A Brief Guide to Stephen King (10 page)

He chose the Plymouth Fury because of its sheer mundanity: ‘it’s not a car that already had a legend attached to it’, he explained. Perhaps its lack of distinguishing marks explains why he posed for his author photo on the first edition with the wrong car, a 1957 Plymouth Savoy rather than the 1958 Fury. It might be a rarity in the real world, but in the Stephen King universe, a Plymouth Fury (which of course might be Christine herself) appears in
IT
, driven by Henry Bowers’ mad father, as well as in
11/22/63
. In the
revised version of
The Stand
, Stu Redman and Tom Cullen find an abandoned Plymouth Fury – and the key is initialled A.C.

Christine
– or rather,
John Carpenter’s Christine
as it was properly known – hit movie theatres very soon after the book was published: the rights were sold even before publication, and filming began soon after the book hit the bestsellers chart. Carpenter, best known for his horror movies
Halloween
and
The Thing
, had previously tried to adapt
Firestarter
, but without success. His version of
Christine
, with future
Baywatch
star Alexandra Paul as Leigh, Keith Gordon as Arnie (replacing Kevin Bacon, who was originally offered the role) and John Stockwell as Dennis, was scripted by Bill Phillips.

However, to the annoyance of many King fans, Carpenter and Phillips altered some of the fundamentals along the way. A prologue, set in 1957, sees Christine on the production line, clearly ‘bad to the bone’ from the very start. Roland LeBay still sells the car to Arnie, but his ghost isn’t part of this story – Carpenter later confessed that this was a mistake on his part, and may have contributed to the film being less effective than it could have been. However, Bill Phillips later used the image for a series of drink and drive advertisements in the US. Twenty-three Plymouth Furies were bought to be used – and in many cases totalled – by the production. Although the film is slated by many, it’s a major step above a lot of the King-based movies of the period, and deserves viewing.

Pet Sematary
(Doubleday, November 1983)

Doctor Louis Creed moves with his wife Rachel, their children Ellie and Gage, and the family cat, Winston ‘Church’ Churchill, to a new home near Ludlow, Maine from Chicago. Their new neighbour, Jud Crandall, warns them to be careful near the busy highway that passes their home. The
elderly Crandall becomes friends with Louis and shows him the local ‘pet sematary’, although Rachel prefers not to think about death if she can. When Church is killed, Crandall shows him the ‘real’ cemetery, a Micmac burial ground; to Louis’s amazement, Church returns to them, although he’s not the pleasant cat he was before.

When Gage is run over, Louis decides to try to resurrect him, despite both Crandall’s warnings and a ghostly visitation from a dead student telling him not ‘to go beyond’. He isn’t even put off by tales of the forest creature, the Wendigo, or sight of it as he takes Gage’s body up to the burial ground. Rachel and Ellie are away visiting Chicago, but head back after Ellie has a nightmare, having to drive after missing their connection. It’s too late: Gage has returned, possessed and murderous. He kills Crandall, and then his mother when she gets to the house. Louis gives both Gage and Church an overdose, then takes his wife to the burial ground, convinced that he waited too long before interring Gage there. That night she returns . . .

Two King novels in one year? As so often is the case in such situations, the dual treat for King fans wasn’t because the author was being extraordinarily prolific, but because of contractual negotiations. To release funds that they were holding, Doubleday required a book from King to complete his contract with them, so King reached into his trunk for one of the few books that hadn’t by now seen print under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, dusted it off, tidied it up and sent it in.

Pet Sematary
was written in 1979, while King was teaching at the University of Maine in Orono for a year. The Kings’ house was beside the busy Route 15 and numerous pets were killed under the wheels of the passing vehicles – enough for the local children to create a pet cemetery, in which Naomi King’s cat Smucky was buried after it was hit by a truck on Thanksgiving Day 1978. When young Owen
King nearly became a casualty, his life only saved when his father managed to grab his leg and yank him away from the road, King wrote the novel, with a strong debt to the classic W.W. Jacobs short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (the endings are very similar). The tale also reflected contemporary concerns in Maine over the rights of the Native American tribes; the Micmacs, whose burial ground is covered by the pet sematary in the book, were fighting for compensation for the loss of their lands.

