by George Beahm
King agreed to the project partly because of his guilt. The plan was that he’d write five hundred words per vignette (one for each month), which Bernie would illustrate. But two problems arose. One problem was logistical: King found that five hundred words was a straightjacket. The other problem was legal: New American Library had the rights to publish King calendars and refused to let Zavisa’s specialty press go ahead with the planned project, despite King’s endorsement. A contract’s a contract, and if anybody’s going to be publishing a “Year of Fear” calendar with King, it’s going to be us, said New American Library.
Both problems were overcome when King decided he’d write a limited edition book instead, which presented no conflict, especially since it’d subsequently be published by New American Library after the limited edition went out of print. The finished book was an oversized (nine-by-eleven-inch) book sumptuously illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. With full-color illustrations and pen-and-ink drawings, the book’s large format provided an ample canvas that displayed the art to full effect: every inked line and every subtle shading in the coloring, printed on glossy stock, stood out.
The title illustration, in color, shows a werewolf crashing through a shack door as a Maine railroad worker looks on in horror. It set the tone for what was to come. The color pieces illustrated the main story, and the black-and-white pieces illustrated the change of seasons, from January’s snow-covered scene to December’s radiant scene of a heavenly light shining down on rural Maine.
The pen-and-ink drawings are among Bernie’s best work. Recalling Joseph Clement Coll’s pen-and-ink drawings, Bernie’s exquisitely detailed seasonal illustrations depicted them in a way that no mere camera could.
The 114-page book had a trade print run of only 7,500 copies; there were also 250 deluxe copies and 100 copies with original werewolf drawings.
Cycle of the Werewolf is a short but memorable tale. The plot: For reasons unknown, just as a winter storm descends on the small Maine town of Tarker’s Mills, a werewolf comes to afflict its unsuspecting population. As the dark beast’s depredations continue, terrifying the townsfolk, only one person suspects the truth—a young boy confined to a wheelchair named Marty Coslaw, who must take matters into his own hands when the efforts of law enforcement fall short.
As Michael Collings explained in the Stephen King Companion (1995):
Unlike many of King’s longer novels, Cycle remains morally ambivalent. The werewolf simply appears—there is no logical or rational explanation, no working out of the inevitable consequences of evil choices. As the human vessel for the werewolf says in November of that fatal year, “this—whatever it is—is nothing I asked for. I wasn’t bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It just … happened.” The werewolf may be evil; the man beneath the werewolf’s flesh is not necessarily so. Yet when the compulsion to kill rises, the good man must give way to the darker, evil impulses. At heart, this seems to be the metaphorical significance of the werewolf in any of its many guises—evil sometimes simply asserts itself, and then its workings must continue until their inevitable and bloody conclusion.
Collings declared, “Cycle of the Werewolf does not disappoint. The words are vintage King through and through,” concluding that it “lingers in the memory as a fundamentally disquieting, dark, foreboding tale.”
A Stephen King “Year of Fear” calendar.
Bernie Wrightson and Cycle of the Werewolf
In the 2009 interview I conducted with Bernie Wrightson, he spoke about his work on Cycle of the Werewolf:
This was the first time I met Stephen King. I don’t think he remembers it, though.
I pitched this to Chris Zavisa, who was in contact with Steve. My wacky idea was to illustrate a Stephen King calendar. We’d have a story with twelve “chapters,” each with a picture and a block of text underneath it for each month. A werewolf story seemed like a logical thing because a full moon is common to every month.
There was a bookseller’s convention in Chicago that year. I flew out there from Florida to meet with Chris and Steve. King was going to have dinner with us, but my plane got stuck in bad weather and I couldn’t land. I finally got in, but I was three hours late. Steve, though, had to be somewhere else, so we only had time for a slice of pizza and a Coke before he had to run. My recollection was that he was a big fan of mine and knew my stuff from comics. He said, “I’d love to work with you. Let’s do this.”
When King started writing the story, he found the format of one block of text per calendar page to be too restrictive. He writes from the gut, and at some point his stories and his characters take over; his characters begin telling him the story and take it where it should go. So he was writing something much longer than what Chris and I had been talking about.
Also, at the same time, NAL, King’s publisher, told Chris in no uncertain terms that we could not do a calendar because those publishing rights belonged exclusively to them.
We thought, What are we going to do? We’ve got a story that is growing into a book, but we can’t do a calendar or a book. But NAL told Chris that he could publish a book, so long as it was a limited edition.
One hundred copies had an original pencil drawing of a werewolf laid in, which Bernie soon found became a Sisyphean task:
I had to do the same drawing of the werewolf a hundred times. The only way to be fair was to do the same drawing, so everyone got essentially the same thing.
I drew one werewolf face as a template, taped it to the drawing board, and copied it repeatedly. Because I had never done anything like that before, I did not conceive how boring and soul-sucking the experience was going to be. After a dozen drawings, I was thinking, this is a life sentence and I am in hell.
