A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  As the description above makes clear, Cycle of the Werewolf plays very fast and loose with the lunar cycle. It was in fact not commissioned by Land of Enchantment’s Chris Zavisa back in 1979 as a novel at all, but a calendar illustrated by Berni Wrightson accompanied by a small vignette of text (approximately 500 words per section) by King. The author found the length restrictions too difficult to work within, so wrote the story as he saw fit, tying each of the werewolf’s twelve appearances to a key date in the month (there should of course be thirteen such visitations in a calendar year). The short novel was published by Land of Enchantment as Cycle of the Werewolf Portfolio, with a short piece, ‘Berni Wrightson: An Appreciation’, penned by King.

  The book is an oddity among King’s work – shorter than some of his novellas, but released and marketed as the equivalent of one of his full-length novels. Without the Wrightson illustrations, which capture the tone of King’s writing perfectly (as they did in the comic tie-in to Creepshow, discussed on page 233), there’s not a lot to it, but once again King uses young heroes battling the supernatural, as with Mark Petrie in ’Salem’s Lot. It also features the same railroad line – the GS&WM – running through Castle Rock that features in The Body.

  Cycle of the Werewolf perhaps gained more recognition after it was turned into the movie Silver Bullet in 1985, which came out six months after the trade paperback edition from Signet. A special movie version of the book, containing King’s novel and the screenplay, also by King, was published to tie in with the release. King had sent an early copy of the original story to prolific film producer Dino De Laurentiis (who had previously been responsible for the Firestarter adaptation, and the King original screenplay Cat’s Eye), who commissioned the screenplay, allowing the author considerable latitude with his own text. One key difference was the removal of the calendar year and the artificial imposition of certain dates over events: the movie story extends from spring to Halloween. Numerous characters were renamed or combined, and Gary Busey, who played Marty’s uncle, ad-libbed a lot of his lines. The film was narrated by an older version of Marty’s sister, called Jane in the movie – it was meant to be a flashback to 1976 (although a newspaper cutting clearly shows it’s 1980!).

  Everett McGill played Reverend Lowe and the werewolf, the latter in a suit created by Carlo Rambaldi, and tried to emulate a real wolf’s movements as much as possible. Daniel Attias directed Corey Haim as Marty, with Terry O’Quinn playing Sheriff Haller.

  The Talisman (Viking Press, November 1984)

  Jack Sawyer is desperate to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his mother, Lily, a former B-movie actress. Only a crystal, called ‘The Talisman’, will do the job but to find it, he has to travel across not only America, but also its twin parallel world, the Territories. Most people have a ‘twinner’ in the other world; a few, like Jack, are ‘single-natured’ and can flip between the two. Jack’s mother’s twinner is the Queen of the Territories, and is also terminally ill. Helped by Lester ‘Speedy’ Parker and his twinner, the gunslinger Parkus, Jack starts his quest, meeting up with a sixteen-year-old werewolf known simply as Wolf, and his old friend Richard Sloat.

  Jack’s progress is hindered by Richard’s father, Morgan Sloat and his twinner, Morgan of Orris, both of whom want to seize power in their respective worlds. Jack travels through the Territories’ Blasted Lands (the equivalent of the mid-west area where nuclear bombs were tested by the US Army in our world) until, back in our world, he finally reaches the west coast. There he locates the Black Hotel, which is where the Talisman awaits him – and its multidimensional powers enable him to save his mother’s life.

  For those of King’s Constant Readers who had not been able to locate The Gunslinger, The Talisman must have come as something of a shock. Rather than the horror (whether supernatural or closer to home) that they had grown to expect from King, this was a full-blown fantasy, with homages, and parallels to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – Jack even goes to watch the Ralph Bakshi-animated version of the classic fantasy quest to hammer the point home.

