Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  After he put the finishing touches on Cell, Steve turned his attention to Lisey’s Story. He’d wanted to write about a long-term marriage similar to his own for a long time.

  “You fall in love with someone that every once in a while you’d like to strangle, but it’s the relationship that I have enjoyed for the longest time,” he said. He specifically wanted to explore how couples develop a secret language all their own. “In a long-term marriage, you might have words that you might not want to trot out in public. They aren’t necessarily dirty, but they may be so babyish so as not to sound good inside that environment.”

  He also wanted to write about how over time a married couple essentially creates two worlds: their own inner world and the outer world. “The whole idea of the book was that it would be centered on their interior existence,” he said. In doing so, he knew he would have to dig deeper emotionally. “I wanted to write something like a Hank Williams song that would convey something about the essential loneliness in people, and how you can love, but sooner or later it ends.”

  But he was also wanted to test out one of his ideas about retirement: that he could continue to write but not necessarily publish, a concept that was solidified when he recalled a story that Bill Thompson, his editor at Doubleday, had told him years before:

  J. D. Salinger went into his bank to put a package in his safe-deposit box. A woman at the bank asked if the parcel was a new book. He nodded, and she asked if he planned to publish it. His reply: “What for?”

  “What if there was a writer like that and somebody held up the bank, not for money but for the unpublished manuscripts?” Steve theorized, going one step further. “What if a famous writer died and there was a crazy person who wanted the unpublished manuscripts? That turned out to be Dooley in Lisey’s Story.”

  Steve poured his very essence into the book, more than he had ever done with any other book, and yet he knew when he finished, he might decide not to publish it.

  That decision would be up to Tabby. She read the book in two sittings before she offered her opinion.

  “It’s about another writer,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “People will think that Scott and Lisey are you and me.”

  “I’ll tell them it’s not,” he said.

  “This book is important to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you say if I say it worries me?”

  “Then I’ll put it away.”

  “It does worry me, but it’s too good not to publish.”

  When the book came out, critics said it was the most intimate book he’d ever written, as well as one of his best-crafted novels. “King is as cagey as a veteran pitcher, employing a career’s worth of tricks to good effect,” wrote Jim Windolf in the New York Times.

  “It’s a very special book,” Steve said. “This is the only book I’ve ever written where I don’t want to read the reviews, because there will be some people who are going to be ugly to this book. I couldn’t stand that, the way you would hate people to be ugly to someone you love, because I love this book.”

  In June 2006, Tabby also had a book published, Candles Burning. She had agreed to complete an unfinished manuscript left behind by the writer Michael McDowell, a friend who died in 1999.

  She referred to McDowell, a supernatural horror writer who had also written the screenplay for Beetlejuice, as her soul mate.

  They met at a mystery convention, though she was already familiar with his Cold Moon over Babylon as well as the Blackwater Chronicles, a serial novel published in six monthly installments in 1983.

  McDowell had left behind several hundred pages of Candles Burning, and Tabby was unaware that her friend had even been working on it. A few years after his death from AIDS, McDowell’s editor, Susan Allison, contacted Tabby to see if she wanted to try finishing it. She was eager to take a look, primarily because she knew that he was a great writer to work with. “He collaborated with so many people, on all kinds of things,” she said. “That takes a generosity that isn’t common.”

  Once the estate and the publisher agreed that Tabby was the best writer to finish the book, they left her alone with the unfinished manuscript and pages of notes with the instructions to do what she thought was best with this supernatural Southern gothic novel with plenty of ghosts to go around.

  To prepare to finish the book, she read the unfinished manuscript and reread a few of McDowell’s books, then researched the cities where parts of the story took place, New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, among them. Though McDowell had not written an outline or provided a firm ending to the story, once Tabby had grounded herself in the work-in-progress, she listened to the characters and started to write according to where they took her.

  When Candles Burning was published, she already knew what kind of reception to expect: her familial connections would attract a good deal of attention to the book, but in the end the quality of the story and the writing would pull her through. “People tell me, ‘I’ve never read one of your books,’ and I say, ‘Millions haven’t!’ ” she joked. “Steve set a standard for millions and millions of books sold that no sane person expects to reach.”

  Though she planned to travel to promote the book, her plans were limited. “I’ve got a big streak of that Yankee live-in-the-woods mentality,” she said. “Too many people stimulate me too much. I can only take three days in New York and twenty-four hours in L.A. It’s unnerving for me to spend that much time with people not looking at you.”

  As usual, Steve was taking the opposite tack. He decided to challenge himself by setting a novel in a place other than Maine, and since he was spending so much time in Florida, he set it there.

  Along with his outlook on life, which has mellowed, his writing habits have changed. “My brains used to work better than they do now,” he said. “I wrote something last week and I looked at it the other day and thought it looked familiar, so I went back a hundred pages and found that I had duplicated something that I had written before. Paging Dr. Alzheimer.”

