Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (74 page)

Ur (2009) 

Ur was first published as a download for Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-reader, on 12 February 2009. While it has yet to see a print publication the audio book was released on 16 February 2010 (King hand-picked the narrator, Holter Graham). It can be safely assumed the story will see a mass-market print version at some point, although it was not included in King’s 2010 collection, Full Dark, No Stars, possibly due to contractual obligations with Amazon. 

King’s agent, Ralph Vicinanza, had originally approached King to write a story for e-book release to “create some excitement” (as King’s Riding the Bullet had done in 2000), at a time when the publishing industry was in the doldrums. Available as a download for $2.99, many King fans were critical or the tactic, claiming it was no more than an infomercial for Amazon and their Kindle. However, on reading the story, it is clear this was no quick knock-off. Ur is a full-blooded King tale and has very important Dark Tower links (the first notable Dark Tower information since the final novel in that series, published five years earlier). 

The 21,000 plus word America Under Siege and Dark Tower story has seven sections – Experimenting with New Technology; Ur Functions; Wesley Refuses to Go Mad; News Archive; Ur Local (Under Construction); Candy Rymer; The Paradox Police; and Ellen. 

Wesley Smith, an English Department instructor at Moore College in Moore, Kentucky has purchased a Kindle “out of spite” for Ellen Silverman, his ex-girlfriend and coach of the college’s highly successful women’s basketball team, the Lady Meerkats. King has long followed women’s basketball (originally inspired through support of the University of Maine’s Black Bears) . Strangely, Wesley’s Kindle is pink, even though Amazon only sells them in white – the idea of buying it to spite Ellen came after he’d called her illiterate when she threw one of his precious books across a room, demanding he learn to read from a computer screen, “like the rest of us.” This has apparently ended their relationship. 

Soon after the Kindle purchase Ellen leaves a message on Wesley’s answering machine, saying she’d heard he had an e-reader and that this may be a sign they should try again, but not until after an important upcoming tournament in Lexington, to which she and the team would travel by bus. He was not to call her in the meantime.  

Intrigued by the unique pink color of his Kindle and accessing the menu, Wesley finds an option called “EXPERIMENTAL,” under which there is a series of “experimental prototypes,” including “UR FUNCTIONS.” Under this, he could access “UR BOOKS,” “UR NEWS ARCHIVE” and “UR LOCAL (UNDER CONSTRUCTION).” 

Clicking on “UR BOOKS” Wesley is confronted with a picture of a large black tower (our first hint of a Dark Tower connection), and when he chooses to search for Ernest Hemingway books he is presented with unknown stories by that literary giant and information claiming different birth and death dates for “Papa.” Wesley buys one of the stories he’s never heard of, Cortland’s Dogs and is delivered of a novel clearly in Hemingway’s style – but one he never wrote, at least not in our reality. Worse, he discovers that if he searches for Hemingway in different “Urs” each provides different novels and even different lives for Hemingway (in one he was a dime novel crime writer). The same applied to other famous, and obscure, authors. Poe had lived a quarter century longer in one “Ur” than in our reality and had written six novels, one of which Wesley purchased and read overnight. The Kindle becomes an all-consuming drug, as he felt compelled to search out more and more “new” tales by his favorite writers. 

Is he deluded? When he shows it to a student and a colleague they both find strange new publications on the device, including new plays by Shakespeare. And the downloaded books are not being charged to Smith’s MasterCard – something is very wrong.  

The next “EXPERIMENTAL” option to be investigated is the “UR NEWS ARCHIVE,” which contains only material from The New York Times. Different “Urs” exist in this function as well, with one noting Hilary Clinton was sworn in as 44th President of the United States on 21 January 2009 (replacing President Gore)! In another reality the Times had not published after the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent nuclear war! Next, Wesley makes the mistake of accessing the “UR LOCAL (UNDER CONSTRUCTION)” function, which offers nothing more than the local newspaper for the college town, the Moore Echo. When accessed it will only allow future dates to be entered and the download cost is much more expensive than past copies of The New York Times. Wesley enters the date of the following Monday, the day after his ex-girlfriend’s team would have played in their tournament – only to discover big, black headlines of tragedy – the coach and seven students would be killed in an horrific bus crash on the way back to town. The crash would be caused by a Candy Rymer, who struck it at speed driving her SUV.  

Wesley and his student are convinced the accident will happen but struggle to work out how to prevent it, and finally strike upon diverting the killer driver. Tracking down Candy Rymer, they stalk the woman as she tracks drunk from bar to bar, finally slashing her tires before Wesley slaps her nearly senseless. The accident is avoided but now, despite their relief, the two men are concerned they may have broken the “Paradox Laws,” which the Kindle had said protected the “Ur Local.” 

