A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Originally released in a limited oversized edition by the Philtrum Press (King’s own publishing company) in 1984, The Eyes of the Dragon was often overlooked by King’s fans before its links to the ‘Dark Tower’ series were made explicit in the short story ‘The Little Sisters of Eluria’, which appeared in 1998. King had written the story (then known simply as ‘Napkins’) for his daughter Naomi Rachel King, the inspiration for the character Naomi Reechul in the book, and it was thought therefore that this was a children’s tale. This perception probably wasn’t helped by the major Time interview with King in late 1986, in which the book is described as ‘an Arthurian sword-and-sorcery epic written for Naomi, who read Carrie and has since refused to venture into any of her father’s other books’.

  In fact, it’s not really a children’s book at all: ‘I respected my daughter enough then – and now – to try and give her my best,’ King explained, ‘and that includes a refusal to “talk down”. Or put another way, I did her the courtesy of writing for myself as well as for her.’ The levels of violence and gore may be toned down – particularly from contemporary King works such as Pet Sematary or IT – and there is a lot more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ involved. The omniscient narrator is able to get away with glossing over details in such a way that those with active imaginations can envision the various beheadings and tortures, but it could be innocuous enough for younger readers.

  In some ways this can be seen as an ‘origin story’ for King’s greatest villain, Randall Flagg – as the final volume of the ‘Dark Tower’ saga makes clear, Delain is where he comes from, and the gunslinger Roland is aware of Thomas and Dennis’s pursuit of Flagg following the events of this book.

  The 1987 version of the story differs in a number of ways from the limited edition. Peter’s companion Ben appears much earlier in the story now, and King wrote the scene with the three-legged sack race which seals the two boys’ friendship specifically to address the concerns of Deborah Brodie, the freelance editor Viking brought on board for the new edition. The concerns of the fans who felt King should stick to writing horror, and not try to break into other fields, became a key note in the book King was working on at the time – Misery.

  Speaking in 1989, Stephen King believed that The Eyes of the Dragon would make ‘such a great cartoon’, and eleven years later, it was optioned by WAMC Entertainment, intended as a $45 million animated feature. ‘The storyline and characters provide all the ingredients for a classic fantasy, sword-and-sorcerer animated tale, but are also blended with Stephen King’s own brand of suspense and dark humour,’ WAMC’s Sidonie Herman told Screen Daily in 2000. Their rights had lapsed by 2005, but a new version, this time for the US Syfy Channel, was announced in April 2012. If this gets the green light, this will be a four-hour miniseries, from a script by Michael Taylor and Jeff Vintar. The channel regularly takes a long time in preproduction on its projects, so its realization may still occur in time to mark King’s forty-year anniversary.

  Misery (Viking Press, June 1987)

  Annie Wilkes is a fan. In fact, she’s author Paul Sheldon’s ‘number one fan’. So when she gets the chance to meet her hero, she’s over the moon – until she finds out that Paul has killed off his long-running heroine Misery Chastain in the most recent novel, and is branching out into other types of literature. He’s going to have to change his mind and resurrect her, whether he likes it or not. And Annie has plenty of ways of ensuring that Paul will do what he’s told.

  Paul isn’t allowed to cheat either – his first version of Misery’s Return doesn’t satisfy his keenest audience, and he has to rework it to make it credible and acceptable. By this time he has become addicted to painkillers, and has been forcibly prevented from being able to escape after Annie cuts his foot off. As Annie becomes increasingly more insane, killing a state trooper, and removing Paul’s thumb, Paul realizes that when he completes the manuscript to Annie’s satisfaction, he will die at her hands. When it is finished, he sets fire to it in front of Annie, and stuffs the burning pages in her mouth. After a fight in which Annie cracks her skull, Paul manages to attract attention from some more state troopers, and is rescued. But that’s not the end of his problems with Annie Wilkes . . .