  The Talisman was written by King and his friend, horror writer Peter Straub, whom he had first met during his short stay in England in 1977. The two had discussed collaborating for some time, and they came up with a story that both were happy with. One would write a section, and send it across by what was then state of the art electronics – ‘telephone modem communication between their respective word processors’, according to the interview they gave The Twilight Zone magazine in 1985. Although they had divided it up, they tended to write until they reached a natural break in the story before passing it over. Rather than cross-editing as they wrote, they completed the manuscript before giving it a rigorous overhaul. ‘I don’t think it’s possible, really, for anybody to tell who wrote what,’ Straub noted. ‘There were times when I deliberately imitated Steve’s style and there were times when he deliberately, playfully, imitated mine.’ King admitted that the only way he could be sure who wrote what ‘was the typing style. He will double space after periods and between dashes, and I don’t do that’.

  While the fantasy element allowed both authors to demonstrate the strengths of their imaginations, the scenes set in ‘our’ world had a sharper focus. Jack encounters many unfortunates, and King said that he wanted to show ‘the ebb and flow of an underclass, the dregs of society, the roadies who are put upon by other people, the unhomed and homeless drifting just below everyone’s sight’. The Talisman is also a parable about what Straub described as ‘the terrible poisoning of the land’ – whenever characters flip between the worlds, contemporary America is shown to have lost an element of beauty.

  The links to the ‘Dark Tower’ series are much clearer with hindsight than they were at the time of writing; the sequel novel, Black House (see page 124) made them explicit, but even before that arrived, it dawned on readers that many of the ideas in the ‘Dark Tower’ books were present in The Talisman. The idea that people can travel between worlds – as members of Roland’s ka-tet do – is first expressed here; that there are ‘thin’ places where the fabric of reality bends.

  Steven Spielberg was immediately interested in The Talisman, and purchased the movie rights. For twenty years, there were multiple stories of screenplays written but never reaching fruition; in 2006, American TV network TNT announced that they were producing a six-hour adaptation for broadcast in 2008. This did not happen – although a young Canadian film-maker, Mathieu Ratthe, did create a six-and-a-half-minute trailer which he posted on YouTube, which showed great potential. Frank Darabont indicated in 2008 that he would be interested in helming a Talisman movie, but again, nothing has yet received a green light.

  The Talisman was adapted for the comic-book format, with the first six of a projected twenty-four parts appearing between July 2009 and May 2010. This included a ‘Chapter 0’ that showed some of the events prior to the opening chapter of the book. The script was by King’s assistant, Robin Furth, with art by Tony Shasteen. A compilation, The Talisman: The Road of Trials, was released as a graphic novel after the final part was published as a separate comic, but Del Rey did not produce any further instalments.

  Thinner (NAL, November 1984)

  Connecticut lawyer Billy Halleck could afford to lose more than a few pounds in weight, but he’s not worried – he has a comfortable life, a good practice, and a wife willing to pleasure him sexually as they’re driving along. The trouble is, while his focus is elsewhere, he doesn’t notice an old gypsy woman and runs her over. The case against him is dismissed, but the gypsy leader, Tadzu Lempke, curses him with the single word, ‘Thinner’.

  And that’s what Billy Halleck becomes: thinner. The pounds fall off him leaving him emaciated and almost incapable of anything. After learning that both the judge and police officer involved in his case have committed suicide after also being cursed, Billy turns for help from an old client, Richie ‘The Hammer’ Ginelli. They track down the
gypsies, who finally provide a solution: the curse can be transferred if someone eats a pie that contains Billy’s blood. Lempke begs Billy to eat it and die with some dignity, but he refuses, intending to give it to his wife, as he now blames her for his predicament. However, the next morning, he discovers that his daughter has also eaten a slice – so Billy cuts himself a piece.

  According to one member of the Literary Guild, Thinner was ‘what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write’, the author recalled shortly after his secret identity was revealed. Twenty-eight thousand copies of Thinner were sold when it was published under Richard Bachman’s name; that figure multiplied by ten when its true author was publicized.

  King wrote Thinner, a considerably shorter novel than those he had been working on in recent times, in 1982 and decided that its outlook made it better suited as a Bachman book than as by King – although he felt it was commercial enough to warrant a hardcover release, unlike the earlier trunk novels, which had only appeared as paperback originals. The book was released with a fake author photo – that of a friend of King’s agent Kirby McCauley – but despite the odd disparaging comment about King’s work in the story, it was too similar to King’s style for some. When librarian Steve Brown located an old copyright form with King’s name accidentally on it, he contacted King, and within a few weeks Bachman was no more – at least for the time being. He would return a decade later with the publication of a ‘previously lost’ manuscript, The Regulators.

