking the university and, in particular, the English Department, for all that they had done for him as a young student who was trying to find his way to understand more about literature and become a writer.
Samuel Schuman, now chancellor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, was on the faculty of the English Department at UMO when Steve returned. He says that Steve’s main responsibilities were teaching a couple of classes to freshman, including Introduction to Creative Writing. “He didn’t do a lot of the kind of star literary turns you’d expect from a novelist of his stature, like readings and signings,” said Schuman. “He carried his share of the academic responsibilities that went along with the job, like serving on department committees and helping to plan curricular matters.”
According to Schuman, students initially were a bit in awe of him, but that wore off once they began to work with him and see his demeanor in the classroom, and from all appearances, the students treated him pretty much like any other professor.
“He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a daunting figure, and at that point he was still fairly young, casually dressed, and very informal in his manner,” said Schuman, adding that Steve would show up to teach a class and his shirt would sometimes not be buttoned right and his socks didn’t match. “He looked like the kind of guy who just jumped into his clothes when he got up in the morning.” Which probably made him less threatening to the students he was teaching.
“I found it interesting to see him come back as a famous person relating to people who had been his teachers,” Schuman continued. “He was still more deferential to his former teachers than they were to him. He treated them the same way that any college graduate treats his old professors, and the faculty treated him like a former student.”
One of the committees Steve served on was in charge of deciding which students were to receive a slate of departmental awards such as Best New Writer and Best Paper of the Year. “It was not a committee that people were fighting to get on, so they assigned it to Steve, who didn’t know any better,” said Schuman. “But the other professors were happy that he was willing to dig in and do that kind of work like everyone else.”
Schuman was impressed that King appeared to be remarkably unspoiled by his rapidly growing success and fame. “He really seemed like he had his head screwed on right in terms of his values and his sense of who he was.”
Of course, Steve drew on his experience teaching high school students during his tenure back at UMO, but he immediately noticed the difference in college students:
“The thing about high school is that the students look at school in a different way because they’re forced to go there, and a lot of times their attitude was that they might as well enjoy it and get what they could out of it. In college, a lot of my creative-writing students really wanted to be writers, so their egos were mortally involved in this. After a while I did the worst thing a creative-writing teacher can do, especially with a poetry class. I started to get very timid with all of my criticism because I was afraid that some student would go home and perform the equivalent of hara-kiri. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying anybody’s ego completely.”
Despite the change in venue and his day being taken up with teaching responsibilities, he continued to work on his own writing steadily. All he had to do was follow the same routine he had for years.
“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he said. “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from eight to eight thirty, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, ‘You’re going to be dreaming soon.’
“It’s not any different than a bedtime routine. Do you go to bed a different way every night? Is there a certain side you sleep on? I mean, I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don’t know. And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don’t know why.”
While Steve was teaching at the university, the Kings lived in a rented house on Route 15 in Orrington on the outskirts of Bangor. The house was on a busy road that they soon discovered was treacherous. So many animals were killed by speeding trucks that the neighborhood children had created their own burial ground in the woods behind the property.
“Our son John and a little neighbor girl named Bethany Stanchfield started the pet graveyard,” said Noreen Levesque, who still lives in the neighborhood. “It started out with a little dead bird or squirrel they found out on the road, and in the beginning they would bury them in the sandbox in our backyard.” However, before long, cats and dogs joined the list of casualties, and they moved the whole thing up the hill.
“One of the kids would have his wagon, put the body in the wagon, and wheel it to the cemetery,” said neighbor Alma Dosen. “They’d hold a ceremony, dig the little graves, bury them, and make the markers. Then they’d have a little after-burial party.” At least thirty kids maintained the cemetery.
Like most things he saw or heard that were out of the ordinary, Steve thought he’d be able to use it in a story or novel someday. In the meantime, he and Tabby dragged a few lawn chairs to the burial ground, and he’d often head up there for some quiet time when he wanted to write. Whenever they were out on the front lawn playing with their kids, however, it was a different story.
“Like most toddlers, Owen thought that running away from Mommy and Daddy was a total scream,” said Tabby. “Just after we moved to Orrington, Owen made a serious break for freedom, heading across the lawn for Route 15, a truly terrifying stretch of road. We got him, but it left us both wrecks. Owen just laughed to see Mommy and Daddy collapsed on the lawn.”
Despite a laundry list of fears of all varieties, the incident confirmed that Steve’s greatest fear was of losing one of his kids.
Naomi’s cat Smucky was hit by a truck on the highway one afternoon when she and Tabby were out shopping. When they got home, Steve pulled Tabby aside to tell her what had happened, and that he had already buried the cat in the pet cemetery. “He wanted to tell Naomi the cat had run away, but I insisted on frankness,” said Tabby. The family held a funeral, made a grave-marker, and placed flowers on the cat’s grave. “And that was the end of it,” Tabby said wryly. “Almost.”