I think Cycle of the Werewolf got a review in People magazine. The review was mostly about King, but there was a little slug about the illustrations that they said looked like Norman Rockwell filtered through EC’s Tales from the Crypt. I thought that was really cool, that the reviewer had really gotten it.
48
SKELETON CREW
1985; ORIGINAL TITLE: NIGHT MOVES
[A] short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.
—STEPHEN KING, INTRODUCTION TO SKELETON CREW
As King’s career moves into its fourth decade of published work, its progression clearly shows that any attempt to brand King only as a genre writer is shortsighted. It’s best to simply call him a writer, because the scope and breadth of his work defies simple categorization.
Skeleton Crew, his third collection of short fiction, is early proof: Night Shift, his first collection, published in 1978, can broadly be categorized as horror or suspense.
Different Seasons (1982) is further proof that America’s best-loved bogeyman doesn’t always wear a fright mask. Only one of its four stories, “The Breathing Method,” is supernatural horror, and the rest explore life in a realistic vein.
In a review of Skeleton Crew for the Stephen King Companion (1995), Michael Collings explains that it “contains some of King’s best work,” which is drawn from nearly eighteen years. The standouts in this large collection are “The Mist,” reprinted from Dark Forces, and “The Reach,” one of King’s finest stories.
What impresses is the range of the stories in this collection and the ease with which King writes in various genres. It speaks to his versatility and skill as a writer and his wide-ranging interests as a reader.
Nona from the short story of the same name, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON SKELETON CREW
Following [“The Mist”] are other stories that are narrow in ambition but that taken as a series examine a wide range of horror, from psychological to physical, from the internal to the external: “Here There Be Tygers,” “The Monkey,” “Cain Rose Up,” “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” and “The Jaunt.” Almost all the centr
al tales deserve to be discussed individually; certainly “The Raft” and “Word Processor of the Gods” are hallmark stories that remain with the readers as potent images. “Beachworld” shows what happens when King immerses himself in a science-fictional universe; “Nona” owes its power to Lovecraftian horror and the directness of Poe. “The Reaper’s Image” similarly suggests Poe, while “Survivor Type” hinges on a grisly (and gristly) pun when the unsympathetic and exploitative survivor of a shipwreck realizes that he now has to depend only upon himself. “Uncle Otto’s Truck” tells about a similarly irascible exploiter whose demise has all of the mechanical, symmetrical justice of a classic tragedy. The semiautobiographical “Gramma” returns to Lovecraftian horror in the story of a monstrous woman willing herself to come back from the grave—and on a psychic level, at least, to devour her own grandson as she has figuratively devoured her daughter. “Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)” and “Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game (Milkman #2)” are strange tales (even in a volume whose stated purpose is to present strangeness) that depend for their effectiveness more upon a particularly chilling tone than upon complete narratives. Interspersed in the stories are rare but welcome examples of King’s poetry: “Paranoid: A Chant” and “For Owen.”
In the final story, however, King exceeds all expectations. “The Reach” is nothing less than one of the finest stories King has ever told, regardless of length. First published as “Do the Dead Sing?” and reprinted here under King’s original title, this is a ghost story that does not frighten, a story about death that bursts with life, a tale of loss and sorrow that merges seamlessly with joy and restoration. Stella Flanders is the oldest resident of Goat Island. At ninety-five, she has decided to cross the reach (a strip of ocean separating island from mainland) for the first time and visit the mainland. Setting out in a violent snowstorm, she sees the dead of Goat Island coming to greet her. Later, when searchers find her body on a rock on the mainland, they realize that she is wearing her dead husband’s hat.
A blunt plot summary is inadequate to the tone, texture, and feeling King gives this tale of life and death and the delicate line that separates them. His landscape functions perfectly on literal and symbolic levels (a technique he will exploit later in Dolores Claiborne as well). Island and mainland represent themselves, as well as a wealth of possibilities: life and death, experience and innocence, the physical and the spiritual, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Both as a story and as the capstone to a remarkably consistent collection of strong stories, “The Reach” ties up a number of themes and motifs scattered throughout the book and, along with “The Mist,” makes Skeleton Crew a standout short story collection.
49
J. K. POTTER:
ILLUSTRATING THE LIMITED EDITION OF SKELETON CREW
On the heels of the limited edition of The Eyes of the Dragon, the limited edition of Skeleton Crew from Scream Press also deserves praise. Elegantly designed in an oversized format and featuring manipulated photographs by J. K. Potter, the book’s illustrative material is all the more impressive because the photo manipulations were done in a “wet” darkroom, years before computers equipped with Adobe’s powerful software, Photoshop, made such darkrooms obsolete.
Jeffrey Knight Potter recalls the moment when he got the word that he had been selected to illustrate the limited edition of Skeleton Crew: “I was elated. Not only would I have top-notch material to illustrate, but I would finally be working on an expensive limited edition with the highest production values. My work would finally be printed as it was meant to be seen.”
