A Brief Guide to Stephen King (16 page)

Desperation
was initially inspired by a trip King made across the Nevada desert in 1991 in his daughter Naomi’s car. As he drove through the seemingly abandoned town of Ruth, an Internal Voice that King often talks about began talking to him. As King thought: ‘They’re all dead . . . who killed them?’, the Voice replied, ‘The sheriff killed them all.’

The use of God almost as a character within the story attracted some criticism, to King’s surprise, since such readers accepted the idea of ‘demons, golems, werewolves and you name it’ without turning a hair. If discussion of a deity who could ‘take sardines and crackers and turn it into loaves and fishes’ caused them a problem, then maybe he was doing his job as a suspense and horror writer properly and getting beneath the skin.

As far as King was concerned, using God in this way was what made the book work. ‘What if you treat God and the accoutrements of God with as much belief, awe and
detail as novelists do the “evil” part of it?’ he wondered. This didn’t mean that he was going to show a fluffy, happy God – King’s God is an Old Testament deity, who is cruel. ‘The myths are difficult and suggest a difficult moral path through life,’ he explained in 2008, ‘and . . . they are ultimately more fruitful and more earth-friendly than the god of technology, the god of the microchip, the god of the cellphone.’ The following year, looking back at the novel for
Time
, he was even more explicit: ‘I really wanted to give God his due in this book. So often, in novels of the supernatural, God is a sort of kryptonite substance, or like holy water to a vampire. You just bring on God, and you say “in his name”, and the evil thing disappears. But God as a real force in human lives is a lot more complex than that. And I wanted to say that in
Desperation
. God doesn’t always let the good guys win.’

The Regulators
was based on an idea that King had some years earlier. In the late 1970s, he had penned a screenplay called ‘The Shotgunners’ which he showed to legendary Western director Sam Peckinpah at a meeting organized by King’s then-agent Kirby Macauley. ‘It was one of these feverish things that I’d written in about a week,’ King told Mauceri. ‘I really liked it but there was no interest in it. Sam read it, liked it a lot and suggested some things for the script that were really interesting. I thought that I could go back and do a second draft. Unfortunately, Sam died about three months later [in December 1984] and I never worked on the script.’ The level of violence in the story, while not as uncommon for a Bachman novel as a King story, was appropriate for a tale with such a genesis.

Both books contain links to other King stories besides each other: there are clear resemblances between Tak in both books and It, as well as the ‘outsider’ who merges with Sara Tidwell in
Bag of Bones
. Terminology is also shared with the ‘Dark Tower’ series, while
The Regulators
movie that Seth loves is mentioned in
Hearts in Atlantis
.

In the revised introduction to
The Bachman Books
, King provided a clear indication of how
Desperation
and
The Regulators
entwined. The idea of doing something connected with toys, guns and suburbia had been percolating in his mind while writing
Desperation
, and it occurred to him to use the same characters and situations in
The Regulators
– and, to ensure they had a different voice, he would ‘resurrect’ Bachman, as if this was a manuscript that had been found after the author’s death. This enabled him to give the material a fresh perspective in the writing, as well as within the stories – one, as he points out, is about God, the other about television. By starting work on
The Regulators
the day after completing
Desperation
, King was able to create a book that was a ‘fraternal twin’. He insisted on the two books arriving in stores together, unlike the similarly linked
Gerald’s Game
and
Dolores Claiborne
, which had a six-month gap between publication.

