A Brief Guide to Stephen King (7 page)

An operatic version of
The Shining
will arrive in May 2016. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell are collaborating on the project for Minnesota Opera, which will be directed by Eric Simonson. ‘It’s perfect for opera, when you think about it,’ the company’s artistic director Dale Johnson told the Minnesota
Star Tribune
. ‘You have a hero who is struggling, a strong mother, both trying to keep the family safe . . . An opera doesn’t have to be all
Sturm und Drang
. It can be entertaining, and scary.’ King has to sign off on the libretto before production begins.

There is also a game based on the book, apparently created with assistance from Stephen King. It’s a free download
available at
http://micro.brainiac.com/contest-games.html
and won the first Microgame Design Contest in 1998. One player is in control of the Overlook Hotel; the other is the Torrance family.

Rage
(New American Library, September 1977)

Charlie Decker is ‘getting it on’. The Placerville, Maine high school senior leaves a meeting with the principal, at which he’s been expelled from school for violent behaviour, and takes a gun from his locker. Shooting two teachers, he then takes his algebra class hostage, and in the hours that follow, encourages them to reveal secrets about themselves, which leads to them inevitably turning on each other. A sniper shoots Charlie, but he survives because the bullet hits his locker padlock. Eventually, after one of the students is badly beaten up, Charlie releases them and is shot by the police chief, before being committed to an institution until he is deemed safe to be released.

Rage
wasn’t initially released under Stephen King’s name – it was credited to Richard Bachman, King’s pseudonym of choice, which he used for publication of various of his ‘trunk’ novels (so called as he consigned them to a trunk), books which he penned early in his writing career but which, for assorted reasons, weren’t published. After Bachman’s identity was revealed,
Rage
was the first of the four
Bachman Books
, (described as ‘Four Early Novels by Stephen King’) published to coincide with the release of
Thinner
, which was also written as by Bachman.

However,
Rage
is no longer in print ‘and a good thing’, according to King himself. The author asked his publisher ‘to take the damned thing out of print’ following reports that Michael Carneal, a Kentucky boy who shot at a group of his classmates when they were praying before school on 1 December 1997, killing three and injuring five more, had a copy of
Rage
in his locker. King believed it was an
influence, both on Carneal and on others. It’s worth noting that Jim Carroll’s book and subsequent movie
The Basketball Diaries
, in fact, was the book most often linked with this incident, and the later Columbine massacre, by the newspapers at the time. In a keynote address to the Vermont Library Conference, VEMA Annual Meeting on 26 May 1999, King discussed the rise of such violence and its links to literature and society, and explained the ‘relief rather than regret’ he felt when he authorized the book’s withdrawal. Even before then, in his introduction to the second edition of
The Bachman Books
in 1996, he expressed his concerns about the links between something he had written and someone committing murder – Jeffrey Lyne Cox cited
Rage
as an influence on his high school spree in April 1988, as did Dustin Pierce a year later. These links he discusses specifically in his Kindle Single book
Guns
, published in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

A few years later, after the murders by Cho Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech in 2007, King admitted in a piece for
Entertainment Weekly
that ‘in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing – including a short story called “Cain Rose Up” and the novel
Rage
– would have raised red flags, and I’m certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them’. King started work on
Rage
in 1965 – aged just seventeen – although he didn’t finish work on it until seven years later. When he was preparing it for print, he updated the contemporary references, in the same way that he would later do with the revised version of
The Stand
.

At the time of its publication, King was pleased with
Rage
, and didn’t want it to ‘become a book the parade had passed’ since it didn’t fit with his new profile as a horror writer. Although he had complied with various editorial requests regarding
Getting It On
(the book’s original title), Doubleday had eventually turned it down prior to their purchase of
Carrie
, and Elaine Koster, his editor at
paperback house New American Library, agreed that it could be released under a pseudonym ‘to go out there and either find an audience, or just disappear quietly’, as King noted. He refused to allow it to have any publicity linking it to his name. Originally submitted as by Guy Pillsbury (King’s grandfather’s name), King withdrew it when word spread at the publishers that he was the author; it was quietly resubmitted as
Rage
, under the Richard Bachman name.

There are no supernatural elements to
Rage
; had Doubleday published it, it’s feasible that King might not have become as associated with horror, at least initially. ‘In the long run, the monster would have come out,’ King commented to Douglas E. Winter in 1984. In some ways, it’s a forerunner of his later books: the horrors of
Misery
and
Gerald’s Game
, in particular, derive from real-life fears and situations, and while
Rage
is clearly the product of a young author learning his craft, it hints at some of the grandeur to come from King. That said, his decision to withdraw it from general public availability must be respected.

According to Stephen Jones’ authoritative book on King adaptations,
Creepshows, Rage
was adapted for the stage in Los Angeles in 1990, although there is no indication of scripter or stars. No film version has been made.

The Stand
(Doubleday, September 1978; May 1990)

When a lethal man-made virus, nicknamed Captain Trips, wipes out the vast majority of the human race, the stage is set for an epic battle between good and evil. Groups of survivors congregate around two people: Mother Abigail, a 108-year-old Nebraskan, who encourages the creation of a Free Zone settlement in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, a supernatural evil being, who attracts similarly minded people to him in Las Vegas, Nevada. Each is aware of the other with Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross setting
a bomb that kills or wounds members of the Free Zone; this prompts a group of survivors to head to Vegas to confront Flagg. Unlike in the rest of the continental United States, there is power in Vegas, and Flagg’s men are stockpiling weapons to assert their supremacy over what remains of humanity. However, when one of Flagg’s followers brings in a nuclear bomb, the Hand of God detonates it, apparently destroying Flagg and his followers – although, as the extended edition makes clear, Flagg simply arrives somewhere else. When a baby conceived after the outbreak of Captain Trips is born and survives, the human race has a chance at a future – if it can learn from its mistakes.

