A Brief Guide to Stephen King (33 page)

The X-Mansion comes under attack from a psychic force which attacks nearly all of the mutants and makes them face their greatest fear – in the case of Kitty Pryde, it’s hunger, and she finds herself in the kitchen of the mansion facing a creature in a Death-like cowl who offers her a tasty meal which turns into a ‘sickening slush of putridity’ filled with maggots. The creature explains he is hunger personified, and tells her to starve. She is rescued by Nightcrawler.

The mutants realize the attack has come from Africa, currently suffering a dreadful epidemic of starvation. They travel there bringing aid, and try to defeat the creature which is feeding off the misery of the human race.

Stephen King’s contribution to this ‘jam session’ for writers and artists was a three-page sequence featuring the young
mutant Kitty Pryde – as delineated above. His section was illustrated by Berni Wrightson, with inks by Jeff Jones.

The one-off comic was the idea of Jim Starlin and Berni Wrightson, who suggested it to Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. The proceeds from the comic would go to a hunger relief charity in the same way that the money raised by the Live Aid concerts assisted with the effort. Chris Claremont, one of the regular
X-Men
writers, recruited various colleagues with Starlin and Wrightson tackling their artistic friends, and the other
X-Men
writer Ann Nocenti coordinating efforts.

As Jim Shooter recalled in 2011, those writers who weren’t used to the sparsity of the comics’ medium – particularly in the way comics worked in the 1980s – needed some help. Although he admitted he might be exaggerating slightly, Shooter believed that King gave them 5,000 words for the three pages; overnight, Claremont, Ann Nocenti and Shooter had to cut 90 per cent of it. Shooter’s blog also details the unbelievably negative reaction Marvel received from Oxfam America when they offered the proceeds to them, and the eventual decision to pass the half a million dollars plus to the American Friends Service Committee.

American Vampire
(Vertigo, May 2010–September 2010; collected October 2010)

Skinner Sweet is an American Vampire – not your standard European breed, but something quite different. His origins are told by Will Bunting, the author of
Bad Blood, or The Monster Outlaw – A Terrifying Tale of the Old West
: a notorious murderer and bank robber, Sweet was captured by Pinkertons Detective Agency in Sidewinder, Colorado, and put on a train bound for New Mexico. However, when his gang derail the train, they encounter a banker named Percy, who bites Sweet in the neck, leaving him for dead. (Percy can go out in daylight, even though he is a vampire, as long as he has sun cream on!) Sweet is buried on Boot
Hill, but despite his grave being flooded for decades when a lake is created over Sidewinder, he survives as one of the undead. The European vampires who control the area aren’t best pleased by his survival particularly as Sweet can walk around in full daylight.

Sweet goes after the Pinkerton agents, summoning them by telegram. They come to Lakeview, the town built next to the lake which now covers Sidewinder, which Sweet has devastated, and guess that he is now a ‘skinwalker’; Bunting, who is with them, thinks that Sweet is some new sort of vampire. Sweet himself deduces his power comes from the sun. The Pinkerton agents attack, but one is killed – the other, Jim Book, is infected by Sweet’s blood. A rock fall seals Sweet inside a cave.

Book begs his partner’s daughter Abilena to kill him, while Sweet escapes and goes to kill his ‘maker’, banker Percy. Abilena makes love to Book, and then shoots him. She and her daughter by Book track Sweet and see him in 1925 at a book signing by Will Bunting . . .

American Vampire
marks the third time that Stephen King has been asked for something short connected to a project, and ended up penning far more than he expected.
Cycle of the Werewolf
developed from vignettes for a calendar;
The Colorado Kid
came when he was asked for a blurb for the new crime imprint; and his involvement with
American Vampire
began after its creator Scott Snyder approached him for some words about the new story that he had sold to DC Comics’ mature imprint, Vertigo. Taken with the tale, King asked if he could instead write part of it – if Vertigo didn’t mind. And of course they didn’t: ‘On Monday morning, at 8.30, I got a call from the whole Vertigo office saying, “Did you say Stephen King would be willing to do an issue or two?” So I told them that he was. And they, of course, were over the moon about it,’ Snyder told Lilja’s Library.

