by George Beahm
No FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC
The Avon paperbacks, digest-size anthologies termed “samplers,” were intended to provide a cross-section of storytellers who wrote in the same vein, with the hope of tapping into new blood: first-time readers who would come back for more. Recalling with great fondness one Avon book, an H. P. Lovecraft anthology with a lurid cover that depicts a cemetery with a creature emerging from beneath a tombstone, King noted in Danse Macabre that it “remains the one which best sums up H.P.L.’s work for me.” Stephen’s “first encounter with serious fantasy-horror fiction” showed him that more than two decades earlier, supernatural fiction, regarded by many as escapist trash, was written with serious intent. Lovecraft, he realized, wasn’t screwing around. “He meant it, and it was his seriousness as much as anything else which that interior dowsing rod responded to,” King wrote in Danse Macabre.
Reading in the horror field meant discovering other writers, and it wasn’t long before King encountered the work of a California writer named Richard Matheson who wrote about horror in a contemporary vein: The monsters weren’t in moldering graveyards and decrepit castles in Europe but in American cities.
His best-known novel, I Am Legend, published in 1945, single-handedly popularized the vampire genre and the disease-borne apocalypse, both major themes that would show up later in King’s novels for Doubleday, ’Salem’s Lot and The Stand.
In Dark Dreamers, Matheson told Stanley Wiater, “King said that because of reading I Am Legend, he realized it was not necessary to write everything like H. P. Lovecraft; that you could have a contemporary shopping mall, housing-tract setting and still do a horror story. So that was very crucial in his decision as to what he was going to write.”
King, in an interview with Winter, in Art of Darkness, elaborated:
I realized then that horror didn’t have to happen in a haunted castle; it could happen in the suburbs, on your street, maybe next door.
In other words, it could happen anywhere—even in your own home.
It was time to drive a stake through the heart of horror fiction set in cobwebbed Europe. It was time to bring the horror to small-town America, and King would do just that.
King embarked on a path that would make him the King of Horror, the darkest of the dark dreamers.
SILVER SCREAMS AT THE RITZ AND “POEPICTURES”
It’s no coincidence that King’s writing is cinematic. During his impressionable youth, King haunted the the Ritz theater in nearby Lewistown. In On Writing, he explained:
I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.
King and his friend Chris Chesley enjoyed what they termed “Poepictures.” It was a reference to Roger Corman’s movies, such as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia, which were loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction.
Back then, kids didn’t sit sedately in their seats; the matinees were participatory theaters, with kids shouting out warnings to the actors on screen when danger lurked. For most kids, the matinee was just a good time, but for King, the experience of seeing movies was a lot more valuable. In The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, Chesley observed that:
A bridge over the Androscoggin River in Lisbon Falls, Maine.
Steve was very influenced by the movies. He would write up sequences for these stories. For instance, he did one called “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but he didn’t use Edgar Allan Poe’s story. Instead of telling the story from the book, he would write the movie scenes down in words. And so even though he read a lot when he was young, and he learned from what he read, he also learned as much or more from the way scenes are written for television and the movies. And, of course, as I said, it’s no secret that his writing is like that now. His writing is extremely cinematic, extremely visual. It’s almost like you’re watching a movie when you read it.
It’s not traditionally literary prose at all, which I think is one of his greatest gifts. When people talk about Stephen King, they don’t talk about that aspect of his writing enough. I think one of the most powerful aspects of his writing is that he doesn’t write prose like anybody else does. He writes cinematically.
“THE KILLER”
When King was fourteen years old and in the eighth grade, he submitted a short story titled “The Killer” to Forrest J. Ackerman, the editor of Spacemen magazine. In his cover letter, King explained that he was fourteen years old, and a subscriber to the magazine. King wrote that he had been writing “as far back as I can remember, and submitting manuscripts for the last couple of years.”
Ackerman was likely amused and charmed by the notion that the fledgling writer sent him a story for publication, just as he had to admire the young boy’s determination to get in print; after all, didn’t he say he had been at it for the previous two years? Nonetheless, Ackerman rejected the story because he didn’t publish fiction written by children.
Ackerman kept all submissions that came over the transom, the slush pile, and true to form he kept King’s. (The original cover letter was sold at auction in 1988 for 440.) We do not know if Ackerman sent the young writer a rejection slip, but the story was eventually published in 1994, thirty-three years later, in Ackerman’s mainstay magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, issue 202. In an article accompanying the one-page, single-spaced story, Ackerman wrote:
Stephen King was in my home sometime in the early ‘80s, and I surreptitiously produced this manuscript. “Steve,” I said, “I’d like to try a little experiment with you. I’d like to read you a portion of a story and see if you can identify its author. Is it an obscure tale told by Poe? An unknown work by H. P. Lovecraft? Something written by Robert Bloch?”
