A Brief Guide to Stephen King (17 page)

It’s also another examination of the existence and importance of God, as nine-year-old Trisha tries to make sense of a world that is no longer the safe and secure place she expected, both thanks to her parents’ divorce, and her adventures in the wood. It’s the sort of subject matter that can often be found in books aimed at the ‘young adult’ market – those in their teens and early twenties – and, indeed, King noted that, ‘If there was such a thing as a Stephen King young-adult novel, it would be
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.’

Creepshow
and
The Dark Half
director George A. Romero was very interested in bringing Trisha McFarland’s story to the big screen. He penned a screenplay – at the time King was recuperating from his near-fatal vehicle accident, so was in no position to work on it or anything else – and announced in June 2000 that he was waiting for King’s
approval before proceeding to filming. In early 2001, there was a rumour that Tom Gordon might play himself in the film: ‘Tom won’t have to be Wesley Snipes or Cuba Gooding Jr. He’s a young enough guy to be adventurous,’ King commented. However, Hollywood studios didn’t seem interested enough for the project to get a green light until Dakota Fanning’s star began to rise following her appearance in the Steven Spielberg miniseries
Taken
– but then, according to Romero, Fanning changed agent, who wasn’t interested in her taking such a role. Despite a report in the
Boston Herald
that filming was starting in April 2005, nothing has progressed.

Possibly one of the most unusual adaptations of a Stephen King story did become available – a pop-up book based on the tale. The text was condensed by Peter Abrahams with illustrations by Alan Dingman and ‘paper engineering’ by Kees Moerbeek. According to
Publishers Weekly
, Dingman’s seven spreads were ‘heavy on the nauseous green and shadowy brown’ and it suggested that ‘daring and, ideally, mature King fans will appreciate this scary, perversely funny combo of horror and children’s pop-up’.

Dreamcatcher
(Scribner, March 2001)

Four childhood friends from Derry, Maine – Gary Ambrose ‘Jonesy’ Jones; Pete Moore; Joe ‘Beaver’ Clarendon; and Henry Devlin – meet up each November for a hunting trip; although their lives have gone in very different ways, they are bound together by an incident when they were young when they saved a young Down’s syndrome boy, Douglas ‘Duddits’ Cavell, from the hands of a bully. Each now has major problems, which are exacerbated when they become caught up in the hunt for some extra-terrestrials that have landed in the area, and are being pursued by a quarantine unit headed by Colonel Abraham Kurtz. They also have a low-level telepathic ability, which enables Duddits, back in Derry, to realize that his friends are in trouble.

Large worm-like creatures known as byrum (nicknamed ‘shit weasels’ because they exit the body through the anus) are created if anyone inhales or eats a red mould. Beaver is killed by a byrum, and Jonesy is taken over by one of the mature byrums, known as Grays. Pete is covered by the mould, and is eventually killed by ‘Mr Gray’ inside Jonesy. Jonesy himself desperately tries to stop Mr Gray from learning about Duddits by placing information in his ‘memory warehouse’ and manages to keep Mr Gray from carrying out his plan to infect Derry’s water supply. Henry and one of the military, who’s not as gung-ho and over the top as his colonel, reach Duddits, who is dying from leukaemia, but still has sufficient power to help Henry and Jonesy defeat the alien. The battle kills Duddits, but the day is won.

Dreamcatcher
– which the author originally wanted to call ‘Cancer’ until his wife prevailed on him to change the title – was the first book that Stephen King wrote after the accident that nearly took his life in June 1999. He began work on it in November, while still in severe pain and using crutches, and had to write longhand into a series of ledger books while propped up in a chair with pillows. It’s one of King’s grosser novels – the life cycle of the alien creature is explained in great detail – and although there are places where some stricter editing might assist the flow of the tale, it’s a clear statement that while the accident may have affected his physical abilities, it hadn’t changed his mental faculties. He wanted to write because ‘it’s my drug, it takes me away. When I’m writing, I’m in another world; you don’t feel the pain during that period of writing’. That didn’t stop him from incorporating elements of his accident into the story – one of the characters has also recently been hit by a vehicle.

