A Brief Guide to Stephen King (8 page)

After successes with
The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile
and
The Mist
, Frank Darabont announced that
he was interested in helming a movie version of
The Long Walk
, predicting in 2008 that it would arrive within the next five years. Despite the
New York Times
website providing a page for it, it has yet to materialize.

The Dead Zone
(Viking Press, August 1979)

Waking from a coma after five years, former schoolteacher Johnny Smith realizes that he can see people’s futures when he touches them or objects connected to them. Although he manages to save lives, he is denounced as a fake. He hopes this means he can return to teaching but he ends up assisting local Sheriff Bannerman, from Castle Rock, to find a child murderer. However, he is starting to suffer from bad headaches. At the same time, Greg Stillson, a young, aggressive man, is starting to rise in local politics, and when Johnny touches him, he sees a future in which Stillson becomes President of the United States and begins a catastrophic nuclear war.

Johnny tries to avoid taking the action he knows he must, but after he fails to act on another of his visions, leading to multiple deaths at a high school graduation party, he gets hold of a rifle to assassinate Stillson in order to save the world. Suffering from terminal brain tumours, Johnny heads to Stillson’s next rally, and tries to shoot him. He misses but Stillson grabs a child to use as a human shield and a news photographer captures the moment. Johnny is shot by Stillson’s bodyguards but when Stillson touches him, Johnny knows that the photo will spread around the world, and Stillson’s political career is finished. Johnny’s former girlfriend, Sarah, visits his grave and has a comforting sense of his presence.

King’s first novel for his new hardback publishers marked the first appearance in his work of a venue that would become very familiar to his long-term readers – the small Maine town of Castle Rock, part of the fictional Castle
County (although it seems that its location in the real world correlates to Oxford County, near Woodstock). The town, whose name (and possibly some of its connotations) King borrowed from William Golding’s novel
Lord of the Flies
, with its inhabitants chock full of secrets, became as important as some of the characters. Here it’s plagued by a serial killer, Frank Dodd, who himself will apparently return in
Cujo
; Sheriff Bannerman also reappears in that book. Richard Dees, a tabloid reporter, later gained his own short story, ‘The Night Flier’.

The Dead Zone
is one of the few plot-driven novels (as opposed to a situational story) he has written that King admits to liking, and which he listed in 1998 among his top two or three. It deals with questions to which he would return in
11/22/63
– can a political assassination ever be justified, and can that assassin become the protagonist of a novel? In this case, the answer to both is clearly yes. It also provides one of his most emotionally affecting stories among his early works, as Johnny Smith fulfils his lonely destiny.

Despite King receiving a number of complaints about Greg Stillson’s introductory scene, in which he tear-gasses a dog that has been annoying him, and then kicks it to death, this was his first book to reach top place on the
New York Times
bestseller list. It wasn’t what he originally intended to follow
The Stand
with:
Pet Sematary
was completed, but put away in a drawer after King received negative feedback from both his wife and Peter Straub. According to King,
The Dead Zone
‘has a nice layered texture, a thematic structure that underlies it, and it works on most levels’ although he has admitted that the ending is ‘something of a cop-out’ – he didn’t want to be seen to be condoning assassination by rifle. There is a question left deliberately open regarding whether Johnny’s brain tumour is affecting his judgement so much that he has imagined the vision concerning Stillson, even if we, as readers, are aware that what Johnny saw fits with the man we’ve encountered.

Like
The Shining, The Dead Zone
has received two very different screen adaptations, each worthy on its own merits. David Cronenberg directed one of the most faithful screen transfers of King’s book with Christopher Walken’s perfect casting as Johnny Smith. Jeffrey Boam’s script covers all the key beats of the novel (more so, apparently, than King’s own proposed screenplay), transferring a 500 page novel into 103 minutes without losing the power of the narrative.

