by Rocky Wood
Percy has “very fair skin” and avoids direct sunlight as much as possible (he is seen carrying an unfurled umbrella), so unlike the traditional vampire he can go out in daylight (in fact he is suffering a mild sunburn). This begins our understanding that these peculiarly American vampires are actually powered by the sun.
King’s final four tales had not been published at the time of writing. Copies of the comic books are easily purchased either new from specialist stores, or on the secondary market. It is also likely American Vampire will be collected in one or more graphic novels (the first volume of which would contain all King’s material). It is most unlikely King’s material from the series will ever appear in one of his collections.
34 www.thedailybeast.com 25 October 2009 and 14 March 2010
An Evening at God’s (1990)
An Evening at God’s is a “one-minute play” that King wrote for a benefit evening. The manuscript was auctioned on 23 April 1990 at the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training. While it has never been published the text circulates freely in the King community.
According to Stephen J. Spignesi35 other authors who contributed to the benefit included Art Buchwald, J. K. Galbraith, Larry Gelbart, David Mamet and John Updike. He reports an interview with Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe36 in which King summarizes the play as:
God sitting at home and drinking a few beers and St. Peter comes in with papers to pass, and God’s watching a sitcom on TV. And the earth is sort of hanging in the way of the TV, and he keeps trying to look around it to see the television. So I sat down and wrote it. And it may have been a critical comment: The typewriter broke down while I was working on this, and I had to redo it.
When God crushes the Earth, St. Peter is somewhat rueful and points out that some of God’s favorite comedians – Alan Alda, Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, all used to live on Earth. Initially disappointed, God remembers he has all the videotapes.
Typically of King a lot of fun and action are crammed into the “one minute” in which this play should be performed. At the beginning there are signs that God has been drinking a lot of beer and, on finding he had destroyed the world on which his favorite comedians live he says, “Shit. Maybe I better cut down on my drinking.” In addition to a drinking problem God also has a problem with certain foods, telling St Peter, “I should know better than to eat those chili peppers. They burn me at both ends.”
This amusing little piece includes a line from God reminiscent of that uttered by Jake Chambers as Roland let him fall to his second death, “Go then. There are other worlds than these.” St. Peter says, “I actually sort of liked that one, God – Earth, I mean,” and God replies, “It wasn’t bad, but there’s more where that came from.”
A papier-mached globe represents Earth, hanging between the TV and God. As it interferes with His viewing God smashes it out of the way, killing us all. In fact, God’s housekeeper gets at least some of the blame. St. Peter remarks before God lashes out at our planet, “So Earth’s still there, Huh? After all these years”, God replies, “Yes, the housekeeper is the most forgetful bitch in the universe.”
Perhaps the most interesting exchange occurs when God mutters, “My son got back, didn’t he?” St. Peter: “Yessir, some time ago.” At the beginning of the play God is described as “a big guy with a white beard” reading a book – When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Concluding the script is an Author’s Note, “God’s Voice should be as loud as possible.”
While no timeline for the events is given we know that Alan Alda, Richard Pryor and Robin Williams were all popular comedians. In Earth time the story is probably set in the 1980s. Due to this, and the Earth’s demise, An Evening at God’s is categorized as a New Worlds tale.
There are no links from this Work to any other King story.
35 The Lost Work of Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.242-244
36 Stephen King: Bogeyman as Family Man, 15 April 1990
Before the Play (1982, 1997)
Before the Play is the prologue to The Shining, cut from that novel in the editing process to help secure a lower cover price for the hardback! It is effectively a collection of five stories, loosely connected by the Overlook Hotel. Four are set at the Hotel and the remaining one during Jack Torrance’s childhood. Not only do the “scenes” provide fascinating background about the Overlook Torrance’s motivations are more clearly explained, perhaps dictating his adult behavior.
The first appearance was in the magazine Whispers (Number 17/18) for August 1982. Copies can be purchased through the various King booksellers, although that particular edition is becoming scarcer as collectors permanently retain copies.