  Stephen King may have put aside the trappings of the horror novel after IT, but Misery is a horror story of a different sort. It’s a highly claustrophobic two-hander in which King deals with the plight and problems of the writer and his relationship with his fans, as well as – subconsciously – talking about the perils of addiction. ‘Even if Misery is less terrifying than his usual work – no demons, no witchcraft, no nether-world horrors – it creates strengths out of its realities,’ John Katzenbach wrote in the New York Times. ‘Its excitements are more subtle. And, as such, it is an intriguing work.’

  With a basis in the tale of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, Misery was described as a ‘love letter’ from King to his fans in some of the attendant publicity; other critics have called it ‘more like a gigantic F*** You’. It certainly derives in part from King’s annoyance at his fans’ reactions to The Eyes of the Dragon, since he felt that they were trying to pigeonhole him into one specific genre of writing. King was clear in interviews promoting Misery that he still was grateful to the fans, but he had experienced the darker side of their adoration, and he had become very wary of it. Years earlier he believed he had encountered his own ‘number one fan’ – Mark Chapman, who would become the murderer of John Lennon in 1980. Ironically, one of the worst fan-related incidents happened four years after Misery was published: King was away at a baseball game, leaving his wife alone in the house in Maine when she heard a window break. ‘There was this guy there, and he claimed he had a bomb (in fact it was a bunch of pencils and erasers and stuff and paperclips),’ King recalled in 2000. ‘He was an escapee from a mental institution and he had this rant about how I’d stolen Misery from him. Tabby fled in her bathrobe and the police came . . .’

  In the book, Annie Wilkes is a monster, and King was delighted with the way that she has no redeeming features: ‘This voice rose up inside me and said, “Why does she have to have a good side?” ’ he recalled in 1990. “If she’s crazy go ahead, make her a monster! She’s a human being but let her be a monster if that’s what she wants to be,” and it was such a relief!’

  In On Writing, King was open about his drug addiction and alcohol problems in the early 1980s, and how they were rapidly escalating around the time he wrote Misery. It was a cry for help from an inner part of his own psyche that he could only recognize once he had come out the other side.

  Had the author not succumbed to ‘cancer of the pseudonym’, chances are that Misery would have followed Thinner as a book by Richard Bachman. It has various connections to other King stories though – Annie talks about the ruins of the Overlook Hotel (The Shining), while Sheldon’s novels are mentioned in The Library Policeman novella in Four Past Midnight.

  There are probably few people who nowadays read Misery without thinking of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, the part she played in Rob Reiner’s 1990 movie – and for whom William Goldman penned the character in the screenplay. A certain amount of expansion was deemed necessary to translate the story to the big screen – we learn far more about the search for Paul as it goes on – with Reiner explaining that ‘we got rid of the most gory and horrific parts. I wanted to concentrate on the idea of this chess match between the artist and his fan’. The foot-lopping was also toned down for the screen. Bates’s performance won her both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

  The claustrophobic nature of the story also lends itself to stage adaptation: Simon Moore wrote and directed a production for the UK stage, which opened in 1992 with Burn Notice’s Sharon Gless as Annie and Bill Paterson as Paul. Ken Stack directed a version of this in Maine in 2000. William Goldman has also adapted his screenplay for a new stage version that opened in Pennsylvania in November 2012, with Johanna Day as Annie and Daniel Gerroll as Paul. Director Will Frears promi
sed that the production would be realistic: ‘There are these astonishing moments of violence and terror in the middle of it, we all felt we had to go there — you had to see those ankles crunch. If you didn’t really deliver that satisfyingly, in a sense you weren’t doing Misery. And that’s what the people came for.’

  The Tommyknockers (Putnam, November 1987)

  Writer Bobbi Anderson is in the woods near her home in Haven, Maine, with her dog, when she comes across a piece of metal sticking out of the ground. Investigating it, she eventually discovers that it is part of an alien spaceship, which starts to release an odourless gas that affects everyone within a certain area of the woods. The gas enables the residents of the town to use parts of their brains they haven’t accessed before, and create incredible gadgets to help them with their everyday life – even if they don’t fully comprehend them, or realize that the gas is also affecting them physically.

