Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition
Page 56
Fans of King’s mythical Castle Rock, Maine will be interested to know that Huffman is apparently in the same county as Castle Rock, which would place it in Castle County. The District Attorney covering Huffman is based in Castle Rock and a judge there, having bought cars from Morton Thatcher, Senior’s dealership in Huffman for twenty years, subsequently exonerated Morton Thatcher, Junior on one charge. However, another judge serving in the Castle Rock District Court fined the Junior Thatcher and took nine points from his licence in a separate case.
From The Huffman Story we find that there is a State Mental Hospital located in Castle Rock and the Castle Rock District Court, as well as WODM, an FM radio station partly owned by Elizabeth Drogan (these are not mentioned in any other King story). The radio station is described as “The Big Rock of Western Maine.” Joe Drogan was taken to Castle Rock Hospital (Royce Merrill was also taken there, in Bag of Bones). Of great interest is the mention of a male sex offender from that town, although this cannot be Frank Dodd, as the offender is alive and, according to The Dead Zone, Dodd killed himself just the previous month, in Castle Rock.
Castle Rock appears in many King stories and this is one of two unpublished stories that add to the legend of that unfortunate town (the other is Squad D). It is also mentioned in the unproduced screenplays of Cujo and The Dead Zone.
Castle Rock is the setting for The Body, Cujo, Gramma, It Grows on You (but only the Nightmares and Dreamscapes version), The Man in the Black Suit, Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut, Needful Things, Premium Harmony, The Sun Dog and Uncle Otto’s Truck. It is also a key setting in Bag of Bones, The Dark Half, Nona (but only the Skeleton Crew version) and The Dead Zone. It is mentioned in Creepshow, Dreamcatcher, Gerald’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill, Riding the Bullet, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Under the Dome and The Stand (Complete and Uncut version).
Elizabeth Drogan had been involved in a successful campaign to stop development on the western end of Castle Lake and also to stop the drainage of sewage into it. Castle Lake is mentioned in Cujo (where we learn it is near Larch Street, the Trenton home in Castle Rock); The Dark Half (the Beaumonts had a lake home there – before the sparrows and fire destroyed it – it was said to be part of the town of Castle Rock, near Route 5); Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut (the Todds had a lake home there, in the town of Castle Rock); and Needful Things (Andy Clutterbuck plunged to his death through the ice on it).
The old Huffman Mill is on Castle River, which is also mentioned in The Body. In that story the Castle River runs “…under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow …” The GW&SM trestle that Gordie Lachance and his friends crossed so dangerously also crossed the Castle River, which runs across all of New Hampshire and half of Maine.
Huffman borders Bridgton, a real Maine town and the setting for The Mist and a key location in The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah. Bridgton is virtually on Long Lake, on which the Kings had a home in the 1970s. In another King link the Bouchards adopted Frances Tho with the assistance of a placement agency in Boulder, Colorado. The Kings lived in Boulder in the summer and fall of 1974 and King largely wrote The Shining there.
The Town Of Huffman
Huffman is a small town at the far end of the Lakes district in Western Maine. Incorporated in 1840, its main industry in 1976 was a furniture factory. In January 1976 an apparent serial killer of young children began to stalk the town.
The Town Green is bordered by Main, Trafford, Shire, River, Chestnut and Maple Streets and was donated to the town by the Hosea Family in 1880. Two stone posts 6 foot high in a brick wall frame the entrance. Brass plates are set in each post, one reading “Huffman Town Green,” the other acknowledging the donation. Playground equipment is on the Main Street side of the Green. The War Memorial is on it, there is a small band shell, and a small pond in the middle, where Ouelette found Frances Tho’s body.
Main Street is also Route 17, which runs parallel to the GS&WM freight tracks (now disused and presumably running in an easterly direction to Castle Rock and further, to the location many years before of the dead boy sought by Gordie Lachance and his friends in The Body).
