A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  The Dark Half also inspired a computer game, developed by Symtus and published in 1992 by Capstone. The point and click game has rightly been called ‘a poor reflection of the novel [which] is riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies’. A walkthrough of the game can be found online, with the introduction available via YouTube. A sequel, The Dark Half: Endsville, (named after the place ‘where all rail services terminate’ in the book) was announced at gaming convention E3 in 1997 as a ‘real time, 3D adventure that contains 28 levels in seven different worlds’. An alternate version of The Dark Half was conceived as a computer game by F. Paul Wilson and Matt Costello – the description Wilson gives of the game is similar to that of Endsville, but this was not put into development after MGM took over Orion Interactive.

  Needful Things (Viking Press, October 1991)

  Storekeeper Leland Gaunt is new to the Maine town of Castle Rock, but his shop Needful Things seems to sell the most unusual items. However, Leland Gaunt has a secret: he can get you exactly whatever it is that your secret greasy heart desires; all he asks is a small favour. What he requests seems to be little more than a prank but once you’ve carried it out, you have to keep quiet, because it’s just one among many things that sees the small town explode into an orgy of violence. Sheriff Alan Pangborn, still trying to come to terms with the murders committed by George Stark (in The Dark Half), desperately seeks answers, as all around him petty feuds are magnified into assault and murder. Throwing mud at clean washing, slashing car tyres or killing a dog are just the start of the problems, but Gaunt has done his homework and knows exactly which buttons to press.

  Before long, the townsfolk need weapons to protect themselves, and Gaunt can provide these too, thanks to help from his assistant, petty crook Ace Merrill. He then gets Merrill and crooked Head Selectman Danforth Keeton to start planting explosives around the town, although the latter is killed when they blow up. Merrill takes the sheriff’s girlfriend, Polly Chambers, hostage, but also ends up dead. Pangborn manages to defeat Gaunt – or at least, forces him to leave what’s left of Castle Rock. But not too long afterwards, a new shop opens in a small Iowa town: Leland Gaunt is back in business.

  Subtitled ‘The Last Castle Rock Story’, Needful Things was a deliberate attempt by King to draw a line under a lot of the themes which he had been writing about in recent times, just as IT had been his way of providing closure to his monster tales. He saw it as a satire on the Reagan/Bush era, and the economic policies that led to the concept that ‘greed is good’. ‘To me, it was a hilarious concept,’ he told Time magazine in 2009. ‘And the way that it played out was funny, in a black-comedy way. It really satirized that American idea that it’s good to have everything that you want.’ While later critics have seen this within the book – even if many don’t believe that King puts his message across particularly well – at the time, Needful Things was criticized by the New York Times, for being a ‘rural Gothic version of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: it contains the same amount of senseless sadomasochistic violence, but the lunatics smear their bloodstained hands on duds from Sears, not Saks . . . hundreds of pages of rambling, turgid “clots and clumps” churned out in Mr King’s trademark dark-and-stormy-night style.’ (This may miss the point that Ellis’s book was also meant as a satire!)

  King was perhaps more sensitive to the criticism than he might otherwise have been: Needful Things was the first book he had written since he was aged sixteen that hadn’t involved ingestion of either alcohol or drugs. In later years, though, he has accepted that ‘maybe it just wasn’t a very good book’, although he maintained in The Atlantic in July 2013 that its opening line, which is printed on its own page, is the best he has ever written: ‘You’ve been here before.’

  Good or bad, Needful Things continues a long tradition in American fiction about a stranger coming to town and causing problems – in the horror genre, the most notable example being Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, whose influence can be felt in King’s description of Gaunt’s background as well as the man himself. Bradbury’s 1958 story ‘The Distributor’ bears a number of similarities too. King himself reworked a lot of the ideas behind Needful Things in his teleplay for Storm of the Century at the end of the 1990s.

  Needful Things also, once again, looks at addiction and obsession – there are few characters within the book that aren’t caught up in one or the other. Oddly, whereas King’s young protagonists usually battle the monster and win, that’s not the case here: eleven-year-old Brian Rusk, Gaunt’s first target, commits suicide.