However, on completing the book, King felt that it was too strong for publication, a view shared by his wife Tabitha. The hardcover dust jacket suggests that it was a ‘story so horrifying that he was for a time unwilling to finish it’, and King had told
Rolling Stone
in 1980 that ‘it’s worse than
The Shining
or any of the other things. It’s too horrible.’ That reputation may have been part of the reason that the book sold three-quarters of a million copies in hardback alone, somewhere around double the usual sales for King’s work. (It also revealed the existence of
The Gunslinger
, as described on
page 155
.)

‘I couldn’t ever imagine publishing
Pet Sematary
, it was so awful,’ he said in a podcast for
The Times
in 2007. ‘But the fans loved it. You can’t gross out the American public, or the British public for that matter, because they loved it too.’ Annie Gottlieb’s review in the
New York Times
sums it up: ‘Through its pages runs a taint of primal malevolence so strong that on each of the three nights it took me to read it, both my companion and I had nightmares. Reader, beware. This is a book for those who like to take their scare straight – with a chaser of despair.’

Perhaps it’s not too surprising, given the prevalence of horror in the late 1980s, that
Pet Sematary
was snapped up for the screen, but King had some very specific conditions for the prospective producers. Laurel Entertainment’s Richard P. Rubinstein had to make the film in Maine, and that
financing should, if at all possible, come from someone who would ‘agree with me that [King’s] screenplay ought to be shot with no changes’. Although it was hoped that George A. Romero would be at the helm, in the end circumstances dictated that Mary Lambert (then best known for working with Madonna on her ‘Like A Virgin’ video) was the director when cameras rolled in 1986. Dale Midkiff played Louis Creed with Denise Crosby – about to head to Hollywood to star in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
– as Rachel, and
The Munsters
’ Fred Gwynne as Jud Crandall. The ending was reshot to make it more graphic, although a lot of the footage of the puppet used to represent Gage in the final scenes had to be cut before the Motion Picture Association of America would give it an ‘R’ rating (rather than the ‘NC-17’: No One 17 and Under Admitted) which would be the kiss of death for the movie’s potential audience).

A sequel, uninspiringly entitled
Pet Sematary II
, followed in 1992. ‘I read the script – or as much of it as I could stand,’ King told
Fangoria
. Lambert returned, but couldn’t achieve similar success a second time around. A remake of the first film has been discussed periodically since 2010, but nothing is yet in production.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a six-part dramatization in 1997, adapted by Gregory Evans. Playing on the benefits of the audio medium, it’s by far the most chilling rendition of this already chilling work to date.

Cycle of the Werewolf
(Land of Enchantment, November 1983; Signet, April 1985)

The town of Tarker’s Mill has a problem: each month there are unexplained animal deaths, mutilations or murders. On New Year’s Day, Arnie Westrum is the first to die; on Valentine’s Day lonely spinster Stella Randolph follows suit. Both recognize that the killer is a huge wolf. A drifter is killed in March, wolfprints found in the snow beside him. On April Fool’s Day, eleven-year-old Brady Kincaid
becomes the next victim. In May, the local Baptist Minister, Reverend Lester Lowe, has a dream about preaching to a congregation of werewolves – and he himself is one. When he finds the janitor eviscerated, he realizes that he is the werewolf. Diner owner Alfie Knopfler is June’s victim, after watching the werewolf transform in front of him. The town’s July 4th fireworks are cancelled, but wheelchair-bound eleven-year-old Marty Coslaw is given some by his uncle – and uses them to put out the eye of the werewolf when it attacks him. After Marty is sent to stay with relatives, his story of a werewolf is discounted by the town constable; however the policeman soon has reason to believe in a werewolf when he becomes the August victim. The next month, the wolf attacks a pen of pigs; at Halloween, Marty spots that Reverend Lowe, who he’s seen for the first time since the summer, now sports an eyepatch. Lowe moves away after receiving anonymous letters, but in November can’t control himself from killing a man in Portland. He returns to Tarker’s Mill, and then receives a letter that Marty has signed. It’s a trap, though: when the werewolf arrives on New Year’s Eve, Marty dispatches it with two silver bullets his uncle has made.

