by George Beahm
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
As I am writing this, California is enduring a severe and long-term drought. It’s gotten so bad that farmers are being forced to drill to deeper depths, tapping into the groundwater, which, among other side effects, is causing land above the water table to collapse as its water is depleted.
Under the Dome sounds an ecological alarm. We live, as King cautions us, in a world of dwindling natural resources that we’re exploiting at an unsustainable rate, as he told James Lileks of The Minneapolis Star Tribune:
From the very beginning, I saw it was a chance to write about the serious ecological problems we face in the world today. The fact is, we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we’ve all seen from outer space, and it appears like that’s about all there is. It’s a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it.… We’re a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven’t seen evidence of anyone else. There’s nothing like ours. We have to conclude we’re on our own, and we have to deal with it. We’re under the dome. All of us.
As one character opines in the novel, “Who in their right mind would ever have expected this sudden contraction of all resources? You planned for more than enough. It was the American way. Not nearly enough was an insult to the mind and spirit.”
But the novel wouldn’t hold water if it was simply King on his soapbox. What makes it work is the Dickensian cast of characters reacting to the anomalous event and interacting with the others as their plight becomes more problematic and life-threatening.
Under the Dome is also King’s take on the Peter Principle—a person is promoted to his level of incompetency—as seen through a political lens: Big Jim is a thinly disguised Dick Cheney, and the clueless, newly installed sheriff is a thinly disguised George W. Bush. (One more character, a thinly disguised warmongering Donald Rumsfeld, would have rounded it out.)
As King joked on his Web site, there’s no place like dome, which is true: Under it is where the townsfolk live, calling it home, where they make their stand.
The TV Adaptation of Under the Dome
We’re all in this together.
—Big Jim Rennie, in the TV miniseries
King fans are used to seeing his books freely adapted for film and TV, with some directors taking a lot of artistic license. But fans were surprised when the television version of Under the Dome’s story line significantly diverged from the book, which prompted King to explain that he had no problem with it, taking to his Web site to explain himself:
Many of the changes wrought by Brian K. Vaughan and his team of writers have been of necessity, and I approved of them wholeheartedly. Some have been occasioned by their plan to keep the Dome in place over Chester’s Mill for months instead of little more than a week, as is the case in the book. Other story modifications are slotting into place because the writers have completely re-imagined the source of the Dome.
The changes are a wise move on Vaughan’s part, since King’s imagining is out of this world. In 2015, the third season of Under the Dome aired on ABC-TV. Tune in and find out what life is like under the dome.
102
BLOCKADE BILLY
2010
I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who’ve spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game. I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it.
—STEPHEN KING, IN A PRESS RELEASE FROM CEMETERY DANCE, BLOCKADE BILLY’S ORIGINAL PUBLISHER
Blockade Billy is a short book—so short, in fact, that flensed of the appropriately haunting artwork by Alex McVey, the Scribner trade edition beefed it up by adding a short story, “Morality,” originally published in Esquire magazine (July 2009).
As with “The Man in the Black Suit” and The Green Mile, the first person narrator is an old man who looks back to recount his story; this time, he’s telling it to Stephen King himself.
At the heart of this story is a mystery: Who exactly is William “Blockade Billy” Blakely? Recruited as a catcher, “He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen,” according to the book-jacket copy, “but today no one remembers his name. He was the first—and only—player to have his existence completely removed from the record books.”
As is often the case, people in a King story—in this case, Blockade Billy—aren’t what they seem. (Are they ever?)
As David Ulin wrote in his review for the Los Angeles Times:
Of course, Blockade Billy being a Stephen King story, there are bound to be complications, and indeed, these eventually lead to the downfall of both the player and the team. It’s not giving anything away to say that: King gleefully telegraphs this from the start. “We contended for a while, partly thanks to Blockade Billy,” the aging coach who narrates the story tells us, “but you know how that turned out.”
The Skeleton Crew at Cemetery Dance
Anyone who picks up the first edition of Blockade Billy, published by a specialty press, Cemetery Dance, might be pleasantly surprised: Though it’s a specialty press, a small press with a small handful of full-time employees, their books’ production values exceed those of bigger publishing houses.
It’s one of the endearing aspects of specialty publishing in the horror/fantasy field, and it’s possible only through the largesse of Stephen King, whose generosity to specialty presses has enabled many to keep their doors open, to publish short-run books for aficionados of fantasy, science fiction, and horror fiction.
Blockade Billy’s original hardback publication features artwork by Alex McVey. It was published in a run of ten thousand copies, a drop in the bucket compared to a print run by Scribner for their trade editions of King’s books. The first edition of the Cemetery Dance hardback had a little bonus laid in: a baseball card of William Blakely. And for the signed limited edition, a baseball card of Stephen King wearing a period baseball uniform was laid in. Not surprisingly, King wears it well.
