A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Both books contain links to other King stories besides each other: there are clear resemblances between Tak in both books and It, as well as the ‘outsider’ who merges with Sara Tidwell in Bag of Bones. Terminology is also shared with the ‘Dark Tower’ series, while The Regulators movie that Seth loves is mentioned in Hearts in Atlantis.

  In the revised introduction to The Bachman Books, King provided a clear indication of how Desperation and The Regulators entwined. The idea of doing something connected with toys, guns and suburbia had been percolating in his mind while writing Desperation, and it occurred to him to use the same characters and situations in The Regulators – and, to ensure they had a different voice, he would ‘resurrect’ Bachman, as if this was a manuscript that had been found after the author’s death. This enabled him to give the material a fresh perspective in the writing, as well as within the stories – one, as he points out, is about God, the other about television. By starting work on The Regulators the day after completing Desperation, King was able to create a book that was a ‘fraternal twin’. He insisted on the two books arriving in stores together, unlike the similarly linked Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, which had a six-month gap between publication.

  For the signed limited edition of the Bachman book, a clever plan was devised to get round the fact that Dicky Bachman was deceased and so couldn’t autograph the book. ‘Signatures’ were found on old cheques that Bachman’s widow possessed (in America, unlike in the UK, once a cheque is cashed at a bank, the cancelled cheque itself is returned to the sender). Separate cheques were created for each of the thousand copies – number 2 was for $20 to Chris Hargenson for prom tickets (Carrie); number 82 to Lloyd Henreid for $100 for ‘taking care of business’ (The Stand); number 306 was to Annie Wilkes for $12 for ‘axe and blowtorch’ (Misery); number 341 was to George Stark for $100 for protection (The Dark Half). (A full list can be found at http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/sk/cheques.html)

  Stephen King’s Desperation eventually arrived on screen directed by veteran King-helmer Mick Garris, filmed in 2004 but not broadcast until May 2006. King was pleased with it, but not with ABC’s decision to run what had been intended as a two-night miniseries as a one three-hour event, and place it opposite the finale of American Idol. Tom Skerritt was Johnny Marinville, with Ron Perlman as Collie Estragian, Steven Weber (the star of King’s own version of The Shining) as Steve, and Annabeth Gish as Mary Jackson. King penned the screenplay himself, and the New York Times noted that this meant it was ‘King done right . . . This first-rate movie is also a chthonic mess. Mr King has once again slammed his hand flat on all the buttons, and everything is lit up.’ Garris was ‘sure that we’d have to make cuts, but I tried to be economical about it. I wanted us to maintain everything we could from the book, and it can be conveyed potently without going over the top. Well, we stood at the precipice, and re-created as much of the book as possible. I don’t think any complaints will be that we backed down on the violence. That said, we didn’t revel in the bloodshed, either.’

  The Regulators was, of course, made in 1958, with John Payne, Ty Hardin, Karen Steele and Rory Calhoun, directed by Billy Rancourt. The screenplay was by Craig Goodis and Quentin Woolrich. Or rather, that’s the case in the Richard Bachman (and Stephen King) universe – in ours, the story has yet to be filmed.

  9

  WIPING THE SLATE CLEAN: BAG OF BONES TO FROM A BUICK 8

  Bag of Bones (Scribner, September 1998)

  Widower Mike Noonan hasn’t been able to write since his pregnant wife Jo’s death in a car accident. Four years later, he decides to confront his fears after he has a number of nightmares about his lakeside house in the unincorporated township of TR-90 in Maine. He meets young widow Mattie Devore and her three-year-old daughter Kyra and learns that Mattie’s father-in-law Max Devore will do whatever is necessary to gain custody of Kyra. Mike helps Mattie, despite Max’s attempts to prevent him.

