Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition

by Rocky Wood

  There are two versions of the tale of the word processor. The story was originally published in Playboy for January 1983 as The Word Processor. A substantially revised version was included in Skeleton Crew (1985) under the new title, Word Processor of the Gods.

  You Know They Got a Hell of a Band, set in the town of Rock and Roll Heaven, Oregon, was first published in the 1992 anthology, Shock Rock. King substantially rewrote it for Nightmares and Dreamscapes the following year.

  The Uncollected, and The Unpublished

  Each of King’s uncollected and unpublished works is reviewed in this section.

  The Aftermath (1963)

  According to King The Aftermath is the first novel he completed. The manuscript is held in Box 1010 of the Special Collections Department of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. Written permission from King is required to access this work. A handwritten note on the first page of manuscript states, “The 1st novel written, aged 16. The Aftermath. Unpublished.” It is made up of 76 single spaced manual typewritten pages and totals on the order of 50,000 words.

  In this New Worlds tale a young man survives a nuclear war that devastates parts of America. After the trials of attempting to survive as a loner, Larry Talman joins Sun Corps, a group that is trying to use military and bureaucratic means to re-establish order. However, he and his partner, Ian Vannerman, secretly plan to bring the Corps down.

  In Sun Corps, Talman is recognized as a brilliant mathematician and is promoted to work with the Corps’ supercomputer, DRAC. Becoming ever more disillusioned he destroys the supercomputer and discovers that the Corps is a front for an alien race, the Denebians, that is planning to take over the Earth. The Denebians had been systematically eliminating anyone with ESP abilities, as those individuals could kill the aliens with mind power alone. Sun Corps will collapse without DRAC, and the Esper organization (those with ESP) determines to move in and fill the power vacuum. Disillusioned with any form of power, Talman again wanders alone before finally realizing that civilisation must arise again.

  As few readers will ever have the opportunity to read this first of King’s novels, let’s take this opportunity to present a brief summary of each Chapter. The novel is split into three parts, each with numbered Chapters.

  Part One, Chapter One: Larry Talman and Kelly are attacked by looters in Graybill and Kelly is killed. Chapter Two: Talman remembers the nuclear attack on Manchester some fourteen months before, on 14 August 1967. This date was later known as “A-Day.” He’d been in Woolworths at the time and afterwards had wandered with other survivors. In a rare piece of overwriting, which is quite excusable from any 16 year old, King writes, “He cried because man was naked.” In present time Talman meets Reina Durrel who immediately attacks and nearly kills him. He knocks her out. Chapter Three: Reina explains that her sister, Iris, had been raped and murdered the day before. They reconcile and make love. Talman remembers a friend, Jimmy Tomlinson and how they had joined up after the War. A week later Tomlinson had been killed by looters in Marl’s Quarry. In present time, Talman awakens the next morning to find Reina has stolen his car.

  Part Two, Chapter One: Three months later. Talman has been wandering all this time alone. Ian Vannerman wanders into Talman’s camp and rants against the Sun Corps, a militaristic group, which is building up strength in the Aftermath. Chapter Two: Vannerman reveals he had once been a member of the Sun Corps. He and Talman decide to travel to Nashville with a plan of joining Sun Corps and destroying it from the inside. They arrive at Nashville and are allowed to join. Chapter Three: Talman and Vannerman are given ESP tests and afterwards meet another Sun Corps member, Arnie Stowe, who tells them about Sun Corps’ “town patrols,” by which they take over a town and provide it with defence against “looters,” which effectively includes anyone who opposes the Corps.