Publisher Richard Chizmar, who has published numerous King titles, is quick to praise the big man from Bangor, who makes it all possible. In an interview for The Baltimore Sun, Rich told Andrea K. Walker:
[King] is as smart as can be.… He’s very gracious. And the biggest compliment I can give him beyond that is that he still does his work for all the right reasons. He loves it. He’s passionate about it. He is the last person in the world you could say it’s all about the paycheck. He could have taken a book like this and made a whole lot more money from someone other than us. But that’s not what he’s about.
Arkham House, the granddaddy of small presses in the horror field, is still alive and well, publishing under the auspices of the founder’s grandchildren, though the publishing schedule is not as robust as it was back in the day. These days, if you want to talk about robust publishing schedules, look no further than Chizmar’s fine small press, which continues to delight and amaze with its high-quality hardbacks and limited editions published for a discerning audience that appreciates the craftsmanship of a well-made book containing a well-told tale.
Well, at that point in the story, we don’t, but we’re surely about to find out. Erik Spanberg, in his review for The Christian Science Monitor, concluded:
All in all, Blockade Billy merits a curtain call for the endlessly prolific, and inventive, King. His novella makes a perfect companion for scanning the summer box scores and, most impressive of all, even conjures a momentary twinge of empathy for that most scorned baseball species: the umpire.
Steve King, the catcher for the New Jersey “Titans.”
103
FULL DARK, NO STARS
2010
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.
—OPENING LINE OF THE SHADOW, A 1930S RADIO SHOW FEATURING A CRIME FIGHTER
In an afterword to Full Dark, No Stars, a novella collection, K
ing states his writing philosophy:
I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face.… I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers.
Three of the four stories in this collection certainly qualify as “propulsive and assaultive.” They include “1922,” “Big Driver,” and “A Good Marriage.”
“1922” certainly justifies the lead position in this collection. It’s an unremittingly dark and harrowing tale well told, in first person, from an old farmer’s perspective. He plotted to kill his wife and dump her down a well (sound familiar?). Set in 1922, the story’s protagonist, Wilfred James, foreshadows what will follow in the fourth story in this book, when he says: “I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a ‘Conniving Man’ who does the dirty deeds.”
“Big Driver” recalls a 1978 cult film, I Spit on Your Grave, in which local yokels chase a young female writer through the woods; she is stalked and gang-raped by four men, who leave her for dead. Seeking and wreaking revenge, she systematically kills them off one by one.
The best story in the book is the last one, a harrowing study in psychological horror. “A Good Marriage” is a title deliberately tinged with irony and shows King at his best. Though the character in his story is imaginary, it’s based on a real-world murderer, Dennis Rader, known as the BTK killer, now serving ten consecutive life sentences for a total of 175 years, with no possibility of parole. In an online photo, Rader looks like the churchgoer and Cub Scouts leader that he was. He is also, however, a remorseless murderer whose principal method of executing his victims was strangulation. He is known to have killed one man, one young boy aged nine, one young girl aged eleven, and seven women. (At his interrogation, he confessed that he was planning to kill again, on October 2004, and had already begun stalking his next intended victim.)
In other words, Mr. Rader is a human monster.
In a curious twist of fate, when Dennis Rader’s daughter, Kerri Rawson, heard about the movie version of A Good Marriage (2014, Screen Media), based on her father’s secret life, she was distraught and wrote an open letter to Stephen King through the media:
My family is done, we are tired. We are not news, we are not a story to be exploited & profited on, to be twisted & retold to your liking whenever you want. Leave us, the families & the community out of it.
My dad is not a monster, that’s elevating him. He’s just a man, who chose to do some of the most horrible things a person can do. Not a monster, a man. A man who took 10 precious lives & tried to destroy countless others. He’s not worth the attention.
My mom is the strongest & bravest woman I know. She doesn’t need her life re-spun in a story or on the big screen. Her life is a true testament of all that is good & right in this world.
My family has tried hard to fight the good fight, to stand on our faith & live out a peaceful life. So let us live that life & please, leave us out of it. Out of the noise & chaos & the ugly & the awful.
King responded, sending a copy of the text to The Wichita Eagle that ran Ms. Rawson’s original letter:
I don’t think Mr. Rader’s daughter has to worry about her father getting a big head; there’s nothing glamorous about the portrayal of Bob Anderson in “A Good Marriage.” He’s depicted as a banal little man, and none of the murders are shown. As for making millions from the project … not going to happen. AGM is a very small, independently financed feature that is opening in less than two dozen venues. How it does as a video on demand feature film (VOD) is hard to predict, but we don’t expect huge returns. The story isn’t really about the killer husband at all, but about a brave and determined woman. And while I understand Ms. Rawson’s distress, the BTK crimes have already been chronicled in no less than 4 feature films, and there may be more in the future. I grant there is a morbid interest in such crimes and such criminals—there have been at least a hundred films about Jack the Ripper, who claimed far fewer victims—but there’s also a need to understand why they happen. That drive to understand is the basis of art, and that’s what I strove for in “A Good Marriage.” I maintain that the theme of both the novella and the movie—how some men are able to keep secrets from even their closest loved ones—is valid and deserves exploration.
