A Brief Guide to Stephen King Read online

  Paul Simpson has been writing professionally about horror and science fiction for the past two decades. As editor of DreamWatch magazine and its web spin-off Scifibulletin.com, which he still oversees from his home in a small Sussex village just north of Brighton, England, he has visited the sets of numerous TV shows, including The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, and interviewed the stars of many of the classic Hammer Horror films.

  For

  Jenn Fletcher, who always believed that I could,

  Brian J. Robb, who helped to open the doors,

  and Barbara Holroyd, who has kept the faith.

  A BRIEF GUIDE TO

  Stephen King

  Paul Simpson

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

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  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2014

  Copyright © Paul Simpson, 2014

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  UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-060-2 (paperback)

  UK ISBN: 978-1-47211-074-9 (ebook)

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  First published in the United States in 2014 by Running Press Book Publishers,

  a member of the Perseus Books Group

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  US ISBN: 978-1-7624-5229-3

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2013950261

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  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Author’s Note: Spoiler Alert!

  Part 1: The Life of Stephen King

  Chapter 1 The Working Poor

  Chapter 2 Living the High Life

  Chapter 3 Rising from Rock Bottom

  Chapter 4 Recovery and Renaissance

  Part 2: The Novels of Stephen King

  Chapter 5 The Basics of Horror: Carrie to Firestarter

  Chapter 6 A Community of Horror: Roadwork to IT

  Chapter 7 A New Beginning?: The Eyes of the Dragon to Needful Things

  Chapter 8 Up Close and Personal: Gerald’s Game to Desperation/The Regulators

  Chapter 9 Wiping the Slate Clean: Bag of Bones to From a Buick 8

  Chapter 10 A New Lease of Life: The Colorado Kid to Doctor Sleep

  Part 3: The Dark Tower

  Chapter 11 The Quest Begins: The Gunslinger to Wizard and Glass

  Chapter 12 The Wheel Comes Full Circle: Wolves of the Calla to The Wind Through the Keyhole

  Chapter 13 The Dark Tower in Other Worlds

  Part 4: Short Stories and Novella Collections

  Chapter 14 Anthologizing the Past

  Chapter 15 A New Horizon: Twenty-first Century Tales

  Part 5: Original Stories in Other Media

  Chapter 16 Writing for the Screen

  Chapter 17 A Graphic Approach

  Chapter 18 Pumping Out the Music

  Part 6: Non-Fiction

  Chapter 19 Close to the Heart

  Afterword

  Appendix: The Works of Stephen King in Public Release Order

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  ‘I’ve been typed as a horror writer, and I’ve always said to people, “I don’t care what you call me as long as the cheques don’t bounce and the family gets fed.” But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.’

  Stephen King, Parade magazine, May 2013

  ‘The Quest is the Quest.’

  Doctor Who ‘Underworld’, Bob Baker and Dave Martin

  ‘It is the tale, not he who tells it.’

  From The Breathing Method, Stephen King

  INTRODUCTION

  A few weeks before starting to write this Brief Guide to Stephen King, during the period when I was re-familiarizing myself with King’s novels, but hadn’t started to analyse them too closely, I had to walk through a deserted hotel in the middle of the night. It was a newish building, built in a palatial style, with Doric columns and huge vases decorating the hallways, as well as two huge marble staircases sweeping up from the entrance area leading to the reception desk – itself a good thirty yards away from the top of the stairs, near two imposing oak doors. Six hours earlier, the area had been filled with guests queuing for restaurants, children burning off their excess energy from fizzy drinks, and people desperately waving tablets and phones in the air trying to get a Wi-Fi signal. Now, although all the lights were on, it was empty. There were no extraneous sounds at all; no elevator buzzing, no coffee machines whirring. All I could hear were my own footsteps echoing from the marble floor. There wasn’t even any sign of life from the concierge, who was supposed to be on duty all night. I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised – scared, maybe, but not surprised – if at any moment, a madman with no face had come around the corner looking for someone to sacrifice to the creature that really possessed the hotel . . .

