A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Castle Rock, Maine, is where a group of boys find The Body. In 1960, Gordie LaChance and three friends – Vern, Teddy and Chris – go looking for the body of a boy who has gone missing. When they reach its location, a local gang of bullies have beaten them to it, and a confrontation ensues, which is broken when Chris fires a gun. They all head home and the older boys make an anonymous call to reveal where the body is. Later, all four youngsters are beaten up by members of the gang but refuse to accuse their attackers. In later life, all three of Gordie’s friends die young; Gordie becomes a successful novelist.

  The Breathing Method is employed by a young woman in the 1930s to help her give birth – even though she has been decapitated. Many years later, Dr Emlyn McCarron tells the tale of this highly unusual delivery: the head was some way from the body, but such was the mother’s determination to have her child that she was able to transcend death to enable his birth.

  Each of the four novellas in this collection was written by Stephen King after he had finished work on one of the major novels that were already published by the time Different Seasons saw print. According to King at the time, The Body followed ’Salem’s Lot, Apt Pupil succeeded The Shining, Rita Hayworth . . . came after The Dead Zone, and The Breathing Method after Firestarter, each usually coming in the six-week period that King allowed himself after completing a first draft before going back to start editing the book. The ‘seasons’ of the title derives from the stories’ subtitles, which contain the name of a season, even if the word is being used in a different context. The stories were very different from what his audience expected – this early in his career, he was known for horror – so King didn’t submit the stories for publication initially.

  The Body has links to incidents in King’s childhood: when he was four years old, he apparently saw a freight train kill a young friend, although he had no memory of the incident. When he was slightly older, his friend Chris Chesley took King and another youngster to see a drowned man, whose body had just been recovered from Runaround Pond. It has also been suggested that King’s college roommate, George McLeod, was working on a story about a similar incident, going to look at the body of a dead dog, which King may have remembered; certainly McLeod asked for some recognition, and as a consequence, like many authors, King now refuses to read other writers’ manuscripts. Portions of Gordie LaChance’s stories in The Body derived from King’s earlier short story ‘The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan’, which appeared in Maine Review in July 1975, and from ‘Stud City’, which dates from 1969, when it was published in Ubris, the University of Maine literary magazine. Considerable changes were made to both for their Different Seasons incarnation.

  The stories have links to other King tales: Shawshank Prison turns up in numerous stories; Apt Pupil mentions Andy Dufresne by name; Todd’s story about the blue jay also turns up in Roadwork and later in Desperation; Ace Merrill, one of the bullies in The Body, and Aunt Evvie both feature in Needful Things, with Ace and Vern also appearing in ‘Nona’ in Skeleton Crew; and the unusual club at which Dr McCarron tells his tale also reappears in Skeleton Crew, in ‘The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands’.

  Three of the four novellas have been filmed. Frank Darabont’s film of the first story, simply entitled The Shawshank Redemption, is hailed as one of the best films ever made, and should be watched by any fan of cinema or King. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman excel as Andy and Red. A ‘Secret Cinema’ version, shot with members of the public, can be found on YouTube.

  A film of Apt Pupil was begun with Nicol Williamson as Dussander and Rick Schroder as Todd in 1987 but the finance ran out about eleven days before filming was completed. A different version, directed by Bryan Singer from a script by Brandon Boyce, starred Ian McKellen as Dussander and Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, and was released in October 1998. Its UK release unfortunately coincided with the Columbine High School massacre in the US.

  The Body became the basis for Rob Reiner’s 1986 movie Stand By Me, which starred Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell as the four boys. Often regarded as the best Stephen King adaptation (including by the author himself), it is a lyrical paean to lost innocence, made all the more poignant given the early deaths of two of its stars.

  A stage version of The Shawshank Redemption, written by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, debuted at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 2009, with Kevin Anderson and Reg E. Cathey as Andy and Red. A fresh version produced for the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe starred Kevin Secor and Omid Djalili.

