A Brief Guide to Stephen King (29 page)

‘I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who’ve spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game,’ King said in the promotion for the book. ‘I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it.’

According to King’s agent Chuck Verrill, the author ‘loved that period of time and the quality of the baseball’ which prompted him to write the tale – his love of the subject was already clear to readers of
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, and the ‘Dark Tower’ series, in which baseball references pop up from time to time. A tad ruefully, King told the
New York Times
that he had learned writing ‘baseball fiction is hard. There’s 25 guys on a major league squad!’

Morality
was first published in
Esquire
magazine in 2009 – the cover of the issue promotes the story heavily as if the words were being projected onto the naked body of
Swimwear Illustrated
model Bar Refaeli, calling it ‘Stephen King’s story of recession’. Refaeli told
Esquire
, ‘I haven’t seen anything like that ever. So I wanted to be the girl who did it.’

The story received a very mixed reception: although it was criticized by a lot of King’s Constant Readers online, it won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette. The story was written after King had completed the first draft of
Under the Dome
, in the ‘cooling off’ period before starting to work on the edit.

Although both stories have been recorded as audiobooks, neither has yet appeared in any other form.

Full Dark, No Stars
(Scribner, November 2010)

Wilfred James admits that he was responsible for the death of his wife Arlette at Hemingford Home, Nebraska in
1922
. He’s sitting in a hotel room eight years later writing a confession, and explaining how everything went wrong for him after that. He forced his teenage son, Henry, to help with the murder, after Arlette decided she wanted to go to Omaha and sell her stretch of land for an abattoir. They dumped her body in a well, and then forced a cow to fall down it to explain the rats and blood. Life went downhill: Henry and his girlfriend Shannon became robbers, and after being bitten by a rat, Wilfred believed that Arlette’s corpse came back to haunt him, and showed him Henry and Shannon’s deaths. After that no one would buy the farm, and Wilfred descended into poverty, still believing he was being haunted by the rats. As he finishes writing, the rats arrive and he can’t find his gun . . .

After a speaking engagement, the organizer suggests that crime author Tess uses a short cut, which will get her back home faster and safer. It does nothing of the sort: as Tess later realizes, she has been set up. Her car goes over nail-studded pieces of wood left in the road, and when she
stops, she is attacked and raped by a
Big Driver
. She feigns death and he dumps her ‘body’ with his other victims. Tess crawls away and decides not to report the crime, worried about the effect it will have on her career. Instead she starts to investigate, and learns that Big Driver is the son of the librarian who sent her down the short cut. In fact the woman has two sons, and the one known to most as Big Driver wasn’t the rapist, but covered for his brother. Tess kills all three and is helped to cover her tracks.

Derry resident Dave Streeter pays George Elvid for a ‘Fair Extension’: he will get roughly fifteen more years of life in return for fifteen per cent of his income and the name of someone he really hates. After some prevarication, Streeter names Tom Goodhugh, his best friend since grammar school. From thereon, Goodhugh’s life collapses, while Streeter prospers. Streeter’s cancer is cured; Goodhugh’s wife contracts it. Streeter is promoted; Nora Goodhugh dies. Streeter’s family all do well; Goodhugh’s falls apart. And still Dave Streeter wants more . . .

Bob and Darcy Anderson have
A Good Marriage
. Until, that is, Darcy finds evidence that convinces her that Bob is not the run-of-the-mill accountant she has always believed, but in fact is a serial killer known as Beadie. Bob admits it but tells her that meeting her meant he stopped killing for a long time, and that they can get through this. Darcy apparently agrees, but in fact makes a plan to kill him. She succeeds, making it look like an accident, but a few weeks after his funeral, she is approached by retired detective Holt Ramsey, who was investigating the Beadie murders. He was sure that Bob was the murderer, and deduces Darcy’s role in his death – but doesn’t intend to do anything more about it.

Full Dark, No Stars
contains three novellas and a short story, all of which were original to the book (because most magazines wouldn’t print stories of this length, according
to King); an excerpt from
Big Driver
appeared in
Entertainment Weekly
in the week of publication. The title came from King’s desire to continue the motif of ‘stories to be read after dark’.

King provided an afterword with some hints about the stories’ inspiration:
1922
came from the non-fiction book
Wisconsin Death Trip
, penned by Michael Lesy in 1973 about the city of Black River Walls, Wisconsin. The photos within it impressed King with a sense of isolation and desperation. He decided to use rats because they were still creatures that scared him – in a conversation with fans to promote the book, he noted that the scene where Wilf reaches up for a hatbox and is bitten by a rat was one of his favourites.

Big Driver
was prompted by a stop during a trip in 2007 when he saw a trucker talking to a woman with a flat tyre. He also wanted to play with the horror-movie tropes of the youngsters taking the short cut that leads to whatever nightmare is waiting for them. In his ‘liner notes’ on the Simon & Schuster website, King references the Charles Bronson movie
Death Wish
, the real-life vigilante Bernard Goetz, and the Jodie Foster film
The Brave One
.

‘Fair Extension’ also played with horror tropes, this time the idea of the man who makes a deal with the devil. Usually, this has some horrible ending, but King wondered what would happen if the devil were a fair trader?

A Good Marriage
was triggered by news reports about serial killer Dennis Rader, and the way that many people refused to believe that his wife Paula could have been married to him for thirty-four years without realizing what sort of person he was. The website page promoting this story on the Simon & Schuster site is suitably gruesome, but worth checking out.

The paperback edition, released in May 2011, also included the short story ‘Under the Weather’: Brad Franklin has always maintained that if anything happened to his wife,
he would use his imagination to keep her alive. And that’s precisely what he proceeds to do, even though the smell is getting worse, and their dog Lady has found something distinctly unpleasant to chew on . . .