  The story was inspired in part by a visit King made to his own doctor, who pointed out that he had ‘entered heart attack country’ (a phrase the author used in the book), and needed to lose weight. King’s own struggles with this, and his annoyance at his doctor’s attitude, fed into the story, although, as ever, the real-world situation was taken to an extreme.

  King admitted some years later that to create the ‘gypsy’ language that he used in the book, he simply ‘yanked some old Czechoslovakian editions of my works off the shelves and just took stuff out at random. And I got caught. I got nailed for it (by the readers), and I deserved to be, because it was lazy.’

  A movie adaptation, known as Stephen King’s Thinner, finally arrived in American cinemas at Halloween 1996, directed by Tom Holland from a screenplay by Holland and Michael McDowell. Robert John Burke played Billy Halleck, with Michael Constantine as Lempke and Joe Mantegna as Richie Ginelli. The script had been started back in the late 1980s for Warner Bros., but they passed on the project, as did other studios, all asking for rewrites to suit their own requirements at the time. King himself did an uncredited polish on the script, but everyone seemed to want a happy ending, which the writers were not willing to provide. In the end, if anything, the conclusion was made more gruesome: the screen Billy sees the corpses of his wife and daughter (even if the latter isn’t visible to the audience). The movie never received a cinema release in the UK, going straight to video the following year. But with reviewers making comments such as the New York Times’ ‘Stephen King’s Thinner has the outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack o’lantern’, perhaps that was hardly surprising.

  IT (Viking Press, September 1986)

  Welcome to Derry, the home of Pennywise the Dancing Clown and the Losers’ Club – and the longtime home of It, a creature from beyond nightmare. In 1985, a serial killer is on the loose in Derry and Michael Hanlon, who has appointed himself the town’s unofficial historian, realizes that whatever it was that he and his friends, known as the Losers’ Club, fought and defeated when they were just eleven years old has returned. He summons his friends back to Derry – though not all of them can face the idea of another battle – and they take the fight to the creature. IT is the story of the two conflicts, one in the late 1950s, the other in 1985 as the creature tries to feed on their worst fears and destroy them before they can destroy it. The older iterations of the Losers’ Club don’t remember exactly what happened in 1958, but as they travel around the town, and It starts to attack them, memories begin to reawaken. The town of Derry itself, which has grown up over It’s landing point millennia earlier, seems to turn against the adult Losers, but, shortly before It’s eggs hatch, the childhood friends manage to defeat It – and in the process, the town itself seems to die.

  Stephen King intended that IT would draw a line under the writing that he had done up to that point, describing IT as ‘a final summing up of everything I’ve tried to say in the last twelve years on the two central subjects of my fiction: monsters and children’. He even went so far as to say, in an interview with Time magazine, that in future, he would be moving away from horror. ‘For now,’ he told Stefan Kanfer, ‘as far as the Stephen King Book-of-the-Month Club goes, this is the clearance-sale time. Everything must go.’ IT was in part inspired by the roll call of Warner Bros. cartoon characters at the start of the Bugs Bunny Show: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to bring on all the monsters one last time? Bring them all on – Dracula, Frankenstein, Jaws, the Werewolf, the Crawling Eye, Rodan, It Came from Outer Space, and call it It.’

  King started work on IT after completing Danse Macabre, his examination of the horror genre, and how it had interwoven his life; the resulting book took over four years to write, and was King’s longest book up to that point, weighing in at 3 lbs 7 1/2 oz in its American hardback edition. He told Charles L. Grant that the storyline was triggered by an incident when he went to collect his car from a repair shop in Boulder, Colorado. He had to walk across a bridge, and could hear his boots as he went. ‘I got this “telephone call” from my childhood,’ he recalled, imagining that a troll was going to call up, as in the story about the three Billy Goats Gruff. That set him thinking about how people change from children into adults, and what would happen if we had to face the fears that haunted us as children.