The book also became the basis for an eighty-episode six season TV series which ran from June 2002 to September 2007. Anthony Michael Hall starred as Johnny, with the pilot replicating the Frank Dodd plot from the book before spinning off into new situations. Greg Stillson’s apocalyptic plans underlie the whole series; the show ended without a proper finale, so this was left unresolved. Character relationships were changed: Sarah was pregnant by Johnny before the accident, and she marries Sheriff Walt Bannerman (a combination of the book’s Sheriff and Sarah’s husband Walt) while he is in the coma. Johnny’s son shares his gift of precognition. John L. Adams played Bruce Lewis, Johnny’s physiotherapist and counsellor – a role not found in the book, but who helped the TV incarnation of Johnny stay sane where his original did not. Michael and Shawn Piller and Lloyd Segan, who developed the show, later created
Haven
from King’s novella,
The Colorado Kid
.

Firestarter
(Viking Press, September 1980)

Outwardly Charlie McGee is a bright little eight year old, the apple of her parents’ eyes. But she’s the focus of a major manhunt by a covert branch of US intelligence, the Department of Scientific Intelligence (better known as The Shop), which is aware that both she and her father Andy have major psychokinetic powers – he can ‘push’ people to
do what he wants; she can create fires simply by thinking about them – and is determined to bring them under its control. Charlie and Andy go on the run, but the agents of The Shop pursue them across the country before capturing them and bringing them to The Shop’s own headquarters, The Farm in Virginia. There Charlie is befriended by John Rainbird, a Cherokee Native American who is really a hit man for The Shop, who wants to learn about Charlie’s powers, and then kill her. Andy is kept drugged but when he manages to break free, he pushes The Shop’s boss, ‘Cap’ Hollister, into helping father and daughter to escape. Things go wrong, and Rainbird shoots Andy; in revenge, Charlie sets both Rainbird and Cap on fire, and proceeds to destroy the Farm. After recovering, Charlie heads for
Rolling Stone
’s New York office to lay bare the details of The Shop’s plans.

Firestarter
has been seen as a milestone in King’s early work, drawing together many of the themes and tropes that characterized the books published in the 1970s. Douglas Winter, writer and critic, looking back in 1984, saw it as a ‘transitional work: King’s revisiting of concepts and themes explored in
Carrie, The Stand
, and
The Dead Zone
suggests a tieing [sic] up of loose ends’. However, King initially was more concerned that what it really meant was that he was running out of ideas. ‘I had this depressing feeling that I was a thirty-year-old man who had already lapsed into self-imitation,’ he told Winter, ‘and once that begins, self-parody cannot be far away.’ He started work on the manuscript in 1976 but stopped when he felt that thematically it was too close to
Carrie
; however when he returned to it a year later, he decided that not only was the book ‘less like
Carrie
than I thought – it was also better’. He was happy if critics felt that he was trying to ‘amplify themes that are intrinsic to my work’ rather than that ‘Steve King had started to eat himself’.

The morality of power is a theme to which King returns repeatedly throughout his work. He admitted in his afterword to the paperback edition of
Firestarter
that he was horrified at the thought of the CIA and the KGB left in charge of experiments into the power of the mind; at the time he was drafting the novel, the CIA’s involvement in such mind-altering programs as MKULTRA was being revealed to the Senate Church Committee. In
Danse Macabre
, his overview of the genre, King pointed out that America had also just experienced the first presidential resignation, a resounding defeat in Southeast Asia, and major domestic discord on several issues – ‘the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet’. Accordingly, although Cap and Rainbird are definitely villains in the book, the main enemy that Andy and Charlie grapple with is the faceless power of the government. The Shop itself reappeared in
The Tommyknockers
, and the original TV series
Stephen King’s Golden Years
.

Firestarter
also contains a sexual element that is almost paedophilic – although Rainbow repeatedly notes that his interest in Charlie is not sexual, it’s clear that there is an unsettling perversity to the relationship. King noted that ‘I only wanted to touch on it lightly, but it makes the whole conflict more monstrous’. He may well have shied away from the book being seen in this light, since one of the inspirations for the character of Charlie was his own daughter Naomi, then aged ten.