  As well as Pangborn, Ace Merrill has appeared previously in King’s work – he was one of the bullies in the novella The Body – and there are mentions of both Thad Beaumont (whose wife has left him) and Cujo. Although this was the last Castle Rock novel, King did return briefly to the town for the short story ‘It Grows on You’, printed in Nightmares & Dreamscapes a couple of years later, and there have been occasional references in later tales, including the 2009 short story ‘Premium Harmony’.

  Needful Things became a movie in 1993, directed by Charlton Heston’s son Fraser C. Heston. Max von Sydow was Gaunt, with Ed Harris as Alan Pangborn, and Bonnie Bedelia as Polly Chambers. Many of the Needful Things were changed – the baseball card altered from one of Sandy Koufax to Micky Mantle when Koufax objected to the way King referred to the card in an interview, misunderstanding that King meant the real object Gaunt handed over was ‘shit’, not what it represented. The original script by Lawrence D. Cohen was replaced (for being overly faithful to King’s story) by W.D. ‘Rich’ Richter’s version, for which he admitted he condensed as much as possible of the original as he could while writing. An extended TV version, running 186 minutes compared to the movie’s 120, aired on TBS in the States in 1996; this reinstated a number of scenes, but trimmed some of the violence from the theatrical print. At the time of writing, only the original film is available on DVD.

  8

  UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: GERALD’S GAME TO DESPERATION/THE REGULATORS

  Gerald’s Game (Viking Press, May 1992)

  Jessie Burlingame is in trouble. She’s handcuffed to the bed in a secluded cabin in western Maine, and the only person who can get the keys from the bureau – her husband Gerald – is lying dead on the floor. Gerald has tried to liven up their sex life, but when Jessie refused to play along, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so received kicks severe enough to knock him to the floor, where he hit his head then had a heart attack. As Jessie desperately tries to find a way to get to the keys, voices in her head start arguing: the ‘Goodwife’, a version of Jessie herself; Nora Callighan, her former psychiatrist; and Ruth Neary, an old college friend. As their conversation continues, Jessie realizes that she has buried memories of being assaulted by her father when she was only ten years old, during a solar eclipse on 20 July 1963.

  She receives two visitors – a ravenously hungry dog named Prince, who eats Gerald’s arm; and an apparition that Jessie initially believes is her father, and then nicknames the Space Cowboy. Jessie manages to free herself, and after a brief confrontation with the Space Cowboy, gets to her car. Crashing after hallucinating seeing him in the back seat, she awakes in hospital. Writing a letter to the real Ruth Neary, Jessie reveals that the Space Cowboy really was there: an escaped serial necrophiliac murderer called Raymond Joubert.

  The 1990s saw King try some experiments with his writing. In IT, he had told a story in two time frames; in 1992’s Gerald’s Game/Dolores Claiborne and then later in Desperation and The Regulators, he told differing sides of the same story. For a short time, King considered publishing Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne as two halves of the same novel, ‘In the Path of the Eclipse’, but they were eventually published separately. ‘They just would not be harnessed together,’ King maintained, but some links are still there: on two occasions, the books clearly overlap, with a psychic connection between Jessie and Dolores.

  King ‘just wanted to sort of play baseball an
d goof off’ during the summer of 1991 before starting work on his next planned novel, Dolores Claiborne, but the central image of Gerald’s Game came to him during a dream on a flight to New York. ‘With Gerald’s Game, it was like an unplanned pregnancy,’ he told Writers’ Digest’s Wallace Stroby. ‘It was one of these situations that’s so interesting that you figure if you start to write it, things will suggest themselves.’

  When King researched the sorts of bondage games Gerald and Jessie played, ‘the whole thing struck me as a bit Victorian. There was something very Snidely Whiplash [Dudley Do-Right’s enemy in the cartoon series featured in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show] about the whole thing’. He also persuaded his son Joe to be tied to a bed as ‘an experiment’ to see if he (and therefore Jessie) would be able to get out by putting her feet over her head, over the head-board, and thus stand. Joe couldn’t – and so neither could Jessie.

  In common with other contemporary reviewers, the New York Times was concerned over the book’s treatment of incest and domestic violence. ‘Did Stephen King take on these heavy themes to prove that he is a Real Writer, not just a horror writer?’ Wendy Doniger asked. ‘Was he trying to shift from writing good bad novels to writing good good novels, and ended up with a bad good novel? The two genres cancel each other out: the horror makes us distrust the serious theme, and the serious theme stops us from suspending our disbelief to savour the horror.’

  Joubert makes a brief reappearance in passing in Insomnia, which King had pretty much completed by this stage. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick, now in charge of what’s left of Castle Rock, also has a small part to play.

  Although there have been various announcements regarding a potential movie of Gerald’s Game, nothing as yet has come to fruition. King himself told the New York Post in 2000 that he’d be interested in helming a version; after what he regarded as the disaster of his first directing endeavour, Maximum Overdrive in 1986: ‘I’d like to get it right. I don’t know, but maybe that hope for perfection – in whatever – is what really drives me. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it?’ Six years later Craig R. Baxley, who had directed Storm of the Century and Kingdom Hospital, noted that he was interested in working on a movie, to star Nicole Kidman as Jessie, from a script by King himself.

  Dolores Claiborne (Viking Press, November 1992)

  Dolores Claiborne is in trouble. She’s been arrested by the police on Little Tall Island for the murder of her employer, Vera Donovan, and is now giving her statement. But this is no ordinary statement: Dolores is going to explain things her own way, and in the process reveal a great deal about events taking place during the solar eclipse on 20 July 1963.

  She admits that she killed her husband Joe St George on the day of the eclipse. (She went back to her maiden name after his death.) When Dolores stood up to Joe’s domestic abuse of her after years of accepting it, he became unable to perform sexually with her, so turned his attentions to their fourteen-year-old daughter, Selena, while continuing to mistreat their sons. When Dolores decided to leave him, she learnt that Joe has stolen her savings, and her employer Vera Donovan pointed out that an accident can sometimes be a woman’s best friend – setting Dolores on course to arrange Joe’s death. On the day of the eclipse, he fell into the well and died when Dolores pushed a rock down on top of him. Dolores continued to work for Vera, who became progressively more mentally unstable. When Vera leaped down the stairs and seriously injured herself, Dolores reluctantly agreed to end her suffering, but Vera died before Dolores had to do anything. She is eventually cleared of any involvement in the ‘wrongful death’ of Vera.

  As mentioned in the entry for Gerald’s Game above, at one stage King considered publishing the two novels together; instead they came out in comparatively quick succession. It’s dedicated to King’s mother, Ruth Pillsbury King, who had to bring up Stephen and his brother after their father walked out, and ‘kept things together’.

  Stylistically, Dolores Claiborne is an oddity for King. There may not have been any chapter breaks in Cujo, simply moving from one story strand to another with just a blank line to indicate the change of location; in Dolores Claiborne, there aren’t even any of those. The entire story (bar a couple of newspaper clippings at the end) is Dolores’ statement, told in her own words, with those often rendered phonetically to get the exact nuances of her Maine accent. These include her vision of ten-year-old Jessie Mahout sitting on her father’s knee during the eclipse (Jessie recalls seeing a woman leading her husband to a well). It’s a very effective method of allowing the reader inside Dolores’s thoughts, and although we’re encouraged to accept her version of events, a few nagging doubts do remain about her reliability as a narrator. Joe St George’s anger and violence when drunk wasn’t autobiographical on King’s part – as he noted in a BBC documentary in 1998, ‘thank God I was never a mean drunk’ – but he was able to include true-to-life reactions from observing drinkers, and having been one himself.