Back in town and alone Wesley parks across the street from “a Cadillac … in the glow of the arc sodium beneath which it was parked, it seemed too bright.” (This is a clear reference to the vehicles in Low Men in Yellow Coats). Suddenly he is filled with fear and begins to believe the “Paradox Police” have come for him. And, when he enters his apartment, there they are, speaking in “a not-quite-human voice” and calling him “Wesley of Kentucky.” 

They wear long mustard-colored coats (“dusters”) and Wesley feels the coats were alive. Worse, the faces of the creatures kept changing and what lies beneath their skin appears reptilian, bird-like or both. “On their lapels, where lawmen in a Western movie would have worn badges, both wore buttons bearing a red eye. Wesley thought these too were alive.” The creatures claim Wesley’s actions have caused “The Tower” to tremble and “The rose feels a chill, as of winter.” Of course, even though the human has no idea what they are talking about, they demand a credible explanation for his actions, otherwise he will die. With Wes trying to justify saving a few lives, the creatures point out the Paradox Laws are there for a reason, and the consequences of avoiding the crash may well far exceed having allowed it to occur, including possibly that, “one of these young women might give birth to the next Hitler or Stalin, a human monster who could go on to kill millions of your fellow humans on this level of the Tower.” 

The creatures tell Wesley the consequences of his actions are unknown, the experimental program he’d accessed could only see clearly six months into the future. Remembering the tower from the “UR BOOKS” interface Wesley asks about it. “‘All things serve the Tower,’ the man-thing in the yellow duster said, and touched the hideous button on its coat with a kind of reverence.” The Paradox Police demand Wesley return the Kindle, which he does, and he is able to convince them that Fate may have chosen him to receive the strange Kindle and even make the choices he did. Convinced, the creatures leave, choosing to let Wesley live. 

The next day’s local newspaper headlines the Lady Meerkat’s winning the tourney and shows a photo of Ellen holding a sign reading, “I LOVE YOU WESLEY.” For the moment, at least, the universe is back on its axis. 

It seems this special Kindle allowed access to the million plus multiple realities of the Dark Tower and King makes this very clear to Dark Tower fans, with clear descriptions of the “Low Men” – they are soldiers of the Crimson King or “Regulators” from the Dark Tower, and feature in Low Men in Yellow Coats (where they are chasing Ted Brautigan), Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling and the last three volumes of The Dark Tower cycle.  

This information makes Ur a vitally important part of the Dark Tower mythos, and for this reason, fans will want a mass-market circulation of this tale at the earliest possible time. In the meantime, readers will need to download a copy to Amazon’s Kindle (avoiding the pink model with “UR” applications); or purchase the audio book. 

Weeds (1976) 

Weeds was originally published in Cavalier (a men’s magazine) for May 1976 and reprinted in Nugget (another men’s magazine) for April 1979. In Cavalier the story is listed in the Index as Weeds but the headline to the story, spread over two pages, reads: “More Than a Green Thumb … Will Be Necessary to Stop the Weeds: A chilling new story by the author of Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot.” 

It has never been reproduced in text format in a King collection and it is far from clear why. It is certainly a far better story than some of the “pulp” fiction stories that King did allow into his collections, such as Night Shift, published in 1978. King clearly has a fond spot for the story itself but perhaps as the years passed found the text version less and less capable of meeting the tone set for each of his short story collections? Alternately, perhaps after Creepshow was released in 1982 King no longer felt a need to republish?  

In The Stephen King Story George Beahm revealed that Weeds is part of an aborted novel. Apparently King had written 20,000 words at one stage. King told an interviewer: “…once the weeds started to grow beyond that closed world and toward the town, I couldn’t find any more to say. It seemed to me that that was all I really cared about, and I ran out of caring about it.” 

For the segment in the Creepshow screenplay/film it was retitled as The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill. King himself plays a wonderfully hammed Jordy in the film.  

As a result there are three King versions of this story – the Cavalier/Nugget version; the Creepshow screenplay (unpublished and subject of a separate chapter in this book); and The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill segment of the Creepshow movie tie-in graphic album/comic book. 

Readers can access the basic story by renting a video/DVD of Creepshow. The text versions are not difficult to find with photocopies circulating freely in the King community. Original copies of the magazines are harder to secure and sell via specialist sellers such as Betts Bookshop, although it is very difficult to find a copy of Nugget. 

In the story a meteor falls on Jordy Verrill’s farm. He was not a smart man but on the evening of July 4, when he saw the meteor falling to earth near his house, he decided to collect it and sell it to the local college. He put out the grassfire around the impact site and then dowsed the meteor with water, causing it to split and release a white flaky substance.  