Initially King saw
Dreamcatcher
as a story set in just one locale – the cabin – with a group of guys encountering
a monster invasion from space, but he realized that he also wanted to enter a ‘taboo zone – a place where ordinarily the door is closed, and we don’t go beyond that door’. Whereas once that door was to the bedroom, now, King reckoned, it was to the bathroom, and he started to think about the way that a lot of nasty discoveries are made in there – ‘I would guess maybe sixty to seventy per cent of our realization that we have a tumour, we have a cancer, that sort of thing, happens in the bathroom . . . You look in the bowl and you’ve got blood, and you go, “Uh-oh, I’ve got a problem”.’ He even suggested that he wrote the whole book for the scene where Beaver is sitting on the toilet lid and can’t get off because the thing is inside and won’t go down because ‘it’s too big to flush’. Perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, he claimed that the scene would ‘do for the toilet what
Psycho
did for the shower’. After all, ‘Nobody’s as defenceless as they are in the bathroom, with their pants down.’

The story pays homage to a lot of classic pulp science fiction – there are blatant references to Ridley Scott’s
Alien
, as well as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and
The Evil Dead
– and Kurtz derives his name, as well as much of his personality, from Joseph Conrad’s classic tale
Heart of Darkness
(the basis for the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie
Apocalypse Now
). There are also various nods to King’s own work, including a moment in Derry that both acknowledges the events of
IT
and suggests that maybe the Losers’ victory wasn’t as final as they had hoped.

William Goldman scripted the movie adaptation of
Dreamcatcher
, which arrived in 2003, directed by Lawrence Kasdan (who added some ‘touches’ to the screenplay, according to an interview he gave the
LA Weekly
in 2012). Morgan Freeman played Colonel Abraham Curtis (renamed to avoid too many
Heart of Darkness
comparisons), with Damian Lewis, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee and Timothy Olyphant as Jonesy, Henry, Beaver and Pete
respectively. Donnie Wahlberg played the grown-up Duddits. The majority of the film script follows the book, although the ending was altered, changing Duddits’ backstory considerably. The film was not a success, leaving Kasdan ‘wounded careerwise, but not personally’.

Black House
(Random House, September 2001)

Jack Sawyer is no longer the thirteen-year-old boy who travelled across America and the Territories in search of the Talisman. He’s now a renowned lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, and he’s repressed memories of those times. When an investigation starts to bring some of them back to mind, he resigns and moves to the small town of French Landing in Wisconsin, where he had once found a serial killer responsible for a hooker’s death in L.A.

Jack may have forgotten the Territories, but he is still linked, and he comes to realize that the Fisherman, an elderly serial killer who is dismembering and cannibalizing children in French Landing, is connected to the other place. The Fisherman, Charles Burnside, has been possessed by Mr Munshun, a servant of the Crimson King, and is transporting his victims through a portal – the Black House – into the Territories. Jack becomes caught up when young Tyler Burnside is kidnapped, and his mother, Judy, starts to go insane – Judy is the ‘twinner’ of the new Queen of the Territories, Sophie. The Crimson King wants Tyler because he is a ‘breaker’, someone who can destroy the Beams that hold reality together. With help from a motorcycle gang, Jack enters the Black House, and saves Tyler, who manages to kill Burnside. Jack then remains in the Territories, looked after by Queen Sophie and his old friend, Speedy Parker.

Ever since
The Talisman
was published, both Stephen King and Peter Straub were asked about the possibility of a sequel, or whether another book would be written by the pair of them. In 1999, shortly before his accident,
when King recalled an idea that Straub had mentioned while they were working on
The Talisman
, he asked the other writer if he’d like to collaborate, which Straub was delighted to do – by coincidence, both men’s recent work had alluded to Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
and Herman Melville’s
Bartleby, the Scrivener
(for King it was in
Bag of Bones
). According to Straub, ‘A sequel to our first effort just seemed the best, most logical thing to do. In fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to either one of us to write anything but a sequel.’