  Two novels in quick succession seemed to be outside the comfort zone of King’s usual Constant Reader – although those who picked them up would quickly realize that King was as capable of creating horror out of everyday life as he was from the supernatural – but the author was quick with reassurance that normal service would be resumed, eventually. ‘When I write, I want to scare people,’ he emphasized to Esther B. Fein in the New York Times. ‘But there is a certain comfort level for the reader because you are aware all the time that it’s make-believe. Vampires, the supernatural and all that. In that way, it’s safe. But these last two books take people out of the safety zone and that, in a way, is even scarier. Maybe it could happen. . . I’m just trying to find things I haven’t done, to stay alive creatively. . . [W]hat I am about is trying to scare people by getting inside their shields, and I’m going to continue to do that.’

  In 2009, King noted that there might one day be a ‘third eclipse novel’ which featured Jessie Burlingame and Dolores Claiborne meeting up; since this was at the same talk at which he mentioned wondering about what was happening now to The Shining’s Danny Torrance, which led directly to the writing and publication of Doctor Sleep in 2013, this reunion may yet occur.

  Dolores Claiborne hit cinemas in 1995, with Kathy Bates as Dolores, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Selena. Christopher Plummer played Detective John Mackey, a character not in the original novel, but who bore similarities to the coroner from the book who was always suspicious of Dolores’s involvement in her husband’s death. The story is opened out considerably in Tony Gilroy’s script – the events of the past are dealt with in much the same way, but we learn far more about Selena in the movie than we do in the book, although to a large degree the two characters are compatible.

  The story has also become the subject of a new opera that opened in San Francisco in the autumn of 2013. According to composer Tobias Picker, ‘Dolores Claiborne is a character destined for the operatic stage – passionate, desperate, trapped. She will do anything to save the daughter who despises her. Pushed to the extreme edge of life, she does what she has to, fearless and forsaken. I have wanted to write this opera for years. Yes, Stephen King is a master of suspense, but he is also a remarkable reader of human desires and fears. The superb team that San Francisco Opera has assembled allowed me to compose a powerful, heart-stopping piece of music theatre for a cast of brilliant voices.’

  Insomnia (Viking Press, September 1994)

  It’s time to return to the town of Derry, where retired widower Ralph Roberts is suffering from insomnia – and he’s not overly happy to learn that the condition has been induced. He’s not the only one with it: his friend Lois Chasse is also afflicted, and they’re both starting to see things in what is dubbed ‘hyper-reality’. Everyone has a balloon aura – but when it turns black, they are heading for death. Ralph and Lauren learn that they have been given insomnia by two small bald doctors whom they name Clotho and Lachesis, after the Fates in mythology, so they will enter this refined state. Their job is to try to prevent a third Fa
te, Atropos, from intervening in a battle against the Kingfisher (also known as the Crimson King), which they seem to do, although Atropos then shows Ralph that he will take the life of innocent Natalie Deepneau. Ralph agrees with Clotho and Lachesis that he will trade his life for Natalie’s.

  Ralph and Lois also have to save the life of everyone who is attending a pro-choice abortion rally. The Crimson King is using Natalie’s father, Ed Deepneau, as his agent, and Deepneau plans to crash a plane into the Derry Convention Centre, killing everyone at the rally. Ralph manages to defeat the Crimson King, and Deepneau’s plane misses the Centre – allowing one key person, Patrick Danville, to survive. He is important to the well-being of the Tower of all existence, and could not be killed without altering the balance of creation. Ralph and Lois marry and have some years together; however, he eventually gives his life in a car accident to save Natalie, and is taken by Clotho and Lachesis to a new plane of living.

  Insomnia is a novel about which Stephen King has had conflicting feelings. Talking in September 1991, he revealed that he had spent about four months working on the book during the previous year but described it as ‘not good . . . not publishable’. To him it felt like a ‘pipe sculpture – except none of the pipes thread together the way they’re supposed to. Some do, but a lot of them don’t, so it’s sort of a mess’. He wasn’t prepared to give up on it since ‘[t]he thing that hurts is that the last eighty or ninety pages are wonderful’ but it lacked that ‘novelistic roundness’. Looking back on it for Time magazine in 2009, he noted that it failed in his eyes because he forced the characters into situations.