In his first two novels, King had wreaked destruction on small towns. In
The Stand
, the scale is magnified a million-fold and in its pages there is plenty of death and devastation, as well as moments of reflection and sheer horror (Larry Underwood’s progress through the Lincoln Tunnel is still one of the creepiest pieces that King has ever written). Although King originally sat down to write a fictionalized version of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, he found himself drawn to reports of a US Army nerve-gas experiment in 1968 which killed 3,000 sheep in Utah; a line he heard on a Christian radio station that ‘Once in every generation the plague will fall among them’; and the post-apocalyptic novel
Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart. As the structure of the book might suggest, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world of Middle-earth also influenced him: ‘I wanted to do
Lord of the Rings
with an American background,’ he explained. The Patty Hearst connection remained: Randall Flagg dimly remembers that he was involved with her kidnapping.

The Stand
took around sixteen months to write, during which time King experienced writer’s block – after creating the characters in the two communities, he wasn’t sure where to go with them, but eventually realized he needed a further
catalyst to move the plot forward. This became the explosion in the Free Zone, and once that was written, the rest of the book took a mere nine weeks to complete. King also mentioned that while he was writing it, he saw a copy of Terry Nation’s novelization of his BBC television series
Survivors
on the shelves, and thought that someone else had already covered the same territory – however, while the starting point may be similar, the two stories are very different.

The book King finally completed was simply too long for his publishers. Doubleday insisted that a third of the book’s 1200 pages had to be removed or they couldn’t publish it, and gave him the option of choosing which to lose. King exercised that right, but restored much of it twelve years later for a revised edition (also rewriting a number of other scenes, shifting some of the characterisation along the way). Many King readers find the original version to be the best of his early books: pared back to its essentials at times, it has a constant forward momentum that draws you in.

It’s a key book in King’s work in other ways: Randall Flagg is the key antagonist in the Dark Tower sequence of stories, as well as appearing in
Eyes of the Dragon
and
Hearts in Atlantis
. He first came to King in 1969 when he wrote a poem called ‘The Dark Man’, which was finally published in July 2013 (see
page 227
). There is a whole section within the fourth ‘Dark Tower’ book,
Wizard and Glass
, where Roland and his ka-tet (a group of four people allied together) visit the world affected by Captain Trips (or one extremely similar). Like ’
Salem’s Lot
, elements appear in an earlier short story – ‘Night Surf’ mentions a superflu nicknamed Captain Trips.

Both before and since the TV miniseries adaptation of
The Stand
, there has been talk of a movie version, but no big-screen script has yet materialized. The sweeping nature of the story demands more time than even a three-hour movie
can provide, as George Romero, King’s partner on the
Creepshow
movie, realized, although screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, who had worked with John Boorman on his proposed version of
The Lord of the Rings
, did produce a screenplay that might have worked. Warner Brothers did not agree, and didn’t proceed.

A 1994 TV miniseries was produced for ABC television, with King writing his own screenplay for Mick Garris to direct. The eight-hour, four-part drama used the original version as its source material, although some elements of the backstory for Captain Trips were derived from the expanded edition.

Subsequent to that, Warner Bros. and CBS Films announced a feature-length adaptation, with
Harry Potter
director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves potentially involved. They were replaced in late 2011 by Ben Affleck, who admitted a year later that he and his team were having scripting problems. After Affleck signed up to play Batman in the second
Man of Steel
film in August 2013, Scott Cooper was hired by Warner Bros. to re-write and direct the project.

The Stand
has also been adapted for the graphic medium, across thirty-one issues (or six graphic novels) between 2008 and 2012. It was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by Mike Perkins, overseen by King.

The Long Walk
(Signet Books, July 1979)

Amerika, the near future: the new national sport in the former America is ‘The Long Walk’, a brutal marathon that begins at the Maine/Canada border, and continues down the East Coast until only one walker is left. And that means left alive. One hundred teenage boys compete for the prize of whatever they want for the rest of their lives; the other ninety-nine are killed along the way. The Walk is televised, and it continues for as long as it takes. Food is provided every morning, and water is available from
soldiers at any time – but nothing can be taken from the spectators on pain of death.

Raymond Davis Garraty is one of the Musketeers, determined to win the event, but as the days go by, he sees everyone around him succumbing to madness, falling below the 4 mph minimum speed, or otherwise falling out of the race. Soon just three teenagers are left: Garraty, Stebbins (a quiet, introspective young man who simply wants to be accepted by his father if he wins), and Peter McVries. And even the eventual winner cannot believe it is all over when his last compatriot collapses and dies – there will always be another runner somewhere ahead of him . . .

The second novel published by Richard Bachman was in fact Stephen King’s first completed book, written while he was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966–1967. Its bleak outlook offers no chance of optimism: it’s clear that there will be no winners from this Long Walk, since even the winner will have experienced much worse things than they can ever have thought possible. Hailed by the American Library Association as one of the best hundred novels for teenagers written between 1965 and 2000,
The Long Walk’s
influence can be seen on more recent dystopias such as
The Hunger Games
.

Chapters are headed with quotes from hosts and creators of classic American television game shows – including the appropriately titled
You Bet Your Life
– including one credited to Chuck Barris, the creator of
The Gong Show
: ‘The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed’. Clearly influenced by the draft for the Vietnam War, at its height when King originally wrote the story, we never learn how the Long Walk began, nor what its purpose really is.