A Brief Guide to Stephen King (26 page)

A group of college students try to survive on ‘The Raft’ on a Pennsylvania lake in which a monster dwells; a writer gains the ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ and discovers he can rewrite reality. ‘The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands’ has a terrible power, while two astronauts crash on ‘Beachworld’ 8,000 years in the future and learn its equally terrible secret. ‘The Reaper’s Visage’ appears in an Elizabethan mirror; ‘Nona’ entices a man to commit terrible crimes near Castle Rock. ‘For Owen’* is a short poem about King’s younger son’s adventures on the way to school. ‘Survivor Type’ asks how far anyone will go to survive, and ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ might have a mind of its own. Two excerpts from an unpublished novel ‘The Milkman’ see a milkman making some unusual ‘Morning Deliveries’* while two men try to flee a homicidal milkman in ‘Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game’. Eleven-year-old George Bruckner has problems with his ‘Gramma’, ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ introduces the reader to fornits, and the collection concludes with ‘The Reach’, as an elderly woman makes her final crossing.

Skeleton Crew
is a more varied collection than
Night Shift
, featuring a full-length novella (
The Mist
) which was later published in its own right to accompany the 2007 feature film. Most of the stories come from the 1980s, although ‘Here There Be Tygers’, ‘Cain Rose Up’ and ‘The Reaper’s Image’ were among King’s earliest ever sales, the first two appearing in 1968, the last a year later. Some of the stories were extensively rewritten, and their order selected to fit
the theme of ‘Do You Love?’, an epigraph which features at the start of the book. The asterisked items had not been previously published.

King provided notes for the reader explaining the genesis of the tales, as well as some anecdotes about how they fitted into his life (‘The Raft’, or ‘The Float’ as it was known originally, was paid for at a very handy time for the impoverished writer). There are a number of recurrent themes present, and an increase in interest in the business of writing itself, as well as storytelling (a common element among the novellas of
Different Seasons
). There are cross-references to other King stories – Joe Camber from
Cujo
and Henrietta Dodd from
The Dead Zone
are mentioned in ‘Gramma’ while Billy Dodd from
The Dead Zone
gets a shout out in ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’, and Ace and Vern from
The Body
appear in ‘Nona’.

Interestingly both ‘Mrs Todd’s Shortcut’ and King’s son Joe Hill’s novel
NOS4A2/NOS4R2
were dedicated to Tabitha King – each features routes that aren’t on any map, and women determined to use them to achieve their ends.

The Mist
has appeared in various different media. An audio adaptation by Tom Lopez of Dennis Etchison’s proposed film version of the story appeared in 1984 in ‘binaural’ sound, and Frank Darabont eventually directed his screenplay for the film in 2007, with Thomas Jane in the lead. (This was referenced in
Under the Dome
.) A computer game was produced in 1985 by Mindscape.

Elements of ‘The Monkey’ appeared in ‘Chinga’, the episode of paranormal investigation series
The X-Files
co-written by King in 1998. Darabont has also expressed an interest in filming this tale. ‘The Raft’ became one of the segments of
Creepshow 2
in 1987, with a screenplay by George A. Romero – the ending was changed but was equally downbeat. Prior to the release of
Skeleton Crew
, ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ had already been adapted
as an episode of
Tales of the Darkside
in 1984 by Michael McDowell following its publication in
Playboy
, with Bruce Davison playing the writer. ‘Gramma’ became an episode of
The New Twilight Zone
courtesy of a script by Harlan Ellison, who also provided some of the voice for Gramma, alongside Carrie’s screen mother, Piper Laurie.

‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ and ‘The Reach’ were adapted for comics by Glenn Chadbourne in the 2006 Cemetery Dance collection
The Secretary of Dreams
; ‘The Monkey’ and ‘Nona’ appeared in the second volume in 2010.

Many of the stories have been adapted as dollar babies, including two different animated versions of ‘Beachworld’.

Four Past Midnight
(Viking Press, September 1990)

In
The Langoliers
, passengers on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston awake to discover that only ten of them are still on board: everyone else, including the crew, has disappeared. Luckily one of them is an off-duty pilot who lands the plane safely in Bangor, Maine. There are no signs of life, not even any sounds or smells. Finally they start to hear a crackling sound which investment banker Craig Toomy believes are ‘the langoliers’, creatures who feed on the lazy and timewasters. Eventually they realize that they have travelled through a rip in time, and are caught in the past; if they remain there, they will die. They are able to return through the tear and land in LA, although it too is deserted until time ‘catches up’ with them.