  That’s the power of Stephen King’s writing. He takes ordinary people and ordinary situations and gives them a twist – and once you’ve experienced his way of looking at things, you can’t look at anything quite the same ever again. Although I’d read Carrie when I was in my late teens, and seen the movie when it was screened by the university film club, my first proper experience of King’s gift as a writer came when I discovered that Switzerland shuts on New Year’s Day – or at least the part of Switzerland that I was in at the start of 1983. Only able to buy food from vending machines, I picked up a copy of a book that someone had left lying around – the original (and much as it may be heresy to say this, the better) edition of The Stand, Stephen King’s apocalyptic tale of good versus evil in the wake of a man-made plague. I was nineteen years old, appropriately enough, as ‘Dark Tower’ fans will appreciate.

  That was my day sorted – apart from going to get refills of Coke, I sat and devoured the novel, vicariously sharing in Larry Underwood’s nightmare journey through the Lincoln Tunn
el, shivering alongside the group travelling to Las Vegas, and feeling their horror when they discover the method by which Randall Flagg intends to kill them. (No spoilers – I wouldn’t want to deprive readers of that shocking moment.) Once I’d returned to the UK, I got hold of the rest of King’s back catalogue (there weren’t anywhere near as many books to buy in those days!), and pretty much from then on, whenever a new book came out I bought it – in paperback initially, but then, whenever I could afford it, in hardback. My library of King books is a pretty good indicator of my income over the years!

  You could say, therefore, that this book has been over thirty years in the writing – certainly, it has in terms of research. There have been periods when I’ve not enjoyed his new books as much as at other times – often coinciding, as I discovered during the writing of this guide, with times when King himself was dissatisfied with his work – and maybe subconsciously, as someone with an addictive personality, I recognized some of the traits that were being highlighted. Slowly I watched as the Dark Tower became ever more prevalent in his writing, and in the last few years I’ve enjoyed his forays into different areas, particularly with crime novels such as The Colorado Kid, or Joyland. 11/22/63 was one of those books that I didn’t want to put down, and like many, I’ve anticipated his sequel to The Shining – Doctor Sleep – for many years.

  This guide therefore is a celebration of King’s work – part aide-memoire for those who have read his stories before but can’t remember it in particular detail; part portal to the many different sides of his writing. The nineteen chapters (yes, that number again – and no, I didn’t plan it that way) start with a brief biography of the writer; we look firstly at his novels in chronological order of publication, starting with Carrie forty years ago, and stretching to Doctor Sleep in September 2013, incorporating the ‘Richard Bachman’ books as appropriate. This doesn’t include the eight books that comprise the ‘Dark Tower’ series, which receive their own section, along with the short story set in that world.

  After that come the short stories and novellas, including the e-book tales that have yet to appear between hard covers, notably King’s serial novel The Plant. Stories which have appeared only in magazines at the time of writing are listed at the end of that section; some of these can be found online at the magazines’ websites.

  All of these entries include a brief description of the stories, followed by some notes about their genesis, derived from multiple sources, including King’s own works Danse Macabre and On Writing (both of which are highly recommended for their insights into both King’s thought processes and the whole business of writing). The sections conclude with a brief rundown of the many adaptations that have appeared – not just the films and TV series, but the comics, stage plays, radio shows, and even ballets and operas inspired by King’s work.

  King’s original screenplays, comic books and musical works are then examined, and the guide concludes with a look at the highlights of King’s non-fiction writing, as well as a list of King’s output in chronological order of public appearance.

  Stephen King once pointed out that even if he stopped submitting books for publication, he wouldn’t stop writing, and the word ‘prolific’ might have been invented for him. The scope of this book doesn’t allow space to discuss all of King’s myriad factual articles over the years, and readers particularly interested in those are steered towards Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’ excellent overview, Stephen King: The Non-Fiction (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2011) as well as the archive of King’s columns for Entertainment Weekly at that magazine’s website.

  Forty years ago, the publication of a New England schoolteacher’s debut novel marked the start of a literary journey that has had many peaks and troughs – this guide is a small thanks to a writer who has formed an essential part of my reading life and that of many, many others.

  Paul Simpson

  September 2013

  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  SPOILER ALERT!

  The descriptions and discussions in this guide cover the complete plotlines of all stories that are available as mass market publications as at March 2014. Those that aren’t available in that format – i.e. Doctor Sleep, Joyland, the uncollected magazine short stories, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and The Plant – are considerably less spoiler-filled, but readers are cautioned that there may be details they don’t want to know before reading the story. However, major twists are not spoiled!

  For clarity, references to the ‘Dark Tower’ relate to the entire saga; The Dark Tower when italicized refers to the seventh published volume of the series.

