A Brief Guide to Stephen King (13 page)

The short story ‘The Revelations of Becka Paulson’ was separately adapted for television as an episode of
The Outer Limits
by Brad Wright. First broadcast in June 1997, this changed the person talking to Becka from Jesus to a ‘Guy in the Photo’.

A second TV miniseries based on the novel was announced in July 2013, this time to be produced by NBC.
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
’s Yves Simoneau has been lined up to direct.

The town of Haven in which both the book and miniseries of
The Tommyknockers
are set is not the same one created for the Syfy Channel series based on King’s novella
The Colorado Kid
. That particular troubled town is located on the Maine coastline.

The Dark Half
(Viking Press, October 1989)

Recovering alcoholic author Thad Beaumont has finally decided to get rid of his alter ego, George Stark. While Beaumont writes literary novels, ‘Stark’ pens violent crime stories featuring a killer called Alexis Machine. For years the world has been unaware that Beaumont and Stark are
the same person, but when the secret is revealed, Thad and his wife Elizabeth stage a fake burial at the local cemetery, which is covered by
People
magazine.

George Stark, though, has other ideas on the subject, and refuses to be dead. He kills off those who he holds liable for his ‘death’, including Thad’s agent, his editor and the
People
reporter, leaving fingerprints at the scenes of the crimes – which are identical to Thad’s. Although Thad has solid alibis, Sheriff Alan Pangborn believes the writer is somehow responsible – and Thad himself is having some very bad dreams. Pangborn learns that Thad was actually one of twins, the other of whom died in utero, although parts had to be removed from Thad’s brain when he was younger. This may be how Stark has been able to achieve corporeal form: two minds in one body become one mind in two bodies. The stage is set for a dramatic confrontation between author and pseudonym made flesh, and it is by no means certain that Thad has the inner steel he requires to defeat Stark.

There was a time towards the end of 1988 when it seemed as
The Dark Half
might have become Stephen King’s new ‘trunk’ novel, a story written, like
Pet Sematary
, because the author needed to tell it, but too personal to publish. According to the Stephen King newsletter,
Castle Rock
, in November 1988, when asked about
The Dark Half
, editor Stephanie Leonard explained, ‘It is true that Stephen has written a book by this title. But at this time he has no plans to publish it.’ In his essay in the reprint of
The Bachman Books
in 1996, King noted that
The Dark Half
was a book his wife 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’.

Unquestionably,
The Dark Half
could not have been written if it had not been for King’s experiences as Richard
Bachman. At one stage, he proposed that the book be published by Viking as by Stephen King and Richard Bachman, but this was not permitted by the publishers. They were concerned that it might confuse readers, particularly after King’s collaboration with Peter Straub on
The Talisman
a few years earlier. The book is dedicated to Bachman – ‘this book could not have been written without him’, King notes.

Thoughts about the differences between King and Bachman (which King discusses in some detail in
The Bachman Books
introduction) led him to consider the subject of multiple personalities. When he learned about twins being imperfectly absorbed in the womb – a real occurrence, although perhaps not as gory as it appears in
The Dark Half
– he wondered, ‘What if this guy is the ghost of a twin that never existed?’ Other books about split personalities – including the classic
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
– also clearly influenced the writing.

This is the third consecutive book in which King writes about writers and the compulsions that drive them, and was penned while King was still wavering over his addictions – he had yet to take the final steps to sobriety. The dichotomy between the ‘addicted’ writer and his sober self is reflected in the very different styles of writing in the book.

It also returns to the locale of Castle Rock, with a new sheriff replacing the late George Bannerman. Pangborn would return in
Needful Things
; Thad Beaumont’s future is revealed in that book, as well as in
Bag of Bones
.

Although the movie version of
The Dark Half
was completed in 1991, audiences had to wait until 1993 to see it, following the financial problems that plagued its production company, Orion Pictures. King’s friend, legendary horror director George A. Romero, who had previously shot King’s screenplay for
Creepshow
and had come close
to helming other adaptations, was behind the camera, and ensured that the film had the visceral shocks that readers of the book imagined. Timothy Hutton played Thad Beaumont and George Stark, with Amy Madigan as his wife, and Michael Rooker as Sheriff Pangborn. Hutton, a Method actor, requested two trailers, to help keep the two identities separate. In one change from the book, the occult expert Rawlie DeLesseps changed gender for the movie, with Julie Harris playing the role of Reggie DeLesseps.

The Dark Half
also inspired a computer game, developed by Symtus and published in 1992 by Capstone. The point and click game has rightly been called ‘a poor reflection of the novel [which] is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies’. A walkthrough of the game can be found online, with the introduction available via YouTube. A sequel,
The Dark Half: Endsville
, (named after the place ‘where all rail services terminate’ in the book) was announced at gaming convention E3 in 1997 as a ‘real time, 3D adventure that contains 28 levels in seven different worlds’. An alternate version of
The Dark Half
was conceived as a computer game by F. Paul Wilson and Matt Costello – the description Wilson gives of the game is similar to that of
Endsville
, but this was not put into development after MGM took over Orion Interactive.

Needful Things
(Viking Press, October 1991)

Storekeeper Leland Gaunt is new to the Maine town of Castle Rock, but his shop Needful Things seems to sell the most unusual items. However, Leland Gaunt has a secret: he can get you exactly whatever it is that your secret greasy heart desires; all he asks is a small favour. What he requests seems to be little more than a prank but once you’ve carried it out, you have to keep quiet, because it’s just one among many things that sees the small town explode into an orgy of violence. Sheriff Alan Pangborn, still trying to come to terms with the murders committed by George Stark (in
The
Dark Half
), desperately seeks answers, as all around him petty feuds are magnified into assault and murder. Throwing mud at clean washing, slashing car tyres or killing a dog are just the start of the problems, but Gaunt has done his homework and knows exactly which buttons to press.

