A Brief Guide to Stephen King

by Paul Simpson

  Unlike some of the stories in Everything’s Eventual, many of these veer towards the horror side of King’s writing, with ‘Harvey’s Dream’ dealing with the issue of Alzheimer’s disease, which King noted in a May 2013 interview, is ‘the boogeyman in the closet now . . . I’m afraid of losing my mind’. Dinky Earnshaw from ‘Everything’s Eventual’ turns up in The Dark Tower, and both of King’s key fictional towns in Maine, Castle Rock and Derry, are mentioned while Julia Shumway, the editor of the Chester’s Mill Democrat in Under the Dome, pens one of the articles quoted in ‘N’. The book’s epigraph comes from Arthur Machen’s story ‘The Great God Pan’, which is the inspiration for ‘N’, a tale of creatures that lie just the other side of our reality, while Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’ is updated in ‘A Very Tight Place’. King reverts to his normal method of author’s notes, providing a set of quite revealing autobiographical details about the tales.

  Just After Sunset was a late choice of title; when discussing the book in February 2008, it was still known as ‘Just Past Sunset’, and King admitted that he wanted to call it either ‘Unnatural Acts of Human Intercourse’ or ‘Pocket Rockets’. His publishers weren’t happy with either of those choices, even after it was pointed out that the word ‘intercourse’ does not have to have a sexual connotation. At that stage there were only going to be thirteen tales (‘The Cat From Hell’ was a late addition), which compiled King’s uncollected stories to date, barring the two which had been developed into novels: ‘Lisey and the Madman’, which became Lisey’s Story; and ‘Memory’, which was reworked as the opening chapter of Duma Key.

  The collection was promoted in an unusual way: Scribner teamed up with Marvel Comics to produce a motion-comic version of the story (which was later included on DVD for a special edition of the book, at King’s suggestion), known as Stephen King’s N. Developed specifically for the small screen-size of a mobile phone, the twenty-five-episode video series was adapted by Marc Guggenheim (with ‘oversight’ from King) with artwork by Alex Maleev. It was released weekly from 28 July 2008, and can still be watched online at www.NisHere.com. A couple of years later, Guggenheim and Maleev reworked the material for a standard graphic novel, adding various elements, such as documents, which wouldn’t work in the motion-comic edition, as well as a few extra plot beats.

  In addition to the motion comic of ‘N.’, ‘The Cat From Hell’ has also been filmed: George A. Romero adapted it for Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, directed by John Harrison in 1990. Blues artist David Johansen played the assassin tasked with getting rid of the cat by William Hickey’s wealthy mogul. A pilot script for a television version of ‘The New York Times at Bargain Rates’ by Jim Dunn and Sam Ernst was sold to ABC in July 2013. Stories from the collection have also been optioned as dollar babies.

  Stephen King Goes to the Movies

  (Pocket Books, January 2009)

  This is a bit of an oddity: it’s a collection of three novellas and two short stories, all of which have been published in previous volumes. All of the tales have formed the basis of movies, but apart from The Shawshank Redemption, they’re not the most successful such films either critically or financially. Each story comes with a very brief introduction by the author, but none of them provides any new information.

  The five stories are ‘1408’ from Everything’s Eventual (filmed in 2007); ‘The Mangler’ from Night Shift, which hit cinemas in 1985; Low Men in Yellow Coats which took the title of its collection Hearts in Atlantis for its movie title in 2002 (this takes up the majority of this book); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption – for which it’s a real shame that King’s essay in the script book couldn’t be reprinted here; and finally, ‘Children of the Corn’, also from Night Shift, which would seem to be there purely for King to comment negatively about the many sequels spawned by the original.

  The book concludes with an alphabetical list of King’s personal top ten adaptations, in which he rather disingenuously includes Storm of the Century, which was an original screenplay not an adaptation. In total, there are only ten pages of new material in this collection, and is one that is for completists only, who must have everything listed in the indicia at the start of each book.