As part of the promotion for the mini-series version of The Shining King allowed an abridged version to be published in the 26 April to 2 May 1997 edition of TV Guide. The cuts were partly a matter of self-censorship to suit the sensibilities of that magazine. However, Spignesi cogently argues King felt there were weaknesses in the deleted scenes, stating as he does in his TV Guide introduction, “I’m glad to see the best of it restored to print here.”37
Copies of the TV Guide version, which Bernie Wrightson illustrated, are relatively easy to secure through King booksellers and other sources.
King also wrote After the Play but that merged into the closing sections of the novel during the editing process and the author says that the original text has been lost.
In this loose set of stories, which King terms “scenes,” we learn something of the history of the Overlook Hotel and the Torrance family. Scene I is The Third Floor of a Resort Hotel Fallen Upon Hard Times. It deals with the construction of the Overlook, from 1907, by Bob T. Watson. In 1908 his eldest son, Boyd, died on the grounds in a riding accident and the Grand Opening in 1909 was marred when a Congressman choked to death. After ploughing huge amounts of money into the Hotel Watson was forced to sell, receiving in return the promise of maintenance jobs for life for himself and his remaining son. In August 1922 the new owner, James Parris, died of a heart attack – in the hotel’s topiary, a fact that probably does not surprise readers of The Shining. Shortly after that death, Bob T. Watson imagined he heard his dead son riding on the grounds. (This entire scene was deleted from the TV Guide version).
In the second section, A Bedroom in the Wee Hours of the Morning, Lottie Kilgallon Pillsbury honeymooned at the Overlook in August of 1929 (Pillsbury was King’s mother’s maiden name). Lottie suffered a number of disturbing dreams, including one in which the hotel was on fire and, in another, she saw the topiary move.
Topping it all off, while Lottie smoked in bed, “She reached down to get the ashtray and the thought burst on her like a revelation: It does creep, the whole place – like it was alive! And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the bed and gripped her wrist firmly … almost lecherously.” Not surprisingly, Lottie insisted upon returning home immediately. After years of dwelling on the events at the Overlook she committed suicide in a Yonkers hotel room in 1949, “It had been twenty years and the hand that had gripped her wrist when she reached down to get her cigarettes had never really let go.” This is perhaps the most memorable (and scariest) of any King scene in an uncollected short story.
In the third section, On the Night of the Grand Masquerade, Lewis Toner, head accountant and former lover of Overlook owner Horace Derwent, committed suicide by overdosing in a bathtub on the night of the 1946 Grand Masquerade Ball. Derwent bought off the coroner and other authorities to avoid a scandal. (This scene was deleted from the TV Guide version, almost certainly as a form of self-censorship due to its heavy sexual nature).
The fourth scene, And Now this Word from New Hampshire, reverts to the summer of 1953. When Jacky Torrance was six, his father came home drunk and broke the boy’s arm in a rage. This, of course, presages Jack’s breaking of his son Danny’s arm twenty-two years later. One scene alone serves to show yet again how well King can position the reader in the mind of a child, in
this case Jacky:
His father was like God, like Nature, sometimes lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be. Jacky’s mother feared and served him. His brothers hated him. Only Jacky of all of them still loved him in spite of the fear and the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out: I love you daddy! Go away! Hug me! I’ll kill you! I’m so afraid of you! I need you!
And, just before the senior Torrance kicked Jacky in the belly, sending him flying from his treehouse to the ground, and a greenstick fracture, “‘Oh, Daddy,’ Jacky mourned for the both of them.” The scene ends as Jacky faints with, “What you see is what you’ll be, what you see is what you’ll be, what you – The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The nightmares went on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.”
The story concludes with Scene V, The Overlook Hotel, Third Floor, 1958, in which there is a mob hit, when three men kill two guards and an underworld figure in the Presidential Suite. The piece closes, “The Overlook Hotel was at home with the dead.”