While Huffman is close to Castle Rock, Fryeburg is the town over Huffman’s town line in one direction and Bridgton neighbors it on another. As Harlow is the town neighboring Castle Rock it must also be close to Huffman, although it is not mentioned. Drivers stop in Huffman on their way to the nearby ski fields, such as Black Mountain, Pleasant Mountain and Sunday River.
Among other places King mentions is Hunington Road (location of the Chasswick place, before it the Sirois place and also known as “Windy Acres”); Back Stage Road; Carbine Street (so named for the factory that had stood there in post-Civil War times); the Old Farm on Devonshire Road; the Huffman Stream, crossed by the Margaret Chase Smith–Lyndon Baines Johnson Bridge, built in 1965; Shire Street; Sirois Creek; Trafford Lane (those who live on it are not well-off) and its extension, Trafford Road, which crosses the Huffman Road via a wooden bridge built in 1932 but which was much run-down four decades later. In early 1976 the town had at least one kindergarten, a grammar school, a junior high and a high school, a library and the Huffman Country Club.
Huffman’s businesses in 1976 included a bank; Thatcher’s Ford-Honda dealership; the furniture factory, at which Bob Bouchard was a foreman; two motels (one called 40 Winks); a pool hall and bowling alley; a drug store; the Brass Rail restaurant and the Home Folks Café; Carl Dusfrene’s legal office; Dr. George Peters’ surgery; an Exxon gas station; the Huffman Barber Shop; and retail outlets, including First National, the Huffman Federal Supermarket, Huffman Field & Stream Sporting Goods, Huffman Giftwize, the Leather Bar and Henry’s Busy Corner. Janet Dolgun ran a half junk shop, half antique shop spread over four buildings on Main and called The Pretty Penny. The Huffman Mill was defunct and “decaying” beside the Castle River by this time.
Drogan’s husband founded her newspaper, the Huffman Gazette-Intelligencer, in the early 1950s. She took control in 1964 and by 1976 had a circulation of 2000 in winter, doubling in summer. Its so-called competition was The Wise Shopper, put out as an attempt by Drogan’s enemies to damage her economically. The Huffman Police Department fell under Chief Stone following Andy Ellerton’s retirement in 1975. Local sports teams included the Lake Region Lakers and the Huffman Wildcats.
Untitled Screenplay (Radio Station) (c1977)
An untitled partial screenplay is held in Box 1011 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. It has never been produced.
This 20 page, 24-scene telescript was apparently penned in Bridgton, Maine. There is no other indication of the year in which the action is set. It is unclear when the script was written, although the Kings lived in Bridgton from the Summer of 1975 to the Fall of 1977. In an interview with David Chute (published in Take One for January 1979 and reproduced in Feast of Fear 136) King talks about the screenplay, saying he was working on it “now, off and on.”
In this Maine Street Horror story a local radio station is to be converted from manned to automated operation, with the changeover taking place one January evening at midnight. That night the owner, Roger Lathrop went to the station to confront his last DJ, the drunken Bob Randall.
The two debated the merits of automation, a service of the Century-2000 Corporation. Randall returned to his apartment and hanged himself. An angry Randall fan slapped Lathrop at his funeral. As it was January, Randall’s body was placed in a vault, to await burial in the spring. At this point the script ends.
The station is WOKY, based in the countryside of Western Maine and which could be found at 1530 on the AM dial. Bridgton is also in Western Maine. We know that the script was not inspired by King’s experiences with his own radio station, WZON in Bangor, as he did not buy that until October 1983.
Randall, about 35 at the time of his sacking and suicide, was a hippie type with a lot of gray in his long hair and a smoker. Also som
ething of a drinker, he had worked at WOKY for five years.
The owner and station manager, Roger Lathrop, was married, to Maddy. He was about 40, a smoker, and “good looking.”
