Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  While he was pleasantly surprised and gracious at his win, even he doubted the award. “It made me feel like an impostor, like someone made a mistake.”

  In the meantime, Steve and Tabby’s kids were beginning to make inroads into their own writing lives. In the academic year 1994–95, Joe was a senior at Vassar College when Owen entered as a freshman. Joe spent most of his free time writing short stories and novels and had already started to submit work to literary magazines and fellowships. His first published story, “The Lady Rests,” would appear in an obscure publication called Palace Corbie 7 two years after he graduated under the byline of Joe Hill, and he would go on to win awards and accolades including a Bradbury Fellowship and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

  For Joe, the influence from his early days growing up as the son of an internationally famous novelist ran deep. “When we were growing up, what we talked about around the dinner table was books and writers,” he said. “It seemed perfectly natural to me to spend your days going into an office and making stuff up. It was as normal as if I came from a family that had a pizza shack and mom and dad went in to throw the pizza dough every day.”

  His brother, Owen, was also developing his writing chops. Though he dreamed of a career playing pro baseball, his real talents lay elsewhere, and he first set his sights on a writing career while in high school. “I never had much ability besides manual labor and writing, so I figured I’d give writing a shot first,” he said. “This is the family business, what I grew up around, so I don’t think they were all that surprised.”

  While Owen readily admits that he comes from a privileged background, he said that his upbringing has kept him grounded: “I love Bangor, it will always be my home. Growing up there and going to public school is something I treasure. I was not sheltered from real people. I grew up with parents that are celebrities and very wealthy, and yet they were treated as part of the community.”

  As for Naomi, after attending a few colleges, from the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she opened a restaurant in July 1994 at 94 Free Street in Portland, Maine. Her partner in the twenty-two-table bistro was Patty Wood, and they christened the restaurant Tabitha Jean’s, a combination of their mothers’ first names. Wood, an experienced chef, was in charge of the kitchen while Naomi ran the dining room. They described the menu as eclectic American cuisine, specializing in grilled entrées, seafood, and vegetarian dishes with an extensive wine list of 150 different vintages. Their primary market was the gay and lesbian community, though Naomi was quick to say the restaurant also attracted a significant number of straight patrons as well.

  Naomi’s upbringing was evident in that she guaranteed that celebrities could dine in total anonymity at her establishment. In this, she shared her mother’s disdain for the unwanted attention their father attracted wherever he went. The official policy was that staff would plead total ignorance when queried by the media about the famous people who frequented the restaurant.

  “The different celebrities I’ve known want to go to places where they can be anonymous, and where the waitstaff will shield them from autograph seekers,” she asserted, citing her own experience in instituting the guidelines, though Portland has never been known as a hotbed of celebrity activity. “I have no ability to be a private citizen just like everybody else,” she said, adding if she’d had her choice, she would have opted for a nonfamous father. “I think that if anybody went through it, they’d prefer to have their privacy.”

  Like her daughter, Tabby felt the need to expand her horizons beyond Bangor. She was working on Survivor, her seventh novel, and for the first time in sixteen years that she had written about a place other than Nodd’s Ridge, a Maine college town by the name of Peltry. “I’ve thought that I needed to take a vacation from Nodd’s Ridge for a long time,” she said. “There are some unsettled matters that need to be dealt with there, but for the moment, Peltry is where I have to get some urgent work done.”

  The idea for the novel came when she was visiting Owen and Joe at Vassar College. She was driving on campus, and out of the blue a student walked in front of her car. She stopped in time, but after the shock wore off, her mind hung on to the image, and before she knew it she was hard at work on a new book. Her views about marriage emerge loud and clear in the story, about a woman named Kissy Mellors who avoids hitting two female college students with her car only to witness a drunk driver behind her plow over them instead, killing one. The novel explores the aftermath in Kissy’s life and in those of others who knew the girls.

  Like her husband, she tends to overwrite first drafts. “I rarely write a manuscript under a thousand pages, and then we cut and cut and cut. I like big fat novels. I think readers do too. It’s only publishers who sort of groan and start worrying about production costs. I think it’s too bad that there’s such an emphasis on stripped-down stories, because people’s lives aren’t.”

  Also like Steve, she writes for three or four hours a day, though her work style is different. “Steve will rewrite the entire book, but I do it a page at a time as I go along, and subsequently my rewrites after the completion of my first draft are usually pretty minor tweaks.”

  When her editor asked her to change the ending of Survivor, she disagreed, saying that her ending was more in keeping with what would happen in real life. Stephen got involved and sided with the editor—of course he would, he prefers happy endings—and Tabby changed the ending.

  Survivor would be published in March of 1997.