As it was King’s intention when writing Before the Play it would be the Prologue to The Shining, it is clear this small collection of scenes is part of that particular storyline of the America Under Siege Reality. This being the case there are obviously a huge number of links to the novel and to King’s other fiction, as well as some anomalies or errors between this piece and the novel itself.
Sidewinder, Colorado, 40 miles east of the Overlook and the nearest town also receives considerable mention in Misery and all versions of The Shining. It is also mentioned in The Talisman. The Overlook Hotel itself is, of course, the key location in all versions of The Shining and is mentioned in both Misery and The Regulators.
The following are some of the very extensive links to the novel version of The Shining. In both, Jack Torrance’s father was an orderly at the Berlin Community Hospital.
In Before the Play Lottie Kilgallon, while staying at the Overlook Hotel in August 1929, dreamed that there had been a fire, “Perhaps it had been the boiler. You had to keep an eye on the boiler, because if you didn’t, she would creep on you.” In Chapter 12 of The Shining Watson says, “Just stuck around to remind Mr. Torrance here about the boiler. Keep your good weather eye on her, fella, and she’ll be fine. Knock the press down a couple of times a day. She creeps.” Danny Torrance then thinks, “She creeps.” Of course, the boiler exploded at midnight on 2 December 1977, destroying the Overlook. In Before the Play, Lottie Kilgallon dreamed a fire hose held her so that a fire could get to her. In The Shining, Danny Torrance thought he saw the fire hose move and was scared it would catch him.
In Before the Play, Jacky Torrance’s father broke his arm in a drunken rage one summer night in 1953. In The Shining, Jack Torrance broke his son Danny’s arm in 1975 while in a drunken temper. This critical piece of back-story is very useful to an understanding of how Jack Torrance came to be both an alcoholic and the cycle of violence he visited upon his son. The novel tempts us to believe the cycle has been broken and King pretty much confirms that with the graduation scene in the mini-series screenplay.
Among characters that appear in both this piece and the novel are: Horace Derwent, Jack (“Jacky”) Torrance, his father Mark and Jacky’s mother.
Grondin is the contractor who diddles Bob T. Watson of $70,000 in 1911 in Before the Play. In The Shining, Charles Grondin headed the group of investors who purchased the Overlook from Derwent in 1952, then later also headed High Country Investments, which purchased the Overlook in 1963. As Charles was born in 1911 he could not be the same Grondin, but perhaps he was a descendant? King continually creates these sorts of connections and it does not seem likely that the use of this surname is a coincidence. Ironically, in this piece a company Horace Derwent controlled and donated the Library in Sidewinder, Colorado. In the novel Jack Torrance used the very same Library to do research on the Overlook Hotel, and Derwent!
One of Bob T. Watson’s friends said the opening night of the Overlook Hotel on 1 June 1910 reminded him of Poe’s story about the Red Death. In the Prelude to Chapter One of the novel there is a lengthy quote from Poe’s The Masque of Red Death and in Chapter 18 Jack Torrance was reminded of a line from the same story.
In Before the Play in the summer of 1952 Jacky Torrance’s father smoke-drugged a colony of wasps and burnt their nest. In the novel, Mark Torrance smoked out a colony of wasps in his back yard. This is presumably the same event. Of course, Jack Torrance’s stinging by wasps while he is clearing the roof of the Overlook is a crucial event in the novel and carries more power in this context.
There is a possible inconsistency in the Presidential Suite Killings. In Before the Play in 1958 three men killed two guards and an underworld figure in the Presidential Suite. In the novel two men killed a mobster called Gienelli and two guards in the Presidential Suite in June 1966. Of course, it is also possible that these were separate killings. Either way if one’s name is, say, Tony Soprano, one should not stay in the Presidential Suite of the Overlook Hotel!