  Mike realizes that his wife’s ghost is helping him, and he begins to investigate the death of singer Sara Tidwell, a blues singer whose ghost haunts the house. After Max unexpectedly kills himself, and Mattie is killed in a drive-by shooting, Mike takes Kyra back to his home, where the ghost of Sara tries to force him to kill Kyra and himself, although Jo prevents this. With Jo’s help, Mike learns the truth: Sara was raped and killed by men in the town, and her son Kito was killed. She cursed the town and its folk, with the firstborn children with ‘K’ names all drowning. Mike manages to destroy her bones and end the curse, which would have affected his unborn child as well. Max’s assistant kidnaps Kyra, but Mattie’s ghost pushes her into the lake, where she is impaled on wreckage. Mike then intends to adopt Kyra, although as a single male, this may not be easy.

  Bag of Bones was Stephen King’s first book for his new publishers, Scribner, and there seemed to be a concerted effort to reposition him away from the horror and fantasy genres with which he was best known – the hardback was billed as a ‘haunted love story’ and included quotes from novelists Amy Tan and Gloria Naylor. (‘To some degree, they rehabilitated my reputation,’ King noted in 2009.) He embarked on a lengthy promotional tour, including a trip to the UK; some of the many radio interviews he gave can be heard on the AudioGO CD Stephen King in His Own Words, which show his increasing displeasure at what he saw as the interviewers’ crude attempts at psychoanalysis. He was obviously happy at the time with the piece – ‘This probably sounds self-serving, but I like BAG O’ BONZ [sic] the best. For now, at least,’ he told an AOL online chat – and it won both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award.

  The supernatural elements of the tale are fully woven into the story: the ghosts are integral to the plot, rather than acting as dei ex machina. There are links to previous Maine stories (King had stated that he wanted to write another full-blown adventure there before he turned fifty), with the fates of both Ralph Roberts from Insomnia and Thad Beaumont from The Dark Half mentioned, as well as Alan Pangborn and Polly Chalmers from Needful Things. There’s even a quick mention of Bill Denbrough from IT. While promoting the book, King noted that, ‘I grew up in the country [in Maine], and to me it really does feel as though reality is thinner in the country. There is a sense of the infinite that’s very, very close, and I just try to convey some of that in my fiction.’

  Once again, King was writing about writers, with Mike Noonan able to hide his writer’s block by publishing novels that he had been stockpiling, something that King had been told that both Danielle Steel and Agatha Christie had done. The New York Times review went so far as to wonder if King actually wanted to write about the writing process within the book, counting over forty references to different authors and their methodology. The title derives from a quote attributed to Thomas Hardy: ‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’ Of course, King was working on his non-fiction title, On Writing, at this time.

  He was also physically writing about writing: Bag of Bones was written in longhand rather than on a word processor, as recent books had been. ‘It made me slow down because it takes a long time,’ King told the Paris Review. ‘But it made the rewriting process a lot more felicitous. It seemed to me that my first draft was more polished, just because it wasn’t possible to go so fast. You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.’

  The rights for Bag of Bones were originally obtained by Bruce Willis as a project for him to produce and star in, but this never progressed. It was finally brought to television in December 2011, with Mick Garris directing from a screenplay by Matt Venne. The two-night miniseries aired on the A&E Network (although shown as one three-hour movie in the UK the following year), and made various alterations to the timeline and storyline, although not as many as would have been required if Garris’s original plans to sho
ot it as a two-hour movie had materialized. ‘Bag of Bones is a pretty dense story,’ the director told Stacey Harrison of Channel Guide Magazine. ‘Our original script was for a two-hour feature film and it really felt like it was missing stuff . . . It’s intense, but it’s not a gorefest by any means. It has its horrific elements, but it’s more about the tension and the mystery and the ghost story.’ Pierce Brosnan played Mike Noonan, with Melissa George as Mattie, and Annabeth Gish as Jo Noonan.

  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Scribner, April 1999)

  Trisha McFarland shouldn’t have wandered off. She knows that, but now the nine-year-old is lost in the woods, after heading on a different trail to relieve herself (and, rather more to the point, to get away from her mother and brother bickering about their parents’ impending divorce). She doesn’t have much with her, but at least she has her radio, on which she can listen for news of her favourite baseball player, Tom Gordon.

