A Brief Guide to Stephen King (14 page)

The 1990s saw King try some experiments with his writing. In
IT
, he had told a story in two time frames; in 1992’s
Gerald’s Game/Dolores Claiborne
and then later in
Desperation
and
The Regulators
, he told differing sides of the same story. For a short time, King considered publishing
Gerald’s Game
and
Dolores Claiborne
as two halves of the same novel, ‘In the Path of the Eclipse’, but they were eventually published separately. ‘They just would not be harnessed together,’ King maintained, but some links are still there: on two occasions, the books clearly overlap, with a psychic connection between Jessie and Dolores.

King ‘just wanted to sort of play baseball and goof off’ during the summer of 1991 before starting work on his next planned novel,
Dolores Claiborne
, but the central image of
Gerald’s Game
came to him during a dream on a flight to New York. ‘With
Gerald’s Game
, it was like an unplanned pregnancy,’ he told
Writers’ Digest’s
Wallace Stroby. ‘It was one of these situations that’s so interesting that you figure if you start to write it, things will suggest themselves.’

When King researched the sorts of bondage games Gerald and Jessie played, ‘the whole thing struck me as a bit Victorian. There was something very Snidely Whiplash [Dudley Do-Right’s enemy in the cartoon series featured in the
Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
] about the whole thing’. He also persuaded his son Joe to be tied to a bed as ‘an
experiment’ to see if he (and therefore Jessie) would be able to get out by putting her feet over her head, over the head-board, and thus stand. Joe couldn’t – and so neither could Jessie.

In common with other contemporary reviewers, the
New York Times
was concerned over the book’s treatment of incest and domestic violence. ‘Did Stephen King take on these heavy themes to prove that he is a Real Writer, not just a horror writer?’ Wendy Doniger asked. ‘Was he trying to shift from writing good bad novels to writing good good novels, and ended up with a bad good novel? The two genres cancel each other out: the horror makes us distrust the serious theme, and the serious theme stops us from suspending our disbelief to savour the horror.’

Joubert makes a brief reappearance in passing in
Insomnia
, which King had pretty much completed by this stage. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick, now in charge of what’s left of Castle Rock, also has a small part to play.

Although there have been various announcements regarding a potential movie of
Gerald’s Game
, nothing as yet has come to fruition. King himself told the
New York Post
in 2000 that he’d be interested in helming a version; after what he regarded as the disaster of his first directing endeavour,
Maximum Overdrive
in 1986: ‘I’d like to get it right. I don’t know, but maybe that hope for perfection – in whatever – is what really drives me. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?’ Six years later Craig R. Baxley, who had directed
Storm of the Century
and
Kingdom Hospital
, noted that he was interested in working on a movie, to star Nicole Kidman as Jessie, from a script by King himself.

Dolores Claiborne
(Viking Press, November 1992)

Dolores Claiborne is in trouble. She’s been arrested by the police on Little Tall Island for the murder of her employer, Vera Donovan, and is now giving her statement. But this is
no ordinary statement: Dolores is going to explain things her own way, and in the process reveal a great deal about events taking place during the solar eclipse on 20 July 1963.

She admits that she killed her husband Joe St George on the day of the eclipse. (She went back to her maiden name after his death.) When Dolores stood up to Joe’s domestic abuse of her after years of accepting it, he became unable to perform sexually with her, so turned his attentions to their fourteen-year-old daughter, Selena, while continuing to mistreat their sons. When Dolores decided to leave him, she learnt that Joe has stolen her savings, and her employer Vera Donovan pointed out that an accident can sometimes be a woman’s best friend – setting Dolores on course to arrange Joe’s death. On the day of the eclipse, he fell into the well and died when Dolores pushed a rock down on top of him. Dolores continued to work for Vera, who became progressively more mentally unstable. When Vera leaped down the stairs and seriously injured herself, Dolores reluctantly agreed to end her suffering, but Vera died before Dolores had to do anything. She is eventually cleared of any involvement in the ‘wrongful death’ of Vera.