Steve used the experience to begin writing the novel he’d call his most terrifying. Pet Sematary was the story of a father who brings his child back from the dead. He was terrified by what he had written.
He gave it to Tabby to read, and she hated it. “When the two-year-old was killed on the road in the book, I found that very, very hard to read and deal with,” she said. Even his friend Peter Straub thought it was a horrible book and that Steve should stick it in a drawer and forget about it.
That’s exactly what Steve did. As usual, it didn’t take long for him to become distracted. On October 1, 1978, The Shining was published in mass-market paperback. With the release of the movie two years later, the paperback would eventually sell 2.5 million copies.
After he put Pet Sematary away, Steve started writing The Dead Zone, which he termed a love story, but was really a response to his increasing concern about the problems that fame was beginning to bring into his life, as well as into his family’s, and all because of his rare gift for storytelling and scaring the pants off people. Fans were beginning to knock on his door and ask for autographs and money, and they were becoming more aggressive. Steve wasn’t sure how to ensure his privacy but still wanted to live as a regular guy.
During this time, a manuscript resurfaced from several years earlier that he had written and also tucked away. But unlike
Pet Sematary, he was quite fond of this manuscript: The Gunslinger. He found it by accident in the basement after a flood. “The pages were all swelled up but they were still readable, and I thought maybe I could sell these to a magazine of short stories.” He retyped it, sent it out, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published “The Gunslinger” in its October 1978 issue.
For Steve and Tabby, life was comfortable beyond their wildest dreams. But they had struggled for so long that it was still hard to get used to their newfound security.
“The money’s never been real,” said Tabby. “I have a kayak, Steve has guitars. Nevertheless, there it is, like an elephant in the living room. We grew up poor and people did for us. So we do for others.”
“The idea is to take care of your family and have enough left over to buy books and go to the movies once a week,” said King. “As a goal in life, getting rich strikes me as fairly ludicrous. The goal is to do what God made you for and not hurt anyone if you can help it.”
He was driven, to be sure. But it wasn’t clear how obsessive he could be until one day in 1979.
After Owen, their last child, was born, Steve decided to get a vasectomy. He went to the doctor’s office for the thirty-minute procedure, the doctor told him to take it easy for the next couple of days, and Steve headed home. All was fine until the next day when he was in the midst of a furious writing session and he started bleeding from the incision. He was finishing up a chapter in his new novel Firestarter when he realized he was bleeding, but he didn’t want to stop until he finished the chapter since the work was going so well.
When Tabby came into the office and saw him sitting in a pool of blood, she panicked. “Anyone else would have been screaming, but he said, ‘Hold on, let me finish this paragraph!’ ” she said. He continued to write until he finished the chapter. Then Tabby took him to the hospital.
6
THE RUNNING MAN
Though he spent most of his time in Maine, publishers, movie producers, and reporters began to demand more of Steve’s time. Though he considered himself shy and preferred to hole up at home with his family and his word processor, Steve started to travel a bit more. He was still tickled that after all the difficult years, people were clamoring for his work.
In the movie and media world of the late seventies, drugs were as much as part of doing business as alcohol, and it wasn’t unusual to see Valium, quaaludes, and cocaine presented in abundance at cocktail parties and industry functions. As Steve began to spend more time in this world—and given his experimentation with drugs back in college—it was inevitable that he would try out these drugs as well, and so around this time he used cocaine for the first time. After all, it seemed as if the rest of the world were doing it back then too. But with Steve’s built-in addictive and obsessive personality, it wasn’t a good thing.
“With cocaine, one snort, and it owned me body and soul,” he said. “It was like the missing link. Cocaine was my on switch, and it seemed like a really good energizing drug. You try some and think, ‘Wow, why haven’t I been taking this for years?’ So you take a bit more and write a novel and decorate the house and mow the lawn and then you’re ready to start a new novel again. I just wanted to refine the moment I was in. I didn’t feel that happiness was enough: that there had to be a way to improve on nature.”
While he had no qualms about drinking in front of other people even when they knew he had a problem with booze, Steve was always careful to conceal the coke from his friends and family. As is the case in any good alcoholic family, each member had long ago perfected his or her role of codependency and denial. From time to time through the years, Tabby would tell him to clean up his act, but she usually let up after it was clear she was wasting her breath. And while she had stuck by him through thick and thin, she was also pretty good at keeping up the public façade as well. “He is not now and never has been an alcoholic,” she said in 1979, the same year he got hooked on cocaine.
But cocaine didn’t replace the beer; if anything, he used it along with the several six-packs of beer he already downed each night, to dull the high from the cocaine enough so he could fall asleep.
