A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  King wasn’t as amused on the set of Maximum Overdrive. Dino De Laurentiis had produced a number of movies based on King’s books – at this stage of the 1980s, most of King’s novels had been filmed, and short stories were either being expanded for feature films (such as ‘Children of the Corn’) or compiled into portmanteau movies like Cat’s Eye – and wanted King to direct one himself. King reluctantly agreed, but the shoot was a nightmare, since the Italian crew mostly didn’t speak English, and King himself was high for much of the time. In the trailer for the movie, on the DVD, the most frightening thing is the state of the author himself.

  Yet still the stories flowed. King saw IT, published in 1986, as his final statement on many of the themes which had punctuated his writing over the years, and the following year’s books – The Eyes of the Dragon (originally written for his daughter Naomi after she wouldn’t read his other books); the second ‘Dark Tower’ book, The Drawing of the Three; and Misery – were very different in style.

  However, the Castle Rock newsletter, which had been set up to provide information for King’s fans, announced in March 1987 that Stephen King was going to retire – but then quickly had to backtrack, and explain that King was actually simply going to be writing less, so he could spend more time with his family. Many fans weren’t impressed with Misery, published shortly after this news became public, particularly in its depiction of fans, and there was a generally negative reaction from readers and critics to The Tommyknockers, which arrived in November that year.

  King himself wasn’t happy. Nor was Tabitha, who had reached the end of her tether over her husband’s alcoholism and drug dependency. Something would have to change.

  3

  RISING FROM ROCK BOTTOM

  Stephen King credits his wife with saving his life. The intervention which she, family members and friends carried out late in 1987 – showing him the detritus of various different addictions, which by now included Listerine, cigarettes and NyQuil as well as alcohol and cocaine – led to a period where he ‘was looking for a détente, a way I could live with booze and drugs without giving them up altogether’, but in the end he realized he had to give up completely. As with many addicts, it was all or nothing – and Tabitha’s ultimatum that she ‘wouldn’t stick if I didn’t clean up my act’ was clear.

  King’s lifestyle changed completely, and with it went his agent, Kirby McCauley. His new personal manager, Arthur B. Greene, negotiated a fresh contract with NAL, tying King to one book each year for the next four. King revamped WZON onto a non-commercial footing, and became more heavily involved with his son Owen’s Little League team.

  Although initially he suffered from writer’s block, after nine months or so he discovered that the writing was enough of a drug on its own. As he was sobering up, he completed work on The Dark Half, and then reworked the original manuscript of The Stand to incorporate all of the material cut at Doubleday’s insistence, as well as updating it and adding a new start and finish (particularly as Randall Flagg, the book’s villain, was already appearing in other works).

  The same year that The Stand reappeared, 1990, saw King start to be taken more seriously by some of his literary peers. He wrote a non-fiction piece, ‘Head Down’, for the prestigious New Yorker literary magazine, about the Little League team, which he described as ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. A couple of years later, the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation provided the money to build a regulation AA baseball field for teenagers near Bangor, one of many charitable donations that the Kings made to benefit their local area.

  Although the Kings had to tighten up their home security as a result of a break-in by a mad fan who insisted King had stolen the plot of Misery from him, their routines continued, even if the types of stories that King produced was starting to change. He completed the third volume of the ‘Dark Tower’ series, The Waste Lands, and brought the saga of Castle Rock to an end (or so he believed) with the satirical Needful Things. His first original TV series, Golden Years, was produced by CBS, but cancelled at the end of its debut season, finishing on a cliffhanger (resolved in the eventual video release), and he began a long and fruitful relationship with a young director named Mick Garris who helmed King’s first full-length original screenplay for the cinema, Sleepwalkers.

  His fiction changed track with the publication of Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne in 1992, both of which featured strong female central characters. In interviews he made it clear that he wasn’t ‘abandoning’ horror, simply finding new ways to challenge himself as a writer.

  He was challenging himself in another way: not long after Gerald’s Game was published, the 1992 American Booksellers Association (ABA) convention in Anaheim, California was host to the first performance of a very unusual band. The Rock Bottom Remainders, supported by the Remainderettes and the Critics Corner, was composed of various rock-loving authors, including Robert Fulghum, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson and Barbara Kingsolver, whose motto, created by Barry, was ‘They play music as well as Metallica writes novels’. The recently released history of the band, Hard Listening, derives its title from Roy Blount’s description of their style of music – the opposite of ‘easy listening’ middle of the road pap.