The writing process was similar to that of
The Talisman
, in that King and Straub would alternate writing sections, but improvements in technology meant that they were able to keep in touch far more easily. They swapped emails back and forth for a couple of months, then Straub spent time at King’s Florida home in February 2000 ‘hammering out a map of the action. It was like a fast-forward version of the novel’, Straub recalled.

It was Straub’s idea to incorporate Jack Sawyer’s tale firmly into the ‘Dark Tower’ series continuity – we learn that Speedy Parker was a gunslinger, like Roland, and the idea of Breakers and Beams is central to that mythology. There was some discussion about a ‘bridge’ book linking the two novels but as yet it has not been written – nor has a final book in the trilogy that has also been mentioned, although King has hinted that it will be based around Jack having to come back to our world from the Territories, which he knows will cause him to sicken and die quickly.

The book unfortunately was scheduled for publication on 13 September 2001; two days earlier, hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, as well as the Pentagon. American television interviews with the pair were unsurprisingly cancelled. ‘I called Peter on the phone and I said, “I don’t think anybody’s gonna wanna read about a supernatural cannibal after what just happened”,’ King recalled in 2007.

Although neither
The Talisman
nor
Black House
has yet been adapted for film or television, a short commercial was prepared for the release of the book, which showed Tyler’s mother receiving a letter from the Fisherman, as a portentous voiceover sang King and Straub’s praises, gave a very brief description of the book, and then demanded, ‘Dare you enter the Black House?’ Johnathon Schaech and Richard Chizmar penned an adaptation of the book for Akiva Goldsman, which was designed to be separate from any version of
The Talisman
. Schaech told horror magazine
Fangoria
in May 2006 that their script ‘does stand on its own, but it also ties in beautifully [to
The Talisman
] through the imagery – even to the “Dark Tower” series’.

From a Buick 8
(Scribner, September 2002)

Ned Wilcox wants to learn more about a mysterious car at a police state barracks in western Pennsylvania, which always fascinated his father, Curtis, who was recently killed by a drunk driver. Known as a Buick 8, it looks like a 1954 vintage Buick Roadmaster, but on closer inspection, it clearly isn’t a normal car: dirt and dust are repelled from it; the engine block has no moving parts, the steering wheel doesn’t move either – and oddest of all, if it receives a dent or a scratch, it heals itself. The car was left at a gas station in 1979 by a man in black who then vanished, so the state troopers brought it back to Shed B at their barracks where it remained. Over the years, Curtis Wilcox tried to understand what it was, and where it came from.

As members of the troop relate to Ned, weird things happen around the car: it gives off ‘lightquakes’, and it ‘gives birth’ to strange plants and creatures, which are not of this earth. Curtis’s partner Ennis Rafferty, who was with him when he first went to see the car, vanishes in its vicinity, as does Brian Lippy, who had been arrested for careless driving, and had escaped from custody.

Ned becomes as obsessed with the car as his father, and believes he can destroy it; however when he tries, he and Sandy Dearborn, the patrol’s commanding officer, are nearly sucked through a portal into another world, visible through the car’s trunk. In the end they deduce that the car acts as some sort of valve, controlling the link between the dimensions – but it is just starting to deteriorate . . .

The catalyst for the contemporary events in
From a Buick 8
is a car accident, in which Curtis Wilcox is killed. Odd as this seems, this wasn’t a case of King writing out his own experiences (that would happen in the final book of the ‘Dark Tower’ series):
From a Buick 8
was pretty much complete before that near-fatal day in June 1999. The
New York Times
noted in August 2000 that its release was being delayed in part because it involved a ‘nasty car crash’.