by Lisa Rogak
The result was “Here There Be Tygers,” published in Skeleton Crew in June of 1985. Steve dedicated the book to Owen.
As he began to treat his youngest with more compassion, Steve began to remember back to his own childhood more. “None of us adults remember childhood,” he said. “We think we remember it, which is even more dangerous. Colors are brighter, the sky looks bigger. Kids live in a constant state of shock. The input is so fresh and strong that it’s bound to be frightening. They look at an escalator, and they really think that if they don’t take a big step, they’ll get sucked in.”
Nineteen eighty-six was the first year since 1980 that King published only one novel. But given the size and scope of IT, published in September, it’s understandable. The book was mammoth, a 1,138-page tome with more than half a million words, King’s longest to date, although The Stand should have been just as long, or longer.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s my final exam,” he said. “I don’t have anything else to say about monsters. I put all the monsters in that book.”
The idea for IT came from a couple of different places. First, one of his favorite cartoon segments as a kid was when the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show came on-screen at the beginning of the opening credits. He wanted to write a book where all the monsters he came to love during his childhood—Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, the werewolf, and others—could all be in one place as well.
Then he thought back to a fairy tale called “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and the bridge the characters crossed. “What would I do if a troll called out from beneath me, ‘Who is trip-trapping over my bridge?’ ” he said. “All of a sudden I wanted to write about a real troll under a real bridge.”
Once he started to work on IT, some surprising things began to happen. For one, as he began to explore the stories of the kids in the book, memories from his own childhood began to surface, so he incorporated some of them into the book. But to his distress, though he usually knew where a story was heading a few writing sessions in advance, he drew a blank when it came to IT and didn’t know what was coming next.
He had written about eight hundred pages of the manuscript and needed to write a scene about the body of a young girl that was going to be found. As he wrote the preceding scenes, he still didn’t come any closer to knowing her fate, and he became increasingly anxious. The night before he was due to write the scene, he still had no clue, so when he went to bed, he willed himself to have the idea by the time he woke up the next morning.
He fell asleep and began to dream that he was the girl he was writing about, and he was standing in a junkyard filled with discarded refrigerators. He opened the door to one and saw what looked like pieces of macaroni hanging from the shelves. One of them suddenly grew wings and flew onto his hand. “All of a sudden, this thing turned from white to red, and the rest of the shells flew out and covered my body. They were leeches. When I woke up, I was very frightened, but also very happy, because then I knew what was going to happen. I took the dream, dropped it into the book, and didn’t change a thing.”
He knew he needed some outside feedback, so he turned to Michael Collings, the author of several books about King, and a retired professor of English and director of creative writing at Pepperdine University. They had been corresponding for a while, and Steve felt comfortable with how Collings viewed his work from an academic standpoint, so he sent along the manuscript for IT in the spring of 1986 with a warning: “Never write a book whose manuscript is bigger than your own head.”
“He told me IT was his magnum opus and that the novel would not only be the culmination of his exploration of the theme of the child in jeopardy, but would also be the last monster-oriented novel he would write,” said Collings, who read the manuscript, suggested a few changes, and sent it back. When the book was published six months later, he was pleased to see that King had incorporated his advice.
“I have a sense of injustice that came from my mother,” said Steve. “We were the little people dragged from pillar to post. We were latchkey kids before there were latchkey kids, and she worked when women basically cleaned up other people’s messes. She never complained about it much, but I wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t blind, and I got a sense of who was being taken advantage of and who was lording it over the other people. A lot of that injustice has stuck with me, and it’s still in the books today.”
“All of his works are rooted in childhood trauma, or a violation of childhood in some way,” said Collings. Maybe Steve kept revisiting this theme in his books in an effort to eradicate it—after all, he forgot about the bad things in his life when he was writing—but also in a way to try on different personae and to live vicariously through the lives of other kids, who ultimately found a way to be powerful, as opposed to Steve’s real life, in which he was always reminded about the lack of power that he and his poverty-stricken family had as compared with the rest of the world.
When he first started writing IT, he deliberately put himself in a frame of mind where he could return to childhood. At first, he struggled to remember anything. “But little by little, I was able to regress, and the more I wrote, the brighter the images became,” he said. “I started to remember things that I’d forgotten. I put myself into a semidreaming state and I started to get a lot of that stuff back.”
After writing more than a dozen novels, one thing hadn’t changed: Steve rarely provided detailed physical descriptions for the characters he created. “For me, the characters’ physical being is just not there. If I’m inside a character, I don’t see myself because I’m inside that person,” he explained. “If a character goes by a mirror or if there’s a situation where his or her physical looks become important, then I provide a description.”
And after he finished writing IT, he announced he was done with writing stories of traumatized children. “When I wrote the books that people remember so clearly, like The Shining, Salem’s Lot, and Firestarter, I had kids in rubber pants and diapers all those years,” he said. “And now, my youngest kid is nine, and I don’t seem to have so much to say about kids anymore.”