Secret Window, Secret Garden
is the title of a story that John Shooter claims he wrote but which author Mort Rainey plagiarized for his tale ‘Sowing Season’. Every time Rainey tries to prove that he published ‘Sowing Season’ before Shooter penned his story, something happens to remove the evidence. Rainey finally realizes that he is in fact suffering from a split personality, and Shooter and he are the same person. He goes mad and tries to kill his ex-wife Amy, but is killed. Later, when she finds a note from
Shooter saying he is going back to Mississippi, Amy and her lover realize that Mort’s imagination was so powerful, it created a character who actually came to life.

The Library Policeman
comes for those who fail to return their books on time, as Sam Peebles learns when he borrows a couple of books to prepare a speech and then misplaces one of them. Ardelia Lotz, the librarian, has given him due warning, and starts to threaten him when he fails to bring the books back. When he goes to the library to apologize, he learns that Ardelia actually died years earlier but she is still able to send the Library Policeman after him. To defeat this embodiment of Ardelia, Sam must face his fear and his memories of being molested as a child, and then prevent Ardelia from possessing his secretary, Naomi.

The Sun Dog
starts to appear in photos taken by Castle Rock resident Kevin Delevan with his Sun 660 Polaroid camera. He shows the camera to junk-shop owner Pop Merrill, who sees it as an opportunity, and surreptitiously switches cameras, so Kevin destroys an ordinary Sun 660. Merrill can’t sell the camera, but is compelled to keep using it, and in each shot, the dog gets closer and more feral. When Kevin and his father confront Merrill, after Kevin has suffered nightmares, the dog tears out of the most recent photograph, but Kevin is able to trap it again by taking its picture with a different camera. For his next birthday, Kevin receives a computer – which informs him that the dog is coming for him . . .

Stephen King explained the inspiration for the four novellas that form
Four Past Midnight
in his introductions to each of the tales, starting the volume off with a general piece that compared his career with the Milwaukee Brewers baseball player Robin Yount (although the scenario that King depicts in his piece didn’t actually take place).

The Langoliers
is a science-fiction piece, which was inspired by a dream King had of a woman placing her hand
over a crack in an aircraft, as he relates in the book, but also by his own fear of flying. According to an interview he gave to Dennis Miller on 3 April 1998, he was chatting with friends who owned a small jet about the possibilities of being unconscious during a flight, and they explained that if the oxygen level was reduced, he’d ‘go right out’. Although they refused to provide a practical demonstration, the idea stuck in his mind. It mines some of the same ideas as
The Mist
, reprinted in the previous collection, a link King freely acknowledges.

Like many authors, King has been accused of plagiarizing on many occasions, one of the many problems of being a writer.
Secret Window, Secret Garden
links both to
Misery
and
The Dark Half
thematically, particularly the latter’s problems with reality and unreality.

The Library Policeman
was triggered by a conversation with King’s younger son Owen about the ‘library police’ and his fears of what would happen if he failed to return his books. Ardelia is conceptually very similar to It, in that she can bring to life people’s deepest fears. The final fate of Sam Peebles and Naomi is revealed at the end of
Needful Things
.

The Sun Dog
was deliberately designed as a lead-in to that book, which came out the following year, and which King intended to be a farewell to the town of Castle Rock where many of his stories had been set. By highlighting some of the personalities there, he was setting the stage for
Needful Things
– and also indulging some of his fancies about the unusual qualities of Polaroid photos.

The first two novellas have both been filmed.
The Langoliers
became a two-part television miniseries in 1995, directed and written by Tom Holland. Various liberties were taken with the characters, and the effects are unfortunately bargain basement even for TV, but at least it was filmed in the right place: Bangor International Airport.

Secret Window, Secret Garden
lost the last two words of its title for its 2003 film version, with Johnny Depp as Mort and John Turturro as Shooter; written and directed by David Koepp it has a very different ending to the novella. The story was adapted more faithfully by Gregory Evans in three parts for BBC Radio 4 in 1999, with Henry Goodman and William Roberts as Mort and Shooter respectively.