‘1922’ became the basis for Shooter Jennings and Last False Hope’s 2012 song of the same name, which begins with a shortened version of Wilfred’s confession and then condenses the plot of the novella into just under four minutes. Jennings and King collaborated on Jennings’ album,
Black Ribbons
, with Jennings’ band Heirophant, in 2010.

Stephen King had already penned a screenplay for
A Good Marriage
by the time the book was published, and it was filmed across the summer of 2013. Peter Askin directed the feature, with Joan Allen as Darcy, Anthony LaPaglia playing Bob, and Stephen Lang as detective Holt Ramsey. The independent production was expected to be released in 2014.

Mile 81
(Simon & Schuster Digital, September 2011)

The rest stop at Mile 81 on interstate highway I-95 has been abandoned for a few years: no one goes to the Burger King or uses any of the other facilities. Except, of course, the local youth, and those, like young Pete Simmons, who want to emulate them. Left to wander around on his own, Pete tries some vodka, and falls into a doze. As he sleeps, an unusual mud-covered station wagon arrives at the rest stop, and attracts the attention of passing insurance man Doug Clayton, whose attempt to be a Good Samaritan leads to him being eaten by the car. Horse trainer Julianne Vernon is its next victim, and then the Lussier family arrive. Mother and father fall victim, but the two children are stuck in the car: six-year-old Rachel and four-year-old Blake get out and manage to call for help. But it takes Trooper Jimmy Holding and Pete Simmons’ ‘baby trick’ with a magnifying glass to make the car vanish . . .

Mile 81
is a good old-fashioned Stephen King story about a scary vehicle. There are elements of
Christine
to it (and there’s even a brief reference to the John Carpenter movie), as well as
From A Buick 8
. The promotional material interestingly refers to the ‘heart of
Stand By Me’
(the film version of
The Body
), rather than King’s original tale. Although many reviewers picked up on the story’s resemblance to his older work, King firmly roots
Mile 81
in contemporary times with references to
Boardwalk Empire
, the
American Vampire
comic book (for which he co-wrote the first part), and even
Doctor Who
. The car may well be one of those used by the Low Men.

Throttle
(William Morrow via iTunes, April 2012)

Biker gang The Tribe – including father and son Vince and ‘Race’ Adamson – are pissed off after a deal to invest in a meth lab fell apart, and they were involved in the murder of the dealer, Clarke, and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend. They’re split over whether to go after Clarke’s sister to try to get some of their money back, or write it off to experience. Discussing their plans at a rest stop, Race throws a flask in anger at an oil tanker, and Vince worries what the driver might have heard. However, he drives off.

As The Tribe go down the road, the tanker pursues them, and starts to either drive them off the road or run them over. While the tanker chases after Race through a small town, the few survivors either hightail it out of there, or plot using a stun grenade against the tanker’s driver. This is successful, killing the driver, but Vince realizes that the driver was the girlfriend’s brother who had heard what happened to her and sought revenge. Disgusted at him, Vince sends his son away.

Throttle
’s resemblance to Richard Matheson’s classic tale ‘Duel’, and Steven Spielberg’s TV movie based on it is
quite deliberate. It was commissioned for
He Is Legend
, an anthology celebrating the veteran author’s work, originally opening the collection in 2009. It was the first published collaboration between Stephen King and his son, Joe Hill. Joe already had a number of books to his name, receiving acclaim in his own right before his connection to Stephen King was revealed: fans of King’s work are encouraged to seek them out. As King himself has noted, their styles are very similar.

In the introduction to
Road Rage
, a graphic novel adaptation by Chris Ryall of both
Throttle
and Matheson’s original tale, father and son recalled trips spent when Joe was only six, shortly after Stephen had bought a laserdisc player and they had repeatedly watched the Spielberg film of
Duel
. They’d worked out what they would do if ‘THE TRUCK’ came after them, and when Joe received the invitation to participate in
He Is Legend
, he asked his father if he wanted to finish the story.

Although various news reports about IDW Publishing’s graphic-novel version of the story mention that the film rights to
Throttle
have been sold, no official announcement has yet been made regarding a big-screen outing for The Tribe.

A Face in the Crowd

(Simon & Schuster Digital, August 2012)

Dean Evers is a widower with some regrets about his life, but he still finds comfort in watching baseball games. However, things start to become rather strange when he sits looking at a game on his home television, and spots his childhood dentist in the crowd. The next night, his former business partner – who he blackmailed to get his own way – is there. And the next night, a boy who committed suicide after being bullied at school. Wondering if he is going mad, he tries to avoid watching, but when he gets drawn in, he sees his wife calling him; when they speak, she reveals
her disappointment in him. Finally, he sees himself, and when he goes down to the game, there’s a ticket waiting for him – and the crowd is filling up with everyone he has wronged over the years. Then he gets a call from someone who sees him on their TV, and Evers knows that the audience is about to be added to – particularly since his son can’t see him when he switches on his TV. Dean Evers has died, and this is his particular hell . . .

Like,
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, A Face in the Crowd
was co-written with Stewart O’Nan. In their book which looked at a season from the point of view of two avid fans, King recalled playing what he called ‘the Face Game’, giving himself points for spotting spectators doing particular things. On 20 May 2004, he notes having ‘a very nasty little idea’ for a story about a man watching baseball on TV, and seeing his childhood best friend sitting there, still looking about ten years old. Whatever game the man watches, the boy is there, with more and more of the man’s dead friends and relatives surrounding him. He mentioned the idea again at the Savannah Book Festival in February 2012, but admitted that ‘I can’t figure it out’ and offered the story to those present to work on for themselves. Stewart O’Nan was in the audience that night. Six months later,
A Face in the Crowd
was published.