If King seemed inclined to rest on the laurels of his magnum opus, the next fourteen months changed all that as four more books followed in quick succession: The Eyes of the Dragon (February 1987), The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three (May 1987), Misery (June 1987)—with a first printing of nine hundred thousand copies, it was the fourth-bestselling hardcover novel for the year, according to the New York Times bestseller list—and The Tommyknockers (November 1987), whose initial print run was 1.2 million. He continued his frantic pace of public appearances and fund-raisers and contributed to small magazines. Time magazine made him its cover story in October 1986, calling him “The Master of Pop Dread.”
But it seemed that the more the world encroached on his life, the more he would pull back. Occasionally, the stress from everybody wanting a piece of him would become too much to bear, and Steve would simply disappear for a while. Stanley Wiater recalled a few such occasions when he was trying to get in touch for some follow-up questions for an interview, and he contacted Peter Straub, whom most of Steve’s cohorts considered to be his best friend.
“Where’s Steve?” Wiater asked.
Straub didn’t know, adding that Steve wasn’t even responding to his calls. “He’s in one of his reclusive states,” Straub told him.
Wiater said that King once told him that every so often the fame got to him and he had to drop out. “He’s a driven man, compulsive and obsessive. If he doesn’t write every day, he gets cranky,” said Wiater. “I’ve known other writers who are like that, but I’m not one of them. Steve lives with a book for months, sometimes years. Basically, he just has to get out of his own way and occasionally shut down.”
King continued to use his name to benefit others, especially when it came to education.
He and Tabby had given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends, strangers, and charitable organizations since Carrie was published
, and in 1987 they decided to create their own foundation—The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation—to make it official, not to mention to simplify bookkeeping for tax purposes. This way, nonprofits could apply directly for grants instead of a friend of a friend asking if the Kings could help out with fund-raising for a particular charity.
Steve funded an endowment to award four college scholarships of $2,000 a year to graduates of Hampden Academy. When a high school student in California wrote telling him that she was unable to go to college due to recent cuts in federal education funds, King obtained her high school academic records and decided to pay for her to attend the University of Southern California for four years.
Influenced by the effects of the antipornography statute he had witnessed in North Carolina the previous year, King began to use his fame for political clout in his home state. In the spring of 1986, the Maine Christian Civic League issued a referendum to prohibit the sale of pornographic material in the state. Steve spoke out against the bill as well as other forms of censorship, and voters turned it down in the June 10 primary.
Perhaps with IT finished, and Steve vowing not to write any more books about the lives of disenfranchised, abused kids, he turned to helping his own children with their writing. It was clear the writing gene had taken hold of all three of his offspring.
At sixteen, Naomi was already writing feature articles for Castle Rock, King’s fan newspaper. Just as her father was regularly deluged with unintelligent questions from his fans, so were his kids. Steve taught them to regard the inquiries in the same light that he did: with as much sarcasm and over-the-head irony as possible.
In response to the number one question, “What’s it like being the daughter of Stephen King?” Naomi replied, “He is thoughtful, considerate, and kind. He doesn’t beat or molest us, and we don’t get locked in dark closets.”
Instead of the fishbowl the family has lived in all their lives, Naomi not-so-secretly wished that her father tended more toward the J. D. Salinger mold. “There are people out there who think my father can walk on water,” she said. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he can’t, and that’s the honest truth.”
Joe was pursuing a writing career of his own. When he was twelve years old, he sent a story to Marvel Comics for the company’s Try-Out Book, which provided aspiring comic-strip writers with the beginning of a story and let them write their own ending, which was reminiscent of Steve’s 1977 story “The Cat from Hell.” Joe worked on his story and sent it off, only to receive a form rejection letter a short time later. But again, like his father, who had thrilled when an editor had taken the time to scrawl a brief note on the slip, Joe was ecstatic that the editor in chief, Jim Shooter, had written on his note. “I felt great euphoria at the idea that he had read some of my script, and felt like I was on my way,” Joe said. “It definitely motivated me to write more.”
Even Owen got into the act. An avid collector of everything G.I. Joe, he wrote to Hasbro suggesting they introduce a new doll that could see into the future and name it Crystal Ball G.I. Joe. The toy company accepted his idea and brought out the Sneak Peek G.I. Joe the following year. As payment for his suggestion, Owen received several boxes of G.I. Joe dolls and assorted accessories.
The kids were also turning out to be a chip off the old block when it came to another of their father’s obsessions: baseball, and the Red Sox in particular.
One of King’s loneliest memories of childhood was when he was nine years old and the family were living in Stratford, Connecticut. Steve was sitting alone in front of the TV on October 8, 1956, when he watched Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitch a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. He was ecstatic at the conclusion of the game, but lamented that he had nobody with whom to celebrate the momentous occasion. He felt not only his brother’s absence, but more painfully, the acute lack of his father—after all, Steve knew his friends’ fathers celebrated with them—and it became all too much for the young boy to bear. He switched off the TV and waited in the silent apartment until his mother and brother came home.