It was “The Killer,” by Steve King, who recognized it as his own work and then inscribed it “For FJA—with all best wishes, Stephen King.” Ackerman concluded his humorous piece on the little-known story behind King’s early submission thus:
In the meantime, Stevie, here’s your check for 25. Don’t spent it all on comics. Or perhaps you’ll want to frame it. If you have any more stories suitable for Famous Monsters, we’ll welcome them with open arms. And a similarly generous check.
I won’t even edit your manuscript.
King finally published his fiction in 1965, when he was eighteen years old, but not in a professional magazine—in a fanzine, Comics Review, which paid in copies only. The story was luridly titled “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber.”
Famous Monsters of Filmland 202 (Spring 1994), publishing King’s first professionally submitted story, “The Killer.”
In The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, Chesley recalled that “the story … is amateurish and very derivative, specifically of B monster movies—but the narrative power is overwhelming.”
Comics Review was an amateur publication produced on a Ditto machine (named after its manufacturer). Creating a Ditto involved typing on a two-ply “master.” The front sheet was white paper, and could be typed, written, or drawn upon; the second sheet was the “master” itself, a waxy sheet that came in different colors, which was used to run off printed copies.
Popular with schools and civic groups, the Ditto machine allowed inexpensive printing in-house. It wasn’t possible to print photos, though; moreover, text corrections involved using a razor blade to scrape off the mistakes and retyping, which was so tedious that typists strived to get it right the first time.
Edited and published by Mike Garrett, whom King credits in Danse Macabre as being his first editor, Comics Review was one of many small-press publications produced by and for comic book, science fiction, and fantasy fans.
Fanzine publications earned their amateur writers “egoboo” (an ego boost) from getting into print and seeing letters of comment in subsequent issues; they offered showcases for aspiring writers, some of whom, like King, would go on to more professional
publications.
In 1963, when King was sixteen, he completed his first book-length work of fiction. Though it was clearly juvenilia, it was long—approximately fifty thousand words. A science fiction story, it posed a question: “Are the evils of government any worse than the evils of anarchy?” (Not surprisingly, King’s later fiction also exhibits a distinct lack of trust with the government at large.)
Composed of three parts, the postapocalyptic novel begins on August 14, 1967, with a teenager named Larry Talman, who infiltrates and attempts to destroy a dubious paramilitary organization called Sun Corps: Talman’s suspicions are realized when the organization turns out be a front for an alien invasion by the Denebians.
Despite its derivative nature and soapbox lecturing, the story showcased King’s natural ability to spin a yarn. It was pure pulp fiction. As Chris Chesley pointed out in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, when King was “twelve years old … he already had a way with words.… The essential ability to write was there in the first thing I ever read by him.”
The kid always was one hell of a storyteller.
A YOUNG JOURNALIST
I was as a teenager haunted by newspapers.
—STEPHEN KING, ON WRITING
Though King could clearly write nonfiction, he preferred fiction because telling stories was all fun. Writing nonfiction, though, was less challenging and more mundane, because it felt more like work. King did, though, write fiction for Dave’s Rag, a home-brewed paper run by his brother, or at least such fiction was announced in its pages. (“Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago” was one such offering.) But, on the whole, journalism wasn’t Stephen’s thing, though he was listed as a “reporter” for it.
The first issue of Dave’s Rag circulated only as two individually typed copies. Dave graduated to printing multiple copies with a hectograph, known as a gelatin duplicator. The process, though, was maddeningly slow, and David soon increased his output with a secondhand mimeograph machine, which used a wax stencil that could be typed or drawn on. It was a substantial improvement over the prehistoric hectograph. Equipped with a hand crank, the mimeo allowed multiple copies to be printed rapidly, at least until the crank broke and the printing drum had to be rotated by hand.
As King explained in On Writing, his interest in contributing to Dave’s Rag ran a distant second to his consuming interest: sitting in a darkened theater watching Saturday matinees.
Dave’s Rag, like a favorite toy that had outlasted its appeal, eventually ceased publication when Dave King moved on to other interests. Smart but restless and impatient, Dave indulged his varied interests instead of focusing on one area, unlike Stephen, who was always either reading, writing, or watching Saturday matinees in nearby Lewiston.
Later, when word got out in high school that Stephen had previously worked as a reporter on a newspaper—no matter its modest origins—he was drafted for the editorship of The Drum.
Stephen King recounted in On Writing that he was game, albeit reluctant, and gave it his best shot—in fact, only one shot, since the students only saw one monster-size issue published during his stint as editor, in his sophomore year. To King, nonfiction was more work, and no play, which dulled his interest. He much preferred having fun writing the aforementioned parody newspaper The Village Vomit. Eventually, King’s writing talents were put to productive use as a sports journalist for a local newspaper.
Lisbon Falls High School.
“I was a journalist for a while,” King told The Maryland Coast Dispatch in 1986. “The first thing I was ever paid for was a sports column … I protested that I didn’t know anything about sports and the guy says, ‘Do you know how to write?’ I said I thought I did. He said, ‘We’re going to find out.’ He said if I could write, then I could learn about sports. So I wrote about bowling leagues and basketball games and stuff like that.”
