by George Beahm
“Y-yeah.” Then I smile. My smile is ridiculous. Dammit, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be a total freak here. This is exactly what a total freak does. I am a total freak. Oh God. I’m vapor-locking. I’m supposed to be speaking. Where am I? Are these books under my arms? Is this Maine? Am I in Maine?
From somewhere behind me, I hear Jay Torreso’s voice, sotto voce and saving my sanity. “Aaaallllan and Poooollllyyyy.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, thankful for my dry mouth only because it means I’m not drooling. My train of thought isn’t derailing, but now I have a direction. “I wanted to ask you about Alan and Polly.” King grins.
“Alan and Polly?” he asks. “Those names sound so familiar …”
Then—then—I decide to remind Stephen King who they are. “You know. From Needful Things.” What the actual hell are you … did you just tell Stephen King which book his characters are from? Did you just do that in a real life that is happening? Are you for serious right now?
“Oh yeah,” King says casually, grinning. “Yeah, they’re doing okay.”
“Okay. That’s good. I want them to do okay. Okay.” Translated: Mr. Stephen King, this is what a full-on fan meltdown sounds like.
With shaky hands, I give him my books, and watch him sign them, trying not to fall over in sensory overload. The line is being ushered out the back door into a little outdoor courtyard back there, and right then, I’m just glad that someone’s giving simple directions I can easily follow.
Then I open my copy of Misery and I see what he’s written on the title page in in blue ink: Best wishes from your number one fan, Stephen King.
Oh. Oh, that’s. Oh. It’s hitting me. It’s all too much. I had met Stephen King, talked with him, and shook his hand. From your number one fan. And now I’m hyperventilating. Oh my God, I’m seriously hyperventilating. This is real. Why are my wrists and my ears tingling? Are my knees suddenly made of water balloons? I’m pretty sure they are. The world is swimming in front of me. Everything’s coming in flashes; the world isn’t a movie but a series of overexposed snapshots. Blackness is crowding in on me.
Blink. Blink. Black.
And then there are arms around me before I can collapse to the cobblestones below, helping me to a nearby bench. The blackness in front of my eyes is dissipating. Had I seriously gone into this thing promising not to be a weirdo fan boy and finished off fainting because Stephen King shook my hand and signed my book. Well, Kev, all signs point toward yes.
Then George Beahm is there, and Stu Tinker, and Roy Robbins from Bad Moon Books crowding around and verifying that I’m okay.
“Sure! Yes. Completely okay.”
59
THE DARK HALF
1989
I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This book could not have been written without him.
—STEPHEN KING, “AUTHOR’S NOTE,” THE DARK HALF
When Richard Bachman died unexpectedly in 1985, no one figured he’d come back from the grave, but he did. You can’t keep a good man down. He posthumously published The Regulators in 1996 and Blaze in 2007. Bachman also “signed” the limited edition of The Regulators, but in an unorthodox fashion: faux checks bearing his signature were glued in the book itself.
In The Dark Half, King draws on the real-world circumstances surrounding the revelation of the Bachman pen name. He crafts a story that, like Misery and The Tommyknockers, deals with the nature of creativity and writing and what happens when they violently collide: In Misery, Paul Sheldon deliberately kills off a popular fictional character, Misery Chastain, to prevent writing more romance novels about her; and in The Tommyknockers, an alien intelligence is at work substantially transforming, through a process known as “becoming,” a writer named Bobbi Anderson.
In The Dark Half, Thad Beaumont’s cover as George Stark is blown by an inquisitive “Creepazoid” named Frederick Clawson, who forces Thad’s hand. Clawson—even his name is suggestive—works to unearth the connection between Thad and his pen name; he places invasive phone calls to people in the publishing industry and takes a trip to the post office in Brewer to stake out Thad’s mailbox for surveillance purposes, finally getting what he wants: incontrovertible proof that Beaumont and Stark are one and the same. He then contacts Beaumont to request an “assistance package,” a blatant, ham-handed attempt at blackmail.
As Thad Beaumont’s wife explains, “When a genuine Creepazoid gets his teeth in you, he doesn’t let go until he’s bitten out a big chunk.”
Clawson meets an untimely end at the hands of George Stark himself: Thad’s pen name that comes roaring back to life and goes on a murder rampage.
Publishers Weekly praised the novel, calling it “so wondrously frightening that mesmerized readers won’t be able to fault the master for reusing a premise that puts both Misery and The Dark Half among the best of his voluminous work.”
Collings, in the Stephen King Companion (1995), fills in the much-needed details:
In this marginally autobiographically inspired horror tale, King touches on inner fears that are intimately related to the external horrors his readers have come to expect, if not demand. Almost obscured by the creatures (supernatural, science fictional, and other) populating the pages of It, The Tommyknockers, and Misery is yet another species of “creature” that finally emerges in The Dark Half to command full attention.
The Dark Half anatomizes the complexity of creative imagination, merging King’s experiences with his own pseudonym-run-wild (as witnessed by the continuing collecting mania for Bachman books) with thoughtful discussions of creativity and responsibility, of artistic integrity, of the destructive and regenerative powers of fiction, all without losing the essential sense of story.