  Ur (Amazon.com, February 2009)

  English teacher Wesley Smith loves books – not just the stories within them, but the books themselves. After a fight with his girlfriend when he angrily calls her an illiterate bitch, she asks why he doesn’t read on a computer like everyone else. He therefore orders a Kindle from Amazon, but instead of the (then-standard) white, it’s pink – and seems to have functions beyond the ordinary. The UR-menu allows him to access books written in alternative realities, where Hemingway wrote about dogs, and John D. MacDonald’s hero wasn’t Travis McGee. When he discovers there’s a newspaper setting as well, he, along with a colleague Don, and student Robbie, see alternative histories, including JFK surviving the trip to Dallas, and a nuclear catastrophe over Cuba. But when they look at UR-Local, and find a setting that shows future news, they learn that the coach carrying Wesley’s ex-girlfriend and Robbie’s lover will be in an accident caused by a drunk driver. Despite clear rules, Wesley and Robbie prevent the driver from getting to the scene, but then Wesley receives some visitors who are not happy with what he’s done – it has threatened the Tower . . .

  Seen by some as a money-making device for Amazon (and for King himself, who noted that he’d made about $80,000 from the story, which took him three days to write), Ur was prompted by King’s agent Ralph Vicinanza after the author had penned one of his Entertainment Weekly columns about the Kindle e-reader. Since Amazon were launching a new version of the device, Vicinanza thought it would be a neat idea to write something specifically for that format. This tied in with an idea that King had already been considering about someone receiving emails from the dead, and although he ‘realized I might get trashed in some of the literary blogs, where I would be accused of shilling for Jeff Bezos & Co . . . that didn’t bother me much; in my career, I have been trashed by experts, and I’m still standing’.

  This didn’t mean that King had become a total convert to the Kindle; another Entertainment Weekly column complained about the issues with footnotes, and noted the problems potentially caused by dropping the devices down the toilet! He was also concerned about the effect on the book industry – something which had earlier prompted his bike trip to promote Insomnia, and would lead to Joyland not receiving an e-version on first printing – and he drily asked, ‘Maybe instead of “Ur,” I should have written a story called “The Monster That Ate the Book Biz” – but would Amazon have wanted that one? Probably not.’

  The story in some ways is a dry run for elements of 11/22/63: King’s fascination with the JFK assassination is already clear, and the potential futures examined in that book are aired briefly here. It’s also a mid-point between The Dead Zone and 11/22/63: like Johnny Smith in the former novel, Wes knows he must do something to avoid a bad future, but unlike Johnny, Wes gets in trouble for what he does with higher powers. The Low Men in Yellow Coats make a reappearance (as introduced in Hearts in Atlantis) and Constant Readers will deduce the connection to the Dark Tower from the logo that appears on the UR-Kindle.

  An audiobook reading of the story was eventually made available, but Ur has yet to materialize on screen (other than those of the Kindle).

  Blockade Billy (Scribner, May 2010)

  Blockade Billy was the world’s greatest baseball player, of whom virtually nobody has ever heard. As an elderly New Jersey Titans’ George Grantham relates to Stephen King, in 1957 the Titans needed a replacement player, so William ‘Billy’ Blakely arrived to help out. Some of the team regarded him as a good luck charm, but questions started to be asked about his methods and his ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. It transpires that Billy was an imposter: he was really Eugene Katsanis, an orphan who worked on the Blakely farm but was abused by the Blakelys, so killed them, and then took their son’s place when the call came
for a player. Before ‘Billy’ was arrested, he took revenge on an umpire who gave a bad call against Grantham, and from thereon, the team suffered bad luck.

  Morality follows the fortunes of Chad and Nora Callahan, who are short of money. Nora works for a retired priest, the partially paralyzed Reverend Winston, who becomes determined to experience at least one sin in his life. He is incapable of doing anything himself, so offers Nora a large sum to commit the sin, so he can experience it vicariously – and possibly be punished doubly for it. Eventually Nora agrees, and punches a small boy in the nose; the incident is videoed to provide Winston with proof. After Winston’s death, possibly by suicide, Nora and Chad worry about the fate of the recording, and they become increasingly worried they will be discovered. This leads both to sin more themselves and eventually divorce. When she finds a book called The Basis of Morality, Nora realizes that there is little she can learn from it.