The first five issues of
American Vampire
contained two stories each: the first, written by Scott Snyder, told the tale of Sweet’s ‘current-day’ activities in 1925. The second was penned by King, and related Sweet’s backstory. Although he had been a comics fan for many years, King had not written for the medium since 1985, and, as he noted in ‘Suck on This’, his introduction to the graphic novel collection, it had changed considerably: ‘thought balloons . . . are now passé’ he discovered. He stated that he wanted to ‘light a blowtorch and burn [a story] in’, keen to help rid readers of the idea that vampires were of the
Twilight
ilk: ‘anorexic teenage girls, boy-toys with big dewy eyes’, as he described them in the introduction.

King didn’t devise Sweet’s backstory – Snyder had worked out the main beats before King’s involvement – but the storytelling was completely down to him, in tandem with artist Rafael Albuquerque. As he told Lilja’s Library, Snyder thought King would only have time to write two issues but King enjoyed himself, and surprised Snyder by asking if he could ‘go off the res[ervation] a little bit . . . He wound up doing five full sixteen-page issues about Skinner and his relationship with his adversary, a Pinkerton who caught him when he was alive. And it was just so good. I mean the series as a whole, not just his part of it, is exponentially better for his involvement. I couldn’t be more grateful.’

Stephen King’s involvement with the title ended with issue five, but according to Snyder at the time, he would ‘love [King] to come back for the 1950s. We both love rockabilly and hot rods. I want to see what he’d do with vampires in that period.’ However, when the tale reached that point – in stories published during 2012 – King was not part of the creative team.

Music has always been a driving force in King’s life – not just his use of song titles and lyrics in his writing, but also playing in the Rock Bottom Remainders, owning a radio station, and ‘cranking the AC-DC up’ when he is working. Although some of his stories have been brought to the stage in musical form – notably
Carrie
and
Dolores Claiborne
– public contributions to new musical works haven’t been one of his more prolific areas.

Black Ribbons
(2010)

Shooter Jennings’ concept album, which he described before it came out as ‘an experience from top to bottom’, is a selection of songs sung by Jennings’ band Heirophant, hosted by a DJ Will O’ The Wisp, whose talk show is being shut down because of government censorship. In the final hour before the government’s lackeys arrive to close him down, Will O’ The Wisp plays music by his favourite band, Heirophant.

Jennings came up with the idea of asking King to play Will O’ The Wisp in the dystopian tale and sent a script to the author. King then ‘took that and he rewrote it and changed it and added quite a lot of great stuff, so at the end of the day, that part of it was a collaboration,’ Jennings told the Associated Press.

Jennings devised the concept while driving around America with his fiancée and infant daughter during the latter part of 2008 just as the economic crisis was building, and people were predicting the end of civilization or a police state. After various emails with the author, Jennings received a CD with a recording of King’s version of the text, called ‘The Last Night of the Last Light’, which he then incorporated into the album.

Jennings’ music was mentioned by King in
Lisey’s Story
, and the author told the
Guardian
that he had ‘been a huge Shooter Jennings fan from the very beginning, so I was flattered to be asked’. Jennings explained to music magazine
Mix Online
: ‘I’m super-proud of this record, and making it was one of the best times of my life.’ His connection with King continued two years later when he recorded the song ‘1922’ which was a retelling of King’s novella of that name from
Full Dark, No Stars
.

Ghost Brothers of Darkland County

(Stage version: 2012; Album: 2013)

In 1967 a tragedy happened in Lake Belle Reve, in Darkland County, Mississippi, and those who died haunt the site. Forty years later, Joe McCandless calls his family to the haunted cabin: his son Frank, an author who is having an affair with Anna, who’s supposed to be dating Drake, his older musician brother, who’s normally been the successful one of the pair. The two boys are constantly at loggerheads: Drake recently broke Frank’s arm, and Anna’s actions are making things worse. Joe arrives as the situation is being stirred up by the Devil whispering in everyone’s
ears, and starts to tell them what happened in 1967 to his two brothers Jack and Andy, as well as the caretaker Dan Coker, who died in the cabin.

