A Brief Guide to Stephen King (25 page)

Night Shift
was Stephen King’s first collection of short stories, and included material that had previously appeared in
Cavalier
magazine between 1970 and 1975, as well as others from
Cosmopolitan, Gallery, Maine
and
Penthouse
. Many of them were rewritten for book publication, and the four tales asterisked above had never seen print previously. King’s foreword sets the scene for the tales, and marks the first time that he used the phrase ‘Constant Reader’ to describe his audience. The introduction came from John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series – after his death, King offered to write a new story for the character, but wasn’t granted permission by the estate, which he finally agreed was probably the right decision.

Many of the themes present in these short stories would permeate King’s work in the years to come – the young couple getting caught in a situation out of their control (‘Children of the Corn’); the survivors of an apocalypse (‘Night Shift’); a fear of technology coming under other influences (‘The Mangler’ and ‘Trucks’).

Nearly every story in
Night Shift
has turned up in some other medium. Many of them have been optioned for what King calls his ‘dollar babies’ – potential film-makers pay King one dollar for the privilege of filming the story, but there are very strict conditions regarding what they can do, and how the films can subsequently be seen. This means that very few of these are known to anyone outside their makers.

In the late 1970s, King created a screenplay for
Daylight Dead
, an NBC TV version of three stories – ‘I Know What You Need’, ‘Battleground’, and ‘Strawberry Spring’ – for which the network’s Standards and Practices department requested multiple changes, eventually leading to the project’s demise. Lee Reynolds and George P. Erengis reworked King’s scripts in 1981 for a
Nightshift
(sic) movie, but this came to nothing. Amicus horror film producer Milton Subotsky originally optioned ‘The Lawnmower Man’, ‘The Mangler’ and ‘Trucks’ for a screenplay entitled
The Machines
, and ‘Quitters Inc.’, ‘The Ledge’ and ‘Sometimes They Come Back’ for one called
Night Shift
; he eventually sold the rights for most of these to Dino De Laurentiis.

Of the publicly available movies that were produced,
Graveyard Shift
(1990) was directed by Ralph S. Singleton from a script by John Esposito, set, rather neatly, in the Bachman Mill. Tobe Hooper directed
Nightmare on Elm Street
’s Robert Englund in
The Mangler
, penning the script with Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck. Hooper claimed ‘Stephen is as happy’ with the film as the producers, but the author’s comments shortly after release seemed to indicate otherwise. It spawned two sequels
(The Mangler 2
and
The Mangler Reborn
) both of which were designed to follow the events of the first. ‘Battleground’ was brought to TV as part of the
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
series in July 2006, with a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson, directed by Brian Henson, and starring William Hurt as Renshaw
– with no dialogue. A ten-minute Russian animated version,
Srazhenie
(‘Battle’) was also created in 1986, directed by Mikhail Titov.

‘Trucks’ has been the basis of two separate versions: the infamous 1986 movie
Maximum Overdrive
, Stephen King’s only time to date directing one of his own stories, and
Trucks
, a 1997 TV movie written by Brian Taggert and directed by Chris Thomson.
Sometimes They Come Back
was filmed in 1991, after the story originally formed part of the screenplay for the portmanteau movie
Cat’s Eye; Superman IV’s
Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal scripted the movie, which starred Tim Matheson and Brooke Adams. Two further sequels followed, . . .
Again
, and . . .
For More
, in 1996 and 1999, taking the same situation but transplanting it elsewhere. ‘The Ledge’ did make it into
Cat’s Eye
with
Airplane
’s Robert Hays trying to turn the tables on Kenneth McMillan (the ending is changed from the story).

‘The Lawnmower Man’ was supposedly adapted for a 1992 film, starring Pierce Brosnan, but it was so far from the short story that King successfully sued to have his name removed from publicity. A sequel followed. The story was faithfully adapted as a comic strip by Walt Simonson for Marvel’s
Bizarre Adventures
#29 in 1981. ‘Quitters Inc.’ also appeared in
Cat’s Eye
, featuring James Woods, and was the basis for the 2007 Bollywood film
No Smoking
, written and directed by Anurag Kashyap.

‘Children of the Corn’ has probably launched more King adaptations than any other story: so far there have been eight films under that title, beginning in 1984 with a moderately faithful version of the short story, starring a
pre-Terminator
Linda Hamilton. The US Syfy channel also aired their own adaptation of the original story in 2009. Bricker-Down Productions’ Justin Zimmerman has announced his own version of ‘The Man Who Loved Flowers’, currently in development limbo. ‘The Woman in
the Room’ is perhaps the most famous of the dollar babies, as it was the first time that Frank Darabont (
The Shawshank Redemption/The Green Mile/The Mist
) handled a King story.

‘The Boogeyman’ was adapted as a play at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 by
The Borgias’
David Oakes.

‘Gray Matter’, ‘Strawberry Spring’, and ‘One for the Road’ were adapted for comics by Glenn Chadbourne for the second volume of
The Secretary of Dreams
in 2010.

Different Seasons
(Viking Press, August 1982)

In
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
, Andy Dufresne has been sentenced to life imprisonment in the brutal Shawshank Prison. He befriends another prisoner, ‘Red’ Ellis, who is able to get him a rock hammer and a poster of movie star Rita Hayworth. As the years go by and the posters in his cell are gradually updated, Andy learns who framed him for the murder of his wife and her lover, but is unable to do anything about it. Many years later, Andy disappears: he has been carefully and slowly chipping away at the wall behind his poster and has made his escape. When Red is released, he goes to find his friend.

