A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  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.

  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 nove
l, 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.

  6

  A COMMUNITY OF HORROR: ROADWORK TO IT

  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.

  Links are there to King’s work. An incident where Dawes recalls shooting a blue jay, but failing to kill it, turned up again in King’s writing: both Audrey Wyler in Desperation, and Todd Boden in Apt Pupil have similar encounters. Andy McGee experienced similar difficulties as a child with a squirrel, according to Firestarter. The Blue Ribbon Laundry is where Carrie White’s mother lives, and the home of ‘The Mangler’ from that short story.

  Roadwork has yet to be adapted into any other medium.

  Cujo (Viking Press, September 1981)

  Large St Bernard Cujo always wanted to be a good dog, and it wasn’t his fault that he became rabid when he did what dogs do and chased a rabbit, leading him to a nest of infected bats. Maybe the spirit of serial killer Frank Dodd possessed him when he terrorized Donna Trenton and her son Tad in their Ford Pinto on a hot summer’s day in Castle Rock, Maine. Donna has taken Tad with her to Joe Camber’s garage to try to get their car repaired; Donna’s affair with Steve Kemp has recently been discovered by her husband Vic, who has had to travel out of town to a business meeting in a desperate attempt to keep his advertising agency afloat. Camber can’t help Donna: Cujo has already killed him. Even Sheriff Bannerman is no longer in a position to assist: when he goes to visit the Cambers’ property, he too is killed by Cujo – and believes for a moment that he can see his former deputy, Dodd, looking at him from Cujo’s eyes as the dog savages him. Eventually, desperate after two days besieged in the car by Cujo, Donna battles the dog, killing it – but it’s too late to save Tad. The four-year-old boy fails to survive the ordeal.

  Stephen King barely remembers writing Cujo, thanks to his ever-growing addictions to alcohol and drugs, which, as he notes himself, is a loss, because it means he doesn’t remember ‘enjoying the good parts’ as he wrote them. It has been seen by some critics as a metaphor for King’s own struggles with addiction – like Cujo, the sufferer from addiction is ordinary and friendly on the outside, but when the alien substance is introduced, the nastier side, which was always there, comes to the surface. Whatever King’s state of mind, it enabled him to create a story that won the British Fantasy Society Award in 1982, and became part of modern pop culture – even those who haven’t read the book or seen the film know that the name Cujo belongs to a threatening canine.

  Cujo was criticised by reviewers and readers for its downbeat ending, ‘perhaps the cruellest, most disturbing tale of horror he’s written yet’, according to the New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. King defended the bleak finale noting that it was what the story demanded. There aren’t happy endings all the time in life: ‘i
t has to be put into the equation: the possibility that there is no God and nothing works for the best’, he commented a couple of years later.

  It’s a story told on a much smaller scale than his more recent work, and in a far more realistic way. There aren’t any large government organizations trying to capture small children, just an infected canine on the loose. Bar the opening mention and Sheriff Bannerman’s hallucination as he dies, there are few suggestions of the supernatural. ‘I’d always wondered whether or not it would be possible to write a novel restricted to a very small space,’ King told Starburst magazine, explaining that he had considered an elevator before choosing a car. ‘I began to think of it as a low-budget novel . . . because the setting is so restricted.’

  It was inspired by a story he read during his time in England about a child in Portland, Maine who was killed by a St Bernard, and his own experiences facing another of the breed who took a dislike to King when he arrived in the driveway of a mechanic’s house. He considered setting up a situation where Donna had been bitten by Cujo, and had to battle to stop herself from harming her son, but when he learned that rabies doesn’t take hold that quickly, he diverted attention to the plot as we know it.

  The unusual format – there are no delineated chapters, simply breaks between scenes – derived from King’s desire to make the book ‘a brick thrown through somebody’s window, like a really invasive piece of work. It feels anarchic, like a punk-rock record.’ It serves to ratchet up the tension, even if some of the juxtapositions of scenes – dealing with Joe Camber’s wife or Donna’s husband’s problems – can be frustrating on first read.

  An ‘excerpt’ from the book appeared as ‘The Monster in the Closet’ in the Ladies Home Journal in October 1981, although it cherry-picks moments from the story, and includes a few details that did not make the final edition.