A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  King worked on his own screenplay, which, as he revealed at a signing in 2009, had a less uncertain ending than the novel. A further script, penned by King and The Last House on the Left remake director Adam Alleca, was announced in October 2012 as entering preproduction, with John Cusack signed to play Clayton. Paranormal Activity 2’s Tod ‘Kip’ Williams was lined up as director. Over the following months, the script was re-credited to Mark Leyner. It was expected to start filming in September 2013 for a 2014 release.

  Lisey’s Story (Scribner, October 2006)

  Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Scott Landon has been dead for two years, and his widow Lisey is still struggling to come to terms with her grief. She’s pursued by a professor who wants her to search through her husband’s papers to see if there are unpublished manuscripts to feed the hunger for new material, and she’s stalked by one mad fan. Scott hasn’t abandoned her though – he has left her hints, warnings and messages to help her get through, and to find a final treasure. She is also having to deal with problems related to her sister, Amanda, who becomes catatonic after suffering a nervous breakdown.

  Scott’s difficult and abusive childhood was ameliorated by visits to another realm, Boo’Ya Moon, which he continued to visit as he got older. It is where he got the ideas for his stories thanks to a word pool and a Story Tree, and dipping in the pool also enabled him to heal quickly, as he did after he was attacked by a rabid fan. Lisey too learns how to get there – and, with Amanda’s help, it’s where her stalker receives his comeuppance, since Boo’Ya Moon is also the home of the ‘long boy’. Once rid of the stalker, Lisey finds Scott’s final story there, and then returns home, ready to move on with her life.

  Lisey’s Story developed from the aftermath of Stephen King’s bout of pneumonia in 2004, which nearly killed him. Once his wife Tabitha was sure that King was going to survive the illness, she told him that she was going to take the opportunity to ‘redo’ his study. When he returned home, she had left the door closed, telling him that what was behind was ‘disturbing’; he initially refused to enter, but while suffering from insomnia, he decided he would look. He did find it disturbing, since the books were packed into cartons, and the furniture had been sent for reupholstering. The thought occurred to him that this was what it would be like if he died, and that he felt like ‘a ghost in my own study’. That led him to consider what would happen if someone wanted to get papers from him after he was dead – they would have to deal with his wife . . . and what if that person was crazy?

  King is quick to point out that Lisey is not Tabitha – although there are obvious links between him and Scott – but the strengths of the book are in its portrayal of the underlying love between two people who have been together for so long (even if their private vocabulary, which litters the book, does grate considerably by the end). Nor was it purely about the grieving process: ‘It started to be a book about the way we hide things,’ he noted. ‘From there it jumped into the idea that repression is creation, because when we repress we make up stories to replace the past.’

  He was concerned about the reception the book would get (‘I’m afraid people will laugh and say, “Look at that barbarian trying to pretend he belongs in the palace”,’) and reviews ranged from the gushing (‘With Lisey’s Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he’ll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom,’ Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post) to the excoriating (‘This is one of his most artful efforts,’ Laura Miller wrote in Salon, ‘but in reaching so far, he’s also come smack up against the wall of his own limitations as a writer.’). However, when he answered questions online in June 2013 to promote the release of the TV series of Under the Dome, he maintained that it was still his favourite book.

  Lisey’s Story was written in longhand, and King left the first draft for six weeks before starting work on the edit. Rather than work with Chuck Verrill, his usual editor at Scribner, King requested that the book was edited by Nan Graham. ‘She gave me an entirely different look, partially because it’s about a woman, and she’s a woman, and also because she just came to the job fresh,’ he told the Paris Review. An excerpt from the book, entitled ‘Lisey and the Madman’, was published in McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories in November 2004, and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for ‘Superior Achievement in Long Fiction’. The full novel was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, losing to Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon.

  There are a few references to King’s other work – the deputies from Needful Things make brief appearances, and there’s a link inferred between the Territories of The Talisman/Black House and Boo’ya Moon.

  At present there are no versions of Lisey’s Story in any other media, bar an audiobook reading by Mare Winningham, which was long-listed for the Audiobook of the Year 2007.

  Blaze (Scribner, June 2007)

  ‘America, not all that long ago.’ Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. (‘Blaze’) is a slow-witted giant, whose best criminal actions have come as a result of his teaming with George Rackley. George knows how to get a big score: kidnap the child of the hugely rich Gerard family, and ransom him. The only problem that Blaze has when he starts to carry out the plan is that George is dead, and has been for three months.

  Blaze has had a poor life up to then, his brain damage brought on by his father throwing him down the stairs three times because the young boy had interrupted his television watching. He has had occasional flashes of happiness, but they are few and far between.

  He’s not been doing too well since George died: he tries to repeat a con trick, and nearly gets caught; and he returns to the scene of a hold-up, proud that this time he’s remembered to bring his mask. He even reveals his name to the cops when he calls them after kidnapping baby Joe. Inevitably, everything goes wrong as the hunt for Joe continues, and Blaze ends up retreating to the orphanage where he grew up. But he is pursued to the bitter end.