In The Bachman Books, King wrote that The Dark Half is “a book my wife has always hated, perhaps because, for Thad Beaumont, the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man; for Thad, delusive thinking overtakes rationality completely, with horrible consequences.”
60
THE STAND
THE COMPLETE & UNCUT EDITION
1990
So here is The Stand, Constant Reader, as its author originally intended for it to roll out of the showroom. All its chrome is now intact, for better or for worse. And the final reason for presenting this version is the simplest. Although it has never been my favorite novel, it is the one people who like my books seem to like the most.
—STEPHEN KING, PART 2 OF “PREFACE IN TWO PARTS,”
THE STAND: THE COMPLETE & UNCUT EDITION
Twelve years before the uncut version was published with illustrations, The Stand was published sans illustrations and significantly truncated in wordage. As with The Lord of the Rings, whose fans complained that it was too short (a view also held by its author, J. R. R. Tolkien), The Stand’s fans also complained that they wanted more, much more, than what they had been given for a first serving: They wanted what was kept back in the kitchen.
This second serving adds 150,000 words to the original text, updates the time frame from the eighties to the nineties, adds a new beginning and ending, and is illustrated with a dozen Bernie Wrightson pen-and-ink illustrations.
Accounts differ as to why the cuts were made. On one hand, King writes in The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition that “[t]he reason was not an editorial one; if that had been the case, I would be content to let the book live its life and die its eventual death as it was originally published.”
Doubleday, however, saw things differently. As stated in the Science Fiction Chronicle:
King’s editor at that time, William G. Thompson, who is now a freelance editor, says he edited the manuscript strictly for editorial reasons. “There was no pressure on me to cut it because it was too big,” Thompson told The New York Times.
However, Thompson was fired by Doubleday before The Stand went into production, and according to King, Doubleday’s publisher Samuel S. Vaughan told him that the book would have to be cut e
ven more, to keep the retail price down.
Vaughan, now a senior vp and editor at Random House, says, “Steve has always made me the heavy in the story. It’s the book that was heavy. By trying to keep the price down so that it was not prohibitive, we were trying to build the career and sales of a young author.”
The consensus among King fans, at least, is that his numerous additions to the primary text, the updates, and the other changes deepen an already rich novel. The fans who wanted more text got their wish. In short, The Complete & Uncut Edition quickly replaced the original version as the edition of choice among his fans.
Michael Collings enumerated the changes:
The 1990 version also incorporates far more detail concerning the spread and the devastation of the superflu. The alterations range from single-paragraph vignettes, frightening in their simplicity and in King’s ability to sketch plausible characters in a minimum of space, to near chapters designed to enrich the novel’s portraits of social dissociation. These restorations establish more plausibly the survivors’ reactions to the new world the superflu has created.
Each of the restorations and changes strengthens the novel. King was not satisfied to merely reconstruct the novel as he had originally envisioned it; he also carefully revised the entire manuscript to bring it up to date for the 1990’s readers. This often includes changing or adding such details as the names of songs and singing groups, fleeting political and social allusions, and brand-name references more immediately recognizable to later audiences. The fantasy elements intrude into the science-fictional framework much sooner, diminishing the sense that the novel begins as post-apocalypse science fiction and then, about halfway through, abruptly introduces the fantastical elements of dreams and portents, prophets and prophecy. The greater emphasis on the superflu and its consequences makes the transition from extrapolation to mysticism more believable. In this respect, it is significant that most of the changes—especially those relating to characterization, setting, backgrounds, and atmosphere—occur early in the book.
In either of its manifestations, The Stand is one of King’s strongest novels. It is a consistent, readable, teachable response to life in a frighteningly technology-oriented world; it also reminds us that we may sometimes be forced to find a place for the spiritual and the supernatural within that world. The restored novel confirms King’s position as a master storyteller; and at the same time it provides even readers familiar with all of his works to date increasing insight into the growth and transformation over more than a decade of his abilities, his themes, and his narrative power.
61
STEPHEN KING DRAWS ON BERNIE WRIGHTSON TO ILLUSTRATE THE STAND
Significantly, unlike the original version, the revised edition of The Stand was illustrated with pen-and-ink artwork commissioned not by the publisher but by Stephen King. Deciding that he wanted Wrightson and no other artist, King paid him out of his own pocket and told him to carefully wrap up the art and pack it away for safekeeping until the time came to publish them.
Wrightson pocketed King’s money, drew a dozen striking illustrations, packed up and stored the art, and turned his attention to other projects.
Two years later, King called with the surprising news that Wrightson would have to negotiate a fee with Doubleday for use of his art. Reminding King that he had already been paid, Wrightson was understandably puzzled. But King told him that what he had been previously paid amounted to a finder’s fee; the rights, though, to publish the art would exact a separate cost payable by the publisher, who was contractually bound to include the art. King made it clear to Wrightson that Doubleday could not publish the book without Wrightson’s art, so he should make sure to get paid a fair price.
