The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  REVEREND LESTER LOWE: The minister at the local Baptist church, Reverend Lowe is a werewolf. He does not realize his dual nature for some time, but eventually he discovers and embraces it. When he learns that Marty Coslaw might reveal his secret, he tries again to kill the boy, but Marty shoots him dead with silver bullets.

  AL: Marty’s uncle (his mother’s brother), Al doesn’t really believe Marty’s claims about the reverend’s true nature, but the boy is convincing enough to get him to have a pair of silver bullets made for New Year’s Eve. Al is with Marty when the werewolf attacks again, and Marty kills the beast. It is presumed that Al still lives in Maine, and visits his sister’s family often.

  CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF: ADAPTATIONS

  Perhaps the only movie ever to be made from an idea for a monthly calendar, Stephen King’s Silver Bullet was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 1985. It was the fourth King movie project produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who clearly wanted a hand in any motion picture that King would participate in in any way. Scripted by King, and helmed by firsttime director Daniel Attias, the seven-million-dollar picture is perhaps most notable for its variation of a classic monster theme and its lack of big-name actors. The star, of course, is the werewolf (actually there are a number of variations on the main werewolf), which was created by Italian creature maker Carlo Rambaldi. His human counterpart was played by the wonderful Everett McGill (Dune, Twin Peaks). King, De Laurentiis, and Attias reportedly never could completely agree on the right “look” for the monster, and so audiences saw a creature that appeared as much as a weredog or werebear as it did a traditional werewolf.

  Nineteen-eighties kid-movie stalwart Corey Haim (The Goonies, Lost Boys) played young Marty Coslaw, while Gary Busey (Lethal Weapon, The Buddy Holly Story) portrayed Marty’s uncle, now called “Red” instead of Al. Although Academy Award nominee Busey is always enjoyable to watch, what is perhaps most extraordinary about the ninety-five-minute feature is how stunningly ordinary it is. There is truly nothing in Silver Bullet that anyone with a passing knowledge of werewolf movies hadn’t seen before. Had it not been written by the Master of Horror, it’s highly unlikely that such a project would ever have gotten out of the special effects makeup room.

  CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF: TRIVIA

  • The novella is connected to King’s other work in perhaps the most natural of ways—by railroad. The GS&WM train line, noted in King’s novella The Body (1982), apparently runs through both that story’s fictional town, Castle Rock, and Cycle of the Werewolf’s setting, Tarker’s Mills.

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  GERALD’S GAME

  (1992)

  Just as Needful Things (1991) marked the end of one phase of Stephen King’s career (basically the “Castle Rock” era), Gerald’s Game signaled the beginning of another. Over the course of his next four novels, beginning with Gerald’s Game and ending with Rose Madder, King focused much more intensely on character development. He had already written his endof-the-world novel, The Stand (1978), and published what he considered his ultimate statement on supernatural horror in It (1986). Perhaps he felt it was time to further investigate the two-legged monsters and maniacs who live just down the street or reside in the adjoining room.

  Although the supernatural remained an important element of his fiction, King began a shift to a more realistic style of storytelling, realistic in the mode of books like Cujo (1981), Misery (1987), and, more recently, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999). Like those books, Gerald’s Game features a single character’s struggle for survival against overwhelming odds. The novel is an example of the challenges King frequently imposes on himself to keep his creative juices flowing. Here he limits himself to a single character in a single setting to further test his resourcefulness and powers of observation as a writer. It’s a tribute to King’s talent that he meets these self-imposed challenges so well.

  Dedicated to “six good women” (Margaret Spruce Morehouse, Anne Spruce Labree, Catherine Spruce Graves, Tabitha Spruce King, Stephanie Spruce Leonard, and Marcella Spruce) who have favorably impacted on his life in one way or the other, Gerald’s Game also signaled the emergence of a more “feminist” King. This may have been perhaps in response to critics who asserted that the most convincing females King was capable of creating were either teenagers or small children.

  Beginning with Gerald’s Game, the theme of “men as monsters” (previously explored briefly in books like Cujo, and more explicitly in It) emerges again and again in King’s work. Gerald Burlingame, the soon-to-die husband of Jessie Burlingame, is the first in a depressingly long line of loathsome males, child-molesting fathers, and wife-beaters King would introduce over the next three to four years.