  Part Two, Chapter Four: The next morning the other Sun Corps troops leave for Eustus, the next town to be “patrolled.” Talman and Vannerman are told they are ESP-negative and will be sent to Los Angeles for training. In the meantime they will serve the Corps in Eustus. Chapter Five: They leave for Eustus by truck and are ambushed but survive. In Eustus they are put at work on fortifications. A month passes with no sign of trouble but Talman and Vannerman have not yet been posted to LA. Suddenly, a huge group of “looters” appears. Chapter Six: March 1969. The looter army attacks the Sun Corps garrison at Eustus, Tennessee. There is a massive battle with large numbers of casualties on both sides but the Sun Corps troops finally prevail. Talman receives minor wounds; Vannerman’s are more serious. At the end of that day, Talman remembers a quote, “It is colder now … there are dark stars near Arcturus.” That night Talman and Vannerman are finally posted to Los Angeles, Vannerman to be trained in Mechanics and Weaponry; Talman in Statistics and Logistics.

  Part Two: Chapter Seven: Three days after the battle, Talman and Vannerman leave Eustus and fly to Los Angeles on a cargo plane from Nashville. They are inducted to LA Co-Center training. Chapter Eight: Talman actually enjoys learning statistics. His trainer, James Carvel, tells him he is the most promising logistics (extrapolating logic from statistics) student he has taught in forty years. Talman starts to consider whether he should actually destroy Sun Corps or work for it. He discovers Reina Durrel is the daytime keeper of the Corps’ supercomputer, DRAC, and is introduced to the computer’s amazing powers of deduction but realizes that the Corps is planning to use DRAC’s predictive ability to control the world.

  Part Two, Chapter Nine: Vannerman asks Talman to destroy DRAC. Talman is undecided and meets Reina that evening. He is now in a moral dilemma over how to destroy DRAC without killing Reina. Chapter Ten: Talman and Reina grow closer as Talman works daily on DRAC. Talman now questions how Sun Corps could have built such a supercomputer in the post-War environment. Vannerman and Talman plot to place a bomb to destroy DRAC. Chapter Eleven: April 1969, Talman prepares to bomb DRAC and places the explosives. Reina attacks him and an Esper who works for Sun Corps reveals the plot. Using an Ear-Hum device Talman kills Reina, the Esper and Sun Corps Lt. Kritzman. Chapter Twelve: Talman escapes and gets to his teacher, Carvel. The bomb goes off and DRAC is destroyed. Carvel reveals to Talman that Sun Corps is a front for the Denebians, an alien race who plan to take over the world. Only Espers can stop them and, with the assistance of DRAC, the Denebians would have built a machine to detect them all. Carvel kills the only Denebian on Earth. Talman and Vannerman leave on a helicopter but Talman becomes upset when Vannerman reveals he too is an Esper and that the Esper group are planning to reconstruct society. Talman insists on being dropped off in the countryside.

  Part Three, Chapter One: Fall. Gray streaks Talman’s hair. He remembers Jason, a boy he’d found in a small Oregon town. Looters had killed the boy’s mother and Jason himself died a week later. Talman finally realizes the foolishness of his anti-society views and decides to go to Esper headquarters near Chicago. “Good to finally be a man … Someone would show him the way.”

  In reading the manuscript, much more detail is available about various characters and events. Larry Talman, the protagonist, was 17 at the time of the nuclear war. His father was in the Army and both he and Larry’s mother were killed in the initial nuclear attack on 14 August 1967. While Larry survived, he was badly burned and thin and pallid for some time thereafter. He lived in Manchester until the War and was a loner after it until January 1969 when he joined the Sun Corps, now weighing 170 lbs. Sun Corps declared him ESP negative and sent him to Eustus for training before moving him on to Los Angeles to be a statistician and logistician. He met Reina Durrel there for a second time and fell in love. He was convinced by Vannerman to plant the bomb that destroyed the Sun Corps supercomputer. Remaining disillusioned by organized society, he returned to wandering alone (this style of hero in American entertainment has been aptly dubbed “The Lone Ranger syndrome”). He finally realized the value of society to individuals and at the end of the story set off for Esper headquarters near Ch
icago.

  Talman’s love interest, Reina Durrel attacked and nearly killed him the first time they met, apparently as a reaction to the rape and murder of her sister Iris the day before. However, they later made love (a strange reaction from the young girl to her recent past) and afterward she stole his car. She was about 16 in 1968, with brown hair and blonde highlights. She joined Sun Corps and became the daytime keeper of the Denebian/Sun Corp supercomputer, DRAC in Los Angeles. Talman was forced to kill her during his successful attempt to destroy the computer.