There are some clear inconsistencies between the two stories. In Before the Play, the elevator at the Overlook Hotel was installed in 1927; in the novel and mini-series it was installed in 1926. In Before the Play Lewis Toner died in 1946 but in The Shining he died in 1945.
In another probable error we read that in 1922 Woodrow Wilson was the only President (prior to October 7, 1922) to stay in the Presidential Suite. “When Wilson had come here he had been a sorry joke. There had been talk in the country that his wife was actually President of the United States.” In fact, Wilson finished his second and final Presidential term in March 1921. In 1922 Harding was President and it seems unlikely that people would have joked of the previous President’s wife actually being President.
Frankly, it is surprising that King has not included this story (or more accurately, collection of scenes) in one of his collections. Before the Play is a tremendously valuable addition to the mythos of the Overlook Hotel and provides key motivation and background for one of the most towering and memorable characters in King’s body of work. Hope should not be lost that King may at some point give this story a wider readership. After all, TV Guide had one of the biggest circulations of any US magazine, so it is unlikely that King does not want this story in broad circulation.
The other possibility would be its restoration in a future printing of the novel. King restored The Stand; allowed excerpts from the original manuscript of ‘Salem’s Lot to be published; revised The Gunslinger; and made minor alterations to The Green Mile when the six parts of that novel were collected in one volume. He has also updated a very large number of his short stories over the years. It may be that a “Restored” version of The Shining is not out of the question.
The History Of The Overlook Hotel
Before the Play adds an enormous amount to the history of the Overlook Hotel, as provided in The Shining. From these sources, along with the mini-series screenplay, the unproduced movie screenplay, Misery and The Regulators it is possible to glean the following information about the Hotel, its history and owners.
It was built by Bob T. Watson between 1907 and 1909 to be the grandest resort hotel in America and, at nearly 12,000ft above sea level, the highest. During the building Watson’s son, Boyd was killed in a riding accident. The Hotel is forty miles west of Sidewinder. The first season was 1910, with the opening ceremony held on 1 June. A Congressman choked to death at the celebration dinner.
By September 1914 Watson was bankrupt and in 1915 the Overlook was sold to James T. Parris, who died in 1922, after which it was sold to Clyde and Cecil Brandywine. In 1922 Woodrow Wilson stayed in the Presidential Suite. The Hotel was resold in 1929 and 1936; Horace Derwent purchased it in 1945. Derwent sold out in 1952 and the Hotel had a number of other owners before being bought in 1970 by Al Shockley and his associates, who refurbished it that year.
On 2 December 1977 the Overloo
k was destroyed when its boiler exploded while Jack Torrance was the caretaker (note: according to the mini-series version this occurred in 1996 or 1997). During the Overlook’s history there were many violent deaths and murders and a number of suicides. It seems the Hotel was at least haunted, and possibly possessed.
The full list of owners: 1907-1915 Bob T. Watson, 1915-1922 James T. Parris; 1922-1929 Clyde and Cecil Brandywine, 1929-1936 Unknown, 1936-1945 Unknown, 1945-52 Horace M. Derwent, 1952-1953/4 Charles Grondin and a group of investors, 1953/4-1957 Mountainview Resorts, 10 April 1963-1967 High Country Investments, 1967-68 Sylvia Hunter, 1970-77 Albert Shockley and Associates. (Note: according to the mini-series version a company called the Sidewinder Corporation owned the Overlook at the time of its destruction in 1996 or 1997).
37 The Lost Work of Stephen King, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.163-165
The Blue Air Compressor (1971, 1981)
One of King’s stranger stories and far from his best, The Blue Air Compressor was originally published in Onan, a student literary magazine published at the University of Maine at Orono (UMO), for January 1971, shortly after King graduated. He allowed republication in Heavy Metal, an “adult illustrated fantasy magazine” in July 1981. King made numerous changes for that publication, although all were minor in nature, the removal or changing of words and the deletion of one sentence being the most severe.