  Trisha ends up lost for far longer than she expects, even though her mother and brother call for help quickly. She tries to act sensibly but the lack of food and water means that she begins to hallucinate, and believes that the ‘God of the Lost’ is stalking her, waiting for her to ‘ripen’ – but she has help and advice from Tom Gordon to keep her going. Gordon encourages her to believe that God will help her ‘at the bottom of the ninth’ – when she needs to close the game. When she encounters a bear, she believes that this is the God of the Lost, and she hurls her Walkman at it. This fight coincides with the arrival of a huntsman, who rescues her, and returns her to civilization.

  In a note to reviewers accompanying copies of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King called the book ‘the result of an unplanned pregnancy’, a short tale – at 224 pages, King’s second-shortest book published under his own name – that is primarily plot driven. Non-American readers, possibly put off by the thought that the book is full of baseball references, should note that everything within the text is self-explanatory; the fact that Tom Gordon was a real-life ball player, whose trademark gesture, pointing at the sky, is emulated by Trisha, isn’t actually important to the story.

  King’s love of baseball appears in various books – and he has written non-fiction tomes about the progress or otherwise of his favourite team – and this book came to mind while he was watching a game at Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox. It’s a variation on the German fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, as recorded by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century – except without Hansel – and is divided into ‘innings’, like a baseball game, rather than chapters. It was published on the Opening Day for the Red Sox, 6 April.

  It’s also another examination of the existence and importance of God, as nine-year-old Trisha tries to make sense of a world that is no longer the safe and secure place she expected, both thanks to her parents’ divorce, and her adventures in the wood. It’s the sort of subject matter that can often be found in books aimed at the ‘young adult’ market – those in their teens and early twenties – and, indeed, King noted that, ‘If there was such a thing as a Stephen King young-adult novel, it would be The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.’

  Creepshow and The Dark Half director George A. Romero was very interested in bringing Trisha McFarland’s story to the big screen. He penned a screenplay – at the time King was recuperating from his near-fatal vehicle accident, so was in no position to work on it or anything else – and announced in June 2000 that he was waiting for King’s approval before proceeding to filming. In early 2001, there was a rumour that Tom Gordon might play himself in the film: ‘Tom won’t have to be Wesley Snipes or Cuba Gooding Jr. He’s a young enough guy to be adventurous,’ King commented. However, Hollywood studios didn’t seem interested enough for the project to get a green light until Dakota Fanning’s star began to rise following her appearance in the Steven Spielberg miniseries Taken – but then, according to Romero, Fanning changed agent, who wasn’t interested in her taking such a role. Despite a report in the Boston Herald that filming was starting in April 2005, nothing has progressed.

  Possibly one of the most unusual adaptations of a Stephen King story did become available – a pop-up book based on the tale. The text was condensed by Peter Abrahams with illustrations by Alan Dingman and ‘paper engineering’ by Kees Moerbeek. According to Publishers Weekly, Dingman’s seven spreads were ‘heavy on the nauseous green and shadowy brown’ and it suggested that ‘daring and, ideally, mature King fans will appreciate this scary, perversely funny combo of horror and children’s pop-up’.

  Dreamcatcher (Scribner, March 2001)

  Four childhood friends from Derry, Maine – Gary Ambrose ‘Jonesy’ Jones; Pete Moore; Joe ‘Beaver’ Clarendon; and Henry Devlin – meet up each November for a hunting trip; although their lives have gone in very different ways, they are bound together by an incident when they were young when they saved a young Down’s syndrome boy, Douglas ‘Duddits’ Cavell, from the hands of a bully. Each now has major problems, which are exacerbated when they become caught up in the hunt for some extra-terrestrials that have landed in the area, and are being pursued by a quarantine unit headed by Colonel Abraham Kurtz. They also have a low-level telepathic ability, which enables Duddits, back in Derry, to realize that his friends are in trouble.

