A Brief Guide to Stephen King (3 page)

Once
Carrie
was complete, King sent it to Bill Thompson at Doubleday, and carried on with his normal routine – but one afternoon in the spring of 1973, he got a message from the school office to say his wife was calling. Because the Kings no longer had a phone, Bill Thompson had had to
send a telegram, and Tabitha had used a neighbour’s phone to call her husband. Doubleday was going to buy
Carrie
. ‘Is $2,500 advance ok?’ Thompson asked. It wasn’t enough for King to retire from teaching to become a writer, but it was a start.

The $400,000 for which the paperback rights to
Carrie
were sold to Signet – out of which under his contract with Doubleday, King would receive half – was another matter. The phone call on Mother’s Day in May 1973 meant that Stephen King was no longer a high school teacher who wrote at evenings and weekends. It was the start of Stephen King’s forty-year-long career as a full-time writer. As Bill Thompson’s telegram confirming the original deal concluded, ‘The future lies ahead.’

Stephen King’s mother Ruth sadly didn’t live to see the fruits of her son’s success. She was aware of the sale to Doubleday, and the changes that the paperback deal would make to the Kings’ lives, but by that stage she was already suffering from uterine cancer, which was confirmed in August 1973. The Kings moved to southern Maine to be near her during her final few months, and King worked on his next novel, a vampire story then known as ‘Second Coming’, but eventually published as
’Salem’s Lot
, in a small room in the garage. By this stage he was starting to drink more heavily.

King sent Bill Thompson a draft of ‘Second Coming’ alongside
Blaze
, a homage in part to John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
, which he had written in the early part of 1973. Thompson felt that the vampire story had more chance of success;
Blaze
didn’t see print for over thirty years. In the aftermath of his mother’s death in December
1973, King wrote
Roadwork
, one of his bleakest stories, as well as the short story ‘The Woman in the Room’.

Doubleday bought
’Salem’s Lot
in April 1974, with New American Library this time paying half a million dollars for the paperback rights. Wanting a change of scenery, the Kings moved to Boulder, Colorado that autumn (apparently chosen at random by opening an atlas of the USA and stabbing a finger at the page). This would eventually provide the background for King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel
The Stand
. While there, King worked on a story based on the Pattie Hearst kidnapping, ‘The House on Value Street’, but couldn’t make it work. He also toyed with an idea about a boy with psychic powers in an amusement park (‘Darkshine’) but found the location wasn’t conducive to creating suspense.

A Halloween trip to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park was the trigger for King’s next novel. The hotel was packing up for the winter, and the Kings were the only people staying there. King’s imagination started working overtime, and within hours he had come up with most of the key beats of ‘The Shine’ – or, as it was renamed,
The Shining
. His anger when three-year-old Joe had ‘helped’ his dad by scribbling on the pages of his manuscript was channelled into the story: for him, writing about something bad happening meant that it wouldn’t happen to him in real life.

King wasn’t concerned about being labelled a horror writer: he considered it a compliment, and believed that there was a long lineage of great writers in the field. When Bill Thompson heard the plotline of
The Shining
in January 1975, he did express his worry about literary ‘typecasting’, but King was adamant that this was what he wanted to write.

Once
The Shining
was complete, King looked once more at ‘The House on Value Street’ but inspiration still failed to strike. A news report about a chemical-biological warfare spill, on the other hand, reminded him of ‘Night Surf’, a
short story he had written a few years earlier about a group of teenage survivors of a terrible flu, known as Captain Trips. The two together formed the core of what many still regard as King’s finest novel,
The Stand
, which he worked on – regarding it as his ‘own little Vietnam’ because it seemed to be never-ending – in Boulder, and then back in Maine when the Kings returned there in the summer of 1975. They bought a house in Bridgton, where he tried to work on other projects, including early versions of
Firestarter
and
The Dead Zone
.

The Kings met Kirby McCauley at a publishing party in the winter of 1976, and the literary agent soon took the author on as a client – initially for some short stories, and then for all of his work. It was the right time for King to make this move:
Carrie
was released as a movie by Brian de Palma in November 1976, and the success of the feature film added to King’s growing reputation, which was heightened further when
The Shining
was published early in 1977.

Another new King book was published that year, but only a tiny handful of people were aware of its authorship. Annoyed at the perceived wisdom that an author could only release one book in a year, or else the sales of the new one would eat into the untapped potential of the previous release, King decided to offer his ‘trunk’ novels – the ones which he had written and put away – direct to New American Library. King insisted that NAL use a pseudonym on the cover (originally it was going to be Guy Pillsbury) and ‘Getting It On’, now retitled
Rage
, was published as by Richard Bachman in September 1977.

Although Doubleday wanted a new King novel for early 1978, King knew that
The Stand
wouldn’t be completed in time, so offered them a collection of short stories, culled from the many that he had been selling since 1967.
Night Shift
was a surprise hit for the publisher in February, although they were less surprised at how well
The Stand
sold when it was published seven months later.

Perhaps if some of the senior executives at the publishing house had treated King better – after all, he was one of their best-selling authors – then the very publicized split that occurred soon after might not have happened. King felt that Leon Uris and Alex Haley were treated much better, whereas it seemed as if Bill Thompson had to remind them who King was every time he visited the office.

Another factor that weighed against Doubleday was their treatment of the manuscript for
The Stand
. The book that King delivered was 1,200 pages long; their presses could only cope with a book two-thirds that size. King was told that 400 pages needed to go; either he could do the edit, or they would. The author understandably carried out the work himself, keeping the material, and eventually reworking it into the revised edition of the story that came out a decade later.