  1. THE LIFE OF STEPHEN KING

  1

  THE WORKING POOR

  In the afterword to his most recent collection of novellas, Full Dark, No Stars, first published in 2010, Stephen King addresses his audience in the familiar way that he has been using ever since his first collection, Night Shift. He sounds like the guy you might sit next to in a bar who’s going to tell you about his life or loves. But the Steve King who comes across in those introductions isn’t necessarily the same as the Stephen King who’s been married to Tabitha Spruce for over forty years, the man who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, the multi-millionaire whose life was nearly cut short by a drunk driver just before the turn of the millennium. ‘Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself,’ King warns in that afterword. ‘It’s a form of deflection.’

  Listen to any of the many interviews with King carried out over the years – there are plenty to choose from on YouTube, or available as CDs/downloads – and you can quickly come to spot when an interviewer is pursuing a topic with which the author is uncomfortable. Certain incidents in King’s life have become magnified in importance, as people try to understand what makes a man write stories that are so affecting – whether as gross-out horror, or tugging the heart strings. The titles of the various biographies hint at the approach their authors have taken to King’s life: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman; Haunted Heart.

  What some fail to appreciate, perhaps, is that Stephen King loves to write. True, there have been times in his life when outside agencies have messed with that process; times when, by his own admission, the words haven’t flowed as freely. But writing is what he does, creating fiction that is, in his own terms, ‘both propulsive and assaultive’. His non-fiction is just as compelling: On Writing ranks as one of the best books about the craft, and his short Kindle essay ‘Guns’ should be required reading in the ongoing gun debate following the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

  However, to put his books in context, the broad strokes of King’s life – his personal and professional ups and downs – do make an intriguing background . . .

  Stephen Edwin King was born on 21 September 1947 to Donald Edwin and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, the younger brother of David Victor, who was adopted. His father was in the merchant marine, and when Stephen was just two years old, Donald announced that he was going for a packet of cigarettes. He was not seen or heard from again. (King quipped that it must have been an obscure brand.)

  Growing up, the subject of Donald King was clearly a sore point for their mother, so Stephen and David learned not to ask about him. They did discover some souvenirs that he had sent home from the South Seas in the attic of their house, as well as a couple of reels of home movies, showing what they believed was their father standing at the bow of a ship in heavy North Atlantic seas. They also learned their father had sent stories to men’s magazines, with their mother commenting that he was very talented but had no persistence.

  Ruth, as she was known, devoted her life to her sons, ensuring that they never went to bed hungry, or lacked for love, even if she had to work at multiple jobs in order to do so. The Kings had to move around the country for a time, staying with relatives, during which period Stephen was apparently playing with a friend, but came home alone. The friend had been hit by a freight train, and they’d had to collect the pieces that remained in a basket. It’s an incident about whi
ch much has been made by those seeking to analyse why King writes horror fiction, although he dismisses such Freudian ideas, noting that he had no memory of it.

  What did stick in his mind were a couple of stories that his mother told him – one about biting into a piece of chewing gum that had been placed on the bedpost overnight and discovering that a moth had fluttered down and got stuck in the gum. When she started chewing, she chomped the moth in half and felt the two halves flying inside her mouth before she spat it out. (King believed this prompted him to want to tell stories that would replicate the feeling he had the first time he heard that tale.)

  The other was about a sailor who committed suicide in Portland, Maine. King asked his mother if she had seen the man strike the pavement, and he never forgot her answer: ‘Green goo in a sailor suit’. King felt that the episode said more about his temperament – asking the question of his mother – than proving that he was somehow warped by his childhood.

  Stephen King always loved stories: his mother read him H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds when he was young, and he started writing his own tales, earning a quarter for each from his mother, who was so impressed with his apparent natural talent. He read the E.C. Comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and watched movies as much as he could, either on television when they were staying with relatives who had a set, or at the cinema, lapping up the B-movie horror and science-fiction films of the mid-1950s. His clear love of these is expressed not just in the autobiographical sections of Danse Macabre. Occasionally they would provoke nightmares and produce images in his mind which would continue to haunt him – one such, of his own corpse rotting away on a scaffold on a hill, became the impetus for the Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot. Another incident from his childhood stuck in his mind: sitting in a movie theatre one Saturday afternoon in October 1957 and learning that the Russians had launched Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite.