A Brief Guide to Stephen King (6 page)

King’s own description of it as a ‘young book by a young writer’ is accurate: there are elements and themes to which he would return regularly over the years (notably in
Firestarter
and
Christine
), but its raw power still reverberates forty years later.

Carrie
has lived on in many different media. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is justly famed for its shock ending; it is a moderately faithful translation of King’s text, with some surprisingly lyrical moments, and good roles for Sissy Spacek as Carrie and John Travolta as Chris’s boyfriend Billy. A belated sequel –
The Rage: Carrie 2
– appeared in 1998, with Amy Irving reprising her role as Sue Snell; based on the idea that Carrie’s father carried the gene that caused her problems, it wasn’t a success. A TV movie followed in 2002, designed as a pilot for an ongoing series; unsurprisingly, Carrie therefore survived. However, no show was commissioned. A further movie was released in 2013, with
Kick-Ass’s
Chloë Moretz cast as Carrie. When it was announced in May 2011, King told
Entertainment Weekly
, ‘Who knows if it will happen? The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not
Casablanca
,
or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book.’

One of the more unusual versions of a King text was the musical adaptation of
Carrie
, which has gone down in Broadway history as one of the great disasters. In fact, there is much to recommend in it – the revival in 2012 spawned a cast album showing the potential of the music – but the original production was undoubtedly doomed when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Terry Hands misunderstood the creators’ instructions to use
Grease
as a template. Instead of the 1950s-set musical, he looked to the ancient Greek civilization . . .

’Salem’s Lot
(Doubleday, October 1975)

They say you can’t go home again, but writer Ben Mears is determined to try, returning to the sleepy Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot after twenty-five years. When he was younger, he had a bad experience in the old Marsten House, currently owned by Kurt Barlow, and he’s now back in the Lot to write a book, perhaps about ‘the recurrent power of evil’, although he keeps his cards pretty close to his chest. He spends time with his old teacher, Matt Burke, and gets close to college graduate Susan Norton. And all the while, a plague of vampirism is spreading through the town, affecting the young and the old, caused by Barlow, a master vampire, and his partner, Richard Straker.

After some persuasion, local doctor Jimmy Cody and alcoholic priest Father Callahan join Ben and young horror fan Mark Petrie in their fight against the vampires. Matt Burke suffers a heart attack; Susan is captured and turned into a vampire, and Mark manages to kill Straker. Father Callahan is caught by Barlow and forced to drink his blood, after his lack of sufficient faith means his crucifix is ineffective against the vampire; as a result he finds himself unable to enter his church and leaves the Lot. Cody is murdered, but Ben and Mark are able to kill Barlow after
he moves from the Marsten house to the basement of the lodging-house where Ben has been staying. Ben and Mark go on the run, staying in Los Zapatas, Mexico for a time, but eventually return to Jerusalem’s Lot to burn the town to rid it of the now leaderless vampires.

One of King’s personal favourites among his early novels,
’Salem’s Lot
rewrote the rules for the horror story, pitching the classic tropes into small-town America. It derived from a conversation with his wife in which they wondered what would happen if Dracula appeared in contemporary America. Although they considered that there was a good chance the lord of the vampires would be hit by a yellow cab in New York, King kept pondering the idea of Dracula arriving in a ‘sleepy little country town’. The story of ‘Second Coming’, as
’Salem’s Lot
was originally known, sprang from there.

As well as Bram Stoker’s classic novel, which was one of the books that King taught at Hampden Academy,
’Salem’s Lot
incorporated a nightmare that King recalled suffering aged eight. The corpse of a hanged man was blowing in the wind, and King realized that it had his face, albeit pecked at by birds – and it then opened its eyes and looked at him, causing him to wake up screaming. Changing the name from Robert Burns (which was written on a placard around the corpse’s neck in his dream) to Hubie Marsten, King used the image for Ben Mears’ strong memory of events in the Marsten House.

One element of the novel often overlooked is its reflection of the paranoia of the time. King was writing
’Salem’s Lot
in 1973, shortly after the revelations regarding President Nixon’s involvement in covering up the burglary at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC, and the web of corruption exposed by the courts, not just within the government, but in the security services. Talking about it in 1980, King commented that he believed ‘the unspeakable
obscenity in
’Salem’s Lot
has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. In a way, it is more closely related to
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
than it is to
Dracula
. The fear behind
’Salem’s Lot
seems to be that the Government has invaded everybody.’

There are strong links to other areas of King’s writing. One of his earliest short stories, ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’, told the tale of events in the town over a century previously; it was published in
Night Shift
in 1978. Father Callahan became a central figure in the later novels in the ‘Dark Tower’ saga, beginning with
Wolves of the Calla
, which also provides an indication of the fate of Ben Mears. According to
Doctor Sleep
, the True Knot pass by the town of Jerusalem’s Lot during their passage across America in the years following the events of the book.

And, of course, this was the first of many stories by King centred upon a writer. Ben’s writing itself is perhaps not so relevant, but the combination of analysis and imagination that he applies to events helps him to understand what’s happening earlier than others.

Bill Thompson at Doubleday was offered the manuscripts for
’Salem’s Lot
and
Blaze
as potential follow-ups to
Carrie
; he decided to go with the vampire story, although he requested various changes from King. Some of the deleted scenes (notably Jimmy Cody’s death by rats rather than knives) were included as extras in a deluxe edition of the book, published in 2005. The book was dedicated to his daughter Naomi Rachel King.
(Blaze
was eventually published in 2007.)

’Salem’s Lot
was the first of King’s works adapted for television, in a four-hour miniseries in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper. Although some of it hasn’t dated well, it still provides some shocks, with David Soul called upon to dig much deeper than he was in his hit cop show
Starsky & Hutch
. Changes were made, in particular the nature of
Barlow: rather than being a sophisticated gentleman vampire, he became a homage to the Nosferatu version of the vampire, as seen in the 1922 movie. A sequel,
Return to
’
Salem’s Lot
, followed in 1987 with little bar the presence of vampires linking it to the original miniseries, or King’s novel. The story was adapted in seven parts for BBC Radio in 1995 by Gregory Evans, with a framing sequence added of Ben confessing to a Mexican priest.
Hellraiser’s
Doug Bradley played Barlow in a version that director Adrian Bean wanted to have ‘terrifying psychological realism with no holds barred action and horror’. In 2004, Rob Lowe’s Ben Mears battled Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer as Straker and Barlow respectively in a new TV miniseries; in this version, Ben is a war correspondent, rather than a fiction writer, and Father Callahan has a rather different fate.

The Shining
(Doubleday, January 1977)

Welcome to the Overlook Hotel. The isolated hotel, in the Colorado Rockies, is the setting for an epic battle for the minds of father and son Jack and Danny Torrance, as five-year-old Danny’s special mental abilities – the way that he can ‘shine’ – are eagerly sought by whatever it is that possesses the hotel.

Jack thinks the Overlook will be the perfect place to write across the winter months, when the hotel is completely cut off from the surrounding area. His only company should be his wife, Wendy, and his son. Jack can’t handle his drink, and has attacked both Wendy and Danny in the past, but the hotel caretakers aren’t allowed to take alcohol with them, so Wendy hopes that everything will work out. Danny’s psychic powers allow him to see the future, and he talks to an imaginary friend, Tony (who appears to be a teenage version of Danny himself).

As the weeks go past, the Overlook plays on Jack’s weaknesses, as Danny receives increasingly disturbing visions, culminating in Jack succumbing to the hotel’s influence. He
manages to break free sufficiently to give Danny a chance to run, and with the help of Dick Hallorann, the Overlook’s chef who can also ‘shine’ and has heard Danny’s telepathic call for help, Danny and Wendy escape before the boiler explodes. Jack is killed and the Overlook is razed to the ground, although its malevolent influence can still be felt . . .

Although the traditional horror elements are front and centre in this early King novel – enough to worry his publisher that King would be typecast as this sort of writer – reading the novel of
The Shining
without the image of a grinning Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance makes it clear that the true horrors described are the ones affecting Danny. The spousal abuse, alcoholism and the collapse of everything that Danny holds dear thread through the book: the monster that Tony warns him of looks like his father, the man he should trust implicitly. Although King didn’t recognize the problems in himself at the time, he knew he was channelling the instincts that many parents feel towards their children from time to time. He later realized that a tale of an alcoholic former schoolteacher might be closer to fact than fiction. According to an interview in the
Tampa Tribune
in 1980, he recalled: ‘I discovered about halfway through that I wasn’t writing a haunted-house story, that I was writing about a family coming apart. It was like a revelation.’

King had been writing a novel, ‘Darkshine’, set in an amusement park and featuring a child with psychic powers, but this wasn’t gelling (elements of this would eventually surface in his 2013 Hard Case Crime tale
Joyland
). The setting for
The Shining
was inspired by a trip that the Kings took to the Stanley Hotel in Colorado while he was working on ‘Darkshine’ over Halloween 1974, when they found themselves the only guests staying prior to the hotel’s clos-ure for the winter. The hotel has a history of hauntings, with the real Room 217 (the setting for a particularly memorable scene in the novel) one of the prime foci. King
was the only customer in a bar, served by a barman named Grady, and that night dreamed that his young son, Joe, was being chased through the corridors by a fire hose. Woken with a jolt, he lit a cigarette and by the time he had smoked it, he knew the basic outline of
The Shining
.

The book was originally known as ‘The Shine’, inspired by the John Lennon song ‘Instant Karma’ which contains the line ‘We all shine on . . . like the moon and the stars and the sun’. However, it was changed after it was pointed out to King by one of the staff at Doubleday that ‘shine’ had been used as a derogatory word for a black person (a ‘shoe-shine’ boy), and the book featured a black cook.

It also was quite a bit longer than the published edition. A five-part prologue, ‘Before the Play’, was eventually printed in
Whispers
magazine, and can be found online; an epilogue, ‘After the Play’, has never been published, but was merged into the novel. ‘Before the Play’ fills in some of the history of the Overlook, which is added to in the novel, as well as revealing the cycle of abuse in which Jack Torrance is caught. Dick Hallorann also makes an appearance elsewhere in the King universe, in the novel
IT
, which shows part of his life in the 1930s.

In September 2013, King released
Doctor Sleep
(see
page 148
), which picks up the story of Danny Torrance a few years after the explosion at the Overlook Hotel. Charting the period from 1981 to 2013, it reveals the fates of Dick Hallorann and Wendy Torrance.

There are two very different screen adaptations of
The Shining
. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie is widely regarded as a classic of the horror genre, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, with Shelley Duvall as Wendy. Kubrick and Diane Johnson penned the screenplay, making many changes to King’s story, much to the writer’s distaste. King himself oversaw a TV miniseries version, based on his own script, with Steven Weber and Rebecca De Mornay as Jack
and Wendy. Directed by Mick Garris, this six-hour series was filmed in part at the Stanley Hotel. It too deviates from King’s novel, but returns the story to the focus of the book.

There is a third movie, which takes its cues from the Kubrick film:
Naughty Little Nymphos 5
is an American porn movie in which the first scene features midget porn star Little Romeo as a Danny Torrance character on a tricycle cycling around for nearly a minute through hotel corridors, before meeting two young girls (Frost and Dyna-Mite) who invite him to come play with them. He ends up having sex with them alongside his ‘father’ (Rick Masters). Even the music veers towards the Carlos soundtrack more than the usual porn fare!

The Walking Dead
producer Glen Mazzarra was hired in April 2013 to pen a screenplay for
The Overlook Hotel
, a prequel to Stanley Kubrick’s version of
The Shining
for producers Laeta Kalogridis, James Vanderbilt and Bradley Fischer. King told
Entertainment Weekly
that he wasn’t sure whether Warner Bros. had the rights to ‘Before the Play’ (which covered the same territory) but either way, he’d ‘be just as happy if it didn’t happen’.