  The two men who convinced Talman to commit the bombing were Ian Vannerman and James Carvel. Vannerman, a big man who said he was opposed to the Sun Corps, had joined and deserted it once before rejoining in January 1969. Sun Corps also declared him ESP negative but he’d deliberately flunked the test. In fact he was an Esper, a member of the secretive organization opposing the Sun Corps. He encouraged Talman to bomb DRAC and provided the actual bomb. He then assisted Talman to escape but could not convince him to join the Espers.

  Carvel, a former Cornell teacher, taught Statistics and Logistics at Sun Corps’ Los Angeles Co-Center. He shot and killed the only Denebian still on earth in April 1969. It was Carvel who revealed to Talman that the Sun Corps was but a front for the Denebian conspiracy to control the Earth.

  The alien Denebians came from Deneb IV. They moved in on Earth after the nuclear war in August 1967, having had their eyes on the planet for three to four hundred years prior (this reminds one of the Martians from The War of The Worlds, which probably served as an inspiration for this tale). The sole Denebian left on earth was a very tall, huge tentacled horror. It had bulbous cone-shaped eyes and a strange voice. When Carvel shot and killed it with a sonic gun purple ichor was blown onto the floor.

  The Denebians’ front organization was the Sun Corps (in King’s presentation one cannot help but think of a fascist, paramilitary group such as the German S.S.). After the nuclear war they reorganized the US along military and bureaucratic lines. Their symbol was a golden sunburst on a green field. They had various garrisons around America by January 1969 but collapsed after Talman destroyed the computer.

  The DRAC itself was the biggest computer ever built. Fourteen stories high, it had tremendous predictive powers and was apparently built by the Denebians to help Sun Corps take over the Earth. It could only be activated by the palm print of the keeper of that shift. It was operated by a sophisticated keypunch, known as the Fountain Head, and would print out coded results which were verbalised by the computer’s simulated voice.

  King introduces some other interesting technology in this tale. This includes the Gunnar-Hellman Bolt Pistol, sonic guns and a “Laser Plate,” which is used for both cooking and setting off nuclear devices! A Sonic Ear-Hum is a weapon used to rupture every brain, except the user’s, within twenty feet, which Talman killed Reina Durrel and Kritzman. In a very interesting reference King mentions Talman learned Asimov-Seldon theorems at the LA Co-Center Statistics school. This is clear homage to Isaac Asimov’s groundbreaking science fiction Foundation series of novels. Seldon was a key character in that series, having created the First Foundation as a response to the imminent collapse of the Galactic Empire.

  Like any good science fiction writer King set the story in the future, although in this case only four to six years from the time of writing. One could argue this was the first of King’s apocalyptic stories, eventually leading to Night Surf, Trucks, his classic The Stand and The End of the Whole Mess. Much of King’s literary career has addressed the vexed issue of technology spinning out of control to form the basis of a horror tale. In this way, King was one of the first writers to successfully meld the lure of the technology based tales that had traditionally been served up as science fiction with the horror genre. Even simple technology such as that used in a laundry serves as the basis for such a tale in The Mangler.

  Interestingly, the novel contains the first recorded use by King of the term “survivor type,” which would later form a story title. Vannerman says this to Talman on page 23, “…you must be a pretty good survivor type to have made it as long as you have, on your own.” On page 27, Talman thought of a particular woman as being “…another survivor type.”

  There are no direct links from this novel to other King works. King has made it very clear he considers this first attempt at a novel to be juvenilia and there is no possibility that it will ever be published. While epic in scope and an interesting story, it suffers from the expected lack of maturity of any sixteen-year old. However, it is very interesting to see the early stages of the development of the style that would become King’s and reveals something of the writer who was to burst upon the world stage barely a decade later.