The other sacked DJs were Tommy Lake; Chip Ripley, who weighed 306 lbs and whose real name was Chester Robichaud (he is somehow reminiscent of Henry Leyden, the DJ of many characters in Black House); and Greg Starr. After automation Tyler Bracken, a 22 year-old college dropout, was to manage the radio station. Thin, with thick horn-rimmed glasses, he had been around the station since he was 16.
A number of the media outlets mentioned in this script appear elsewhere in King’s fiction. WJBQ, the radio station Bob Randall was to join after leaving WOKY, is also mentioned in The Mist, where it was briefly on the air after the storm and Steffy Drayton managed to tune into it. WIGY, the radio station to which Chip Ripley was moving, is also mentioned in The Mist, as it was also on the air shortly after the storm. WLAM, the radio station in Lewiston, Maine Greg Starr was to join is mentioned in The Body. Bob Cormier, a DJ there, was a contestant at the pie-eating contest in the Lard Ass Hogan part of the novella. WCSH, the TV station on which Tommy Lake got an announcer’s job, is the station in Portland, Maine on which executions were televised live in The Stand (Complete and Uncut edition only).
In King’s interview with Chute he gave away some of the storyline: “It’s a story about the owner of a radio station in western Maine. He fires all his disk jockeys and imports this computer radio thing. It’s one of those automated radio voices, with this syrupy, totally mechanical voice, totally divorced from any real human being. One of the deejays commits suicide, and after that the machine starts to take over. It’s saying things like, “And now the latest from, and blah, blah, blah and fuck you, you’re going to die; I’m going to kill you.” I’m having a good time writing it.” This clearly indicates more was written than the short piece held in Box 1011 at UMO. Hopefully, the extra scenes will one day come to light.
We can presume Randall has come back to haunt the radio station (the automated voice would have allowed for plenty of potentially hilarious mayhem, particularly with regard to the tracks playing at any given point in time, and for the threats noted by King). The fact that his body was not buried, but lay in a vault, would also have allowed for a plot development such as the corpse’s disappearance, but that is entirely speculative. Where King was actually going with this script we will probably never know but should he ever choose to return to the concept (having delivered haunted houses, hotels, hotel rooms, bathtubs and hospitals, among other places) his fans could well be in for a treat.
136 Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (editors), page 79
Untitled Screenplay (Radio Station) (c1977)
An untitled partial screenplay is held in Box 1011 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. It has never been produced.
This 20 page, 24-scene telescript was apparently penned in Bridgton, Maine. There is no other indication of the year in which the action is set. It is unclear when the script was written, although the Kings lived in Bridgton from the Summer of 1975 to the Fall of 1977. In an interview with David Chute (published in Take One for January 1979 and reproduced in Feast of Fear 136) King talks about the screenplay, saying he was working on it “now, off and on.”
In this Maine Street Horror story a local radio station is to be converted from manned to automated operation, with the changeover taking place one January evening at midnight. That night the owner, Roger Lathrop went to the station to confront his last DJ, the drunken Bob Randall.
The two debated the merits of automation, a service of the Century-2000 Corporation. Randall returned to his apartment and hanged himself. An angry Randall fan slapped Lathrop at his funeral. As it was January, Randall’s body was placed in a vault, to await burial in the spring. At this point the script ends.
The station is WOKY, based in the countryside of Western Maine and which could be found at 1530 on the AM dial. Bridgton is also in Western Maine. We know that the script was not inspired by King’s experiences with his own radio station, WZON in Bangor, as he did not buy that until October 1983.
Randall, about 35 at the time of his sacking and suicide, was a hippie type with a lot of gray in his long hair and a smoker. Also something of a drinker, he had worked at WOKY for five years.
The owner and station manager, Roger Lathrop, was married, to Maddy. He was about 40, a smoker, and “good looking.”