  One man appears immune to the effects of the gas, Bobbi’s former lover Jim ‘Gard’ Gardener, who has a metal plate in his head. He’s virulently against nuclear power and is initially trying to alert people to the dangers of this, before understanding that what the spaceship is providing is considerably worse. The other residents of Haven are taken over by the aliens’ consciousness as they ‘become’ Tommyknockers, and want Bobbi to dispose of Jim, but she refuses. When the spaceship’s hatchway is uncovered, Bobbi and Jim enter to find the Tommyknocker crew in hibernation; soon after, Jim kills Bobbi accidentally. He then finds a way to control the ship telepathically, and, as he dies, it blasts off into space. Haven’s survivors are collected by agents of The Shop, although most of them die quickly.

  A book that King admits he wrote at the height of his cocaine and alcohol addictions across the spring and summer of 1986, The Tommyknockers is also the writer at his least controlled. King stated in interviews regularly that he didn’t always take well to criticism, even from his editors: after all, what were they going to do? Fire one of America’s top-selling authors? There are whole swathes of The Tommyknockers that feel self-indulgent – notably the 200 pages dedicated to introducing us to the residents of Haven – which should have been carefully pruned. The multiple references to characters and situations from his other work don’t help, particularly when they contradict and undercut the previous stories, such as the reference to the presence of It in Derry in a book clearly set years after the events of that novel.

  The Tommyknockers was King’s homage to the schlock science-fiction tales of the 1940s, and was a conscious reworking of themes in H. P. Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (itself adapted for the big screen in the same year that The Tommyknockers was published). It also bears remarkable similarities to Nigel Kneale’s third Quatermass TV serial, Quatermass and the Pit, whose 1967 film version was released in America under the title Five Million Years to Earth, as well as the 1970 TV movie Night Slaves, which was based on a novel by Jerry Sohl.

  Discussing the novel in 2009, King noted that he had the original idea for The Tommyknockers while still a senior in college, but he realized that ‘the canvas was just too big. And so I quit’. When he picked the novel back up a couple of decades later, he thought that it would become an examination of the corrupting nature of power. ‘If I have these two people and they’re able to get this flying saucer out of the ground and fly it, then they can decide they’re going to become sheriffs for world peace and discover they do a really terrible job at it, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ he told Time magazine. Instead the book became about the unstoppable power of addiction: Bobbi notes that her compulsion to dig the craft out of the ground had nothing to do with free will, and that once something is discovered, human nature dictates you have to dig it out, in case it’s treasure.

  Portions of The Tommyknockers were published as ‘The Revelations of Becka Paulson’ in Rolling Stone magazine on 19 July and 2 August 1984. The short-story version was considerably changed for its inclusion in the book – for a start, it takes place in 1973 rather than contemporaneously.

  The Tommyknockers was not well received. The New York Times damned it with faint praise: ‘We already knew [Mr King] could grip us with good horror stories and so-so horror stories. Now he has shown that he can grip us with a lousy horror story as well.’ Publishers Weekly said that the book was ‘consumed by the rambling prose of its author’ and that, like the characters in the story, King had ‘ “become” a writing machine’.

  The early 1990s saw a number of King’s projects adapted for the small screen with The Tommyknockers appearing on ABC in May 1993. Like IT – and the earlier movie of Carrie – this was penned by Lawrence D. Cohen, with L.A. Law’s Jimmy Smits and later CSI star Marg Helgenberger as Gard and Bobbi. Cohen tightened up the story, as well as making various changes (listed in considerable detail online) – notably the Tommyknockers themselves come to life at the end, and the effects of the ‘becoming’ are rather less visually obvious (a lack of teeth rather than the full-blown radiation poisoning symptoms of the novel). Filmed in New Zealand, The Tommyknockers didn’t have the pulling power of IT, and was severely edited for its US video release, although the whole miniseries is now available on DVD. ‘I thought they did a pretty decent job with a book that wasn’t top drawer to begin with,’ King told Cinefantastique.

  The short story ‘The Revelations of Becka Paulson’ was separately adapted for television as an episode of The Outer Limits by Brad Wright. First broadcast in June 1997, this changed the person talking to Becka from Jesus to a ‘Guy in the Photo’.

  A second TV miniseries based on the novel was announced in July 2013, this time to be produced by NBC. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee’s Yves Simoneau has been lined up to direct.