  Blaze was originally written in 1973, and, like Roadwork, was submitted to Bill Thompson at Doubleday alongside the manuscript of ‘Second Coming’ (aka ’Salem’s Lot) as a potential follow-up to Carrie. Thompson elected to go with the vampire tale, and King consigned Blaze to his ‘trunk’ of unpublished novels. When he arranged for some of these to appear under the NAL banner a couple of years later, as by Richard Bachman, he reread Blaze, and decided that it wasn’t worth salvaging. Apart from a brief mention in the afterword to Different Seasons (noting its thematic links to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, particularly the characters of Blaze and Lennie), it became renowned as one of the ‘lost’ King stories that was never likely to see print.

  However, following the success of The Colorado Kid, King was considering another story for the Hard Case Crime imprint, and tracked down the copy of Blaze in storage with his papers. Although it wasn’t really appropriate for the Hard Case Crime line (which hadn’t stopped him publishing the very different The Colorado Kid with them!), he considered that, with rewriting, it could be made publishable. He therefore reworked the typewritten manuscript, in the process making it far less of a sentimental book – he had thought of it as a ‘three-handkerchief weepie’ rather than a hard-boiled crime novel – and removed references to the time frame, to avoid needing to incorporate modern technological advances such as cell phones and caller ID.

  King first mentioned the twenty-first-century incarnation of Blaze during his book tour to promote Lisey’s Story, although it wasn’t a book for which he was under contract. He decided to publish it as a lost novel of Richard Bachman (with an introduction by Stephen King) and assign the proceeds to the Haven Foundation, which he set up to help writers and artists who were down on their luck – something brought to mind by the fate of his friend, audiobook reader Frank Muller, who had a motorcycle accident when he had no health insurance, and a huge amount of debt.

  The revised manuscript saw King incorporate certain references to his own work – Shawshank Prison gets a name check, for example – and there�
��s a nice tip of the hat to the book’s aborted original genesis, when Blaze and a friend go to see a vampire movie named Second Coming.

  In addition to the audiobook reading by Ron McLarty, Blaze was read by William Hope on BBC Radio 7 (now BBC Radio 4Extra) in a six-part version. It was first broadcast between 29 December 2008 and 5 January 2009, and has been regularly repeated. It’s worth noting that it is promoted as a book by Stephen King: there’s no mention at all of the apocryphal Mr Bachman in the BBC material.

  Duma Key (Scribner, January 2008)

  Successful building contractor Edgar Freemantle is involved in an accident at work, losing his right arm and suffering bad head injuries. Although not expected to survive, he does, but suffers memory lapses and terrible rages. As a result his wife divorces him, and he moves to Duma Key, a small island off the west coast of Florida for a year’s break. His psychiatrist suggests that he tries painting as a way of alleviating the stress, but when he does, odd things start to happen. If he paints something in, then it appears; if he removes it, it is deleted from existence. Something in the island of Duma Key is working through the paintings – but ‘Perse’ is a force with its own agenda. People come under Perse’s control and start killing those close to Edgar, including his daughter.

  Edgar realizes that the paintings are linked to the life of Elizabeth Eastlake, an elderly woman with Alzheimers whom he befriended when he arrived; she died of a seizure after seeing an exhibition of his paintings. As a child, she had found a figurine of Persephone, which started using her, and then killed her sisters when she rebelled and tried to destroy it. It can only be neutralized by being placed in fresh water, which Edgar manages to do again, despite Persephone offering him immortality. His final painting shows a storm destroying Duma Key.

  Duma Key was King’s first novel set in Florida, where he has a winter home near Sarasota, although he knew that eight years of visiting the state did not qualify him as an expert (he noted that locals picked up mistakes that he missed, such as a renamed hotel), so wrote the lead character as an outsider rather than, as he usually did with books centred in Maine, as a resident.

  It also allowed the author to channel some of the feelings that he experienced as a result of the van smashing into him in 1999. Of course, as he pointed out repeatedly while promoting the book, Edgar’s injuries are considerably worse than his, ‘but like him,’ he told USA Today, ‘my memory was affected. I know a little about pain and suffering and what happens when the painkillers lose their efficacy, when your body gets used to them.’ Of course, the book was written half a dozen years after his own accident which gave him ‘some distance. It’s like Wordsworth once said of poetry: “Creativity works best when strong emotions are recollected in relative tranquillity.” ’

  The effects of the accident that occurred to his friend Frank Muller (see Blaze, above) also fed into Edgar’s behaviour: King was aware that people like Muller who suffer frontal lobe injuries can often strike out at the ones they love when they experience rages.

  Another inspiration was an incident when he was out walking at dusk in Florida, and saw a sign that read ‘Caution: Children’. Wondering what sort of children you had to be cautious of brought to mind an image of two dead girls holding hands. (He once described the book as ‘The Maltese Falcon meets The Shining’.) Although that doesn’t specifically feature in Duma Key, the story developed from that central idea. He admitted that he didn’t work from a plot or an outline for the novel, but simply used Post-It notes; by the end he had so many that he could hardly see his computer screen.