  Blockade Billy was originally published on its own by Cemetery Dance to mark the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season on 20 April. A further limited edition was produced by Lonely Road Books later that year.

  ‘I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who’ve spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game,’ King said in the promotion for the book. ‘I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it.’

  According to King’s agent Chuck Verrill, the author ‘loved that period of time and the quality of the baseball’ which prompted him to write the tale – his love of the subject was already clear to readers of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and the ‘Dark Tower’ series, in which baseball references pop up from time to time. A tad ruefully, King told the New York Times that he had learned writing ‘baseball fiction is hard. There’s 25 guys on a major league squad!’

  Morality was first published in Esquire magazine in 2009 – the cover of the issue promotes the story heavily as if the words were being projected onto the naked body of Swimwear Illustrated model Bar Refaeli, calling it ‘Stephen King’s story of recession’. Refaeli told Esquire, ‘I haven’t seen anything like that ever. So I wanted to be the girl who did it.’

  The story received a very mixed reception: although it was criticized by a lot of King’s Constant Readers online, it won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette. The story was written after King had completed the first draft of Under the Dome, in the ‘cooling off’ period before starting to work on the edit.

  Although both stories have been recorded as audiobooks, neither has yet appeared in any other form.

  Full Dark, No Stars (Scribner, November 2010)

  Wilfred James admits that he was responsible for the death of his wife Arlette at Hemingford Home, Nebraska in 1922. He’s sitting in a hotel room eight years later writing a confession, and explaining how everything went wrong for him after that. He forced his teenage son, Henry, to help with the murder, after Arlette decided she wanted to go to Omaha and sell her stretch of land for an abattoir. They dumped her body in a well, and then forced a cow to fall down it to explain the rats and blood. Life went downhill: Henry and his girlfriend Shannon became robbers, and after being bitten by a rat, Wilfred believed that Arlette’s corpse came back to haunt him, and showed him Henry and Shannon’s deaths. After that no one would buy the farm, and Wilfred descended into poverty, still believing he was being haunted by the rats. As he finishes writing, the rats arrive and he can’t find his gun . . .

  After a speaking engagement, the organizer suggests that crime author Tess uses a short cut, which will get her back home faster and safer. It does nothing of the sort: as Tess later realizes, she has been set up. Her car goes over nail-studded pieces of wood left in the road, and when she stops, she is attacked and raped by a Big Driver. She feigns death and he dumps her ‘body’ with his other victims. Tess crawls away and decides not to report the crime, worried about the effect it will have on her career. Instead she starts to investigate, and learns that Big Driver is the son of the librarian who sent her down the short cut. In fact the woman has two sons, and the one known to most as Big Driver wasn’t the rapist, but covered for his brother. Tess kills all three and is helped to cover her tracks.

  Derry resident Dave Streeter pays George Elvid for a ‘Fair Extension’: he will get roughly fifteen more years of life in return for fifteen per cent of his income and the name of someone he really hates. After some prevarication, Streeter names Tom Goodhugh, his best friend since grammar school. From thereon, Goodhugh’s life collapses, while Streeter prospers. Streeter’s cancer is cured; Goodhugh’s wife contracts it. Streeter is promoted; Nora Goodhugh dies. Streeter’s family all do well; Goodhugh’s falls apart. And still Dave Streeter wants more . . .

  Bob and Darcy Anderson have A Good Marriage. Until, that is, Darcy finds evidence that convinces her that Bob is not the run-of-the-mill accountant she has always believed, but in fact is a serial killer known as Beadie. Bob admits it but tells her that meeting her meant he stopped killing for a long time, and that they can get through this. Darcy apparently agrees, but in fact makes a plan to kill him. She succeeds, making it look like an accident, but a few weeks after his funeral, she is approached by retired detective Holt Ramsey, who was investigating the Beadie murders. He was sure that Bob was the murderer, and deduces Darcy’s role in his death – but doesn’t intend to do anything more about it.

