A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Jack may have forgotten the Territories, but he is still linked, and he comes to realize that the Fisherman, an elderly serial killer who is dismembering and cannibalizing children in French Landing, is connected to the other place. The Fisherman, Charles Burnside, has been possessed by Mr Munshun, a servant of the Crimson King, and is transporting his victims through a portal – the Black House – into the Territories. Jack becomes caught up when young Tyler Burnside is kidnapped, and his mother, Judy, starts to go insane – Judy is the ‘twinner’ of the new Queen of the Territories, Sophie. The Crimson King wants Tyler because he is a ‘breaker’, someone who can destroy the Beams that hold reality together. With help from a motorcycle gang, Jack enters the Black House, and saves Tyler, who manages to kill Burnside. Jack then remains in the Territories, looked after by Queen Sophie and his old friend, Speedy Parker.

  Ever since The Talisman was published, both Stephen King and Peter Straub were asked about the possibility of a sequel, or whether another book would be written by the pair of them. In 1999, shortly before his accident, when King recalled an idea that Straub had mentioned while they were working on The Talisman, he asked the other writer if he’d like to collaborate, which Straub was delighted to do – by coincidence, both men’s recent work had alluded to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (for King it was in Bag of Bones). According to Straub, ‘A sequel to our first effort just seemed the best, most logical thing to do. In fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to either one of us to write anything but a sequel.’

  The writing process was similar to that of The Talisman, in that King and Straub would alternate writing sections, but improvements in technology meant that they were able to keep in touch far more easily. They swapped emails back and forth for a couple of months, then Straub spent time at King’s Florida home in February 2000 ‘hammering out a map of the action. It was like a fast-forward version of the novel’, Straub recalled.

  It was Straub’s idea to incorporate Jack Sawyer’s tale firmly into the ‘Dark Tower’ series continuity – we learn that Speedy Parker was a gunslinger, like Roland, and the idea of Breakers and Beams is central to that mythology. There was some discussion about a ‘bridge’ book linking the two novels but as yet it has not been written – nor has a final book in the trilogy that has also been mentioned, although King has hinted that it will be based around Jack having to come back to our world from the Territories, which he knows will cause him to sicken and die quickly.

  The book unfortunately was scheduled for publication on 13 September 2001; two days earlier, hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, as well as the Pentagon. American television interviews with the pair were unsurprisingly cancelled. ‘I called Peter on the phone and I said, “I don’t think anybody’s gonna wanna read about a supernatural cannibal after what just happened”,’ King recalled in 2007.

  Although neither The Talisman nor Black House has yet been adapted for film or television, a short commercial was prepared for the release of the book, which showed Tyler’s mother receiving a letter from the Fisherman, as a portentous voiceover sang King and Straub’s praises, gave a very brief description of the book, and then demanded, ‘Dare you enter the Black House?’ Johnathon Schaech and Richard Chizmar penned an adaptation of the book for Akiva Goldsman, which was designed to be separate from any version of The Talisman. Schaech told horror magazine Fangoria in May 2006 that their script ‘does stand on its own, but it also ties in beautifully [to The Talisman] through the imagery – even to the “Dark Tower” series’.

  From a Buick 8 (Scribner, September 2002)

  Ned Wilcox wants to learn more about a mysterious car at a police state barracks in western Pennsylvania, which always fascinated his father, Curtis, who was recently killed by a drunk driver. Known as a Buick 8, it looks like a 1954 vintage Buick Roadmaster, but on closer inspection, it clearly isn’t a normal car: dirt and dust are repelled from it; the engine block has no moving parts, the steering wheel doesn’t move either – and oddest of all, if it receives a dent or a scratch, it heals itself. The car was left at a gas station in 1979 by a man in black who then vanished, so the state troopers brought it back to Shed B at their barracks where it remained. Over the years, Curtis Wilcox tried to understand what it was, and where it came from.