After touching the substance Jordy found himself with a strange infection that caused a green vegetation to grow all over his body and at various points around the house and property. Unable to stop its advance, and in terrible agony, Jordy shot and killed himself on July 6. Heedless to Jordy’s death, the strange green vegetation continued to move towards the nearby town of Cleaves Mills, New Hampshire. 

While this is an America Under Siege story, for Creepshow King moved Jordy’s farm to a location near Castle Rock, relocating the tale into the Maine Street Horror Reality. 

King does a tremendous job of describing the run-down hardscrabble rural life Jordy leads, including the property (which reminds the reader of the Camber place in Cujo). “A faucet jutted out from the side of the shed at the end of a rusty pipe; the ground underneath was the only place grass would grow in Jordy’s dooryard, which was otherwise bald and littered with old auto parts.” Using Jordy’s very limited mental capacities as a tool to his eventual demise King tells the reader, “…you can’t predict what a man will do in a certain situation after he reaches a certain degree of dumbness.” As the weeds slowly infest Jordy’s body he is trapped by his own inability to react logically (much as teenagers in slasher movies never go straight to the nearest police station but instead re-enter darkened houses). 

Once it is established that Jordy is doomed King reveals the true horror – the weeds are spreading and have a rudimentary form of intelligence. When the weeds on his body point at the weeds rapidly growing on his farmland,  

Jordy, his thoughts dimming with the tide of greenness that now grew from the very meat of his brain, understood that a kind of telepathy was going on. Is the food good? Yes, very good. Rich. Is he the only food? No, much food. His thoughts say so. Does the food have a name? Two names. Sometimes it is called Jordy-food. Sometimes it is called Cleaves Mills-food.  

At the end of the story, as in any good pulp horror classic, the weeds are growing toward town thinking Earth “a fine planet, a wet planet. A ripe planet.” 

Jordy Verrill “…wasn’t bright; he had a potato face, large, blocky hands … and he got along as best he could.” He tends to speak and think in a very down-to-earth, rural manner. “There, you done it now, Jordy, you lunkhead,” he says out loud after breaking the meteor. After burning his fingers he thinks, “He was going to have a crop of blisters, sure as shit grows under a privy.” “Thinking was hard work for him. Thinking hurt, because there was a dead short somewhere inside, and keeping at it for long made him want to take a nap or beat his meat and forget the whole thing.” Jordy felt that “…Verrill luck was Verrill luck, and you spelled that B-A-D” but hoped it had changed with the meteor, for which he might get $25 from the college. Little did he know how BAD his luck was about to become! The reader quickly develops sympathy for Jordy, who is in fact a likeable character, not one of the miserable, harsh rural characters King writes of so often and so honestly. 

The story takes place exclusively on Jordy’s farm, set on Bluebird Creek and near the town of Cleaves Mills, New Hampshire. The year in which the story occurs is not provided but the meteor struck at twilight one 4th of July. By the next day the “weeds” were growing on Jordy and by the 6th, in despair, he had committed suicide. At dawn on that day the weeds had reached the highway, only two miles from the town. 

There are just a few links to other King stories. Interestingly, in the Creepshow version the only other character from the small cast in the original who reappears is Jordy’s father. Cleaves Mills is in New Hampshire. In the King universe there is a Cleaves Mills, Maine and this is the town where John Smith lived at the time of his accident in The Dead Zone. Jordy is also mentioned in passing in King’s Pet Sematary screenplay. In that script the Baterman place is said to look like the home of Jordy Verrill. 

This is one of the few King stories that have not been published in a mainstream King collection but have been adapted. It forms the basis of The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill segment in the 1982 movie Creepshow, for which King himself wrote the screenplay and which was directed by George A Romero. King played Verrill. The movie was released on DVD in 1999. 

The Life and Hard Times of Jordy Verrill 

The son of a farmer, he lived on Bluebird Creek, near Cleaves Mills, New Hampshire, was a subsistence farmer and odd jobs man who fixed cars, sold wood and drove Christmas trees to Boston at Christmas. He had faded blue eyes and had to wear glasses to read his Louis L’Amour westerns and dirty books. He was not very smart. When he was 46 a meteor crashed onto his land and after it broke open he was infected by the ‘meteorshit’ inside it. The infection caused green stuff to grow all over his body. Two days later, on July 6, he killed himself by gunshot. 

(Source: Weeds) 

Son of Anita, his father was also a farmer who died three years before the meteor landed. An unfortunate simple-minded man, he touched a strange meteor that landed on his farm, which was on Route 26 near Castle Rock, Maine. The contents of the meteor slowly turned him into a walking weed. He killed himself with a shotgun when, in intense pain, he realized that there was no hope of surviving. 

(Source: The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill) 

He was about 45 when the meteor hit. 

(Source: Creepshow screenplay) 

Note: Stephen King played Jordy Verrill in the only adaptation of this character, the 1982 film Creepshow.