As mentioned in the entry for
Gerald’s Game
above, at one stage King considered publishing the two novels together; instead they came out in comparatively quick succession. It’s dedicated to King’s mother, Ruth Pillsbury King, who had to bring up Stephen and his brother after their father walked out, and ‘kept things together’.

Stylistically,
Dolores Claiborne
is an oddity for King. There may not have been any chapter breaks in
Cujo
, simply moving from one story strand to another with just a blank line to indicate the change of location; in
Dolores Claiborne
, there aren’t even any of those. The entire story (bar a couple of newspaper clippings at the end) is Dolores’ statement, told in her own words, with those often rendered phonetically to get the exact nuances of her Maine accent.
These include her vision of ten-year-old Jessie Mahout sitting on her father’s knee during the eclipse (Jessie recalls seeing a woman leading her husband to a well). It’s a very effective method of allowing the reader inside Dolores’s thoughts, and although we’re encouraged to accept her version of events, a few nagging doubts do remain about her reliability as a narrator. Joe St George’s anger and violence when drunk wasn’t autobiographical on King’s part – as he noted in a BBC documentary in 1998, ‘thank God I was never a mean drunk’ – but he was able to include true-to-life reactions from observing drinkers, and having been one himself.

Two novels in quick succession seemed to be outside the comfort zone of King’s usual Constant Reader – although those who picked them up would quickly realize that King was as capable of creating horror out of everyday life as he was from the supernatural – but the author was quick with reassurance that normal service would be resumed, eventually. ‘When I write, I want to scare people,’ he emphasized to Esther B. Fein in the
New York Times
. ‘But there is a certain comfort level for the reader because you are aware all the time that it’s make-believe. Vampires, the supernatural and all that. In that way, it’s safe. But these last two books take people out of the safety zone and that, in a way, is even scarier. Maybe it
could
happen. . . I’m just trying to find things I haven’t done, to stay alive creatively. . . [W]hat I am about is trying to scare people by getting inside their shields, and I’m going to continue to do that.’

In 2009, King noted that there might one day be a ‘third eclipse novel’ which featured Jessie Burlingame and Dolores Claiborne meeting up; since this was at the same talk at which he mentioned wondering about what was happening now to
The Shining’s
Danny Torrance, which led directly to the writing and publication of
Doctor Sleep
in 2013, this reunion may yet occur.

Dolores Claiborne
hit cinemas in 1995, with Kathy Bates as Dolores, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Selena. Christopher Plummer played Detective John Mackey, a character not in the original novel, but who bore similarities to the coroner from the book who was always suspicious of Dolores’s involvement in her husband’s death. The story is opened out considerably in Tony Gilroy’s script – the events of the past are dealt with in much the same way, but we learn far more about Selena in the movie than we do in the book, although to a large degree the two characters are compatible.

The story has also become the subject of a new opera that opened in San Francisco in the autumn of 2013. According to composer Tobias Picker, ‘Dolores Claiborne is a character destined for the operatic stage – passionate, desperate, trapped. She will do anything to save the daughter who despises her. Pushed to the extreme edge of life, she does what she has to, fearless and forsaken. I have wanted to write this opera for years. Yes, Stephen King is a master of suspense, but he is also a remarkable reader of human desires and fears. The superb team that San Francisco Opera has assembled allowed me to compose a powerful, heart-stopping piece of music theatre for a cast of brilliant voices.’

Insomnia
(Viking Press, September 1994)

It’s time to return to the town of Derry, where retired widower Ralph Roberts is suffering from insomnia – and he’s not overly happy to learn that the condition has been induced. He’s not the only one with it: his friend Lois Chasse is also afflicted, and they’re both starting to see things in what is dubbed ‘hyper-reality’. Everyone has a balloon aura – but when it turns black, they are heading for death. Ralph and Lauren learn that they have been given insomnia by two small bald doctors whom they name Clotho and Lachesis, after the Fates in mythology, so they
will enter this refined state. Their job is to try to prevent a third Fate, Atropos, from intervening in a battle against the Kingfisher (also known as the Crimson King), which they seem to do, although Atropos then shows Ralph that he will take the life of innocent Natalie Deepneau. Ralph agrees with Clotho and Lachesis that he will trade his life for Natalie’s.

