A Brief Guide to Stephen King (5 page)

The Kings had started to spend their winter months in Florida, and during February 2000, Peter Straub visited to start work on a new collaboration,
Black House
, the long-awaited sequel to
The Talisman
, which, thanks to developments in technology in the intervening decades, they were able to complete much more easily than the first book. At the suggestion of his foreign rights agent, Ralph Vicinanza, King published the original novella
Riding the Bullet
as an e-book, and the response was phenomenal: within twenty-four hours of its release, the book was downloaded 400,000 times. (In the Scribner office pool, King thought it might make 16,000.)

As a result of
Riding the Bullet’s
success, King resurrected
The Plant
, a story which he had sent out in parts to friends as Christmas gifts in the early 1980s, and made that available on an honour system: readers could donate a dollar each for most instalments (some were two dollars). ‘My friends – we have the chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare,’ he announced on his website. Over three-quarters of those who read the book did pay, but King lost interest in the story, and although he promised there would be further chapters from the summer of 2001, none has ever appeared.

In contemporary interviews, King regularly referred to his life post-accident as ‘the bonus round’, and he was determined to complete the ‘Dark Tower’ saga. The final three volumes were written together, and published between November 2003 and September 2004, incorporating a famous author called Stephen King as an integral part of the plot. The cliffhanger ending to the penultimate
volume was a news report of King’s death in an accident. King was unrepentant about what was seen as self-indulgence by some, and also about the way in which the story closed.

From A Buick 8
was published in 2002, although King had completed the draft of it a few weeks before the accident; since it begins with someone killed by a car in the sort of drive-by in which King was involved, Scribners felt it might be inappropriate to release it straightaway.
Rose Red
appeared on ABC the same year, for which King worked with Ridley Pearson on a tie-in prequel novel. However, a lot of attention was paid to comments King made about his impending retirement – and for a time, many fans believed that the final ‘Dark Tower’ volumes would mark the end of King’s writing career. King clarified that he meant retiring from publishing the material he wrote, rather than ceasing to write altogether, and there were many who believed that he never really had any intention of packing up, and that this was simply a long-running joke he was having with his fans.

For someone who was contemplating retiring, starting work on a new column for a popular magazine might seem a contradictory step. King’s regular contributions to
Entertainment Weekly
which started in August 2003 were subtitled ‘The Pop of King’ and showcased his favourite items of pop culture. No doubt there were those who thought of these pieces when they expressed their amazement at the news that King was to receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters that November.

It may have made some critics apoplectic, such as Yale professor Harold Bloom, but attending the ceremony nearly killed Stephen King. He was still not properly recovered from the accident, and had contracted pneumonia, but he was adamant that he was going to attend the ceremony. He gave a speech defending the role of popular literature,
wondering if people felt they got ‘brownie points’ for not keeping in touch with the keystones of their own culture. In response, Australian author Shirley Hazzard opined that they didn’t need a reading list from Stephen King.

The pneumonia was caused by the bottom part of his lung not properly reinflating after the accident, and he then contracted a bacterial infection, keeping him hospitalized for weeks, during which time Tabitha reorganized his office. This gave him the inspiration for
Lisey’s Story
, a tale of a writer’s widow dealing with her grief, which he worked on as he recovered his strength. He was also heavily involved with the adaptation of Lars von Trier’s 1995 Danish miniseries
Riget
about a haunted hospital, incorporating his own experiences into the single-season
Kingdom Hospital
that ran from March to August 2004. This marked the first time that he and his wife had officially worked together on a story, with Tabitha providing the plotline for the tenth episode.

King had never lost his love for small publishers – he maintained the relationship with Donald M. Grant for all seven of the ‘Dark Tower’ novels – and was delighted to help the Hard Case Crime series, set up by editor Charles Ardai. Rather than just provide a cover blurb, King offered to pen a story, and
The Colorado Kid
became a headline release for the company, eventually leading to a TV series,
Haven
, from the same production team who mined King’s early novel
The Dead Zone
for six years of stories about psychic Johnny Smith. His contributions to the mystery field were recognized when he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 2007.

His creative juices seemed to be flowing: in addition to
The Colorado Kid
and
Lisey’s Story
, King wrote the shorter, but very effective, tale
Cell
, which Scribners decided they wanted to publish ahead of
Lisey’s Story
. The two books showcased the differing sides of King’s writing in the twenty-first century:
Cell
is a science-fiction horror
story;
Lisey’s Story
, which he proudly maintained was the best piece of fiction he had written, is a love story with some fantastical elements.

The Kings continued to split their time between Maine and Florida, and, starting with the novella
The Gingerbread Girl
, King began to set some of his stories in his new locality, able to bring an outsider’s eye to locations and situations which he was unable to do in Maine. His love of short stories was rekindled when he was asked to be guest editor for the
Best American Short Stories 2007
, and he increased his output in that area – leading to a new collection,
Just After Sunset
, in 2008. King was proud that both that collection and his novel,
Duma Key
, out the same year, won the Bram Stoker Awards in their relevant categories.

The ‘Dark Tower’ series had been fêted on its completion, with the final volume receiving a British Fantasy Award. In 2007, the circle started to turn again with the start of Marvel Comics’ sixty-issue series that ran for six years, filling in gaps in Roland the gunslinger’s chronology, and retelling some of the key stories from the early years. King kept a weather eye on the stories plotted by his assistant Robin Furth, and scripted, for the most part, by Peter David. The same year, a further ‘trunk’ novel,
Blaze
, was released under the Richard Bachman name, to support the Haven Foundation, a charity set up to help freelance artists who couldn’t work because of sudden disability or disease. King worked with John Irvine and J.K. Rowling on a two-night benefit at the Radio City Music Hall in New York (‘Harry, Carrie and Garp’) to kick-start the foundation, and all his revenue from
Blaze
was passed to Haven.