King believed
Firestarter
should be seen as a suspense novel, rather than lumped in with a generic ‘horror’ label: ‘I see the horror novel as only one room in a very large house, which is the suspense novel. That particular house encloses such classics as Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
and Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter,’
he told the
Minnesota Star
in the summer of 1980.

Firestarter
was brought to the screen by Mark L. Lester
in 1984, in what most critics agree was ironically too close an adaptation of King’s book. Screenwriter Stanley Mann included all the key events and characters, but even with Drew Barrymore capturing Charlie’s mix of innocence and terrifying abilities, it doesn’t come alive – not helped by what has to be George C. Scott’s worst performance on celluloid as Rainbird. A belated sequel,
Firestarter 2: Rekindled
, appeared as a miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel with Marguerite Moreau as a grown-up Charlie. This followed continuity with neither book nor film – Rainbird (now played by Malcolm McDowell) didn’t die but is still chasing after Charlie, and is creating his own band of mutant children.

A remake of
Firestarter
was announced as being on the drawing board in late 2010 but nothing further has resulted in the intervening years.

Roadwork: A Novel of the First Energy Crisis
(Signet Books, March 1981)

November 1973, and Barton George Dawes is starting to go insane. The death of his son, Charlie Frederick Dawes, from cancer the previous year has triggered irrational feelings of guilt, and Dawes is determined to prevent a new road from being built which will mean the obliteration both of his home and of his workplace. In his head, conversations take place between ‘George’ and ‘Frederick’, the latter the voice of reason as the former starts to go completely off the rails. Dawes buys weapons and eventually manages to get hold of some explosives from Sal Magliore, a local used-car dealer who has links to the Mob. By this point, Dawes has tried to sabotage the deal for his company to move elsewhere, has lost his job, his wife has left him, and he has created homemade explosives to damage
the construction equipment. The money he gets from the enforced sale of his house is used to pay for the explosives, and to help a young hitchhiker he has befriended. At the start of January 1974, Dawes barricades himself in the house to prevent its destruction, after wiring it with explosives. Following a stand-off with police, and explaining his story to a reporter, Dawes blows himself up – never knowing that the only reason for the new road was to use up some spare council money.

There are a number of contenders for the bleakest book that Stephen King has written – with
Pet Sematary
high on most readers’ list – but this tale, published as by Richard Bachman, is certainly the one that does not allow a glimmer of hope to permeate it. King wrote it a year or so following the death of his mother from cancer in November 1973, in an effort to ‘write a “straight” novel’, as he admitted in the introduction to
The Bachman Books
in 1985. He was trying to make sense of what had happened to his mother, and through the book he was trying to ‘find some answers to the conundrum of human pain’. At that stage, perhaps, he was still too close to the story to gain perspective on it: he described it as his least favourite of the Bachman stories, but when the collection was reprinted a decade later, it had completely reversed position.

King described the voice in this work as ‘simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted’ than the tone he usually adopted in his stories, written in a state of ‘low rage and simmering despair’. It was unique among King’s early work in not having any supernatural element to it whatsoever –
Roadwork
is a very credible detailing of one man’s complete breakdown. Much as his detractors may wish to believe otherwise, King has always had the capacity to drop the trappings of the fantastic and focus purely on the characters he creates. As Doubleday editor Bill Thompson noted when King originally sent
Roadwork
to him
alongside
’Salem’s Lot
for consideration, this was ‘a more honestly dealt novel, a novelist’s novel’. The tale about vampires was a more viable commercial proposition; as King wryly commented after
Roadwork
did get published, ‘I don’t think it ever made a cent’, noting that the ‘twelve people in bus stations’ who bought it as a Bachman novel probably only had that, the
Encyclopedia Britannica
or a bird book to choose between.