  Full Dark, No Stars contains three novellas and a short story, all of which were original to the book (because most magazines wouldn’t print stories of this length, according to King); an excerpt from Big Driver appeared in Entertainment Weekly in the week of publication. The title came from King’s desire to continue the motif of ‘stories to be read after dark’.

  King provided an afterword with some hints about the stories’ inspiration: 1922 came from the non-fiction book Wisconsin Death Trip, penned by Michael Lesy in 1973 about the city of Black River Walls, Wisconsin. The photos within it impressed King with a sense of isolation and desperation. He decided to use rats because they were still creatures that scared him – in a conversation with fans to promote the book, he noted that the scene where Wilf reaches up for a hatbox and is bitten by a rat was one of his favourites.

  Big Driver was prompted by a stop during a trip in 2007 when he saw a trucker talking to a woman with a flat tyre. He also wanted to play with the horror-movie tropes of the youngsters taking the short cut that leads to whatever nightmare is waiting for them. In his ‘liner notes’ on the Simon & Schuster website, King references the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish, the real-life vigilante Bernard Goetz, and the Jodie Foster film The Brave One.

  ‘Fair Extension’ also played with horror tropes, this time the idea of the man who makes a deal with the devil. Usually, this has some horrible ending, but King wondered what would happen if the devil were a fair trader?

  A Good Marriage was triggered by news reports about serial killer Dennis Rader, and the way that many people refused to believe that his wife Paula could have been married to him for thirty-four years without realizing what sort of person he was. The website page promoting this story on the Simon & Schuster site is suitably gruesome, but worth checking out.

  The paperback edition, released in May 2011, also included the short story ‘Under the Weather’: Brad Franklin has always maintained that if anything happened to his wife, he would use his imagination to keep her alive. And that’s precisely what he proceeds to do, even though the smell is getting worse, and their dog Lady has found something distinctly unpleasant to chew on . . .

  ‘1922’ became the basis for Shooter Jennings and Last False Hope’s 2012 song of the same name, which begins with a shortened version of Wilfred’s confession and then condenses the plot of the novella into just under four minutes. Jennings and King collaborated on Jennings’ album, Black Ribbons, with Jennings’ band Heirophant, in 2010.

  Stephen King had already penned a screenplay for A Good
Marriage by the time the book was published, and it was filmed across the summer of 2013. Peter Askin directed the feature, with Joan Allen as Darcy, Anthony LaPaglia playing Bob, and Stephen Lang as detective Holt Ramsey. The independent production was expected to be released in 2014.

  Mile 81 (Simon & Schuster Digital, September 2011)

  The rest stop at Mile 81 on interstate highway I-95 has been abandoned for a few years: no one goes to the Burger King or uses any of the other facilities. Except, of course, the local youth, and those, like young Pete Simmons, who want to emulate them. Left to wander around on his own, Pete tries some vodka, and falls into a doze. As he sleeps, an unusual mud-covered station wagon arrives at the rest stop, and attracts the attention of passing insurance man Doug Clayton, whose attempt to be a Good Samaritan leads to him being eaten by the car. Horse trainer Julianne Vernon is its next victim, and then the Lussier family arrive. Mother and father fall victim, but the two children are stuck in the car: six-year-old Rachel and four-year-old Blake get out and manage to call for help. But it takes Trooper Jimmy Holding and Pete Simmons’ ‘baby trick’ with a magnifying glass to make the car vanish . . .

  Mile 81 is a good old-fashioned Stephen King story about a scary vehicle. There are elements of Christine to it (and there’s even a brief reference to the John Carpenter movie), as well as From A Buick 8. The promotional material interestingly refers to the ‘heart of Stand By Me’ (the film version of The Body), rather than King’s original tale. Although many reviewers picked up on the story’s resemblance to his older work, King firmly roots Mile 81 in contemporary times with references to Boardwalk Empire, the American Vampire comic book (for which he co-wrote the first part), and even Doctor Who. The car may well be one of those used by the Low Men.