The boys both fell in love with the same girl, Jenna (and all three, as ghosts, are watching what’s happening in 2007), but when Jack started to get more attention after winning a shooting medal, Andy became very jealous. The story starts to get to Frank and Drake as Drake believes a ghostly hand helps him find Jack’s shooting medal that has been in the cabin for forty years. Joe relates how, as a youngster of ten, he watched Jack and Jenna tell Andy that they were engaged. The argument became more volatile as the boys got drunk, and escalated into a shooting contest – in which Jack shot Andy. Joe tells his family that Jack and Jenna then committed suicide. But the ghosts give their brother a chance to tell the truth – and that has unintended consequences . . .

Ghost Brothers of Darkland County
was over a decade in preparation – rock star John Mellencamp approached Stephen King with the idea for a play in the mid-1990s, based on real events that had occurred at a cabin in Indiana. Two brothers had fallen out over a girl, one had shot the other, and the survivor and the girl were killed in a car accident on their way back into town. King liked the idea of a haunted cabin where events started to play out in the present as they had done in the past, reckoning he was the obvious choice for someone to talk to about writing a ghost story.

King provided a hundred-page book, to which Mellencamp added the songs – unlike musicals such as
The Phantom of the Opera
, the songs were composed to add flavour to the story. ‘Steve and I made a decision early on that we weren’t going to use the songs to move the story forward,’ Mellencamp explained. King would say that a song was needed at a particular part of the story, and Mellencamp would write something appropriate for the characters.
Working with Grammy-winning music producer and composer T-Bone Burnett, and director Susan V. Booth, they created a show that premiered in Atlanta in 2012.

‘What a long, strange trip it’s been,’ King said at an Atlanta press conference in December 2011, admitting that he became involved with the musical ‘to try something that was a little bit risky and outside my comfort zone’. Booth’s involvement led to considerable changes to the show, which had been due to be staged in 2009 but was cancelled when the creators felt it wasn’t working. ‘I ask an obnoxious amount of questions,’ Booth explained. ‘I want to know, starting at the very beginning, “What made you decide you wanted to tell this story with this language? What do you want to accomplish, what do you want us to feel? How do you want us to be moved, changed, altered by what you’ve written, by the song you’ve composed?” Steve, in particular, loves to engage in the dialogue of “tell me why”. And you earn a place in that conversation with him by close and careful reading.’

Ghost Brothers
ran for a month, from 11 April–13 May 2012, and a twenty-city North American tour was planned for autumn 2013. The album, featuring an all-star cast of both actors and singers, was released in June 2013 in various formats: the stand-alone CD features most of the songs, with brief snippets of dialogue to introduce them. King fans are recommended to get the ‘hardback’ edition, which contains the full book and libretto – without them, many of the songs lack context.

Although Stephen King is best known for his fiction, his three major pieces of published non-fiction – not counting his various essays for
Entertainment Weekly
, which were never less than thought-provoking, and could be controversial – are all key pieces in their fields. (For considerable detail on his other work including his baseball-related material, check out Rocky Wood’s book,
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction
.)

Danse Macabre
(Everest House, April 1981; revised and corrected edition Berkeley Books, December 1983)

Stephen King’s guide to the world of horror, particularly over the period 1950–1980, with some intriguing biographical side steps. Beginning with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and the effect it had on the world, he discusses what horror means to different people. The use of the ‘hook’, and the various archetypes of horror fiction
are examined first, with Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
taken as the source texts for many of the vampire, ‘thing without a name’, and werewolf stories which followed.

Following what he calls ‘An Annoying Autobiographical Pause’ – which makes an interesting counterpoint to the equivalent sections in
On Writing
– he returns to his dissection of the state of horror as of 1980. Some classics of radio horror are relived, before two chapters are devoted to different elements of horror movies. The chapter on text and subtext details with some of the underlying themes, while the piece about the horror film as ‘junk food’ recalls really dreadful movies.