  He was no longer writing two thousand to three thousand words a day. Now he was happy if he cranked out a thousand words during a writing session.

  Life was changing, but life was good.

  In February 2007, the first issue of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born was published by Marvel Comics in comic-book format. Seven issues were planned to cover the first book in the series and would appear each month through August. The entire seven-issue run of The Gunslinger Born was collected into a hardcover edition, released on November 7, 2007.

  Though King had always intended The Dark Tower to exist only in book form, he jumped at the chance to see how it would look as a comic book. “It’s a blast to see them adapted in an illustrated form, and that’s all that I wanted out of it,” he said.

  He was also starting to come around to the idea of having someone rework his epic for the silver screen. Frank Darabont had suggested doing it, but even he realized it was a pie-in-the-sky dream. “The thought of adapting that saga makes me break out in a cold sweat, curl into a ball, and weep,” said Darabont. “It’s just so metaphysical and trippy. So much of it is almost impossible to visualize on-screen.”

  In February, Steve announced that he’d sold an option for The Dark Tower to J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, creators of the TV show Lost. Steve loves the show, and he figured he’d give Abrams and Lindelof a chance to see what they could do. For the privilege, he charged them $19.

  That same month, Joe Hill’s real identity came out when his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published. “My real secret to keeping a low profile was failure,” he said. “Nothing helps a writer stay under the radar like not getting published. I didn’t want someone to publish my book because of who my dad was or what my last name was. And in that sense, I feel like getting turned down was actually a case of my pen name doing its job.”

  Even before the book was published, however, the online rumor mill had already started to b
uzz about the resemblance between Joe Hill and Stephen King, not only physically but in writing style and subject matter. “I had pretty much run to the end of my rope around that time,” said Hill, describing a book signing he’d done in the UK where readers had commented on the similarities in appearance. “It would have been nice if the book could have come out and been out for a while, but it just didn’t work out that way.”

  While Tabby totally got why Joe chose a pen name, Steve didn’t understand why his son needed to hide who he was. Indeed, Hill said it was hard for his father to say nothing: “My dad likes to boast on his kids and isn’t used to keeping quiet about anything. Secrecy is not his strong suit. But he did it.”

  “I didn’t offer any advice, just encouragement,” said Steve. “Everyone does it their own way. I just told them to read everything within reach and treasure the bad, because that shows there’s hope for you.”

  Just as Steve told readers not to think that the married couple of Lisey’s Story was a mirror image of himself and Tabby, Joe also warned his fans to avoid a knee-jerk reaction that he’s referring to his own father when he writes about bad fathers. “I can write a bad father, and he’ll just laugh,” Joe said. “He won’t see it as a standin for himself.”

  While Joe’s book is a bestseller and editors are clamoring for more of his work, he still sounds a bit wistful about the days when he could write under the radar: “If one of my stories appeared in a magazine, people just read it as a story. They didn’t have any preconceptions. Now I feel like there’s a bit more pressure because there’ll be some comparison.”

  On April 14, 2007, Sarah Jane White Spruce died at age eighty-three. Tabby’s mother was gone, and Steve had lost a devoted mother-in-law.

  There wasn’t much time to mourn, however, because the accolades for Steve’s accomplishments in fields other than horror continued. Two weeks after his mother-in-law’s death, he attended the annual Edgar Banquet by the Mystery Writers of America and was given the Grand Master Award for 2007. The prize is akin to a lifetime achievement award in the field, and Steve was heartened by the reception of his peers, unlike what had happened at the National Book Foundation award back in 2003.

  Then in June, King received a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association. He was the first non-Canadian to win the award since its inception in 2000.

  He also frequently attended awards ceremonies to honor other celebrities. Steve and Tabby planned to attend a dinner in Los Angeles held by a Jewish philanthropic organization to honor the actor Billy Crystal, but Tabby didn’t go because she wasn’t feeling well. Steve called Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who played with him in the Remainders, and invited her to go with him instead. She said she’d love to. Because she has an informal northern-California style and it was a formal dinner, “I got three calls from his office making sure I knew I was supposed to wear a dress,” she said, laughing.

  “When we walked through the doors of the hotel to go to the banquet, the explosion of lightbulbs and people jumping out at Steve was terrifying,” she said. “I have never seen paparazzi before in my life and I’m sure I never will again, but then I realized that this is something that happens to him all the time.”

  Goldmark was impressed by how he handled it. “We couldn’t have a conversation or even finish a sentence because people were constantly coming over to talk to him. I had a different look at what his life was like in that world and why the band is such a nice, comfortable place for him because people aren’t treating him like some weird famous guy.”

  After a hiatus of several years, Steve played once again with the Remainders at Webster Hall in New York on June 1 in connection with BookExpo America (BEA).