For the signed limited edition of the Bachman book, a clever plan was devised to get round the fact that Dicky Bachman was deceased and so couldn’t autograph the book. ‘Signatures’ were found on old cheques that Bachman’s widow possessed (in America, unlike in the UK, once a cheque is cashed at a bank, the cancelled cheque itself is returned to the sender). Separate cheques were created for each of the thousand copies – number 2 was for $20 to Chris Hargenson for prom tickets (
Carrie
); number 82 to Lloyd Henreid for $100 for ‘taking care of business’ (
The Stand
); number 306 was to Annie Wilkes for $12 for ‘axe and blowtorch’ (
Misery
); number 341 was to George Stark for $100 for protection (
The Dark Half
). (A full list can be found at
http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/sk/cheques.html
)

Stephen King’s Desperation
eventually arrived on screen directed by veteran King-helmer Mick Garris, filmed in 2004 but not broadcast until May 2006. King was pleased with it, but not with ABC’s decision to run what had been
intended as a two-night miniseries as a one three-hour event, and place it opposite the finale of
American Idol
. Tom Skerritt was Johnny Marinville, with Ron Perlman as Collie Estragian, Steven Weber (the star of King’s own version of
The Shining
) as Steve, and Annabeth Gish as Mary Jackson. King penned the screenplay himself, and the
New York Times
noted that this meant it was ‘King done right . . . This first-rate movie is also a chthonic mess. Mr King has once again slammed his hand flat on all the buttons, and everything is lit up.’ Garris was ‘sure that we’d have to make cuts, but I tried to be economical about it. I wanted us to maintain everything we could from the book, and it can be conveyed potently without going over the top. Well, we stood at the precipice, and re-created as much of the book as possible. I don’t think any complaints will be that we backed down on the violence. That said, we didn’t revel in the bloodshed, either.’

The Regulators
was, of course, made in 1958, with John Payne, Ty Hardin, Karen Steele and Rory Calhoun, directed by Billy Rancourt. The screenplay was by Craig Goodis and Quentin Woolrich. Or rather, that’s the case in the Richard Bachman (and Stephen King) universe – in ours, the story has yet to be filmed.

Bag of Bones
(Scribner, September 1998)

Widower Mike Noonan hasn’t been able to write since his pregnant wife Jo’s death in a car accident. Four years later, he decides to confront his fears after he has a number of nightmares about his lakeside house in the unincorporated township of TR-90 in Maine. He meets young widow Mattie Devore and her three-year-old daughter Kyra and learns that Mattie’s father-in-law Max Devore will do whatever is necessary to gain custody of Kyra. Mike helps Mattie, despite Max’s attempts to prevent him.

Mike realizes that his wife’s ghost is helping him, and he begins to investigate the death of singer Sara Tidwell, a blues singer whose ghost haunts the house. After Max unexpectedly kills himself, and Mattie is killed in a drive-by shooting, Mike takes Kyra back to his home, where the ghost of Sara tries to force him to kill Kyra and himself, although
Jo prevents this. With Jo’s help, Mike learns the truth: Sara was raped and killed by men in the town, and her son Kito was killed. She cursed the town and its folk, with the firstborn children with ‘K’ names all drowning. Mike manages to destroy her bones and end the curse, which would have affected his unborn child as well. Max’s assistant kidnaps Kyra, but Mattie’s ghost pushes her into the lake, where she is impaled on wreckage. Mike then intends to adopt Kyra, although as a single male, this may not be easy.

Bag of Bones
was Stephen King’s first book for his new publishers, Scribner, and there seemed to be a concerted effort to reposition him away from the horror and fantasy genres with which he was best known – the hardback was billed as a ‘haunted love story’ and included quotes from novelists Amy Tan and Gloria Naylor. (‘To some degree, they rehabilitated my reputation,’ King noted in 2009.) He embarked on a lengthy promotional tour, including a trip to the UK; some of the many radio interviews he gave can be heard on the AudioGO CD
Stephen King in His Own Words
, which show his increasing displeasure at what he saw as the interviewers’ crude attempts at psychoanalysis. He was obviously happy at the time with the piece – ‘This probably sounds self-serving, but I like BAG O’ BONZ [sic] the best. For now, at least,’ he told an AOL online chat – and it won both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award.