GETTING IT ON: RAGE
At the end of his senior year in high school, King realized he had learned a lot about the stratified social structure in high school, which he would later put to good use in his fiction. King always stored away his experiences to later mine for use in fiction.
As King told Winter in The Art of Darkness, his public face was different from his private one. “Inside,” King said, “I felt different and unhappy a lot of times. I felt violent a lot of times. But I kept that part of myself to myself. I never wanted to let anybody get at it.… It wasn’t the same as being embarrassed about it, so much as wanting to keep it and sort of work it out for myself.”
King worked out his frustrations by sublimating them in his fiction.
In grammar school, for instance, King had written a story that he passed around, which his fellow classmates loved reading, in part because they were the stars of the story. As Chesley recounted in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, it was a pass-along story:
But anyway, it was a mini-novel, and in the story he had us real kids—including him—take over the school. We stole our parents’ guns, and everything else we could get, and we holed ourselves up in the elementary school. The whole story was basically like an Alamo kind of thing, where first the local cops, and then the National Guard come and try to get us out of the school; and in the end we all died.… The story went from hand to hand—everybody read it, and Steve was lionized. That was the beginning of his mythology. People were just floored by that. We all loved it.
During the summer of 1966, after graduating from high school and before heading off for college, King revisited the story he passed around in grammar school and wrote what would clearly his first mature work, Getting It On, a psychologically intense short novel. It was not horror or science fiction; it was naturalist fiction.
King finished the novel in 1971, and drew its title from a popular song at the time, T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” It eventually saw publication in 1977 as Rage (published by NAL).
3
EC COMICS
In the old EC Comics, the guilty were always punished. That was the traditional American view of morality.
—STEPHEN KING, STEPHEN KING AT THE MOVIES
In the opening scene of Creepshow, an homage to the horror comics of the fifties, an enraged father snatches a comic book out of his son’s hands and throws it in the trash.
The message is clear: Comic books are thought by the older generation to be the lowest form of trash literature, unfit for human consumption, and sure to pollute the minds of the youth.
The EC line included Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales, Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories. They were works of comic book art, well written and drawn, and highly moral.
King has repeatedly said that horror stories must have a sense of morality. It’s not enough, he argues, to throw in shock effects to surprise or stun the reader into submission. The writer’s job is to show the truth, and that means the bad guys get their comeuppance—their seeds of destruction lie within.
That sense of morality was the cornerstone of EC Comics. Despite the admittedly gruesome fare between the lurid covers—shown out of context by Frederic Wertham to a concerned nation of parents who thought, “I don’t have to read trash to know it’s trash”—the bad guys reaped what they sowed in an EC story.
King’s Creepshow, published in 1982, was a loving homage to those comics. Both King and George Romero (who directed the film) love the EC line, and it shows. In both the film and comic book adaptation, the look and feel of the horror comics of the fifties are deliberately evoked. The comic book adaptation is replete with direct and indirect EC references. The cover was drawn by Jack Kamen, an EC artist; the framing device of a ghoulish figure introducing each story was the technique EC Comics employed; the theme of revenge is incorporated in the stories; and Bernie Wrightson, who illustrated the book, would have felt right at home in the stable of EC artists in the fifties, whom he studied and admired.
EC publisher, William Gaines.
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“THREE DURHAM LADS PUBLISHING BRIGHT HOMETOWN NEWSPAPER”
BY DON HANSEN
BRUNSWICK RECORD, APRIL 23, 1959
GETTING OUT THE PAPER, Dave King (left) and Donald Flaws get together on an issue of Dave’s Rag, a semi-monthly, individually typed newspaper circulated in Durham. At the moment the paper is circulated primarily to friends, but the editors are planning to include wider coverage of the West Durham area. The editorial and printing officces are in Dave’s bedroom at the moment. The circulation is now 20.
—original caption for photo taken by Mr. Downing.
What follows is an article on Dave King’s newspaper Dave’s Rag. The newspaper is defunct, and this story is now part of King history. General reporter Don Hansen was probably bemused at three kids writing and publishing a newspaper, but he took it seriously, took them seriously, and wrote about it accordingly.
David had printer’s ink in his veins, but not for long. Innately curious and obviously intelligent, his wide-ranging mind was always moving on in search of new worlds to conquer. (As an adult, David became a high school math teacher and a town selectman. He and his wife are evangelical Christians.)
Newspapers throughout this area have stepped up their coverage recently as the result of a new semimonthly newspaper now being published by three Durham lads.
The paper, called Dave’s Rag, is published by 13-year-old David V. King, the editor, publisher and photographer; his 11-year-old brother Stephen, and Donald Flaws, 15, the sports editor.
Boasting an all paid circulation of 20 copies, the typewritten newspaper thus far has had a good reception with readers.