The other sacked DJs were Tommy Lake; Chip Ripley, who weighed 306 lbs and whose real name was Chester Robichaud (he is somehow reminiscent of Henry Leyden, the DJ of many characters in Black House); and Greg Starr. After automation Tyler Bracken, a 22 year-old college dropout, was to manage the radio station. Thin, with thick horn-rimmed glasses, he had been around the station since he was 16.
A number of the media outlets mentioned in this script appear elsewhere in King’s fiction. WJBQ, the radio station Bob Randall was to join after leaving WOKY, is also mentioned in The Mist, where it was briefly on the air after the storm and Steffy Drayton managed to tune into it. WIGY, the radio station to which Chip Ripley was moving, is also mentioned in The Mist, as it was also on the air shortly after the storm. WLAM, the radio station in Lewiston, Maine Greg Starr was to join is mentioned in The Body. Bob Cormier, a DJ there, was a contestant at the pie-eating contest in the Lard Ass Hogan part of the novella. WCSH, the TV station on which Tommy Lake got an announcer’s job, is the station in Portland, Maine on which executions were televised live in The Stand (Complete and Uncut edition only).
In King’s interview with Chute he gave away some of the storyline: “It’s a story about the owner of a radio station in western Maine. He fires all his disk jockeys and imports this computer radio thing. It’s one of those automated radio voices, with this syrupy, totally mechanical voice, totally divorced from any real human being. One of the deejays commits suicide, and after that the machine starts to take over. It’s saying things like, “And now the latest from, and blah, blah, blah and fuck you, you’re going to die; I’m going to kill you.” I’m having a good time writing it.” This clearly indicates more was written than the short piece held in Box 1011 at UMO. Hopefully, the extra scenes will one day come to light.
We can presume Randall has come back to haunt the radio station (the automated voice would have allowed for plenty of potentially hilarious mayhem, particularly with regard to the tracks playing at any given point in time, and for the threats noted by King). The fact that his body was not buried, but lay in a vault, would also have allowed for a plot development such as the corpse’s disappearance, but that is entirely speculative. Where King was actually going with this script we will probably never know but should he ever choose to return to the concept (having delivered haunted houses, hotels, hotel rooms, bathtubs and hospitals, among other places) his fans could well be in for a treat.
136 Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (editors), page 79
Ur (2009)
Ur was first published as a download for Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-reader, on 12 February 2009. While it has yet to see a print publication the audio book was released on 16 February 2010 (King hand-picked the narrator, Holter Graham). It can be safely assumed the story will see a mass-market print version at some point, although it was not included in King’s 2010 collection, Full Dark, No Stars, possibly due to contractual obligations with Amazon.
King’s agent, Ralph Vicinanza, had originally approached King to write a story for e-book release to “create some excitement” (as King’s Riding the Bullet had done in 2000), at a time when the publishing industry was in the doldrums. Available as a download for $2.99, many King fans were critical or the tactic, claiming it was no more than an infomercial for Amazon and their Kindle. However, on reading the story, it is clear this was no quick knock-off. Ur is a full-blooded King tale and has very important
Dark Tower links (the first notable Dark Tower information since the final novel in that series, published five years earlier).
The 21,000 plus word America Under Siege and Dark Tower story has seven sections – Experimenting with New Technology; Ur Functions; Wesley Refuses to Go Mad; News Archive; Ur Local (Under Construction); Candy Rymer; The Paradox Police; and Ellen.
Wesley Smith, an English Department instructor at Moore College in Moore, Kentucky has purchased a Kindle “out of spite” for Ellen Silverman, his ex-girlfriend and coach of the college’s highly successful women’s basketball team, the Lady Meerkats. King has long followed women’s basketball (originally inspired through support of the University of Maine’s Black Bears) . Strangely, Wesley’s Kindle is pink, even though Amazon only sells them in white – the idea of buying it to spite Ellen came after he’d called her illiterate when she threw one of his precious books across a room, demanding he learn to read from a computer screen, “like the rest of us.” This has apparently ended their relationship.