The Sun Dog
was intended to become an eighteen-minute-long 3D IMAX film, with production starting in 2000 from a screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen. Although it went on hiatus, Cohen still listed it as an upcoming project for 2013/4 according to his biographical notes in the programme for the
Carrie
musical revamp.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes

(Viking Press, September 1993)

‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ is a classic tale of revenge as schoolteacher Robinson buries mobster Dolan in his precious car. ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ comes when researchers discover a crime-free area in Texas. ‘Suffer the Little Children’ follows the problems Miss Emily Sidley faces in class. Richard Dees investigates ‘The Night Flier’ and gets a story with more bite than he anticipates. ‘Popsy’ comes to the rescue of his son when he’s kidnapped, while weird things happen in Castle Rock as ‘It Grows on You’. ‘Chattery Teeth’ become protection for salesman Bill Hogan, and a maid shows some ‘Dedication’ to an unpleasant writer.

‘The Moving Finger’ arrives in Howard Mitla’s bathroom and ‘Sneakers’ in a restroom are equally disturbing. ‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’ in Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, and the inhabitants of Gennesault get a zombie ‘Home Delivery’. The ‘Rainy Season’ is particularly unpleasant in Willow, Maine, while ‘My Pretty Pony’ is a lecture about Time. ‘Sorry, Right Number’* (presented as
a teleplay) sees a phone call arrive at an inopportune time, and ‘The Ten O’Clock People’* are able to identify batmen.

Creatures from the Cthulhu mythos arrive in the London suburb of ‘Crouch End’, and the Bradbury children get some help from ‘The House on Maple Street’* to deal with their hated stepfather. ‘The Fifth Quarter’ changes the odds in a shoot-out, ‘The Doctor’s Case’ is a new story for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and ‘Umney’s Last Case’* sees a Chandler-esque hero and his creator swap places. The book concludes with ‘Head Down’, a non-fiction piece about baseball, and ‘Brooklyn August’, a poem on the same subject. After King’s author’s notes comes ‘The Beggar and the Diamond’*, a retelling of a Hindu fable.

As with
Skeleton Crew
, King provided notes for these stories, giving some background about their inspirations, and also where they had been altered from the original publications. Some stories are notably different in their
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
edition – ‘It Grows on You’ originally didn’t feature characters from Castle Rock, for example – while five tales (asterisked above) were freshly written for the collection. The teleplay for ‘Sorry, Right Number’ is the original draft that King wrote, set in more locations than the budget for the TV series
Tales From The Darkside
could afford. ‘Suffer the Little Children’ is the oldest story, dating from 1972, with most coming from the 1980s.

Unlike the previous two collections of short stories, where there seems to have been more care taken over the placement of the tales, the running order in
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
seems a little haphazard, with two of the pastiches (‘Umney’s Last Case’ and ‘The Doctor’s Case’) together, but not printed alongside ‘Crouch End’, which similarly owes a debt to an earlier writer. While a couple of the stories feel as if they were written more by Richard Bachman than Stephen King, only one had appeared
pseudonymously before – ‘The Fifth Quarter’ marked King’s single use of the pen-name John Swithen for its publication in
Cavalier
.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
was an eight-part TV series that was first broadcast in July and August 2006 on the cable network TNT, although only five of the stories came from the collection after which it was named. ‘Crouch End’ starred Claire Forlani and Eoin Bailey; ‘Umney’s Last Case’ featured William H. Macy; ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ starred Henry Thomas (
E. T
.); ‘The Fifth Quarter’ centred around Jeremy Sisto; and King perennial Steven Weber (
The Shining/Desperation
) joined Kim Delaney in ‘You Know They Got A Hell of a Band’. (The other stories are referenced under their respective collections.)

In addition to the dollar babies based on the stories,
Dolan’s Cadillac
became a movie in 2010, starring Christian Slater as the mobster in one of the better Stephen King adaptations. (An earlier version with Sylvester Stallone and Kevin Bacon didn’t get beyond preproduction.)
The Night Flier
was filmed in 1997 with
NCIS: LA’s
Miguel Ferrer excellent as Richard Dees – the movie was an antidote to the ‘rehabilitation’ of vampires prevalent at the time. A sequel was proposed in 2005 (simply known as
The Night Flier
2), in which King was interested enough to do a rewrite of Mark Pavia’s script; the project has not moved forward subsequently. ‘Chattery Teeth’ became one of the instalments in the portmanteau TV movie
Quicksilver Highway
, which otherwise featured a story by Clive Barker.