  His own childhood is recreated in IT’s pages: the Losers’ Club members are the age that King himself was in 1958, and features of Stratford, Connecticut were borrowed wholesale for the locations in which they battle It. The murder of Adrian Mellon, which marks the start of It’s return, was based on the death of Charlie Howard, who was killed in a homophobic attack in 1984. The book did raise some eyebrows over what reviewers have dubbed ‘that scene’ in which an eleven-year-old girl has sex with all the members of the Losers’ Club.

  A story entitled ‘The Bird and the Album’ appeared in A Fantasy Reader: The Seventh World Fantasy Convention Program Book at Halloween 1981, which was apparently the start of chapter 13 of King’s work-in-progress, IT. It eventually became the beginning of chapter 14, and was rewritten heavily, losing some highly descriptive material, and changing tense for the published book.

  Awarded the British Fantasy Award in 1987 and nominated for both Locus and World Fantasy Awards, IT was the best-selling book in the United States in 1986 – a title it achieved despite being on sale for only four months of that year.

  There are considerable links to King’s other stories, apart from the setting of Derry. Dick Halloran from The Shining appears in one of the flashback sequences; Mike Hanlon is important in the later novel Insomnia; and two of the Losers’ Club appear in 11/22/63. Perhaps most importantly, there are some clues about the ‘Dark Tower’ series. And intriguingly, ‘Pennywise’s Circus’ is one of the worlds that is mentioned in King’s son, Joe Hill’s novel NOS4R2. In Dreamcatcher, there’s a hint that Pennywise may not be dead, but in June 2013, King said that he didn’t think he ‘could bear to deal with Pennywise again. Too scary, even for me’.

  Given King was trying to roll every horror icon into one story, it’s perhaps surprising that IT became a TV miniseries on a broadcast network in the US, but that’s how IT was presented in 1990. George A. Romero was originally involved with the production, which was intended to have a seven-hour running time, allowing Lawrence D. Cohen’s screenplay to adequately explore the nuances of King’s novel. However, it was eventually cut back to four hours, adopting a linear structure rather than intercutting between
the two plots as the book does. When Romero had to back out following scheduling issues, Tommy Lee Wallace was hired to direct and worked on the second half of the script to ensure that key incidents from the book were re-created on screen. The series starred Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown, with genre stalwarts Annette O’Toole (Smallville) as the older Beverly, and Seth Green (Buffy/Austin Powers) as the younger Richie.

  The story inspired the Hindi-language TV series Who in 1998, in which another group of seven childhood friends reunite as adults to deal with a monster they believed they had destroyed. A cinematic version of the original book was announced in 2009 by Warner Bros. with Dave Kajganich writing the screenplay; in 2012, this was superseded by a report that a two-movie adaptation would be directed by Cary Fukunaga from scripts by Fukunaga and Chase Palmer.

  7

  A NEW BEGINNING?: THE EYES OF THE DRAGON TO NEEDFUL THINGS

  The Eyes of the Dragon (Viking Press, February 1987)

  Evil magician Flagg wants to tighten his grip on the kingdom of Delain, but he’s being prevented from doing so by the queen, Sasha. After she gives birth to an heir, Peter, Flagg knows he needs to act quickly, and forces the midwife to cause Sasha a fatal injury when she gives birth a few years later to Peter’s brother, Thomas. He then targets Peter when he’s a teenager, and uses the prince’s habit of bringing his father some wine to frame him for the king’s murder, ensuring that Thomas sees his brother apparently poisoning the wine through the eyes of a dragon statue. Peter is found guilty of murder, and locked in a huge tower, the Needle, in the centre of the capital city. The judge allows him to have his mother’s old dollhouse with him, and a napkin with each meal. Thomas is crowned king, but increasingly falls under Flagg’s influence. Peter uses the loom in the dollhouse to make a rope from threads in the napkins and escapes. Flagg reveals his true demonic nature but flees when denounced by Thomas and is shot in the eye by his protégé. While Peter takes his rightful throne, Thomas and his butler Dennis head after Flagg.