  A stage adaptation of Apt Pupil was mounted in May 1995 by Chicago’s Defiant Theatre, adapted and directed by Christopher Johnson, with William J. Norris as Dussander and Jim Slonina as Todd. The ‘by turns riveting, terrifying, stomach-churning, and downright offensive’ production was powerful enough to give the Chicago Reader reviewer nightmares for two successive nights, and was judged to ‘undermine King’s critique of the darker side of human nature’.

  Skeleton Crew (Putnam, June 1985)

  In the novella The Mist, strange alien creatures are waiting within a mysterious mist to devour the inhabitants of Bridgton, Maine. Artist David Drayton is among those caught inside a supermarket battling for their very survival. ‘Here There Be Tygers’ is about a tiger in a boys’ bathroom; ‘The Monkey’ is a cymbal-playing toy with the power to cause things nearby to die. ‘Cain Rose Up’ follows a depressed student who goes on a murderous spree. ‘Mrs Todd’s Shortcut’ gets faster and faster each time she uses it; ‘The Jaunt’ is a science-fiction tale about a young boy determined to see what happens during the teleportation process. ‘The Wedding Gig’ is a tale of revenge set during Prohibition, while ‘Paranoid: A Chant’* is a poem told by a schizophrenic.

  A group of college students try to survive on ‘The Raft’ on a Pennsylvania lake in which a monster dwells; a writer gains the ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ and discovers he can rewrite reality. ‘The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands’ has a terrible power, while two astronauts crash on ‘Beachworld’ 8,000 years in the future and learn its equally terrible secret. ‘The Reaper’s Visage’ appears in an Elizabethan mirror; ‘Nona’ entices a man to commit terrible crimes near Castle Rock. ‘For Owen’* is a short poem about King’s younger son’s adventures on the way to school. ‘Survivor Type’ asks how far anyone will go to survive, and ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ might have a mind of its own. Two excerpts from an unpublished novel ‘The Milkman’ see a milkman making some unusual ‘Morning Deliveries’* while two men try to flee a homicidal milkman in ‘Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game’. Eleven-year-old George Bruckner has problems with his ‘Gramma’, ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ introduces the reader to fornits, and the collection concludes with ‘The Reach’, as an elderly woman makes her final crossing.

  Skeleton Crew is a more varied collection than Night Shift, featuring a full-length novella (The Mist) which was later published in its own right to accompany the 2007 feature film. Most of the stories come from the 1980s, although ‘Here There Be Tygers’, ‘Cain Rose Up’ and ‘The Reaper’s Image’ were among King’s earliest ever sales, the first two appearing in 1968, the last a year later. Some of the stories were extensively rewritten, and their order selected to fit the theme of ‘Do You Love?’, an epigraph which features at the start of the book. The asterisked items had not been previously published.

  King provided notes for the reader explaining the genesis of the tales, as well as some anecdotes about how they fitted into his life (‘The Raft’, or ‘The Float’ as it was known originally, was paid for at a very handy time for the impoverished writer). There are a number of recurrent themes present, and an increase in interest in the business of writing itself, as well as storytelling (a common element among the novellas of Different Seasons). There are cross-references to other King stories – Joe Camber from Cujo and Henrietta Dodd from The Dead Zone are mentioned in ‘Gramma’ while Billy Dodd from The Dead Zone gets a shout out in ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’, and Ace and Vern from The Body appea
r in ‘Nona’.

  Interestingly both ‘Mrs Todd’s Shortcut’ and King’s son Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2/NOS4R2 were dedicated to Tabitha King – each features routes that aren’t on any map, and women determined to use them to achieve their ends.

  The Mist has appeared in various different media. An audio adaptation by Tom Lopez of Dennis Etchison’s proposed film version of the story appeared in 1984 in ‘binaural’ sound, and Frank Darabont eventually directed his screenplay for the film in 2007, with Thomas Jane in the lead. (This was referenced in Under the Dome.) A computer game was produced in 1985 by Mindscape.