Ralph and Lois also have to save the life of everyone who is attending a pro-choice abortion rally. The Crimson King is using Natalie’s father, Ed Deepneau, as his agent, and Deepneau plans to crash a plane into the Derry Convention Centre, killing everyone at the rally. Ralph manages to defeat the Crimson King, and Deepneau’s plane misses the Centre – allowing one key person, Patrick Danville, to survive. He is important to the well-being of the Tower of all existence, and could not be killed without altering the balance of creation. Ralph and Lois marry and have some years together; however, he eventually gives his life in a car accident to save Natalie, and is taken by Clotho and Lachesis to a new plane of living.

Insomnia
is a novel about which Stephen King has had conflicting feelings. Talking in September 1991, he revealed that he had spent about four months working on the book during the previous year but described it as ‘not good . . . not publishable’. To him it felt like a ‘pipe sculpture – except none of the pipes thread together the way they’re supposed to. Some do, but a lot of them don’t, so it’s sort of a mess’. He wasn’t prepared to give up on it since ‘[t]he thing that hurts is that the last eighty or ninety pages are wonderful’ but it lacked that ‘novelistic roundness’. Looking back on it for
Time
magazine in 2009, he noted that it failed in his eyes because he forced the characters into situations.

‘It was a book that had one bad guy that really wanted to go off the reservation, and I wouldn’t let him. I made him do what I wanted. And as a result, it was tough for me to
believe it. And if I can’t believe some of these things, I can’t expect readers to believe them because, let’s face it, they’re pretty out there anyway.’

And yet it was published in 1994, with King going on a long road trip to promote it, driving around America on a ten-city tour from Vermont to California on his Harley motorcycle to help independent bookstores who were suffering as a result of discounting at the major chain stores. King had left the manuscript alone for some time, and then, as happened when he had his breakthrough on
The Stand
, when he realized what needed altering, he was able to complete the revisions in a white heat. After two comparatively short books (at least by his standards),
Insomnia
was another of King’s ‘longer, shaggier’ novels, a description coined by the
New York Times’
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who noted acerbically that ‘the most elusive spectre in this story is a fresh idea or an original turn of phrase’.

There are links with
IT
, as well as
Pet Sematary
and the later
Bag of Bones
, but the most important connections are with the ‘Dark Tower’ series, of which the first three books had already appeared. Many of the key principles are set out here – the Four Constants of existence: life, death, the Random, and the Purpose; the different forms of life: short-timers, long-timers (enhanced mortals) and all-timers (immortals), all of whom are part of the Tower of Existence, known to Roland as the Dark Tower. The concept of the
ka
, the Great Wheel of Being, and a ka-tet are all mentioned, and are key to the ‘Dark Tower’ series. The relevance of Patrick Danville becomes clear in the final book,
The Dark Tower
.

Contrary to the opinions of a couple of bloggers, Christopher Nolan’s film
Insomnia
has absolutely nothing to do with Stephen King’s story. A screenplay was prepared for producer Mark Carliner in the period leading up to King’s original TV miniseries
Storm of the Century
, but King
wasn’t happy with it: ‘It didn’t have any pop to it,’ he told Michael Rowe in
Fangoria
. There was a report on 1 July 2007 that Rob Schmidt, the director of the horror movie
Wrong Turn
, had announced at a convention that he was directing an adaptation. According to some sources, he had explained that Stan Winston was contracted to provide effects work. Like many other such announcements, it was premature; no film is currently in development. Given its scale, a miniseries would seem a more appropriate format.