  As members of the troop relate to Ned, weird things happen around the car: it gives off ‘lightquakes’, and it ‘gives birth’ to strange plants and creatures, which are not of this earth. Curtis’s partner Ennis Rafferty, who was with him when he first went to see the car, vanishes in its vicinity, as does Brian Lippy, who had been arrested for careless driving, and had escaped from custody.

  Ned becomes as obsessed with the car as his father, and believes he can destroy it; however when he tries, he and Sandy Dearborn, the patrol’s commanding officer, are nearly sucked through a portal into another world, visible through the car’s trunk. In the end they deduce that the car acts as some sort of valve, controlling the link between the dimensions – but it is just starting to deteriorate . . .

  The catalyst for the contemporary events in From a Buick 8 is a car accident, in which Curtis Wilcox is killed. Odd as this seems, this wasn’t a case of King writing out his own experiences (that would happen in the final book of the ‘Dark Tower’ series): From a Buick 8 was pretty much complete before that near-fatal day in June 1999. The New York Times noted in August 2000 that its release was being delayed in part because it involved a ‘nasty car crash’.

  According to King’s afterword, the book was inspired by a trip he took through Western Pennsylvania. After stopping at a gas station, he went for a look round, and slipped, almost falling into a stream. It occurred to him that if he had died, it could have been a long time before anyone found him. By the time he reached New York, he had the plot firmed out in his mind. The title is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s classic song ‘From a Buick 6’.

  It’s also got clear links to H.P. Lovecraft’s work, in particular his 1920 short story ‘From Beyond’, which was filmed by Stuart Gordon in 1986, and the idea that mankind is insignificant in cosmic terms, and the universe completely beyond our comprehension. From a Buick 8 certainly doesn’t provide easy answers – in fact, it can be argued that the characters know little more by the end of the story than they do at the start, although the links that King said were present with the ‘Dark Tower’ series suggest that the Buick might be a mobile ‘thinny’, an area where the spaces between realities are thinner, and that the car is one of those used by the Low Men which are not quite right, as noted in Hearts in Atlantis.

  Interviews promoting From a Buick 8 provoked one of the regular scare stories that King was planning to retire, and the author set the record straight. ‘There’s almost a wilful misunderstanding among the press or among people about what that means,’ he clarified to Time magazine. ‘I can’t imagine retiring from writing. What I can imagine doing is retiring from publishing . . . If I wrote something that I thought was worth publishing, I would publish it. But in terms of publishing stuff on a yearly basis the way I have been, I think those days are pretty much over . . . From a Buick 8 . . . so far as I know [is] the last Stephen King novel, per se, in terms of it just being a novel-novel.’

  There has been plenty of interest in bringing From a Buick 8 to the screen. George A. Romero was linked to the project in 2005, with a script co-written by Johnathon Schaech and Richard Chizmar, as a miniseries. However, in 2007, Tobe Hooper, the director of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, announced he would be helming a feature film adaptation. According to an interview in Variety, it would not be ‘your stock horror film by any means. There’s a really cool, layered quality to the story. The producers, writers and I shared the same sensibility about the project and responded to it in a similar way’. Hooper worked with Schaech and Chizmar on a revised screenplay, going through fifteen rewrites, which, Schaech told website Bloody Disgusting in 2009, had King’s ble
ssing. Amicus Films and Mick Garris were set to produce, and Schaech sent Garris a revised screenplay in December 2011, but the economic downturn has so far prevented the project receiving a studio green light.