  Like most American teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s, King had dreamed of being part of his own band. He played keyboard in a group for a time, and then what he described as ‘coffee house guitar . . . in that period when Donovan was into his denim look’. Occasionally in the past, he had been able to indulge his playing – at a private party at the ABA the previous year for example – and he was delighted to be asked by the Remainders’ founder Kathi Kamen Goldmark to come out and thrash his guitar for the new band, adding to what Dave Barry called ‘the bad music set’.

  The Remainders’ performances were sell-out hits with King getting a chance to sing ‘Sea of Love’ as a solo, as well as joining the others for songs such as ‘Gloria’, ‘Teen Angel’ and ‘Last Kiss’, for which King occasionally altered the lyrics to be more appropriate to his style of writing. They were so successful that the band continued to meet up regularly over the next twenty years, giving their final concert in June 2012.

  Their debut was part of a concert put on by the ABA to support the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, a cause close to King’s heart, particularly given the number of times that his books were banned. He regularly argued against censorship, advising students at one school whose authorities had pulled The Dead Zone and The Tommyknockers from the library shelves to go to the public library and find out what made them so horrible that they had to be removed from the school. In 1986, when the Maine legislature wanted to bring in a bill barring ‘obscene material’ in the state, King argued vehemently against it, pointing out that ‘it takes the responsibility of saying “no” out of the hands of citizens and puts it into those of the police and the courts’. (In the resulting referendum, 72 per cent of Mainers voted against it.)

  Although the flood of movies based on stories by King had dwindled towards the end of the 1980s, those that did appear tended to be at extremes of the quality scale. King adored Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, released in 1986, based on the novella The Body, and the director excelled again with an adaptation of Misery, starring Kathy Bates and James Caan, with a script by Oscar winner William Goldman. King was also delighted with Frank Darabont’s prison movie The Shawshank Redemption, based on the novella in Different Seasons, and for many years he faced scepticism from members of the public who assumed that ‘America’s horrormeister’ couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the film.

  King was considerably less happy with the plethora of sequels that followed both Children of the Corn, and Sometimes They Come Back, but since he had sold the rights to the titles, there was little he could do. However, in the case of The Lawnmower Man, he was able to ensure his name was taken off the credits: New Line’s movie combined King’s tale with a script called Cyber God, with the end result bearing no resemblance to th
e spooky horror story. Two separate courts found in King’s favour, and the distributors finally caved in when faced with paying King a daily fee and full profits until they complied.

  After IT had been made into a successful miniseries for ABC in 1990, the network commissioned further King adaptations, starting with the less well received The Tommyknockers. Most fans’ attention, though, was on King’s own screenplay for The Stand (rather than on his performance as Tommy Weizak), which arrived as a four-night event on ABC in May 1994. Rather than allow the film makers to get on with things once he had delivered his script, King decided to immerse himself in the production, acting as co-executive producer, and going on set for the vast majority of the 125-day shoot. It was the culmination of many years’ trying to get the story filmed, and King was pleased with the final product.

  To promote that year’s novel, Insomnia, which introduced a number of elements which would become important to the ‘Dark Tower’ saga, King jumped on his Harley Davidson motorcycle and went on a ten-city tour around the US from Vermont to Santa Cruz in California, only carrying out events for the book at independent booksellers. This trip around America gave him a number of ideas that came to fruition in the 1996 double book release, Desperation and The Regulators. The latter was credited to Richard Bachman, after King realized that he needed to find a way to make the two stories stand apart, yet indicate that they were linked.

  His standing within the writing community rose further when he was awarded the 1996 O. Henry Award for the best American short story published between 1994 and 1995. King’s ‘The Man in the Black Suit’ appeared in the 1994 Halloween edition of the New Yorker, and also gained him the World Fantasy Award. It’s a typical King short story, if such a thing can be said to exist – Chuck Verrill, King’s editor and friend, had offered the magazine one of King’s non-supernatural stories, but that wasn’t what fiction editor Chip McGrath was after – and King pointed out that ‘I think a lot of people who read the story don’t recognize it as being typical of my work because they haven’t read much of my work.’