  In 1996, Steve began work on his first nonfiction book in eighteen years, since Danse Macabre. He thought that the proposed book, On Writing, would mean he would no longer have to answer the same old questions his fans still asked more than twenty years after Carrie was published. The number one offender, “Where do you get your ideas?” still elicited a groan. Partway into the project, however, he became distracted by an idea for a novel and put On Writing aside. When he returned to it a few years later, it would turn out to be a very different book from the one he had originally envisioned.

  The midnineties were a golden time for King and his family. His kids were forging lives of their own, Steve had been sober for almost a decade, and his writing was hitting the sweet spot, pleasing his fans and surprisingly winning over critics who had previously regarded his work with undisguised contempt. He decided now to experiment with the literary roots of his youth: serial fiction. Between March and August of 1996, his six-part series, The Green Mile, was published, one installment each month, all in paperback by Signet. Predictably, each book hit the bestseller charts.

  In a way, it was a deliberate response to fans who flipped ahead in his books to see how they ended, as well as an homage to his mother. As a boy, Steve had watched as Ruth would occasionally turn to the last page of a book to discover how the story ended. With a serialized novel, the ending wouldn’t be published for another six months. At the same time, the project was also a direct challenge to himself.

  “I wrote like a madman, trying to keep up with the crazy publishing schedule and at the same time trying to craft the book so that each part would have its own mini-climax, hoping that everything would fit, and knowing I would be hung if it didn’t,” he said. “There was less margin for screwing up, it had to be right the first time. I want to stay dangerous, and that means taking risks.”

  What made the situation even more tenuous was that he had no idea how the story would end, as he was still writing the last volume even when the first two books in the series had been published. He added another aspect to his high-wire act when the 1997 publication of the fourth Dark Tower book was announced in the back of the third book of The Green Mile. His fans were on alert.

  When the final Green Mile book was published in August of 1996, all six of the books in the series appeared on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time, creating an outcry at the newspaper. From then on a book would only appear in one slot on the list regardless
of how many different volumes were in the series.

  King continued his interest in serialized fiction the month after the last Green Mile book came out, albeit with a twist. Two more novels would follow in the fall: The Regulators, a Richard Bachman book, came in at just under 500 pages, while the 704-page Desperation was published under his own name. He billed the two as companion novels and insisted they both come out on the same day: October 1, 1996. With The Green Mile books still selling well, King had an astonishing eight different books on some bestseller lists at the same time, which would be a difficult record for him, or anyone else, to beat. On a few bestseller lists where the mass-market edition of Rose Madder hit the paperback list, he held nine separate slots.

  King described his two new novels as the equivalent of fun-house reflections of the other: “The same characters populate each book, but they have been shaken up, turned inside out, and stood on their heads. Think of the same troupe of actors performing King Lear one night and Bus Stop the next.”

  The idea for Desperation came on a cross-country trip when Steve was driving Naomi’s car from Oregon to Maine. In Ruth, Nevada, a small town that looked totally uninhabited, the only sign of life was a burly policeman walking toward his car parked on the street. Suddenly, a thought popped into King’s head: “Oh, I know where everybody is, that cop killed them all.” He then wrote a story set in a town named Desolation in the Nevada desert with a population of one: Sheriff Collie Entragian, who has a special purpose in rounding up motorists unlucky enough to pass through the town.

  The Regulators had a longer gestation time. In the early eighties, Steve had been working on a screenplay called The Shotgunners. In 1984, Kirby McCauley set up a meeting between Steve and Sam Peckinpah, a movie director whose films included The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, and Convoy. Peckinpah was sniffing around for an idea for a new picture to direct, and Steve had The Shotgunners.

  Peckinpah liked what he saw and gave Steve some ideas for revamping it, since it was still essentially a first-draft screenplay, but Sam died of a stroke in December 1984 before anything was hammered out. Steve put the screenplay away until he started work on Desperation, when he thought some of the ideas from both stories could work well in tandem in a companion book.

  Some readers were offended by the outright mention of God in Desperation, particularly through the character of David Carver, a young boy whose fervent belief and faith helped him to lead the others.

  “The idea of using God as a character in Desperation was the engine that made the book go,” Steve said. “While I don’t see myself as God’s stenographer, He’s always been in my books. It depends on the people I’m writing about.” In a way, Steve just decided to take a break from the evil that’s inherent in most of his books. “So I thought, what if I treat God and the accoutrements of God with as much belief, awe, and detail as I have treated evil. Some people say the God stuff really turns them off, but these guys have had no problems with vampires, demons, golems, and werewolves in the past.”

  He still retained his basic religious beliefs from childhood: “I’ve always believed in God. I also think that the capacity to believe is the sort of thing that either comes as part of your equipment, or at some point in your life when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement to believe in God because it will make your life easier and richer to believe than not to believe. So I choose to believe.”