The Stand
was the final story King owed Doubleday under his contract, and he was determined to get a better financial deal for the next books. He asked for an advance of $3.5 million; Doubleday refused. With McCauley as his agent, King went to NAL, and made a deal with them. Since they were only paperback publishers, they sold the hardback rights to Viking.

After all of the difficulties over the negotiations, the Kings decided on another change of scenery. They crossed the Atlantic to England, complete with new arrival Owen, who was born in February 1977, and rented a house in Fleet in Hampshire. Although the move wasn’t the creative jolt King had hoped for, he did meet fellow author Peter Straub, and the two fantasy writers agreed to collaborate on a book when they were both free. The proposed year-long sabbatical in Britain lasted only three months, and the Kings bought a new home in Center Lovell, Maine.

In September 1978, King started a year teaching at his old university in Maine, renting a house near Route 15.
His lectures at his alma mater formed the core of his non-fiction book
Danse Macabre
, which was commissioned by Bill Thompson for his new publishing house, Everest, after he had been fired by Doubleday. The Kings’ home, and its proximity to traffic, led to a family tragedy when Naomi’s cat was killed, and inspired King’s most gruesome novel,
Pet Sematary
, which he wrote and then put away, not intending to publish it.

Another story about which he hadn’t thought for a long time also resurfaced when the Kings looked in the cellar of their Bridgton home: King had been fascinated by Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’ at university, and it had prompted him to write both a poem, ‘The Dark Man’, and a couple of short stories about a gunslinger named Roland. Little realizing how central to his fiction this fantasy Western would become, he sold the stories to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
.

While working on
The Dead Zone
and then
Firestarter
, King’s addictions started to get worse, as he was now mixing in circles where cocaine was freely available. In interviews as well as in
On Writing
, he freely admitted that he was writing stories with paper stuffed up his nose to prevent bleeding, and that there weren’t many hours of the day when he was fully functional – hungover until 2 p.m. and then drunk from 5 p.m. till midnight.

The stories continued to flow.
’Salem’s Lot
became a well-reviewed TV miniseries in November 1979, shortly before the Kings bought a house in Bangor, Maine, which, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be haunted. Stanley Kubrick filmed
The Shining
, and although he consulted with King on a number of issues, he didn’t use the author’s own screenplay, or remain faithful to the core of the book.
Cujo
appeared in hardback, and local small press publisher Donald M. Grant presented the first of his lavish editions of the ‘Dark Tower’ series with
The Gunslinger
in
1982. King’s trunk novels
The Long Walk, Roadwork
and
The Running Man
were all published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, each slipping beneath the radar of the fans who were keen to buy anything with the Stephen King name on it.

King enjoyed the luxury of spending time with his children – he and Joe both recall watching laser video discs (early DVDs) together of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
Duel
– and he was able to indulge his older son during the filming of
Creepshow
, an anthology movie based on five of his short stories directed by George A. Romero, released in 1982. Joe played young Billy, the reader of the E.C.-inspired comic book in which the tales appear, while King had a chance to stretch his acting muscles playing the lead in ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’. Not the author’s finest hour, perhaps, but it led to a tradition of King – like Hitchcock, or Spider-Man creator Stan Lee – making a cameo appearance in stories based on his work. He was also able to indulge his whims, buying the local Bangor radio station WACZ in 1983, renaming it WZON, and providing a solid diet of rock music.

While Tabitha’s own writing career started to take off, King had a final tussle with Doubleday over the release of funds they owed him. To make a clean break, King gave them
Pet Sematary
, which he had believed would never be published. As well as Donald M. Grant, he worked with small publishers Land of Enchantment on
Cycle of the Werewolf
, which had originally been intended as a calendar.

He hoped to continue the Richard Bachman pen-name as an outlet for other writing, but when
Thinner
was published in late 1984, an enterprising librarian, Steve Brown, became convinced that Richard Bachman and Stephen King were one and the same, despite King’s regular protestations. Investigating the copyright pages of the earlier books, he discovered that mistakenly King’s name had
been linked to
Rage
. He wrote to King, expecting a denial, but instead got a personal call from the writer inviting him to talk about what to do next. As a result, King went public with the news in February 1985 and provided a foreword for an omnibus reprint of
The Bachman Books
later that year. The collaboration with Peter Straub finally saw print at the same time as
Thinner
. In
The Talisman
both writers consciously imitated the other, as much for their own amusement as anything else.

King wasn’t as amused on the set of
Maximum Overdrive
. Dino De Laurentiis had produced a number of movies based on King’s books – at this stage of the 1980s, most of King’s novels had been filmed, and short stories were either being expanded for feature films (such as ‘Children of the Corn’) or compiled into portmanteau movies like
Cat’s Eye
– and wanted King to direct one himself. King reluctantly agreed, but the shoot was a nightmare, since the Italian crew mostly didn’t speak English, and King himself was high for much of the time. In the trailer for the movie, on the DVD, the most frightening thing is the state of the author himself.

Yet still the stories flowed. King saw
IT
, published in 1986, as his final statement on many of the themes which had punctuated his writing over the years, and the following year’s books –
The Eyes of the Dragon
(originally written for his daughter Naomi after she wouldn’t read his other books); the second ‘Dark Tower’ book,
The Drawing of the Three
; and
Misery
– were very different in style.

However, the
Castle Rock
newsletter, which had been set up to provide information for King’s fans, announced in March 1987 that Stephen King was going to retire – but then quickly had to backtrack, and explain that King was actually simply going to be writing less, so he could spend more time with his family. Many fans weren’t impressed with
Misery
, published shortly after this news became
public, particularly in its depiction of fans, and there was a generally negative reaction from readers and critics to
The Tommyknockers
, which arrived in November that year.