  It was part of a very productive period for King. As well as the King/Bachman interlocked novels, he also wrote The Green Mile during 1996, which returned to the serial fiction form popular with writers like Charles Dickens. The tale of an innocent prisoner on Death Row in the 1930s appeared in six instalments, with King challenging himself to complete the story coherently and on time. It won the Horror Writers’ Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel the following year, and was filmed by Frank Darabont with comparable success to The Shawshank Redemption.

  King was also pleased with another version of one of his stories – the TV miniseries of The Shining, which he scripted, gaining the opportunity to bring his tale of the possessed Overlook, rather than a mad Jack Torrance, to the screen. Mick Garris was once more behind the camera, and although King made some alterations to the storyline, this was more faithful to the book. As part of the deal to do it, however, King had to agree not to make any more negative remarks about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film.

  The author received some unwelcome publicity that year when his contract negotiations with NAL became public knowledge. Over the years he had become increasingly unhappy with the publishers, feeling that, as had happened decades earlier at Doubleday, they were giving priority to other authors on their books – and in King’s case, continuing to straitjacket him with the ‘horror’ label when his stories had often moved far beyond that. Calculations of profit margin which should have stayed confidential were released, and it seemed as if King was being greedy by asking for around $17 million for his next book – even if it did represent the earnings that could be reasonably expected. Embarrassed by this (particularly when it was brought up regularly during his promotional tour of the UK for his next book), King reached a different sort of deal with Scribners, part of Simon & Schuster, getting a much lower down payment in return for a considerably higher percentage of the profits. Chuck Verrill moved from Viking to Scribner to maintain continuity.

  The first book under this new contract was Bag of Bones, a ghost story that paid tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which his new publishers heavily promoted, using the O. Henry Award as proof that King wasn’t simply a one-trick horror-writing pony. At the same time, though, a version of his story for the popular paranormal series The X-Files aired, and he was working on a story which did aim to scare audiences. Storm of the Century was his next project for the ABC network, an original ‘novel for television’, and although its ratings were hit by unfortunate scheduling, ABC bosses were happy to work on another original, King’s reworking of The Haunting of Hill House, titled Rose Red.

  In addition to the television work, King wrote a short novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and was midway through his second major non-fiction piece, On Writing. He was also contemplating the fifth volume of the ‘Dark Tower’ saga (Wizard and Glass, the fourth tome, was published in 1997) when as normal, on Saturday 19 June 1999, he went for an afternoon walk. He didn’t come home for weeks.

  Around 4.30 p.m., King was hit by a light-blue Dodge van, driven by forty-two-year-old Bryan Smith. When the writer came to, his ‘lap was kind of on sideways’. He had major injuries to large parts of his body, and doctors came close to amputating his right leg. Smith couldn’t believe his misfortune: as King recalled, he kept telling him that he had never had an accident before and now it was his ‘bad luck to hit the bestselling writer in the world’.

  Stephen King’s life was changed for ever.

  4

  RECOVERY AND RENAISSANCE

  King’s injuries took a long time to heal. He underwent major bouts of surgery as well as months of physical therapy (which he put to good use in the short story ‘The Little Green God of Agony’ a few years later). Tabitha bought Bryan Smith’s van – not so that her husband could destroy it with a sledgehammer, as King joked to the New York Times a year later, but to prevent anyone from selling the van that nearly killed Stephen King on eBay – and Smith himself died on 21 September 2000 (King’s fifty-third birthday) from an accidental overdose of a painkiller.

  His victim was also having problems with painkillers; after years of sobriety, he now had to take great quantities of medication simply to function. He was determined to go cold turkey as soon as he could, although he acknowledged for a time that the ‘addict part of his brain’ began inventing pain just to get the painkillers. By the end of 1999, however, he had achieved his aim, and was back writing – completing the manuscript of On Writing and starting work on a new novel, Dreamcatcher (which he called ‘Cancer’ until Tabitha felt that it was perhaps tempting fate). Although he had handwritten some earlier manuscripts, he now was forced into that position more often, since that was a more comfortable way to write.

  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 hi
s 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.