After a series of back-and-forth negotiations between Wrightson and Doubleday, they finally agreed on a fee. Had Wrightson forced the issue, he could have asked for significantly more money, but he did not, because he is a gentleman. As Wrightson explained to me, he had no interest in taking advantage of the situation and financially holding the publisher hostage; his only interest was in getting adequate compensation for a book that he knew would make its publishers millions of dollars.
Wrightson was thankful for King’s largesse. King had gone out of his way to make sure he took care of Wrightson in this matter. Wrightson knew that King was well within his rights to have claimed the art was paid for, to the point where King himself could have resold the rights to the publisher for a large sum and simply pocketed the money for himself. But from the start, King’s strategy was to put money in Wrightson’s pocket by subsidizing him in a way that the artist would find acceptable: not with an outright gift of money but with an art fee the artist would negotiate with the publisher.
Wrightson’s twelve illustrations were rendered in pen and ink. Its first plate was a film noir piece depicting Larry after he put his sick mother to bed; its last plate depicted Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, presenting himself as Russell Faraday as he lords it over a group of “brown, smooth-skinned folk … simple folk.” With his sharply defined portraits, sweeping landscapes, and “freeze frame” shots of the novel’s significant moments, Wrightson’s cinematic art lends the right visual touch to King’s epic novel: artist and author working together, at the height of their artistic talent, to create a textual and visual work of wonder.
“I Nearly Jumped Out of My Skin”
I have read every word King’s ever published in book form. I love his stories. I love everything he does. He’s one of the most accessible writers I’ve ever read. His voice just runs through every sentence, every paragraph, every page. It’s like having him actually tell you a story. I have read a lot of Poe, Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I haven’t read everything they have done as I have done with King.
The first King book I read was The Shining. It had been out for about a year. I knew who Stephen King was because of the movie Carrie, but I hadn’t read the book. I didn’t even know about ’Salem’s Lot. I was in Detroit, working on A Look Back when Chris Zavisa asked me, “Have you read any of this stuff by Stephen King?” He loaned me a copy of The Shining. I took it back to the hotel and started reading, and I was up reading until four in the morning. I was just exhausted, but I couldn’t put it down. I was in a dismal little motel room. The light was out in the bathroom. And when I got to the scene with the woman in room 217, I was scared to death to go into my darkened bathroom.
Then someone in the next room threw something against the wall when I was reading that scene, and I jumped out of my bed; I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’ve always loved horror stories, but there aren’t too many guys whose books have scared me: The Shining is one of them.
I always freeze up a bit when I’m illustrating Stephen King. My idea of an illustrator is to be a servant to the story and the writer’s vision. I try to be a faithful interpreter. This opens up a lot of doors in my head.
When I read a King story, I realize that everything that’s happening in the story is set in the real world, not some fantasy world. I’m not reading a fantasy, a ghost story, or a horror story. King’s world is so real I’m afraid that the world I’m creating won’t be as real as his. I would ultimately do a disservice to his story if I get something wrong.
—Bernie Wrightson, interview, Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King
62
A DARK TREASURE
THE LIMITED EDITION OF THE STAND
Dedicating the novel to his wife, Tabby, Stephen King called the book “this dark chest of wonders.” He also described The Stand as a “long tale of dark Christianity,” and the limited edition’s design plays off both motifs.
The limited edition of 1,250 copies, issued at $325, resembles either a “dark chest” or a red-velvet-lined black casket, depending on your viewpoint. Regardless, the limited edition stands as the most collectible, and most desirable, limited edition of any King book.
Designed by Peter Schneider, who is best known in the specialty-book-publishing f
ield as a cofounder of Hill House, the signed limited edition of The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition is a stark contrast to the uninspired production values of the previously published Doubleday editions, including The Stand in its 1978 edition, which King singled out in interviews as being a fat, ugly brick; in contrast, the limited edition is a bar of gold bullion.
Doubleday spared no expense in publishing this limited edition; in fact, making a profit wasn’t an issue, as it always must be for a specialty press. Doubleday’s exceptionally high production values meant that the final bill for the book and its custom-made box probably covered costs but didn’t generate a big profit. The idea, clearly, was to give fans a limited edition that would be, like the family Bible, an heirloom to be passed down to the next generation. Doubleday, after all, could afford it: the costs of the limited were likely “folded” into the cost of the trade edition, which made millions of dollars for the publisher.
The limited edition book itself is bound in authentic black leather, not leatherette, which is often used for limited editions to keep costs down. There is foil stamping in metallic gold and red on the leather boards. The book is printed on heavy, opaque, off-white interior paper stock. Two-color printing is used throughout, for maximum visual effect: red ink for ornamentation devices, and black for the text. The gilt edges are in gold ink.
The box itself is a work of art. It’s a varnished wooden box painted in flat black paint, its case lined with red silk, like that of an expensive coffin. On top of the two-piece box, a brass plate identifies its content. The final touch: a sewn-in silk ribbon to facilitate book extraction.