  Elements of ‘The Monkey’ appeared in ‘Chinga’, the episode of paranormal investigation series The X-Files co-written by King in 1998. Darabont has also expressed an interest in filming this tale. ‘The Raft’ became one of the segments of Creepshow 2 in 1987, with a screenplay by George A. Romero – the ending was changed but was equally downbeat. Prior to the release of Skeleton Crew, ‘Word Processor of the Gods’ had already been adapted as an episode of Tales of the Darkside in 1984 by Michael McDowell following its publication in Playboy, with Bruce Davison playing the writer. ‘Gramma’ became an episode of The New Twilight Zone courtesy of a script by Harlan Ellison, who also provided some of the voice for Gramma, alongside Carrie’s screen mother, Piper Laurie.

  ‘Uncle Otto’s Truck’ and ‘The Reach’ were adapted for comics by Glenn Chadbourne in the 2006 Cemetery Dance collection The Secretary of Dreams; ‘The Monkey’ and ‘Nona’ appeared in the second volume in 2010.

  Many of the stories have been adapted as dollar babies, including two different animated versions of ‘Beachworld’.

  Four Past Midnight (Viking Press, September 1990)

  In The Langoliers, passengers on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston awake to discover that only ten of them are still on board: everyone else, including the crew, has disappeared. Luckily one of them is an off-duty pilot who lands the plane safely in Bangor, Maine. There are no signs of life, not even any sounds or smells. Finally they start to hear a crackling sound which investment banker Craig Toomy believes are ‘the langoliers’, creatures who feed on the lazy and timewasters. Eventually they realize that they have travelled through a rip in time, and are caught in the past; if they remain there, they will die. They are able to return through the tear and land in LA, although it too is deserted until time ‘catches up’ with them.

  Secret Window, Secret Garden is the title of a story that John Shooter claims he wrote but which author Mort Rainey plagiarized for his tale ‘Sowing Season’. Every time Rainey tries to prove that he published ‘Sowing Season’ before Shooter penned his story, something happens to remove the evidence. Rainey finally realizes that he is in fact suffering from a split personality, and Shooter and he are the same person. He goes mad and tries to kill his ex-wife Amy, but is killed. Later, when she finds a note from Shooter saying he is going back to Mississippi, Amy and her lover realize that Mort’s imagination was so powerful, it created a character who actually came to life.

  The Library Policeman comes for those who fail to return their books on time, as Sam Peebles learns when he borrows a couple of books to prepare a speech and then misplaces one of them. Ardelia Lotz, the librarian, has given him due warning, and starts to threaten him when he fails to bring the books back. When he goes to the library to apologize, he learns that Ardelia actually died years earlier but she is still able to send the Library Policeman after him. To defeat this embodiment of Ardelia, Sam must face his fear and his memories of being molested as a child, and then prevent Ardelia from possessing his secretary, Naomi.

  The Sun Dog starts to appear in photos taken by Castle Rock resident Kevin Delevan with his Sun 660 Polaroid camera. He shows the camera to junk-shop owner Pop Merrill, who sees it as an opportunity, and surreptitiously switches cameras, so Kevin destroys an ordinary Sun 660. Merrill can’t sell the camera, but is compelled to keep using it, and in each shot, the dog gets closer and more feral. When Kevin and his father confront Merrill, after Kevin has suffered nightmares, the dog tears out of the most recent photograph, but Kevin is able to trap it again by taking its picture with a different camera. For his next birthday, Kevin receives a computer – which informs him that the dog is coming for him . . .

  Stephen King explained the inspiration for the four novellas that form Four Past Midnight in his introductions to each of the tales, starting the volume off with a general piece that compared his career with the Milwaukee Brewers baseball player Robin Yount (although the scenario that King depicts in his piece didn’t actually take place).

  The Langoliers is a science-fiction piece, which was inspired by a dream King had of a woman placing her hand over a crack in an aircraft, as he relates in the book, but also by his own fear of flying. According to an interview he gave to Dennis Miller on 3 April 1998, he was chatting with friends who owned a small jet about the possibilities of being unconscious during a flight, and they explained that if the oxygen level was reduced, he’d ‘go right out’. Although they refused to provide a practical demonstration, the idea stuck in his mind. It mines some of the same ideas as The Mist, reprinted in the previous collection, a link King freely acknowledges.