  Large worm-like creatures known as byrum (nicknamed ‘shit weasels’ because they exit the body through the anus) are created if anyone inhales or eats a red mould. Beaver is killed by a byrum, and Jonesy is taken over by one of the mature byrums, known as Grays. Pete is covered by the mould, and is eventually killed by ‘Mr Gray’ inside Jonesy. Jonesy himself desperately tries to stop Mr Gray from learning about Duddits by placing information in his ‘memory warehouse’ and manages to keep Mr Gray from carrying out his plan to infect Derry’s water supply. Henry and one of the military, who’s not as gung-ho and over the top as his colonel, reach Duddits, who is dying from leukaemia, but still has sufficient power to help Henry and Jonesy defeat the alien. The battle kills Duddits, but the day is won.

  Dreamcatcher – which the author originally wanted to call ‘Cancer’ until his wife prevailed on him to change the title – was the first book that Stephen King wrote after the accident that nearly took his life in June 1999. He began work on it in November, while still in severe pain and using crutches, and had to write longhand into a series of ledger books while propped up in a chair with pillows. It’s one of King’s grosser novels – the life cycle of the alien creature is explained in great detail – and although there are places where some stricter editing might assist the flow of the tale, it’s a clear statement that while the accident may have affected his physical abilities, it hadn’t changed his mental faculties. He wanted to write because ‘it’s my drug, it takes me away. When I’m writing, I’m in another world; you don’t feel the pain during that period of writing’. That didn’t stop him from incorporating elements of his accident into the story – one of the characters has also recently been hit by a vehicle.

  Initially King saw Dreamcatcher as a story set in just one locale – the cabin – with a group of guys encountering a monster invasion from space, but he realized that he also wanted to enter a ‘taboo zone – a place where ordinarily the door is closed, and we don’t go beyond that door’. Whereas once that door was to the bedroom, now, King reckoned, it was to the bathroom, and he started to think about the way that a lot of nasty discoveries are made in there – ‘I would guess maybe sixty to seventy per cent of our realization that we have a tumour, we have a cancer, that sort of thing, happens in the bathroom . . . You look in the bowl and you’ve got blood, and you go, “Uh-oh, I’ve got a problem”.’ He even suggested that he wrote the whole book for the scene where Beaver is sitting on the toilet lid and can’t get off because the thing is inside and won’t go down because ‘it’s too big to flush’. Perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, he claimed that the scene would ‘do for the toilet what Psycho did for the shower’. After all, ‘Nobody’s as defenceless as they are in the bathroom, with their pants
down.’

  The story pays homage to a lot of classic pulp science fiction – there are blatant references to Ridley Scott’s Alien, as well as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Evil Dead – and Kurtz derives his name, as well as much of his personality, from Joseph Conrad’s classic tale Heart of Darkness (the basis for the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie Apocalypse Now). There are also various nods to King’s own work, including a moment in Derry that both acknowledges the events of IT and suggests that maybe the Losers’ victory wasn’t as final as they had hoped.

  William Goldman scripted the movie adaptation of Dreamcatcher, which arrived in 2003, directed by Lawrence Kasdan (who added some ‘touches’ to the screenplay, according to an interview he gave the LA Weekly in 2012). Morgan Freeman played Colonel Abraham Curtis (renamed to avoid too many Heart of Darkness comparisons), with Damian Lewis, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee and Timothy Olyphant as Jonesy, Henry, Beaver and Pete respectively. Donnie Wahlberg played the grown-up Duddits. The majority of the film script follows the book, although the ending was altered, changing Duddits’ backstory considerably. The film was not a success, leaving Kasdan ‘wounded careerwise, but not personally’.

  Black House (Random House, September 2001)

  Jack Sawyer is no longer the thirteen-year-old boy who travelled across America and the Territories in search of the Talisman. He’s now a renowned lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, and he’s repressed memories of those times. When an investigation starts to bring some of them back to mind, he resigns and moves to the small town of French Landing in Wisconsin, where he had once found a serial killer responsible for a hooker’s death in L.A.