It’s a justifiable concern among artists. Far too often in trade books, the illustrations take a backseat to the text; in many cases, the expense of illustrating the book’s interior is bypassed by not hiring an illustrator; and far too often, when illustrations are commissioned, they are severely cropped, often changed in coloration to suit an art director, and manipulated until the published image looks very different from what the artist had submitted.
Cover art, too, often suffers: Festooned with type crowded on a six-by-nine-inch cover, the artwork is buried beneath, barely able to be glimpsed through oversized type demanding attention.
Mindful that the Scream Press edition would be a major showcase for his work, Potter threw himself into the project with enthusiasm. He rushed out to buy a skeleton from a medical-supply company, hired models, and spent countless hours producing black-and-white photographs spanning seventy-five photo sessions, followed by months of messy photographic hand-printing in a darkroom and, as Potter explained to me in an interview for Knowing Darkness, “lots of cut and paste photo finishing all done by hand.”
Though Potter was disappointed with the book that was printed, saying it was “the most poorly reproduced art of all the Stephen King limited editions,” I beg to differ: I thought its reproduction was very good.
Like other artists whose work depends heavily on photo manipulation, Potter now uses Photoshop, a graphics tool of extraordinary versatility. Back in the day, photographers worked in darkrooms to expose photosensitive paper to light from an enlarger and carefully slipped the sheets into trays of developer, stop bath, and fixer; artists and photographers had to be focused and dedicated: It was an arduous process necessary to make nonmanipulated, “straight” prints.
In Potter’s case, he made multiple manipulations for every print in Skeleton Crew. Given the range of King’s subject matter, Potter could hardly have had a more difficult book to illustrate. As a black-and-white photographer myself, relying on making prints in a home darkroom, I know full well the challenges he faced to “pull” and manipulate images from the photo paper.
To get his distinctive effects, Potter used specialized techniques like “multiple printing” and “force developing” (longer immersion in the developer tray) to directly manipulate the print; he then cut and pasted images by hand to recombine them in a collage; finally, he airbrushed or hand-colored the photos with watercolors, gouache, and transparent dyes until he got the final print he desired.
In the 1999 introduction to Neurotica, Stephen King wrote, “J. K. Potter’s best work may sometimes unsettle me, but it never leaves me feeling let down, presumed upon, or demeaned.” (I respectfully submit that any artist illustrating horror should be unsettling. I have both of Potter’s art books, and the word “horripilation” comes to mind when viewing the phantasmagoric images.)
As for his own assessment on the project, Potter admitted that he “went a little crazy and overillustrated the book. The end result was that some of my illustrations were substandard, and there were certainly way too many skeletons.”
I submit that in a book titled Skeleton Crew there cannot be too many skeletons…
Potter later provided illustrations, as did Edward Miller and Glenn Chadbourne, for Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid, which was originally published as a paperback in 2005 by Hard Case Crime, and subsequently reissued in 2007 for PS Publishing in multiple states: an unsigned hardback, a signed hardback, and a traycased edition signed by King and all three artists. Using Adobe’s Photoshop software, Potter’s work in The Colorado Kid is a giant leap forward in terms of technical expertise and aesthetic impact when compared to his earlier work in Skeleton Crew.
50
OFF THE BEATEN PATH:
STEPHEN KING’S OFFICE
We can’t be on a main road because people would find us. And it’s not people you want to find you. He draws some weird people.
—ONE OF KING’S OFFICE ASSISTANTS, QUOTED IN ANDY GREENE’S
“STEPHEN KING: THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW,” NOVEMBER 6, 2014
If you’re interested in visiting Stephen King’s office in Bangor, Maine, the welcome mat is laid out for you; the door open. All you have to do is enter … by clicking your computer’s track pad or mouse. On the official Stephen King Web site (www.stephenking.com/the_office), you can tour his main office, which is as close as most people are going to get to him and his office assistants.
<
br /> In recent years, though, according to Andy Greene, who interviewed King at length for Rolling Stone, King rarely makes it to his office. Greene says King’s there once a month, but does anyone really think the Stephen King empire is run by a boss who shows up only a dozen times a year? It strains credulity.
So where does King spend most of his time? He spends it—according to Greene—in one of his homes in Center Lovell, Maine. The Kings winter down in Florida, near Sarasota; and during the spring and summer, they’re at the Bangor home on West Broadway, but again, says Greene, not with great frequency. (Again, I’m skeptical. I think the Kings spend more time in Bangor than Greene thinks.)
But no one can blame King for wanting a little privacy. The West Broadway home is a magnet that draws visitors worldwide. What was intended as a private residence has become Bangor’s biggest tourist attraction, which distresses the Kings and their neighbors, who’d prefer a little more privacy.
As Naomi King told the hometown newspaper, “The press is as the press will be. The American public tends to have an appetite for knowing the private lives of people that they adore, to make themselves feel closer to these people. That’s as it will be. I can’t change that.”