Before long, the townsfolk need weapons to protect themselves, and Gaunt can provide these too, thanks to help from his assistant, petty crook Ace Merrill. He then gets Merrill and crooked Head Selectman Danforth Keeton to start planting explosives around the town, although the latter is killed when they blow up. Merrill takes the sheriff’s girlfriend, Polly Chambers, hostage, but also ends up dead. Pangborn manages to defeat Gaunt – or at least, forces him to leave what’s left of Castle Rock. But not too long afterwards, a new shop opens in a small Iowa town: Leland Gaunt is back in business.

Subtitled ‘The Last Castle Rock Story’,
Needful Things
was a deliberate attempt by King to draw a line under a lot of the themes which he had been writing about in recent times, just as
IT
had been his way of providing closure to his monster tales. He saw it as a satire on the Reagan/Bush era, and the economic policies that led to the concept that ‘greed is good’. ‘To me, it was a hilarious concept,’ he told
Time
magazine in 2009. ‘And the way that it played out was funny, in a black-comedy way. It really satirized that American idea that it’s good to have everything that you want.’ While later critics have seen this within the book – even if many don’t believe that King puts his message across particularly well – at the time,
Needful Things
was criticized by the
New York Times
, for being a ‘rural Gothic version of Bret Easton Ellis’s
American Psycho
: it contains the same amount of senseless sadomasochistic violence, but the lunatics smear their bloodstained hands on duds from Sears, not Saks . . . hundreds of pages of rambling, turgid “clots and clumps” churned out in Mr King’s trademark
dark-and-stormy-night style.’ (This may miss the point that Ellis’s book was also meant as a satire!)

King was perhaps more sensitive to the criticism than he might otherwise have been:
Needful Things
was the first book he had written since he was aged sixteen that hadn’t involved ingestion of either alcohol or drugs. In later years, though, he has accepted that ‘maybe it just wasn’t a very good book’, although he maintained in
The Atlantic
in July 2013 that its opening line, which is printed on its own page, is the best he has ever written: ‘You’ve been here before.’

Good or bad,
Needful Things
continues a long tradition in American fiction about a stranger coming to town and causing problems – in the horror genre, the most notable example being Ray Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes
, whose influence can be felt in King’s description of Gaunt’s background as well as the man himself. Bradbury’s 1958 story ‘The Distributor’ bears a number of similarities too. King himself reworked a lot of the ideas behind
Needful Things
in his teleplay for
Storm of the Century
at the end of the 1990s.

Needful Things
also, once again, looks at addiction and obsession – there are few characters within the book that aren’t caught up in one or the other. Oddly, whereas King’s young protagonists usually battle the monster and win, that’s not the case here: eleven-year-old Brian Rusk, Gaunt’s first target, commits suicide.

As well as Pangborn, Ace Merrill has appeared previously in King’s work – he was one of the bullies in the novella
The Body
– and there are mentions of both Thad Beaumont (whose wife has left him) and Cujo. Although this was the last Castle Rock novel, King did return briefly to the town for the short story ‘It Grows on You’, printed in
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
a couple of years later, and there have been occasional references in later tales, including the 2009 short story ‘Premium Harmony’.

Needful Things
became a movie in 1993, directed by Charlton Heston’s son Fraser C. Heston. Max von Sydow was Gaunt, with Ed Harris as Alan Pangborn, and Bonnie Bedelia as Polly Chambers. Many of the Needful Things were changed – the baseball card altered from one of Sandy Koufax to Micky Mantle when Koufax objected to the way King referred to the card in an interview, misunderstanding that King meant the real object Gaunt handed over was ‘shit’, not what it represented. The original script by Lawrence D. Cohen was replaced (for being overly faithful to King’s story) by W.D. ‘Rich’ Richter’s version, for which he admitted he condensed as much as possible of the original as he could while writing. An extended TV version, running 186 minutes compared to the movie’s 120, aired on TBS in the States in 1996; this reinstated a number of scenes, but trimmed some of the violence from the theatrical print. At the time of writing, only the original film is available on DVD.

Gerald’s Game
(Viking Press, May 1992)

Jessie Burlingame is in trouble. She’s handcuffed to the bed in a secluded cabin in western Maine, and the only person who can get the keys from the bureau – her husband Gerald – is lying dead on the floor. Gerald has tried to liven up their sex life, but when Jessie refused to play along, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so received kicks severe enough to knock him to the floor, where he hit his head then had a heart attack. As Jessie desperately tries to find a way to get to the keys, voices in her head start arguing: the ‘Goodwife’, a version of Jessie herself; Nora Callighan, her former psychiatrist; and Ruth Neary, an old college friend. As their conversation continues, Jessie realizes that she has buried memories of being assaulted by her father when she was only ten years old, during a solar eclipse on 20 July 1963.

She receives two visitors – a ravenously hungry dog named Prince, who eats Gerald’s arm; and an apparition that Jessie initially believes is her father, and then nicknames the Space Cowboy. Jessie manages to free herself, and after a brief confrontation with the Space Cowboy, gets to her car. Crashing after hallucinating seeing him in the back seat, she awakes in hospital. Writing a letter to the real Ruth Neary, Jessie reveals that the Space Cowboy really was there: an escaped serial necrophiliac murderer called Raymond Joubert.