The
Apt Pupil
is Todd Bowden, who insists that an elderly German, Arthur Denker, is really former SS officer Kurt Dussander. He forces Dussander to tell him about his crimes, but the German is able to turn the tables when Todd needs his help and they end up wanting the other dead, but each claims he has left a letter betraying the other should he die. Both begin to kill homeless vagrants, independently of each other, and Todd also shoots at cars on the freeway. When Dussander is hospitalized, an elderly Jew recognizes him, and the German eventually commits suicide. The police and Todd’s former counsellor are on Todd’s trail; Todd kills the counsellor, and goes to fire at cars – and is killed five hours later.

Castle Rock, Maine, is where a group of boys find
The
Body
. In 1960, Gordie LaChance and three friends – Vern, Teddy and Chris – go looking for the body of a boy who has gone missing. When they reach its location, a local gang of bullies have beaten them to it, and a confrontation ensues, which is broken when Chris fires a gun. They all head home and the older boys make an anonymous call to reveal where the body is. Later, all four youngsters are beaten up by members of the gang but refuse to accuse their attackers. In later life, all three of Gordie’s friends die young; Gordie becomes a successful novelist.

The Breathing Method
is employed by a young woman in the 1930s to help her give birth – even though she has been decapitated. Many years later, Dr Emlyn McCarron tells the tale of this highly unusual delivery: the head was some way from the body, but such was the mother’s determination to have her child that she was able to transcend death to enable his birth.

Each of the four novellas in this collection was written by Stephen King after he had finished work on one of the major novels that were already published by the time
Different Seasons
saw print. According to King at the time,
The Body
followed ’
Salem’s Lot, Apt Pupil
succeeded
The Shining, Rita Hayworth
. . . came after
The Dead Zone
, and
The Breathing Method
after
Firestarter
, each usually coming in the six-week period that King allowed himself after completing a first draft before going back to start editing the book. The ‘seasons’ of the title derives from the stories’ subtitles, which contain the name of a season, even if the word is being used in a different context. The stories were very different from what his audience expected – this early in his career, he was known for horror – so King didn’t submit the stories for publication initially.

The Body
has links to incidents in King’s childhood: when he was four years old, he apparently saw a freight train kill a young friend, although he had no memory
of the incident. When he was slightly older, his friend Chris Chesley took King and another youngster to see a drowned man, whose body had just been recovered from Runaround Pond. It has also been suggested that King’s college roommate, George McLeod, was working on a story about a similar incident, going to look at the body of a dead dog, which King may have remembered; certainly McLeod asked for some recognition, and as a consequence, like many authors, King now refuses to read other writers’ manuscripts. Portions of Gordie LaChance’s stories in
The Body
derived from King’s earlier short story ‘The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan’, which appeared in
Maine Review
in July 1975, and from ‘Stud City’, which dates from 1969, when it was published in
Ubris
, the University of Maine literary magazine. Considerable changes were made to both for their
Different Seasons
incarnation.

The stories have links to other King tales: Shawshank Prison turns up in numerous stories;
Apt Pupil
mentions Andy Dufresne by name; Todd’s story about the blue jay also turns up in
Roadwork
and later in
Desperation
; Ace Merrill, one of the bullies in
The Body
, and Aunt Evvie both feature in
Needful Things
, with Ace and Vern also appearing in ‘Nona’ in
Skeleton Crew
; and the unusual club at which Dr McCarron tells his tale also reappears in
Skeleton Crew
, in ‘The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands’.

Three of the four novellas have been filmed. Frank Darabont’s film of the first story, simply entitled
The Shawshank Redemption
, is hailed as one of the best films ever made, and should be watched by any fan of cinema or King. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman excel as Andy and Red. A ‘Secret Cinema’ version, shot with members of the public, can be found on YouTube.

A film of
Apt Pupil
was begun with Nicol Williamson as Dussander and Rick Schroder as Todd in 1987 but the finance ran out about eleven days before filming was completed. A
different version, directed by Bryan Singer from a script by Brandon Boyce, starred Ian McKellen as Dussander and Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, and was released in October 1998. Its UK release unfortunately coincided with the Columbine High School massacre in the US.

The Body
became the basis for Rob Reiner’s 1986 movie
Stand By Me
, which starred Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell as the four boys. Often regarded as the best Stephen King adaptation (including by the author himself), it is a lyrical paean to lost innocence, made all the more poignant given the early deaths of two of its stars.

A stage version of
The Shawshank Redemption
, written by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, debuted at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 2009, with Kevin Anderson and Reg E. Cathey as Andy and Red. A fresh version produced for the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe starred Kevin Secor and Omid Djalili.

A stage adaptation of
Apt Pupil
was mounted in May 1995 by Chicago’s Defiant Theatre, adapted and directed by Christopher Johnson, with William J. Norris as Dussander and Jim Slonina as Todd. The ‘by turns riveting, terrifying, stomach-churning, and downright offensive’ production was powerful enough to give the
Chicago Reader
reviewer nightmares for two successive nights, and was judged to ‘undermine King’s critique of the darker side of human nature’.

Skeleton Crew
(Putnam, June 1985)

In the novella
The Mist
, strange alien creatures are waiting within a mysterious mist to devour the inhabitants of Bridgton, Maine. Artist David Drayton is among those caught inside a supermarket battling for their very survival. ‘Here There Be Tygers’ is about a tiger in a boys’ bathroom; ‘The Monkey’ is a cymbal-playing toy with the power to cause things nearby to die. ‘Cain Rose Up’ follows
a depressed student who goes on a murderous spree. ‘Mrs Todd’s Shortcut’ gets faster and faster each time she uses it; ‘The Jaunt’ is a science-fiction tale about a young boy determined to see what happens during the teleportation process. ‘The Wedding Gig’ is a tale of revenge set during Prohibition, while ‘Paranoid: A Chant’* is a poem told by a schizophrenic.