While he had smoked pot in college, he’d lost his taste for the drug because he was fearful of the additives. “Anybody can squirt anything into it if they want to, and that scares me.
“My idea of what dope is supposed to be is to just get mellow,” he said. “And what I do, if I smoke it anymore, is when I’m driving to the movies, is to smoke a couple real quick so I can sit there in the first row. It’s kind of interesting and they have all the good munchie food too.”
After college, Rick Hautala, Steve’s classmate from the University of Maine, was working at a local bookstore and writing fiction in his spare time. Steve often visited the bookstore and they ended up shooting the breeze. One day, Steve asked Rick if he was still writing, and he said he was working on a novel. Steve said he’d like to take a look, and he liked what he saw enough to pass it along to McCauley. As a result, Hautala signed with Kirby, who promptly sold Rick’s horror novel Moondeath to Zebra, which published it in 1981. King wrote a blurb for that book and Hautala’s second, Moonbog, which came out the following year.
They also renewed their friendship by visiting bars in and around Bangor. “It scared me how fast he could drink a beer,” said Hautala. “I liked having a couple of beers, but he would put down six or eight in the same time I had two. At first, I actually thought he was dumping it onto the floor.”
Chuck Verrill, an editor who started working with King at Putnam around this time, noticed the same thing: “Whenever we went to a bar, I’d order a beer and Steve would order three.”
What bothered Rick even more is that Steve would drink during book signings. “Public drinking in the Maine Mall with hundreds of fans milling around,” said Hautala. “You know the old expression, ‘instant asshole, just add alcohol’? Once Steve got into his cups, he could be pretty obnoxious.”
King mostly remained sober whenever he had to teach a class at the university. Students liked him because of his informal teaching style—they were also being taught by a bona fide celebrity—and because he still considered himself to be one of them. He could have dressed in the finest designer clothes, but, of course, you didn’t do that in Maine, at least not where he came from. So his jeans jacket looked as if it were pulled from a Salvation Army reject bin, and with his Levi’s and flannel shirt—the official dress code of the state of Maine—he fit right in.
He also didn’t look any older than his students, who were at least ten years his junior, and he had a finely honed theory about this.
“There are a lot of writers who look like children,” he said. “Ray Bradbury, he … has the face of a child. Same thing with Isaac Singer, he has the eyes of a child in that old face.” Steve theorized that it was because writers and other artists use their imaginations the way that children do, and always have, and that’s why their faces retain a youthful look.
He readily acknowledged, however, that he had no other marketable or useful talent to use in the world: “I have no skill that improves the quality of life in a physical sense at all. I can’t even fix a pipe in my house when it freezes. The only thing I can do is say here’s a way to look at something in a new way. It may be just a cloud to you, but really, doesn’t it look like an elephant? And people will pay for me to point it out to them because they’ve lost all of it themselves. That’s why people pay writers and artists, that’s the only reason we’re around. We’re excess baggage. I am a dickey bird on the back of civilization.”
Steve continued to write short stories and submit them to the same magazines that had published him in his poverty-stricken pre-Carrie days. He held on to the rights to reprint them in a collection of short stories, especially since his first collection, Night Shift, had sold well. And he still relished the challenge of the short form, as compared with the novel.
“The Crate” was first published in the July 1979 issue
of Gallery. As usual, the initial idea for the story came to Steve in passing when he heard a news story on the radio about some old artifacts that had been stored under a heavily traveled stairway in a chemistry building for at least a century, including an old wooden crate. The story mentioned a few of the other items, but Steve’s imagination was already off and running.
“What got to me was the idea of a hundred years’ worth of students going up and down those stairs with that crate right underneath,” he said. “It probably had nothing in it but old magazines, but it kind of tripped over in my mind that there could have been something really sinister in there.” So that’s where the story went, and when it came time for Steve to describe the creature that comes alive once the crate was pried open, all he could think of was the Tasmanian Devil in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. “All teeth!” he said. “One day my kids were watching one of those cartoons, and I thought, ‘shit, that’s not funny, that’s horrible!’ ”
His second Richard Bachman novel, The Long Walk, was also published in July. Like Rage, the first Bachman book, it pretty much disappeared from view in a couple of months. In contrast, The Dead Zone, the first novel with his new publisher, Viking, would be published the following month, with fifty thousand copies printed in hardcover.
“That’s the first real novel I wrote,” he said. “Up until then, the others were just exercises. That’s a real novel with real characters, a real big plot and subplots.”
The Dead Zone was his first book set in Castle Rock, a town in Maine that he’s said he’s patterned after Durham and Lisbon Falls. He borrowed the name from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, one of his favorite books as a kid. Castle Rock is the rocky part of the island where Golding’s story occurs.