Joe King had begun publishing stories under the pen-name Joe Hill some years earlier, although his identity was revealed in 2007; he and his father started to team up to write the occasional story, starting with ‘Throttle’, a tribute to Richard Matheson’s ‘Duel’ in 2009, and continuing
with ‘In the Tall Grass’ in 2012. Clearly proud of all his children’s achievements, King even noted that, should anything happen to him, Joe would be able to complete his work in progress.

King returned to an unfinished novel, ‘The Cannibalists’, for his next work, which became the massive
Under the Dome
, which was released in the summer of 2009. He started hinting that he was thinking about another story in the ‘Dark Tower’ saga around this time, as well as a sequel to
The Shining
. He decided to work on the former first, with
The Wind Through the Keyhole
arriving in 2012, and
Doctor Sleep
– which King noted was a new attempt to scare readers properly – following in 2013.

Before those, he returned to an earlier fascination – what if someone could prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy? – for his 2011 blockbuster novel
11/22/63
, as well as indulging his love of baseball in the novella
Blockade Billy
, which first appeared in 2010, alongside a dark collection of novellas
Full Dark, No Stars
. At the same time, he was writing his first comic book series,
American Vampire
, after its creator Scott Snyder approached him for a blurb, and King asked if he could contribute more fully.

Another long-running project finally came to a head in 2012: King was approached in the late 1990s by rock legend John Mellencamp to assist with writing a musical about a cabin haunted by the spirits of two brothers. Progress was slow but steady across the decade, with Mellencamp involving record producer T-Bone Burnett, and King writing the book for the show, which they titled
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County
. Every so often it would look as if it was close to being staged, but the creative forces were keen for it to be right straight out of the gate. Eventually a production was mounted in Atlanta in April 2012, with an album, containing King’s full script, released in June 2013.

For a man in his mid-sixties, King is showing little signs of slowing down. He contributed a second story for the
Hard Case Crime series,
Joyland
, and while promoting the release of the CBS adaptation of
Under the Dome
during the summer of 2013, he revealed that he had completed work on the first draft of his next novel (currently titled ‘Mister Mercedes’) and was halfway through the next (‘Revival’). Interest in his work continues: as well as a fourth season of
Haven
, and the
Under the Dome
TV show, a new film of
Carrie
is hitting cinemas not long before the fortieth anniversary of his first novel, with
A Good Marriage
, based on the novella from
Full Dark, No Stars
, in front of the cameras ready for release in 2014.

King dismissed his own work at the start of
Bag of Bones
as the ‘literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries’. That’s unfair on the body of work he has created – and on his own legacy, as one of the true storytellers of our age.

Carrie
(Doubleday, April 1974)

1980: an investigation is taking place into a wave of deaths in the town of Chamberlain, Maine, following the prom attended by Carietta White’s year group. Through witness testimony of various kinds, a picture comes together of a troubled child whose telekinetic gifts were displayed from an early age. An outsider among her class at Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School, Carrie is teased mercilessly after her first period, which she simply does not comprehend. Her fundamentalist Christian mother is no more sympathetic, and further antagonism is aimed at Carrie after her teacher, Rita Desjardin, punishes those who teased her.

Some of her classmates – particularly Chris Hargensen, who is banned from the school prom because she won’t serve the detention punishment – decide to teach Carrie a lesson and humiliate her at the prom. Another classmate,
Sue Snell, befriends Carrie and persuades her boyfriend Tommy Ross to take Carrie to the prom. Carrie and Tommy are crowned king and queen, in a rigged vote, and buckets of pigs’ blood, set up by Chris and her boyfriend, are dropped on them from above the stage. Carrie proceeds to kill everyone in the gym, then starts to destroy the town, wreaking her revenge on Chris and her boyfriend along the way. After her crazed mother stabs her, Carrie stops her heart, but Carrie is dying. After speaking to Sue, accepting that she was not involved in the prom incident, she expires.

Although Stephen King had sold a number of short stories to various men’s magazines, and had penned novel-length stories that had yet to sell, his real success dated from the publication of
Carrie
. It is dedicated to his wife Tabitha, who encouraged him to complete the story after he had written the shower scene at the start of the tale but then consigned the pages to the garbage, considering he had ‘written the world’s all-time loser’. She was certain that it had a lot of potential, even if he didn’t want to spend time developing an idea which would need more space than a short story could provide. Her advice was sound: the book was bought by Bill Thompson for Doubleday for $2,500; the paperback rights sold for $400,000 enabling King to give up teaching and concentrate on writing.

According to King’s recollections in
On Writing
, the idea for
Carrie
had been sparked by cleaning the showers when he was working as a janitor at his old high school, and reading an article in
Life
magazine about telekinesis possibly being triggered by the onset of puberty in young girls. The character herself was inspired by two girls he knew while growing up: one was raised in a house with a nearly life-sized, realistic depiction of the Crucifixion; the other was taunted by her high school peers because she didn’t have a change of clothing, and then teased more
when she did try to wear a new outfit. Both had died before King wrote the book.

Although King would experiment with different formats over the years,
Carrie
is unusual for its epistolary form – the text is made up of excerpts from letters, books, diaries and official reports rather than a strictly linear approach. Some of the places mentioned would reappear in King’s later stories – the laundry where Carrie’s mother works is the same one that possesses the Mangler in the short story of that title. King himself potentially makes an appearance – one of Carrie’s teachers is an Edwin King – and there’s even a possibility that King’s greatest villain, Randall Flagg, is lurking somewhere near: after all, Carrie’s mother refers to the ‘Black Man’ as an embodiment of evil.