Exactly three decades later, King took Owen, who was nine years old, to Fenway Park in Boston to see a World Series game, where the Red Sox took on the New York Mets. Steve studied his son closely. “His eyes are everywhere, trying to take in everything at once,” said King. He was painfully aware of the “almost ceremonial way in which the joy of the game is handed down from generation to generation. Plus,” he said, not bothering to try to hide the giddiness in his voice, “there was a dad in the picture this time around.”
Unfortunately, the Red Sox lost to the Mets 7–1.
Owen was caught unaware by his disappointment over the loss, and as father and son left Fenway, both were taken aback by Owen’s tears. King told him about that lonely day thirty years ago when he watched Don Larsen’s perfect game. Twenty minutes later, the Red Sox’s loss didn’t seem so bad. And quite possibly, the edge had been smoothed over on that still painful memory.
9
THE LONG WALK
Though Steve had already resolved that he would no longer write about kids, he decided to write for kids, specifically, for his daughter.
While Joe eagerly read The Stand and Salem’s Lot when he was eleven years old, Naomi had no desire to read her father’s work. “My daughter is a more gentle soul,” he said. “She has very little interest in my vampires, ghoulies, and slushy crawling things.” Naomi instead preferred fantasy novels by Piers Anthony and works by John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and Shakespeare.
“She never read anything that I had written, and in a way that hurt. So I thought, all right, if she won’t come to me, I’ll go to her.” He sat down to write a story of sibling rivalry set in a faraway mythical kingdom, originally calling it The Napkins, in 1983 and gave it to Naomi to read. She liked it, and he was so pleased with it that he decided to send out the story for his annual Christmas missive in 1984. He renamed it The Eyes of the Dragon and published it himself through his own small press, Philtrum. He had started Philtrum, in 1982, to publish the first installment of The Plant. One edition of 1,000 signed copies numbered in black pen had been sold via lottery to fans, and a second edition of 250 signed copies were numbered in red, which he sent to his Christmas-card list. Philtrum later expanded to publish limited editions of stories and novellas that Steve deemed to be either too short or too far away from his typical style for his New York publishers.
Though he never intended The Eyes of the Dragon to be published for the general public, in 1987 Steve decided that the story deserved to be read by a wider audience, and so he granted permission to Viking to publish a trade edition of the book for distribution to bookstores. Deborah Brodie, a freelance book editor who had worked with noted children’s authors Jane Yolen and Patricia Reilly Giff, was brought on to edit the book, and she was impressed at how well King took her editorial direction.
She asked him to introduce Peter’s best friend, Ben, earlier in the story; in the original, Ben showed up at the halfway point. “Steve wove several references into various scenes early in the book, and then he created a whole new scene with a three-legged sack race to explain the genesis of their friendship,” she said. “That’s a very exciting moment for an editor, to ask the right questions and have the author do more than just answer it.”
She was initially concerned that she’d feel intimidated working with King, but her fears were dissipated when he told her, “The book is the boss.”
In March 1987, Stephanie Leonard—Tabby’s sister and the editor of Castle Rock—dropped a bomb on Stephen King fans. Though he’d previously hinted at retiring from writing, it now looked as if he would finally do it.
In her editor’s column, Leonard announced that Steve would be taking some time off from writing. “We’ve heard him say he’ll take five years,” she wrote.
The reaction was fast and furious. Fans flooded the office with phone calls and letters to protest and beg him to reconsid
er, and the story made headlines around the world. To pacify the fans, Steve backtracked a bit.
“I think it would be a good idea,” he said, laughing, “but I don’t know if I can. Tabby says that I can’t. She says that I couldn’t stop writing any more than I could stop breathing.”
The backlash and outrage forced Stephanie Leonard to amend her editor’s letter a few issues later: “Stephen is not really retiring, he is hoping to cut back on work so he can spend more time with his family. There will not be any more five-book years anytime soon. He plans to continue writing but publish less.”
His fans were somewhat mollified a few months later when Misery was published … at least those readers who didn’t take his novel about a nightmare fan personally.
As usual, King had ripped the headlines from his own life to create a novel. He’d been thinking about branching out from his usual oeuvre of horror—Eyes of the Dragon was the first real step in this direction—and he realized that some of his fans would fight him tooth and nail, which was particularly evident in the wake of his most recent retirement announcement. Misery is the story of a romance novelist who wants to work in a genre totally different from the one he has long been pigeonholed in, and one obsessed fan who kidnaps him and demands that he write another novel in the old genre.
Some fans reacted with anger as they interpreted the message of the novel—originally written as a Bachman book—to be King thumbing his nose at them. Because the character of Annie Wilkes was written as an over-the-top caricature, some of Steve’s fans believed that he held nothing but contempt for them.
During media interviews for the book, he was careful to say that he still loved his fans, and that he wouldn’t be where he was if it not for them. However, he had experienced firsthand a dark side to some fans that he spoke about publicly for the first time: