by Lisa Rogak
Though his previous collection of short stories, Everything’s Eventual, had come out five years earlier, he maintained that he still loved the form and wanted it to continue even though the number of short-story markets had precipitously declined through the years.
“I’ve fallen away from writing short stories and thought maybe if I reac-quaint myself with what’s going on in the short-story landscape, I’ll be rein-vigorated and want to write them again,” he said. “I’ve never really lost my taste for them, and it would be sad to feel that a skill I once had had slipped away.”
He dove into the project headfirst: “I wanted to expand the playing field and find stories online and in magazines that I hadn’t seen represented before, like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder on a book in my life than I did on this one.” Pitlor said she read more than 4,000 stories and passed 120 along to King that she felt were good enough, but by hunting on his own he estimated that he plowed through more than 400 stories.
His gig as editor accomplished exactly what he wanted it to do: it jump-started his short-story writing skills again. About the same time that the anthology came out, Steve sold a story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which paid $500. While some would call it charity on King’s part, he disagreed, and the old frugal native Mainer came out:
“I wouldn’t say it’s charity because I could buy some hot dinners with that, but I’d love to see the magazine reach a wider reading public,” the subtext being that because his name was on the cover, the magazine would likely order a higher print run and sell out.
He wrote another story called “A Very Tight Place.” When he and Tabby are in Florida, Steve goes for a daily walk on a relatively isolated stretch of road. One late afternoon he saw a Porta Potti at a construction site. The workers had all gone home for the day, and Steve, still a mile from home, thought he’d take advantage of it.
When he stepped inside, he felt it rock slightly and his mind went into overdrive. “If one of those things fell over on its door with a person inside, he’d be in trouble. Immediately I’m thinking about Poe and his story ‘The Premature Burial’ and all the buried-alive stories that I’ve ever read, but I’ve never read a story about anyone trapped in a Porta Potti. I’m not a particularly claustrophobic person myself, but I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is wonderful!’ ”
It was continuing to be a busy fall 1997 with the release of The Mist in November. Steve wrote the novella back in 1980.
He was living in Bridgton, Maine, at the time and went to the market to pick up a few things for Tabby. He was headed for the checkout line when he suddenly looked up and noticed that the entire front wall of the market was made of plate glass. The first thought that popped into his mind when he saw the window was “What if giant bugs started to fly into the glass?”
As usual, he was off and running. The story appeared in Dark Forces, an anthology edited by Kirby McCauley, his former agent.
When Frank Darabont wrote the screenplay for The Mist, he deliberately changed the ending of the novella, which had been unclear at best. Though it usually bugged Steve when his story line was radically changed, this time he didn’t mind; in fact, he thought Darabont, who also directed the movie, greatly enhanced the story.
“I thought it was terrific but it jarred me,” Steve said. “I knew what was coming the first time that I looked at the movie in a rough cut, and it still jarred me. It took a second viewing to get used to the idea that it was probably the only ending in terms of the world that had been created in that story.”
Duma Key was published in January 2008 and represented yet another departure for Steve. For one, the novel was set in Florida and Minnesota, but it was also the story of a divorced man who began to pursue artwork as a hobby, both of which were outside King’s realm of personal experience.
“I love art, but I couldn’t draw a picture of a cat,” he said. “So I took what I feel about writing and put it in a book about an artist. After all, the last thing I need in my books is another author.”
The initial spark for the novel came when he was out on his daily afternoon walk. “I was walking on this deserted road—the only kind of road I walk on now—when I saw this sign that said Caution: Children. I thought, what kind of children do you have to be cautious about? Then I got this image of two dead girls.”
Though Duma Key was critically acclaimed and hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it came out, Steve has pretty much accepted that he is no longer at the top of the heap when it comes to bestsellers. Tom Clancy and John Grisham and King are often mentioned in the same breath, but King has had a good degree of attrition among readers, and his numbers have fallen more rapidly than those of the other guys, a trend that can directly be traced back to when he began to stray from the straightforward horror formula that had made him famous. For instance, the first print run for Lisey’s Story was 1.1 million copies, while the combined print run for Desperation and The Regulators was 3 million. Also, the bookselling business, and overall readership numbers, have dramatically changed since he first published Carrie.
“The bottom line is always sales,” he said. “Grisham outsells me four to one, but it’s not a big deal to me anymore. I look at the New York Times bestseller list and ask, ‘Do I really want to bust my ass to be on this list with Danielle Steel and David Baldacci and the born-again books?’ ”
Though he has long regretted his 1985 statement “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” he no longer feels he has to defend himself against it. “I’m still paying for that remark,” he admitted. “What I meant by it is that I’m tasty and I go down smooth, but I don’t think that a steady diet of Stephen King would make anybody a healthy human being.”
“He glories in popular culture and popular literature,” said George MacLeod. “It’s just the basic dynamic of who he is, and I don’t think he’s ever going to change.”
After more than thirty-five years since his first book was published, a wide-ranging oeuvre, and the admission that if he couldn’t write, he’d die, it would be reasonable to assume that Stephen King has gotten the writing part of his life down to a science, that it’s streamlined. But he says that through the years it hasn’t gotten any easier, he just knows how to push the right buttons so the work will flow. While he also adds that it hasn’t got any harder, he’s discovered that he needs to continue to push off into directions that are unfamiliar to him.
He admits that his Entertainment Weekly column has gotten more difficult to write as time passes: “I want it to be good, but at the same time I want it to feel casual and off-the-cuff, and that’s not easy to achieve all the time.”
Steve said, “It’s grow or die. If you’re only going to get to go to the dance once, you ought to do more than just the box-step waltz.” With that, he and John Mellencamp are putting the finishing touches on their collaborative musical called The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and testing it out through readings and workshops before bringing it on the road and ultimately to Broadway.
Mellencamp initially approached Steve with the idea to collaborate on a musical set in the 1950s based on a true story about two brothers in love with the same girl. One brother accidentally shoots and kills the other, and the girl and the remaining brother bring him to the hospital. They’re speeding, and on the way to the hospital they drive into a tree and are both killed. Mellencamp offered to write the music if Steve would write the play. He loved the idea and, true to form, sat down and cranked out a sixty-seven-page treatment.
“In a way, John came to me at the right time,” Steve said. “He’s been doing what he does for a long time, and I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. He’s tried to keep the music fresh and try different things and formats.”
The two clicked immediately when they started working together and got along famously. “I love Steve, he’s nothing like everyone thinks he is,” said Mel
lencamp, “and we really have a lot in common. He lives in the middle of nowhere, I live in the middle of nowhere. He’s not comfortable being around a lot of people and neither am I. We’re kinda antisocial guys, and we’re big mouths too.”
While Steve continued to expand his horizons, he still feared to tread in a few places. For instance, the idea of directing another movie still occasionally crossed his mind: “I’d never say never, and I think it would be great to direct a movie when I wasn’t drunk out of my mind and see what came out. But I’m not crazy enough to do it again.”
He’s long said he writes about the things that scare him most, such as rats and airplanes, but he hasn’t yet managed to work up the courage to cover one subject in particular.
“I want to write about spiders because it’s the one theme that cuts right across and scares just about everybody,” he said. “To me spiders are just about the most horrible, awful things that I can think about.”
Today, work is his sole drug, and in one way it’s taken up the slack in the vacuum of his drug-free life: when he’s not writing, his brain and body go into withdrawal.
He still smokes cigarettes, though he’s down to only three a day. He kicked alcohol, cocaine, powerful prescription painkillers, and almost every mind-altering substance under the sun.
“I’m not as angry as I used to be because I’m not twenty-five anymore,” he said. “I’m sixty, and that’ll kick your ass every time.”
Both his charitable organizations, the Haven Foundation and the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, are going strong. “Steve believes religiously in tithing, and I don’t,” said Tabby. “I just believe you can’t take it with you, so we try to unload as much as we can. We’re happy to do it and we wish we could do more. There’s the feeling that it’s the teaspoon against the sea.”
“Give away a dime for every dollar you make, because if you don’t give it, the government’s just going to take it,” Steve said. “If you think you can’t afford it, just look at the taxes you pay on every gallon of gas you buy.”
“Steve is coming to the end of what has been an extraordinary career,” said Tony Magistrale. “He’s got money, he’s got popular acclaim, the only thing he doesn’t have is for people to take him seriously and recognize that this is not a hack writer.”
But even that has been changing in the years since the New Yorker published his first story. One senses that he feels a bit torn about the respect. “People ask me when I am going to write something serious, but questions like that always hurts,” he said. “They don’t understand it’s like walking up to somebody and asking how it feels to be a nigger. My answer is that I’m as serious as I can be every time I sit down at a typewriter. It took me about twenty years to get over that question and not be kind of ashamed about the books I write. There’ll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck.”
But one thing hasn’t changed: Steve still doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in his life.
“I think we all feel that way,” said Ridley Pearson. “After all, we spend most of our time in a little room typing, and there’s nothing interesting about that. But that’s who he is, he’s not an egocentric kind of guy.”
That is not to say he isn’t competitive, because he’s extremely competitive. “Despite the fact that he’s already had it thirty-six times, Steve still wants that number one spot on the list every time he publishes,” said Pearson. “But he doesn’t think that there’s anything remarkable about that, and he just feels that there are a lot more interesting people around than him.”
He’s a grandfather three times over now; Joe and Leanora have three sons: Ethan, Aiden, and Ryan.