  Discussing the book a few months after publication, King seemed a little surprised that no one had noticed the correlation between Edgar’s paintings in the story, and the way that he approached writing. He saw himself and Edgar as similar: both took clichés (in Edgar’s case, sunsets; in his, ordinary people’s lives) and added something unusual to them so you looked at them differently. The ability to delete items from paintings was also displayed by Patrick Danville in the final volume of the ‘Dark Tower’ saga.

  The US wraparound dust jacket featured specific items that King requested: an ocean, a large shell in the foreground and tennis balls. Unfortunately the UK edition is rather more generic. The first chapter of Duma Key was modified from a short story that King published in Tin House issue 28, in the summer of 2006, under the title ‘Memory’, which he read publicly at Florida State University the previous February, and which appeared as an extra in copies of Blaze.

  At present, there are no official plans for a movie based on Duma Key, although a short trailer prepared for the book’s launch can be viewed on YouTube.

  Under the Dome (Scribner, November 2009)

  Welcome to Chester’s Mill, an ordinary small town in Maine whose inhabitants find themselves at the centre of attention when a huge dome suddenly appears out of nowhere to encase their home. You can’t go through it, or beneath it; you’re trapped there with your friends and neighbours – and inevitably, some people are going to see it as an opportunity.

  Prime among these is Second Selectman ‘Big Jim’ Rennie, a used car salesman, who plans to rule the town. When the police chief dies after his pacemaker explodes, Rennie starts to fill the force with his cronies, including his psychotic son, Junior. Former Army captain Dale Barbara (‘Barbie’) is caught inside, and becomes the Army’s chosen leader for the community, tasked with finding out the source of the dome, along with local newspaper woman Julia Shumway. This puts Barbie in conflict with Big Jim, who frames him for various murders, but townsfolk angered by Rennie’s actions free the soldier.

  After finding a strange device in an abandoned farm, the people realize that they are effectively inside an ‘ant farm’ set up by juvenile extra-terrestrials, nicknamed ‘leatherheads’. The majority of the inhabitants of Chester’s Mill are killed in a huge explosion triggered at a hidden methamphetamine factory, which also releases a toxic cloud that threatens to kill the few remaining survivors. Julia manages to persuade one of the female leatherheads to let them go free, and the dome is lifted, in time for twenty-six people to escape with their lives.

  Stephen King had been working on variants of the story of Under the Dome for over three decades before he finally completed the book. His early versions were abandoned for various reasons, mostly connected to his perceived inability to handle such a large subject. The scale was larger then: whereas the book takes place over a matter of days, the earlier versions covered months. ‘You would see the whole thing about depletion of resources, gas [and] food running out, people using wood fires because there’s no electricity,’ King told USA Today. ‘And you can see the grit building up on the dome the way it does in the atmosphere of the earth.’ The first version of Under the Dome ran aground in 1976, so he decided to start again a few years later, in 1981–1982, around the time he was working on Creepshow. Rather than deal with the weather problems of a dome, he transferred the action to an apartment block for the retitled The Cannibalists, ‘but I didn’t like any of the characters,’ he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, ‘so I put it away.’ The handwritten first 120 or so pages of The Cannibalists can be downloaded from King’s website, and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was working on the project long before either The Simpsons Movie (2007) or Michael Grant’s series of novels that began with Gone (2008) appeared – both have a similar form of dome over their subject area.

  King was also inspired by his anger over the Iraq War of 2003, and the US administration headed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. ‘Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people,’ he told Time. In the novel, Rennie controls the First Selectman, Andy Sanders, who King explained ‘wasn’t actively evil, he was just incompetent – which is how I always felt about George W. Bush. I enjoyed taking the Bush–Cheney dynamic and shrinking it to the small-town level.’ While writing the first draft, King was so convinced that Hillary Clinton would win the Democrat nomination that all refe
rences to the president were female.

  The ecological aspect of the situation also influenced King, and he felt he was treating the subject allegorically, in the same way that George Orwell wrote about communism in Animal Farm: the story can be read as a simple fable, without ‘whamming the reader over the head’ with the allegory. ‘We’re under the dome,’ he said bluntly. ‘All of us.’

  Under the Dome came to television as a major thirteen-part drama by CBS Studios in summer 2013. The project was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks on publication, with broadcast expected to be on the Showtime pay TV channel. In 2011, Lost writer Brian K. Vaughn was hired as the adapter, and the project switched from Showtime to CBS over the following year, with an official announcement of its new home in November 2012. A teaser trailer aired during the Superbowl game in February 2013 before the series began on 24 June.

  Numerous changes were made to the characters and situations, which, King assured readers on his website, were ‘of necessity, and I approved of them wholeheartedly. Some have been occasioned by their plan to keep the Dome in place over Chester’s Mill for months instead of little more than a week, as is the case in the book. Other story modifications are slotting into place because the writers have completely re-imagined the source of the Dome.’ One of the key alterations has been to the length of time the Dome is in place, which, King noted, takes the story back to his original roots for it.

  The series was a great success for CBS, and a second thirteen-episode season of Under the Dome was commissioned in July 2013 for broadcast in the summer of 2014. Stephen King is penning the script for the opening hour, his first TV work since Kingdom Hospital a decade earlier.

  11/22/63 (Scribner, November 2011)