The supernatural elements of the tale are fully woven into the story: the ghosts are integral to the plot, rather than acting as dei ex machina. There are links to previous Maine stories (King had stated that he wanted to write another full-blown adventure there before he turned fifty), with the fates of both Ralph Roberts from
Insomnia
and Thad Beaumont from
The Dark Half
mentioned, as well as Alan Pangborn and Polly Chalmers from
Needful Things
. There’s even a quick mention of Bill Denbrough from
IT
. While promoting the book, King noted that, ‘I grew up
in the country [in Maine], and to me it really does feel as though reality is thinner in the country. There is a sense of the infinite that’s very, very close, and I just try to convey some of that in my fiction.’

Once again, King was writing about writers, with Mike Noonan able to hide his writer’s block by publishing novels that he had been stockpiling, something that King had been told that both Danielle Steel and Agatha Christie had done. The
New York Times
review went so far as to wonder if King actually wanted to write about the writing process within the book, counting over forty references to different authors and their methodology. The title derives from a quote attributed to Thomas Hardy: ‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’ Of course, King was working on his non-fiction title,
On Writing
, at this time.

He was also physically writing about writing:
Bag of Bones
was written in longhand rather than on a word processor, as recent books had been. ‘It made me slow down because it takes a long time,’ King told the
Paris Review
. ‘But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.’

The rights for
Bag of Bones
were originally obtained by Bruce Willis as a project for him to produce and star in, but this never progressed. It was finally brought to television in December 2011, with Mick Garris directing from a screenplay by Matt Venne. The two-night miniseries aired on the A&E Network (although shown as one three-hour movie in the UK the following year), and made various
alterations to the timeline and storyline, although not as many as would have been required if Garris’s original plans to shoot it as a two-hour movie had materialized.
‘Bag of Bones
is a pretty dense story,’ the director told Stacey Harrison of
Channel Guide Magazine
. ‘Our original script was for a two-hour feature film and it really felt like it was missing stuff . . . It’s intense, but it’s not a gorefest by any means. It has its horrific elements, but it’s more about the tension and the mystery and the ghost story.’ Pierce Brosnan played Mike Noonan, with Melissa George as Mattie, and Annabeth Gish as Jo Noonan.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
(Scribner, April 1999)

Trisha McFarland shouldn’t have wandered off. She knows that, but now the nine-year-old is lost in the woods, after heading on a different trail to relieve herself (and, rather more to the point, to get away from her mother and brother bickering about their parents’ impending divorce). She doesn’t have much with her, but at least she has her radio, on which she can listen for news of her favourite baseball player, Tom Gordon.

Trisha ends up lost for far longer than she expects, even though her mother and brother call for help quickly. She tries to act sensibly but the lack of food and water means that she begins to hallucinate, and believes that the ‘God of the Lost’ is stalking her, waiting for her to ‘ripen’ – but she has help and advice from Tom Gordon to keep her going. Gordon encourages her to believe that God will help her ‘at the bottom of the ninth’ – when she needs to close the game. When she encounters a bear, she believes that this is the God of the Lost, and she hurls her Walkman at it. This fight coincides with the arrival of a huntsman, who rescues her, and returns her to civilization.

In a note to reviewers accompanying copies of
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, King called the book ‘the result
of an unplanned pregnancy’, a short tale – at 224 pages, King’s second-shortest book published under his own name – that is primarily plot driven. Non-American readers, possibly put off by the thought that the book is full of baseball references, should note that everything within the text is self-explanatory; the fact that Tom Gordon was a real-life ball player, whose trademark gesture, pointing at the sky, is emulated by Trisha, isn’t actually important to the story.

King’s love of baseball appears in various books – and he has written non-fiction tomes about the progress or otherwise of his favourite team – and this book came to mind while he was watching a game at Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox. It’s a variation on the German fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, as recorded by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century – except without Hansel – and is divided into ‘innings’, like a baseball game, rather than chapters. It was published on the Opening Day for the Red Sox, 6 April.