  30 Readers will note there is no F13 key on an IBM PC keyboard

  31 On The Shining and Other Perpetrations, in Whispers #17/18, August 1982, page 16

  32 The Seventeenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. London: Fontana/Collins, 1981; Great Ghost Stories: Tales of Madness and Mystery, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones. Baltimore: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2004; and Great Ghost Stories, selected by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004

  33 The first independent reprint of the original text appears in Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, edited by John Skipp. New York, NY: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009.

  American Vampire (2010)

  American Vampire is a comic book series launched by Vertigo (an imprint of DC Comics) in May 2010. It represents King’s first original comic script. Each of the five issues in the first “arc” (a comic book term for an extended or continuing storyline) will have one story by King and one by series creator, Scott Snyder. After the first arc King will have no further involvement.

  According to publicity material34:

  The series twists the well-trod vampire legend by allowing the creatures to evolve into a distinctly American creature and will follow the adventures of Skinner Sweet, a sociopathic outlaw in the Wild West who becomes the first American vampire. Unlike European vamps, Skinner is powered by the sun and, true to his native environment, has rattlesnake fangs. Each cycle, consisting of five individual comic issues, will take place in a different period of time in American history, tracing Skinner’s descendants, with Skinner himself as a recurring character.

  Snyder originally sold his idea for “a uniquely American take on vampires” to DC Comics then approached King for a blurb. The author enjoyed the tale so much he suggested he’d be willing to contribute to future issues. Naturally enough, this excited Snyder and the editors at Vertigo, who agreed. King then penned five stories relating to Skinner’s origins in the American West. Again, according to publicity material:

  King’s arc will trace the origins of the first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, as he goes fang-to-fang with even nastier vamps, a group out to get rich by damming up a river to create a new town. “It’s really the vampire as American capitalist gone totally wild.” (King said)

  Only the King stories in the first five issues are “canon,” or officially by King. King’s story in Issue One is Bad Blood. Set in Sidewinder, Colorado in 1880, this first tale is narrated by Will Bunting, who “only wrote one novel in my life – Bad Blood.” Sidewinder is an imaginary town from King’s America Under Siege Reality – it first appeared in The Shining as the town closest to the Overlook Hotel, and has since appeared in Before the Play, Misery and The Talisman, along with both of King’s adaptations of The Shining. It is notable that he chose to make this link.

  Bunting says most of his “novel” (later revealed as Bad Blood, or The Monster Outlaw – A Terrifying Tale of the Old West by William Bunting) is actually true. His story opens with Skinner Sweet, “notorious murderer and bank-thief” in the custody of the Pinkerton Agency, operating on behalf of “Percy,” a wealthy banker. As the train carrying Sweet and his captors proceeds from Sidewinder towards New Mexico Sweet’s crew prepare t
o derail the train, intent on freeing Sweet and killing all the passengers – “No Witnesses!”

  Meanwhile, Sweet regales a Pinkerton agent with the tale of his gang’s robbery of a bank in Bakersville, Colorado six months earlier. While his men were raping the women (and one man!) a loan officer began a shoot out, in which a number of people including a three year old child were killed. The gang retreated to a nearby mine to hole-up.

  Just before the train is derailed Sweet unlocks his handcuffs, using a peppermint stick. Bunting watched the aftermath of the derailment, “What I saw next was surely colored by my imagination a swell as by the dying hues of that terrible day’s sunset … but what I saw is more real than any dream or memory.” Sweet and his gang are confronted by “Old Man Percy” who amazingly says, “I think I’ve had enough of your shit, Mr. Sweet.” The gang shoots Percy dead but he immediately rises and bites Sweet in the neck, baring lengthy fangs. Sweet shoots Percy again and again before being shot dead himself. His gang flees and Percy and the survivors leave Sweet’s body by the side of the railroad. Percy (we now realize he is a vampire) is furious! Bunting closes this first tale, declaring, “I started writing that very night, and I think I knew two things even then: that what I wrote could only be published as fiction … and Skinner Sweet’s story wasn’t over but just beginning.”