  10

  A NEW LEASE OF LIFE: THE COLORADO KID TO DOCTOR SLEEP

  The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime, October 2005)

  In a diner on Moose-Lookit, a small island off the coast of Maine, three people are finishing a meal: veteran newspapermen Dave Bowie and Vince Teague, and their new intern Stephanie ‘Steffi’ McCann. After she passes an initiation test of her powers of observation, they return to the office, where she asks her colleagues if they have ever encountered a real unexplained mystery. Dave and Vince relate the tale of the Colorado Kid, whose body was found in April 1980 by two teenagers. His death was caused by asphyxiation, but there appear to be no clues to his identity or exactly what he was doing on the island. When an out of state cigarette tax stamp is spotted later, the investigators deduce where he came from. He is subsequently identified as James Cogan from Nederland, Colorado – but no one can explain how he managed to travel over 2,000 miles across country in the five hours between being seen in Colorado and found in Maine. Twenty-five years after that discovery, Dave, Vince and Steffi ponder theories, but still aren’t able to solve the mystery – but the process has brought the young intern closer to the two men, who explain that now, at last, there is a third person who knows the full story.

  Ask Stephen King for vignettes for a calendar, and you get a full-blown werewolf story; if you’re the editor of a new crime imprint, and you ask him for a blurb for your series of hard-boiled crime novels, you end up with a complete new King tale – even if it doesn’t really contain the sex, violence and police procedural elements which the line normally boasts. ‘This is an exciting line of books,’ King commented in the press release for the book, ‘and I’m delighted to be a part of it. Hard Case Crime presents good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling, and even though The Colorado Kid is probably more bleu than outright noir, I think it has some of those old-fashioned kick-ass story-telling virtues. It ought to; this is where I started out, and I’m pleased to be back.’

  In his afterword to The Colorado Kid, King explains that the story was triggered by a newspaper clipping about a girl who had been found dead in Maine without the distinctive red purse she had been carrying the day before. He also discusses why it doesn’t explain everything – it wasn’t because he didn’t have a solution, but because it was the mystery that intrigued him. He was aware that this was a book which would divide his readers: one review did indeed describe it as ‘postmodern-lite drivel at its worst’.

  There was perhaps more to the story than first appeared: King advised readers in a response to a USA Today review, which picked him up on a ‘mistaken’ use of Starbucks in Denver in 1980, not to ‘assume that’s a mistake on my part. The constant readers of the “Dark Tower” series may realize that that is not necessarily a continuity error, but a clue.’ This might not be playing fair with the readers of the Hard Case Crime series – who would normally expect their mysteries to be solved without the use of inter-dimensional portals, parallel worlds and time passing at different rates – but it would make sense of the tagline on the back of the book: ‘an All-New Investigation into the Unknown’.

  For King’s Constant Readers, though, it was a clear sign: despite the author’s statements that there might not be further books once he had completed the ‘Dark Tower’ series, he had re-engaged with his audience. His first two published novels might be shorter than they were used to, but that didn’t matter. As he explained during the promotion of the later Duma Key, ‘I heard myself using that word [retirement] in an interview when I was sick and miserable and addicted to painkillers. I no longer wanted to work.’ Now he was on the road to recovery, his interest had returned.

  The Hard Case Crime edition of The Colorado Kid contains 179 pages of moderately large type; as of December 2013, the TV adaptation has run for fifty-two hours! Syfy’s Haven has been one of the network’s greatest hits, produced by much of the team behind the successful television version of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. King’s story was reworked by Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn for the Piller Segan production company, in tandem initially with the ABC network, but it was a casualty of the 2007–2008 strike by the Writers’ Guild of America. In September 2009, E1 Entertainment announced that it was picking up the project, and in November, Syfy came on board the rechristened Haven.

  The mystery of the Colorado Kid is central to the show’s revised concept, but it’s just one part. Haven is a town periodically afflicted by the ‘Troubles’, with certain members of the population discovering differing supernatural gifts. FBI agent Audrey Parker is sent to investigate, but there’s an even greater mystery about her – since her double is in a picture with the Colorado Kid from twenty-seven years earlier. King fans can have a field day with the show: there are multiple references in many episodes to elements of his books and films – characters visit Derry and Shawshank Prison, for example – and Syfy has posted a video to its website after many episodes showing the links.