In other words, King isn’t an apologist for writing his “propulsive and assaultive” fiction.
The irony is that Mr. Rader is now taking a page from King’s playbook. In a four-page, handwritten letter to The Wichita Eagle, Dennis Rader, who has read King’s story, is now collaborating with Dr. Katherine Ramsland on a book, with a portion of the proceeds going to the victimized families. Citing King’s visit to Wichita as a stop on his book tour for Revival, Dennis Rader ungrammatically wrote:
The main reason for the book idea, is to help the VF’s (Victims Fund) monetarily wise; something I had hoped for years, to help them and in a way to pay my debt to them. I mean to burn no bridges, and hope some day to open up. People like me, need to be under stood, so the criminal professional field, can better under stand, the criminal mind. That would be my way of helping debt to society.… Mr. King, in his book Full Dark, No Stars, the last chapter “Good Marriage,” the character (Fiction), also kept his secret, until his wife found his main “hidey hole.” I’m sure other people have “dark secrets,” that love ones don’t know about, and live normal Family lives.… I figure with Mr. King coming to Wichita, once more “BTK” will be in the spotlight.… I hold no bad feelings with the Wichita Police Department.
104
11/22/63
2011
Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe.… Get rid of one wretched waif … and you could save millions of lives.
—AL TEMPLETON TO JAKE AMBERSON, WHOM HE RECRUITS TO STOP LEE HARVEY OSWALD FROM KILLING KENNEDY, IN 11/22/63
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three shootings that irrevocably changed the course of history: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, killed by assassins.
History was changed forever, but what if you could go back in time to change history? Prevent JFK from getting shot, and perhaps prevent, or shorten, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of King and yet another Kennedy?
That’s the basic premise for King’s 11/22/63, a date that baby boomers can’t forget, just as World War Two veterans can’t forget “a day that will live in infamy,” and just as we, in more recent times, can’t forget 9/11/01, the day the Twin Towers fell in New York City.
King, a baby boomer, was sixteen years old when he got the news that Kennedy had been assassinated. He was getting into a hearse; the driver, Mike, had the radio on.1
Ten years later, when King was teaching English at Hampden Academy, he had written fourteen single-spaced pages of a novel about Kennedy’s assassination, Split Track, but abandoned it. “The research,” he said in an interview published in a paperback edition of 11/22/63, “was daunting for someone who was working full-time at another job. Also, I understood I wasn’t ready—the scope was too big for me at the time.”
What King mostly needed was time to distance himself from the event, to get a fresh perspective, and look at those times and that dark day in particular with clarity.
GENESIS
In Marvel Spotlight, issue 14 (January 27, 2007), King provided the details about the novel in “An Open Letter from Stephen King.” He wrote:
I’d like to tell a time-travel story where this guy finds a diner that connects to 1958 … you always go back to the same day. So one day he goes back and just stays. Leaves his 2007 life behind. His goal? To get up to November 22, 1963, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. He does, and he’s convinced he’s just FIXED THE WORLD. But when he goes back to ‘07, the world’s a nuclear slag-heap. Not good to fool with Father Time. So then he has to go back again and stop himself … only he’s taken on a fatal dose of radiation, so it’s a race against time.
; King felt his new book, because it’s historical fiction, had mainstream possibilities. “This might be a book,” King mused, “where we really have a chance to get an audience who’s not my ordinary audience. Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read The Help or People of the Book might like this book,” he told Alexandra Alter of The Wall Street Journal.
The book was a major departure for King, especially since it required a tremendous amount of research, which is unusual for him; he usually starts with a premise, sets up the characters, and starts writing the story, trusting his instincts to carry the day, and the story as well. But this book had to be historically accurate, which meant he had to have a researcher assist him. He recruited Russ Dorr, a longtime friend who helped on Under the Dome, among other books.
King also sought the input of the renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Dick Goodwin (a former advisor and speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Senator Robert F. Kennedy), who speculated that the worst-case scenario was that former Alabama governor George Wallace would become president. (Perish the thought!)
Told in split tracks—one track running through the time period from the late fifties to the early sixties, the other running through contemporary times—the lengthy 849-page novel features Jacob “Jake” Epping, who lives in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Through one of his students, who becomes a friend, he’s introduced to Al Templeton, who owns and operates Al’s Diner. Al harbors an astonishing secret: He’s got a portal to the past, a doorway that opens up at 11:58 A.M., on September 9, 1958, no matter how many trips are taken in the past. It answers the question Al’s patrons can’t figure out: How can he sell his burgers so cheap? (It’s because he buys beef at 1958 prices, brings them back to the present, and passes on the savings to his customers.)