  Like many authors, King has been accused of plagiarizing on many occasions, one of the many problems of being a writer. Secret Window, Secret Garden links both to Misery and The Dark Half thematically, particularly the latter’s problems with reality and unreality.

  The Library Policeman was triggered by a conversation with King’s younger son Owen about the ‘library police’ and his fears of what would happen if he failed to return his books. Ardelia is conceptually very similar to It, in that she can bring to life people’s deepest fears. The final fate of Sam Peebles and Naomi is revealed at the end of Needful Things.

  The Sun Dog was deliberately designed as a lead-in to that book, which came out the following year, and which King intended to be a farewell to the town of Castle Rock where many of his stories had been set. By highlighting some of the personalities there, he was setting the stage for Needful Things – and also indulging some of his fancies about the unusual qualities of Polaroid photos.

  The first two novellas have both been filmed. The Langoliers became a two-part television miniseries in 1995, directed and written by Tom Holland. Various liberties were taken with the characters, and the effects are unfortunately bargain basement even for TV, but at least it was filmed in the right place: Bangor International Airport.

  Secret Window, Secret Garden lost the last two words of its title for its 2003 film version, with Johnny Depp as Mort and John Turturro as Shooter; written and directed by David Koepp it has a very different ending to the novella. The story was adapted more faithfully by Gregory Evans in three parts for BBC Radio 4 in 1999, with Henry Goodman and William Roberts as Mort and Shooter respectively.

  The Sun Dog was intended to become an eighteen-minute-long 3D IMAX film, with production starting in 2000 from a screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen. Although it went on hiatus, Cohen still listed it as an upcoming project for 2013/4 according to his biographical notes in the programme for the Carrie musical revamp.

  Nightmares & Dreamscapes

  (Viking Press, September 1993)

  ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ is a classic tale of revenge as schoolteacher Robinson buries mobster Dolan in his precious car. ‘The End of the Whole Mess’ comes when researchers discover a crime-free area in Texas. ‘Suffer the Little Children’ follows the problems Miss Emily Sidley faces in class. Richard Dees investigates ‘The Night Flier’ and gets a story with more bite than he anticipates. ‘Popsy’ comes to the rescue of his son when he’s kidnapped, while weird things happen in Castle Rock as ‘It Grows on You’. ‘Chattery Teeth’ become protection for salesman Bill Hogan, and a maid shows some ‘Dedication’ to an unpleasant writer.

  ‘The Moving Finger’ arrives in Howard Mitla’s bathroom and ‘Sneakers’ in a restroom are equally disturbing. ‘You Know They Got a Hell
of a Band’ in Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, and the inhabitants of Gennesault get a zombie ‘Home Delivery’. The ‘Rainy Season’ is particularly unpleasant in Willow, Maine, while ‘My Pretty Pony’ is a lecture about Time. ‘Sorry, Right Number’* (presented as a teleplay) sees a phone call arrive at an inopportune time, and ‘The Ten O’Clock People’* are able to identify batmen.

  Creatures from the Cthulhu mythos arrive in the London suburb of ‘Crouch End’, and the Bradbury children get some help from ‘The House on Maple Street’* to deal with their hated stepfather. ‘The Fifth Quarter’ changes the odds in a shoot-out, ‘The Doctor’s Case’ is a new story for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and ‘Umney’s Last Case’* sees a Chandler-esque hero and his creator swap places. The book concludes with ‘Head Down’, a non-fiction piece about baseball, and ‘Brooklyn August’, a poem on the same subject. After King’s author’s notes comes ‘The Beggar and the Diamond’*, a retelling of a Hindu fable.

  As with Skeleton Crew, King provided notes for these stories, giving some background about their inspirations, and also where they had been altered from the original publications. Some stories are notably different in their Nightmares & Dreamscapes edition – ‘It Grows on You’ originally didn’t feature characters from Castle Rock, for example – while five tales (asterisked above) were freshly written for the collection. The teleplay for ‘Sorry, Right Number’ is the original draft that King wrote, set in more locations than the budget for the TV series Tales From The Darkside could afford. ‘Suffer the Little Children’ is the oldest story, dating from 1972, with most coming from the 1980s.