A Brief Guide to Stephen King (28 page)

‘Autopsy Room Four’ was adapted for the TNT series
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Mind of Stephen King
, with Richard Thomas as the unfortunate victim; Tom Berenger starred in the same series’ version of ‘The Road Virus Heads North’. Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack starred in Mikael Håfström’s version of ‘1408’ from a script by Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski. An alternative ending was filmed after audiences complained that the original was depressing, and that is
the one more commonly available on home video versions. Neither follows King’s original! Mick Garris wrote and directed a film of
Riding the Bullet
in 2004, with Jonathan Jackson and David Arquette. A number of the stories have also formed the basis for dollar babies.

‘The Road Virus Heads North’ was adapted by Glenn Chadbourne for the comic book collection
The Secretary of Dreams
in 2006; ‘In the Deathroom’ appeared in the second volume in 2010.

Just After Sunset
(Scribner, November 2008)

David searches for his missing fiancée ‘Willa’ following a train crash, and has to face some harsh truths.
The Gingerbread Girl
Emily has to run for her life when she encounters the new inhabitant of a large mansion on the Florida coastline. ‘Harvey’s Dream’ starts to scare his wife Janet when the details in it seem to be coming true. Author John Dykstra has to call on the tougher qualities of his pen name Rick Hardin to deal with trouble at a ‘Rest Stop’. Artist Richard Sifkitz discovers that using his ‘Stationary Bike’ makes him some very powerful enemies. New Yorker Scott Staley begins to acquire ‘The Things They Left Behind’ from the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. High School ‘Graduation Afternoon’ turns horribly sour for Janice and her boyfriend’s rich family when catastrophe strikes. Patient ‘N’ is only the first person to become concerned about a circle of stones near Ackerman’s Field: is it a gateway to another reality? ‘The Cat From Hell’ is the target of a professional hit, but the furry feline is more than a match for his putative murderer. A wife hears from her dead husband in ‘The
New York Times
at Special Bargain Rates’, and a ‘Mute’ hitchhiker may be able to solve some problems for travelling book salesman Monette. ‘Ayana’ is a little girl with a gift of healing which is passed on in a mysterious way, and a portable toilet becomes ‘A Very Tight Place’ from which Curtis Johnson has to try to escape.

As King explains in his introduction, his output of short stories had dropped in recent years, partly because of pressure of work, but his interest in the format was revived when he was asked to edit
The Best American Short Stories 2007
by Katrina Kenison. Over half the contents of this collection stem from this period, with one previously unpublished story (‘N.’), and one classic, ‘The Cat From Hell’, from 1977, which King believed he had included in one of the earlier collections, and had to be shown tables of contents for the previous books before he accepted he was wrong. King often quotes the story as an example of his use of the ‘gross out’. The book won a Stoker Award for short fiction the same year as
Duma Key
won for the longer form, something that greatly pleased King.

Unlike some of the stories in
Everything’s Eventual
, many of these veer towards the horror side of King’s writing, with ‘Harvey’s Dream’ dealing with the issue of Alzheimer’s disease, which King noted in a May 2013 interview, is ‘the boogeyman in the closet now . . . I’m afraid of losing my mind’. Dinky Earnshaw from ‘Everything’s Eventual’ turns up in
The Dark Tower
, and both of King’s key fictional towns in Maine, Castle Rock and Derry, are mentioned while Julia Shumway, the editor of the Chester’s Mill
Democrat
in
Under the Dome
, pens one of the articles quoted in ‘N’. The book’s epigraph comes from Arthur Machen’s story ‘The Great God Pan’, which is the inspiration for ‘N’, a tale of creatures that lie just the other side of our reality, while Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ is updated in ‘A Very Tight Place’. King reverts to his normal method of author’s notes, providing a set of quite revealing autobiographical details about the tales.

Just After Sunset
was a late choice of title; when discussing the book in February 2008, it was still known as ‘Just Past Sunset’, and King admitted that he wanted to call it
either ‘Unnatural Acts of Human Intercourse’ or ‘Pocket Rockets’. His publishers weren’t happy with either of those choices, even after it was pointed out that the word ‘intercourse’ does not have to have a sexual connotation. At that stage there were only going to be thirteen tales (‘The Cat From Hell’ was a late addition), which compiled King’s uncollected stories to date, barring the two which had been developed into novels: ‘Lisey and the Madman’, which became
Lisey’s Story
; and ‘Memory’, which was reworked as the opening chapter of
Duma Key
.

The collection was promoted in an unusual way: Scribner teamed up with Marvel Comics to produce a motion-comic version of the story (which was later included on DVD for a special edition of the book, at King’s suggestion), known as
Stephen King’s N
. Developed specifically for the small screen-size of a mobile phone, the twenty-five-episode video series was adapted by Marc Guggenheim (with ‘oversight’ from King) with artwork by Alex Maleev. It was released weekly from 28 July 2008, and can still be watched online at
www.NisHere.com
. A couple of years later, Guggenheim and Maleev reworked the material for a standard graphic novel, adding various elements, such as documents, which wouldn’t work in the motion-comic edition, as well as a few extra plot beats.

In addition to the motion comic of ‘N.’, ‘The Cat From Hell’ has also been filmed: George A. Romero adapted it for
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
, directed by John Harrison in 1990. Blues artist David Johansen played the assassin tasked with getting rid of the cat by William Hickey’s wealthy mogul. A pilot script for a television version of ‘The
New York Times
at Bargain Rates’ by Jim Dunn and Sam Ernst was sold to ABC in July 2013. Stories from the collection have also been optioned as dollar babies.