As the description above makes clear,
Cycle of the Werewolf
plays very fast and loose with the lunar cycle. It was in fact not commissioned by Land of Enchantment’s Chris Zavisa back in 1979 as a novel at all, but a calendar illustrated by Berni Wrightson accompanied by a small vignette of text (approximately 500 words per section) by King. The author found the length restrictions too difficult to work within, so wrote the story as he saw fit, tying each of the werewolf’s twelve appearances to a key date in the month (there should of course be thirteen such visitations in a calendar year). The short novel was published by Land of Enchantment as
Cycle of the Werewolf Portfolio
, with a short piece, ‘Berni Wrightson: An Appreciation’, penned by King.

The book is an oddity among King’s work – shorter than some of his novellas, but released and marketed as the equivalent of one of his full-length novels. Without the Wrightson illustrations, which capture the tone of King’s writing perfectly (as they did in the comic tie-in to
Creepshow
, discussed on
page 233
), there’s not a lot to it, but once again King uses young heroes battling the supernatural, as with Mark Petrie in
’Salem’s Lot
. It also features the same railroad line – the GS&WM – running through Castle Rock that features in
The Body
.

Cycle of the Werewolf
perhaps gained more recognition after it was turned into the movie
Silver Bullet
in 1985, which came out six months after the trade paperback edition from Signet. A special movie version of the book, containing King’s novel and the screenplay, also by King, was published to tie in with the release. King had sent an early copy of the original story to prolific film producer Dino De Laurentiis (who had previously been responsible for the
Firestarter
adaptation, and the King original screenplay
Cat’s Eye
), who commissioned the screenplay, allowing the author considerable latitude with his own text. One key difference was the removal of the calendar year and the artificial imposition of certain dates over events: the movie story extends from spring to Halloween. Numerous characters were renamed or combined, and Gary Busey, who played Marty’s uncle, ad-libbed a lot of his lines. The film was narrated by an older version of Marty’s sister, called Jane in the movie – it was meant to be a flashback to 1976 (although a newspaper cutting clearly shows it’s 1980!).

Everett McGill played Reverend Lowe and the werewolf, the latter in a suit created by Carlo Rambaldi, and tried to emulate a real wolf’s movements as much as possible. Daniel Attias directed Corey Haim as Marty, with Terry O’Quinn playing Sheriff Haller.

The Talisman
(Viking Press, November 1984)

Jack Sawyer is desperate to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his mother, Lily, a former B-movie actress. Only a crystal, called ‘The Talisman’, will do the job but to find it, he has to travel across not only America, but also its twin parallel world, the Territories. Most people have a ‘twinner’ in the other world; a few, like Jack, are ‘single-natured’ and can flip between the two. Jack’s mother’s twinner is the Queen of the Territories, and is also terminally ill. Helped by Lester ‘Speedy’ Parker and his twinner, the gunslinger Parkus, Jack starts his quest, meeting up with a sixteen-year-old werewolf known simply as Wolf, and his old friend Richard Sloat.

Jack’s progress is hindered by Richard’s father, Morgan Sloat and his twinner, Morgan of Orris, both of whom want to seize power in their respective worlds. Jack travels through the Territories’ Blasted Lands (the equivalent of the mid-west area where nuclear bombs were tested by the US Army in our world) until, back in our world, he finally reaches the west coast. There he locates the Black Hotel, which is where the Talisman awaits him – and its multidimensional powers enable him to save his mother’s life.

For those of King’s Constant Readers who had not been able to locate
The Gunslinger, The Talisman
must have come as something of a shock. Rather than the horror (whether supernatural or closer to home) that they had grown to expect from King, this was a full-blown fantasy, with homages, and parallels to Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
– Jack even goes to watch the Ralph Bakshi-animated version of the classic fantasy quest to hammer the point home.

The Talisman
was written by King and his friend, horror writer Peter Straub, whom he had first met during his short stay in England in 1977. The two had discussed collaborating
for some time, and they came up with a story that both were happy with. One would write a section, and send it across by what was then state of the art electronics – ‘telephone modem communication between their respective word processors’, according to the interview they gave
The Twilight Zone
magazine in 1985. Although they had divided it up, they tended to write until they reached a natural break in the story before passing it over. Rather than cross-editing as they wrote, they completed the manuscript before giving it a rigorous overhaul. ‘I don’t think it’s possible, really, for anybody to tell who wrote what,’ Straub noted. ‘There were times when I deliberately imitated Steve’s style and there were times when he deliberately, playfully, imitated mine.’ King admitted that the only way he could be sure who wrote what ‘was the typing style. He will double space after periods and between dashes, and I don’t do that’.