The title for Stephen’s new short-story collection is Just After Sunset, though his original title for the book was Unnatural Acts of Intercourse. The book was published in November 2008.
“The appeal of horror has always been consistent,” he said. “People like to slow down and look at the accident. That’s the bottom line.”
Through the years, he’s been tempted to hide out, to deny who he is when he’s recognized. “The day that I deny my identity, the day that I say that I am not who I am, is the day I quit this business forever,” he said. “Close up shop, turn off the word processor, and never write another word. Because if the price of what you do is a loss of your identity, it’s time to stop.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, thanks must first go to superagent Scott Mendel for shepherding this book through its various hoops and barrels.
Next at bat is Peter Joseph, who edited the book and offered valuable insight and suggestions as I delved into King’s psyche.
Once again, transcriptionist Paula Hancock helped make sense of hours of tapes.
Genealogist Margaret Dube of Common Folk Ancestry in Kittery, Maine, dug up some great details about Steve and Tabby’s beloved Maine.
Thanks to King’s friends, acquaintances, business associates, and assorted others who offered revealing stories and anecdotes, including Dave Barry, George Beahm, Michael Collings, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Rick Hautala, Peter Higgins, Jonathan Jenkins, Jack Ketchum, Richard Kobritz, George MacLeod, Anthony Magistrale, Ridley Pearson, Otto Penzler, Sandy Phippen, Lew Purinton, James Renner, Samuel Schuman, Stephen Spignesi, Bev Vincent, Stanley Wiater, and Nye Willden.
Kudos to the Buddies for knowing how to deal with me when I’m in the throes of a deadline: Tim Ashe, Leslie Caputo, Bob DiPrete, Doc and Nancy Gerow, Dean Hollatz, Ed Leavitt, Don McKibbin, Spring Romer, Paul and Cary Rothe, and Andy and Donna Vinopal.
TIME LINE
This is a chronological list of Stephen King’s books interspersed within the events of his life. For a complete bibliography of his works, including short stories, novels, and screenplays, the best source is his own Web site: stephenking.com.
1947 September 21: Stephen Edwin King is born in Portland, Maine, to Donald and Ruth King, who already had a two-year-old boy, David
1949: Donald walks out one evening for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back
1949–58: Ruth and her two boys move from house to house constantly, including in Chicago; West De Pere, Wisconsin; and Stratford, Connecticut
1958 Summer: The Kings settle in West Durham, Maine, to live with Ruth’s elderly parents
1962 June: Steve graduates from grammar school
1962 September: Steve enrolls at Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine
1966 June: Steve graduates from Lisbon High School
1966 September: Steve enters the University of Maine at Orono as a freshman
1967 October: Steve sells his first short story, “The Glass Floor,” to the magazine Startling Mystery Stories
1968: Steve meets Tabitha Spruce, a college student a year younger
1969 February: Steve begins writing a weekly column, “The Garbage Truck,” for the Maine Campus
1970 June: Steve graduates from UMO with a bachelor of science degree in English
1970 June: Naomi Rachel, Steve and Tabitha’s first daughter, is born
1970 October: Short story “Graveyard Shift” is published in Cavalier, marking the beginning of a steady stream of sales of Steve’s short stories to men’s magazines
1971 January 2: Steve and Tabitha marry in Old Town, Maine
1974 April: Carrie published
1975 October: Salem’s Lot published
1976 November: Carrie movie released
1977 January: The Shining published
1977 September: Rage by Richard Bachman published
1978 February: Night Shift published
1978 September: The Stand published
1979 July: The Long Walk by Richard Bachman published
1979 August: The Dead Zone published
1980 May: The Shining movie released
1980 September: Firestarter published
1981 April: Danse Macabre published
1981 April: Roadwork by Richard B
achman published
1981 October: Cujo published
1982 May: Running Man by Richard Bachman published
1982 July: Creepshow book published
1982 August: Different Seasons published
1982 November: Creepshow movie released
1983 April: Christine published
1983 October: The Dead Zone movie released
1983 November: Pet Sematary published
1983 December: Christine movie released
1984 April: Cycle of the Werewolf published
1984 May: Firestarter movie released
1984 November: Thinner by Richard Bachman published
1984 November: Talisman published
1985 February: Richard Bachman revealed
1985 April: Cat’s Eye movie released
1985 June: Skeleton Crew published
1985 July: King directs Maximum Overdrive in Wilmington, North Carolina
1986 July: Maximum Overdrive released
1986 August: Stand by Me released
1986 September: IT published
1987 February: Eyes of the Dragon published
1987 June: Misery published
1987 November: Tommyknockers published
1988 September: The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger published
1988 November: Nightmares in the Sky published
1989 March: The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three published
1989 November: The Dark Half published
1990 May: The Stand Uncut published
1990 September: Four Past Midnight published