Stephen King Goes to the Movies

(Pocket Books, January 2009)

This is a bit of an oddity: it’s a collection of three novellas and two short stories, all of which have been published in previous volumes. All of the tales have formed the basis of movies, but apart from
The Shawshank Redemption
, they’re not the most successful such films either critically or financially. Each story comes with a very brief introduction by the author, but none of them provides any new information.

The five stories are ‘1408’ from
Everything’s Eventual
(filmed in 2007); ‘The Mangler’ from
Night Shift
, which hit cinemas in 1985;
Low Men in Yellow Coats
which took the title of its collection
Hearts in Atlantis
for its movie title in 2002 (this takes up the majority of this book);
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
– for which it’s a real shame that King’s essay in the script book couldn’t be reprinted here; and finally, ‘Children of the Corn’, also from
Night Shift
, which would seem to be there purely for King to comment negatively about the many sequels spawned by the original.

The book concludes with an alphabetical list of King’s personal top ten adaptations, in which he rather disingenuously includes
Storm of the Century
, which was an original screenplay not an adaptation. In total, there are only ten pages of new material in this collection, and is one that is for completists only, who must have everything listed in the indicia at the start of each book.

Ur
(
Amazon.com
, February 2009)

English teacher Wesley Smith loves books – not just the stories within them, but the books themselves. After a fight with his girlfriend when he angrily calls her an illiterate bitch, she asks why he doesn’t read on a computer like everyone else. He therefore orders a Kindle from Amazon, but instead of the (then-standard) white, it’s pink – and seems to
have functions beyond the ordinary. The UR-menu allows him to access books written in alternative realities, where Hemingway wrote about dogs, and John D. MacDonald’s hero wasn’t Travis McGee. When he discovers there’s a newspaper setting as well, he, along with a colleague Don, and student Robbie, see alternative histories, including JFK surviving the trip to Dallas, and a nuclear catastrophe over Cuba. But when they look at UR-Local, and find a setting that shows future news, they learn that the coach carrying Wesley’s ex-girlfriend and Robbie’s lover will be in an accident caused by a drunk driver. Despite clear rules, Wesley and Robbie prevent the driver from getting to the scene, but then Wesley receives some visitors who are not happy with what he’s done – it has threatened the Tower . . .

Seen by some as a money-making device for Amazon (and for King himself, who noted that he’d made about $80,000 from the story, which took him three days to write),
Ur
was prompted by King’s agent Ralph Vicinanza after the author had penned one of his
Entertainment Weekly
columns about the Kindle e-reader. Since Amazon were launching a new version of the device, Vicinanza thought it would be a neat idea to write something specifically for that format. This tied in with an idea that King had already been considering about someone receiving emails from the dead, and although he ‘realized I might get trashed in some of the literary blogs, where I would be accused of shilling for Jeff Bezos & Co . . . that didn’t bother me much; in my career, I have been trashed by experts, and I’m still standing’.

This didn’t mean that King had become a total convert to the Kindle; another
Entertainment Weekly
column complained about the issues with footnotes, and noted the problems potentially caused by dropping the devices down the toilet! He was also concerned about the effect on the book industry – something which had earlier prompted his bike trip to promote
Insomnia
, and would lead to
Joyland
not receiving an e-version on first printing – and he drily asked, ‘Maybe instead of “Ur,” I should have written a story called “The Monster That Ate the Book Biz” – but would Amazon have wanted that one? Probably not.’

The story in some ways is a dry run for elements of
11/22/63
: King’s fascination with the JFK assassination is already clear, and the potential futures examined in that book are aired briefly here. It’s also a mid-point between
The Dead Zone
and
11/22/63
: like Johnny Smith in the former novel, Wes knows he must do something to avoid a bad future, but unlike Johnny, Wes gets in trouble for what he does with higher powers. The Low Men in Yellow Coats make a reappearance (as introduced in
Hearts in Atlantis
) and Constant Readers will deduce the connection to the Dark Tower from the logo that appears on the UR-Kindle.

An audiobook reading of the story was eventually made available, but
Ur
has yet to materialize on screen (other than those of the Kindle).

Blockade Billy
(Scribner, May 2010)

Blockade Billy
was the world’s greatest baseball player, of whom virtually nobody has ever heard. As an elderly New Jersey Titans’ George Grantham relates to Stephen King, in 1957 the Titans needed a replacement player, so William ‘Billy’ Blakely arrived to help out. Some of the team regarded him as a good luck charm, but questions started to be asked about his methods and his ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. It transpires that Billy was an imposter: he was really Eugene Katsanis, an orphan who worked on the Blakely farm but was abused by the Blakelys, so killed them, and then took their son’s place when the call came for a player. Before ‘Billy’ was arrested, he took revenge on an umpire who gave a bad call against Grantham, and from thereon, the team suffered bad luck.

Morality
follows the fortunes of Chad and Nora Callahan,
who are short of money. Nora works for a retired priest, the partially paralyzed Reverend Winston, who becomes determined to experience at least one sin in his life. He is incapable of doing anything himself, so offers Nora a large sum to commit the sin, so he can experience it vicariously – and possibly be punished doubly for it. Eventually Nora agrees, and punches a small boy in the nose; the incident is videoed to provide Winston with proof. After Winston’s death, possibly by suicide, Nora and Chad worry about the fate of the recording, and they become increasingly worried they will be discovered. This leads both to sin more themselves and eventually divorce. When she finds a book called
The Basis of Morality
, Nora realizes that there is little she can learn from it.

Blockade Billy
was originally published on its own by Cemetery Dance to mark the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season on 20 April. A further limited edition was produced by Lonely Road Books later that year.