  Cell (Scribner, January 2006)

  A normal day: people using their cell phones as they go about their everyday business. But then out of nowhere, it seems, a signal is sent out over the global cellular network, and everyone who was in the middle of a call is affected, turning them at first into mindless zombies. The Pulse, as it becomes known, is the catalyst for the collapse of civilization.

  Amidst the chaos, artist Clayton Riddell bands together with the middle-aged Tom McCourt and teenager Alice Maxwell, and they head from Boston towards Maine, where Clayton’s son Johnny should be. When they reach the Gaiten Academy in New Hampshire, they meet teacher Charles Ardai and a single surviving pupil, Jordan, who join them. The ‘phoners’ are starting to develop a hive mind and the five normal people each suffer from a dream featuring ‘the Raggedy Man’, who seems to be controlling the phoners. A flock of phoners order Clayton and his cell of ‘normals’ to head to Kashwak in Maine. Ardai and Alice are killed along the way and the others learn that Johnny has gone to Kashwak. There the Raggedy Man intends to expose everyone to a new version of the Pulse. Thanks to another normal, Ray, they are able to destroy the phoners using explosives aboard a school bus, and possibly even kill the Raggedy Man.

  While most of the survivors head to Canada to wait for winter to kill off the remaining phoners, Clay heads south and finds Johnny, who had received a corrupted Pulse.

  Believing that hearing another corrupt version of the Pulse might reset Johnny’s brain, Clay dials and puts the phone to his son’s ear . . .

  ‘He does not own a cell phone’ reads the second and final sentence of Stephen King’s biographical note in copies of Cell. A fear of technology runs through a lot of King’s work – his only foray into directing, Maximum Overdrive (see page 190), based on his story ‘Trucks’, looks at a world where technology turns against mankind. Talking about the book shortly after publication to the Paris Review, King revealed that the idea hit him when he came out of a New York hotel and saw a woman talking on her cell phone. ‘What if she got a message over the cell phone that she couldn’t resist, and she had to kill people until somebody killed her?’ the author wondered, and the consequences of that ‘started bouncing around in my head like pinballs’. When he then saw someone apparently talking to himself – but who was in fact talking on an earpiece microphone – he had ‘an instant concept’ and knew he had to write the story.

  King originally thought Cell would appear in 2007 or 2008, long after Lisey’s Story, which he had been working on for some time. However, his publishers were keen to have the horror story in stores before the more literary tale, and he therefore turned the drafts round very rapidly. He was fine with the change – to him Cell was an ‘entertainment’ rather than a (serious) ‘novel’, and he was prepared to edit on screen for speed, rather than prepare a fresh new draft. The first chapter was released
on Amazon.com on 7 July 2005 as ‘The Pulse’; minor amendments were made by King during the novel’s polishing.

  The name for one of the characters was the result of an eBay auction in September 2005, a mere four months before the book hit the streets, with King noting in the lot description: ‘Buyer should be aware that Cell is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the brain. Like cheap whiskey, it’s very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I’ll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don’t give a rip).’ Pat Alexander from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, paid over $25,000 for the privilege, and asked King to name the character after her brother, Ray Huizenga.

  Like many of his recent novels, Cell ended on an uncertain note, but because he received so many queries, King finally had to write on his website: ‘It seems pretty obvious to me that things turned out well for Clay’s son, Johnny.’ He claimed that it had never crossed his mind otherwise – although he admitted that ‘I’m a f***ing optimist!’

  Dimension Films acquired the rights to Cell quickly after publication, and Hostel director Eli Roth was set to direct, noting in an interview with TV Guide that ‘I’ve got to have the freedom to change things if I’m going to make the movie’. Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who had already adapted King’s short story ‘1408’, worked on the script, and Roth wanted to keep ‘the tension of the opening forty pages of the book going throughout the whole film’ since he felt the book lost some power once the phoners became more organized. However, Roth had ‘walked away’ from Cell by 2009, partly because Dimension saw the picture’s tone differently to the director. (Later reports suggested he felt the concept would become dated too quickly.)