  “It’s like camp for grown-ups,” said Amy Tan. “I’d kill the whales to do this.”

  King said that he never took the band seriously, and that he just did it for fun. “Somebody once said that the Remainders without Stephen King is like the Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia, which I thought was really sweet,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to go out and do something that is more of a hobby than work.”

  He was well aware that his bandmates had different ideas. “Dave and Ridley and Greg [Iles] take this very seriously,” he said. “It’s like watching three type A people prepare for the GREs. I’m just a hood ornament on this band.”

  Though the band members loved to play music, Ridley Pearson said the primary reason they schedule three-city tours is to hang out with each other. “With a one-night gig, there’s not enough time to spend quality time with everybody in the band,” he explained. “When we do a tour, we’re all trapped in airplanes or buses and that’s what we love because we all get to hang out and talk and have fun together. Of course, the band should be a lot better since we’ve played together for fifteen years, and we aren’t. But the friendships are way better.”

  Though Steve loved going on tour, Tabby had become more cautious. “She’s more down-to-earth than Steve and she really looks out for him,” said Pearson. “I remember she told me once that she didn’t want the band to be Steve’s John Lennon moment.”

  Pearson remembered a gig in Rhode Island where they needed twenty state police to form a human barricade to get Steve through the crowds: “It was just insane, just like the Beatles. People were throwing stuff at us and trying to touch him.”

  In June 2007, Blaze was published. A Bachman book he wrote before Carrie, Steve had referred to it as one of his “trunk novels,” one written for practice that he had forgotten about long ago.

  Frank Muller, a professional audiobook reader who’d narrated several of King’s books onto CD, had become permanently disabled from a motorcycle accident in the fall of 2001 and would never be able to work again. Not only did he have no money, but he had no insurance and owed back taxes to the IRS. He had one child and a few days before the accident he found out that another was on the way.

  Steve regularly listened to audiobooks, and he’s served as a reader on some recording sessions, so he had a great respect for what Muller did. “It’s exhausting work because there are a lot of takes and it is very difficult work,” Steve said. “I think no book really exists until it has been done in audio. Good work gets better when it is read aloud, and bad work is mercilessly exposed. It’s like taking a strong light and shining it on facial structure. When you do that, even good makeup won’t hide bad writing.”

  Steve was tormented about his friend and certainly knew what it took to recover from a life-threatening accident. Steve set up the Wavedancer Foundation in 2002 to help Frank. But that got Steve to thinking about other freelance performing artists who suffer disabling accidents or illness, so he started another nonprofit called the Haven Foundation to provide grants to freelance writers, artists, and performers who are not able to support themselves because of a sudden disability or illness.

  Steve invited authors John Irving and J. K. Rowling to perform in a two-night benefit at Radio City Music Hall called “Harry, Carrie, and Garp” so the Haven Foundation could raise enough money to begin offering grants.

  Steve had long thought about giving the copyright to one of his books to the foundation, which would then receive 100 percent of the revenue from advances, royalties, and foreign rights sales, and he thought of Blaze.

  He dug it out, reread it, and thought it really wasn’t that bad, just needing some revision and a polish. Scribner published it in June. Booklist gave it a starred review, calling the novel a tribute to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and it hit number two on the New York Times bestseller list the first week it was out.

  In 2007 Steve and Tabby expanded their real estate holdings yet again. In May they bought another house on Casey Key in Osprey, about two miles away from the one they’d bought five years earlier. At $2.2 million, the new one was a bargain compared to their main house, which was now assessed by the county at more than $12 million.

  Then in October, Steve and Tabby bought the mansion next door to their home in Bangor. T
he white Victorian house with a mansard roof, known as the Charles P. Brown House, was built in 1872 and valued then at $10,000. The Kings paid $750,000, according to city records. Steve mentioned that he wanted to turn the house into a library, or perhaps a museum, and he planned to build an underground tunnel connecting the two houses and ride a trolley between them.

  “I fantasize about this and Tabby says, ‘Why do we need to do that?’ And I tell her, ‘Because we could!’ ”

  Steve was chosen to serve as guest editor for the Best American Short Stories 2007, published in October. In a sense, he’d come full circle. Short stories had given him his start and pulled his hide from the fire numerous times in his early days, a check arriving just as Naomi had come down with an ear infection and Tabby had run out of pink stuff from the toddler’s previous bout.

  Indeed, Steve was in high demand in the short-story market that year. Otto Penzler planned on asking him to be guest editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of 2007, but Heidi Pitlor, the editor of Best American Short Stories beat him to it. “I’ll just have to ask him again in the future,” said Penzler.

  The inevitable, grumbling about the dumbing down of American culture came when it was announced that King would serve as editor for the 2007 edition. But he must have been heartened by the company he kept among previous guest editors of the series: Margaret Atwood and Richard Ford, Michael Chabon and Walter Mosley.