  Due to the demands and challenges of publishing two books on the same day with a combined print run of over 3 million copies, Viking begged King to publish the two books separately, but Steve insisted they appear simultaneously. In the end, Viking published Desperation, while Dutton, another imprint under the Penguin umbrella, published The Regulators. To further complicate matters, Dutton was in charge of bringing out the limited edition of The Regulators while publisher Donald M. Grant would publish the limited edition of Desperation. Neither publisher felt it could handle bringing out two limited editions at the same time.

  A problem arose in the middle of producing the limited edition for The Regulators. When the time came for Steve to sign the pages for the book, he balked, as production manager Peter Schneider recalled. “How can I sign these books?” Steve asked. “The Regulators was written by Richard Bachman, and as you know, Bachman’s dead. I said you could do a limited edition—I never said anything about signing them.”

  Schneider contacted Joe Stefko, the freelance designer in charge of the limited edition, who recalled that another small press had run into the same problem with a limited edition by Philip K. Dick, who had died a few years earlier. “They purchased canceled checks from Dick’s widow, cut out the signature, and used them as the signature,” said Schneider. In the continuing story line of the fictional Richard Bachman, his widow had discovered a few unpublished manuscripts after her husband’s death. “What if she also found a number of canceled checks?” Schneider mused.

  In the end, each of the numbered-and-lettered limited-edition copies of The Regulators had a canceled check signed by Richard Bachman—in Stephen King’s hand—included on the first page. The fun part was that each check not only had a different number, from 1 to 1,000, but that each was made out to a character or business mentioned in a past King novel, or a prominent establishment from King’s own past, with a pertinent note in the memo line. For instance, check number 306 was made out to Annie Wilkes for $12; the memo read “axe and blowtorch.” Number 377 was made out to Cavalier for eight bucks for a back issue of the magazine containing “The Cat from Hell.”

  After having eight new books come out in one year, Steve understandably needed to take a bit of a breather. Indeed, 1997 and 1998 would be relatively quiet by comparison, with only one book to appear each year: the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass, would be published in November of 1997, and Bag of Bones in September 1998. Also in November 1997, he’d win the Horror Writers’ Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for The Green Mile series.

  In perhaps the biggest upheaval of that period, with his last contract to Viking fulfilled, King decided to shop around for a new publisher. Viking had earlier come under the publishing umbrella of Penguin when they’d bought NAL, which meant that he and Tom Clancy now shared a publisher. Clancy had been with Putnam since 1986 when they’d published his second novel, The Hunt for Red October, and Steve felt that the marketing the company had done on his previous titles was less aggressive than Putnam’s campaign for Clancy. In addition, they categorized Clancy as mainstream while King was still classified in the horror genre, despite his recent efforts to branch out.

  But probably the more compelling reason for Steve to look elsewhere was that after a relationship of almost two decades, he and his publisher had grown complacent with each other. He felt stale. He didn’t even offer Viking a chance to propose a new strategy; he just wanted out.

  But he made a serious gaffe in the search for a new publisher, mostly because the drama was played out in public. For years, Steve had maintained that the money didn’t matter, all he wanted to do was write his books, but given that, his next move didn’t look so good. He could have been bluffing, or maybe he just wanted to leave Viking so badly that he made such an outrageous demand for the advance on his next book that he knew Viking would never agree to it. He asked for a whopping $18 million for Bag of Bones, which actually wasn’t that outrageous when his previous price per book was $15 million. A commonly bandied-about figure in the publishing industry is that 90 percent of the books published with a traditional advance and royalty agreement never sell enough books or subsidiary rights to earn their advance back, and King was no exception. However, when the publisher turned thumbs-down, he took the opposite tack in the search for his next publisher.

  After almost twenty-five wildly successful years in the bestseller realm, he didn’t need the money. So he tossed out another insane idea to the next round of publishers and suggested an up-front payment of a mere $2 million
for each of three books. King would pay for half of the production costs, and the profits would be split the down the middle. Publisher Susan Moldow at Scribner, part of Simon & Schuster, agreed to his unorthodox proposal, and they got busy. Steve’s longtime editor, Chuck Verrill, followed him to his new publisher.

  The financial arrangements weren’t the only unusual thing about his new deal. The first book, Bag of Bones, was a big departure as well, the story of a widower who was a bestselling author who’d suffered from writer’s block in the three years since his wife’s death. It was billed by King’s new publisher as alternately a love story and a literary read, a departure for him, even though he seemed to be in his typical form when he exclaimed with glee, “I just loved that, killing off a major character right at the start!”

  When he began writing the book, he had in mind a gothic novel, both within the scope of his storytelling and how he traditionally defined the term: “It’s a novel about secrets, about things that have been buried and stay quiet for a while and then, like a buried body, they start to smell bad.”

  He cited a traditional gothic classic as his inspiration for the book: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, the story of a woman who marries a man who is tormented by the memory of his previous wife, now deceased. One aspect of the novel represented a real departure for him, but he found it was the only way the story could work: “There’s a narrator, a first-person voice, which I haven’t used very much in my longer fiction.”