  The town of Haven in which both the book and miniseries of The Tommyknockers are set is not the same one created for the Syfy Channel series based on King’s novella The Colorado Kid. That particular troubled town is located on the Maine coastline.

  The Dark Half (Viking Press, October 1989)

  Recovering alcoholic author Thad Beaumont has finally decided to get rid of his alter ego, George Stark. While Beaumont writes literary novels, ‘Stark’ pens violent crime stories featuring a killer called Alexis Machine. For years the world has been unaware that Beaumont and Stark are the same person, but when the secret is revealed, Thad and his wife Elizabeth stage a fake burial at the local cemetery, which is covered by People magazine.

  George Stark, though, has other ideas on the subject, and refuses to be dead. He kills off those who he holds liable for his ‘death’, including Thad’s agent, his editor and the People reporter, leaving fingerprints at the scenes of the crimes – which are identical to Thad’s. Although Thad has solid alibis, Sheriff Alan Pangborn believes the writer is somehow responsible – and Thad himself is having some very bad dreams. Pangborn learns that Thad was actually one of twins, the other of whom died in utero, although parts had to be removed from Thad’s brain when he was younger. This may be how Stark has been able to achieve corporeal form: two minds in one body become one mind in two bodies. The stage is set for a dramatic confrontation between author and pseudonym made flesh, and it is by no means certain that Thad has the inner steel he requires to defeat Stark.

  There was a time towards the end of 1988 when it seemed as The Dark Half might have become Stephen King’s new ‘trunk’ novel, a story written, like Pet Sematary, because the author needed to tell it, but too personal to publish. According to the Stephen King newsletter, Castle Rock, in November 1988, when asked about The Dark Half, editor Stephanie Leonard explained, ‘It is true that Stephen has written a book by this title. But at this time he has no plans to publish it.’ In his essay in the reprint of The Bachman Books in 1996, King noted that The Dark Half was a book his wife hated ‘perhaps because, for Thad Beaumont, the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man; for Thad, delusive thinking overtakes rationality completely, with horrible consequences’.

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bsp; Unquestionably, The Dark Half could not have been written if it had not been for King’s experiences as Richard Bachman. At one stage, he proposed that the book be published by Viking as by Stephen King and Richard Bachman, but this was not permitted by the publishers. They were concerned that it might confuse readers, particularly after King’s collaboration with Peter Straub on The Talisman a few years earlier. The book is dedicated to Bachman – ‘this book could not have been written without him’, King notes.

  Thoughts about the differences between King and Bachman (which King discusses in some detail in The Bachman Books introduction) led him to consider the subject of multiple personalities. When he learned about twins being imperfectly absorbed in the womb – a real occurrence, although perhaps not as gory as it appears in The Dark Half – he wondered, ‘What if this guy is the ghost of a twin that never existed?’ Other books about split personalities – including the classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – also clearly influenced the writing.

  This is the third consecutive book in which King writes about writers and the compulsions that drive them, and was penned while King was still wavering over his addictions – he had yet to take the final steps to sobriety. The dichotomy between the ‘addicted’ writer and his sober self is reflected in the very different styles of writing in the book.

  It also returns to the locale of Castle Rock, with a new sheriff replacing the late George Bannerman. Pangborn would return in Needful Things ; Thad Beaumont’s future is revealed in that book, as well as in Bag of Bones.

  Although the movie version of The Dark Half was completed in 1991, audiences had to wait until 1993 to see it, following the financial problems that plagued its production company, Orion Pictures. King’s friend, legendary horror director George A. Romero, who had previously shot King’s screenplay for Creepshow and had come close to helming other adaptations, was behind the camera, and ensured that the film had the visceral shocks that readers of the book imagined. Timothy Hutton played Thad Beaumont and George Stark, with Amy Madigan as his wife, and Michael Rooker as Sheriff Pangborn. Hutton, a Method actor, requested two trailers, to help keep the two identities separate. In one change from the book, the occult expert Rawlie DeLesseps changed gender for the movie, with Julie Harris playing the role of Reggie DeLesseps.