  Originally intended to be one half of a single volume entitled In the Path of the Eclipse, Gerald’s Game is a companion piece to King’s next novel, Dolores Claiborne (1993). The total eclipse of the sun on July 20, 1963, plays an important part in both novels. During that solar event, twelve-year-old Jessie is molested by her father, while many miles and an entire novel away, Dolores Claiborne slays her abusive husband, Joe St. George. Both characters briefly have visions of the other later in that fateful day. Their strange bond persists some thirty years later. On the day her employer, Vera Donovan, passes away, Dolores thinks of Jessie, and somehow knows “she’s in terrible trouble.” The eclipse acts as a powerful metaphor in both novels, expressing the notion of secrets once hidden in the dark, eventually emerging into the light of day.

  Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder all showcase women who, over the course of these novels, learn how to exert control over their lives. Gerald’s Game is perhaps the most intense and immediate, relating Jessie’s life-and-death struggle to free herself from physical and mental bonds.

  GERALD’S GAME: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  JESSIE BURLINGAME: Though she is always reluctant to do so, Jessie participates in mild bondage games that her husband finds sexually arousing. Over time, she becomes more and more disturbed by these games, but when he pleads with her, Jessie allows Gerald to handcuff her to a bed at their cabin at Lake Kashwakamak, Maine. Finally having had enough, Jessie demands to be freed from her bonds. Pretending not to understand, Gerald ignores her pleas. Enraged, Jessie lashes out at her husband, kicking him solidly in the chest. The blow triggers a heart attack, and Gerald slumps to the floor, dead. Jessie finds herself alone, almost naked, and handcuffed to the bed, in a cabin on a remote dirt road.

  Thus begins a twenty-eight-hour ordeal that results in both injury and healing—and changes the woman forever.

  The bedroom becomes Jessie’s entire world—her major concerns lay in how to reach a glass of water on the shelf behind her, and the handcuff keys on the bureau in front of her. Her attempts to free herself became increasingly gruesome, building to the point where she uses her own blood as a lubricant to slip off one of the cuffs.

  Wracked by pain and dehydration, Jessie begins to hallucinate. She engages in imaginary conversations with friends and family, and with her mental alter ego, the demure “Goodwife Burlingame.” What Jessie doesn’t realize is that her mind is attempting to tell her something, trying to get her to confront a horrible incident she has spent her whole life trying to forget. Alternating between the rational and delusional, Jessie eventually uncovers the buried memory of what had unfortunately become the central event of her life: the day of the eclipse, July 20, 1963, when her father molested her. Her father’s abuse has since ruined her life, perhaps even causing her poor decisions that have led to her present predicament.

  Due to the cabin’s utter isolation, it is unlikely someone will find her before she starves to death. Things are complicated by the appearance of Prince the dog, a hungry stray who feasts on Gerald’s corpse. Finally, there is “the dead cowboy … the specter of love,” a hideous creature who shows up at the cabin and simply stares at her. In her delirium, she mistakes the hazy figure for her father, returned from the dead. Later, she realizes that the figure was r
eal. Shortly after she escapes her bonds, the figure reappears, bent on doing her harm. Summoning all her remaining strength, Jessie escapes and flees in her Mercedes.

  Although Jessie achieves closure of sorts regarding her molestation, the experience leaves her physically and mentally traumatized. For months after, she lives as a virtual recluse, shutting herself off from the world. It is only when she reads in the newspaper about the ghoulish Andrew Ray Joubert that she begins to emerge from her self-imposed isolation. Jessie realizes that Joubert is the spectral figure who haunted her during her strange imprisonment. Traveling to the court where Joubert is being tried for various perverted sex crimes, she confronts him and, when he laughs at her, spits in his face. This act of defiance is, hopefully, an indication that Jessie may be on the road to a full recovery.

  GERALD BURLINGAME: A lawyer by trade, Gerald hopes to revitalize his listless marriage by cajoling his wife into participating in bondage games. Jessie goes along out of love and a desire to keep the peace, but is enraged one day when her husband willfully ignores her repeated requests to open the handcuffs that chain her to the bed in their remote cabin. Gerald’s brutish behavior angers Jessie, who kicks him in the chest, triggering a fatal heart attack. His corpse is later partially consumed by a stray dog. Fortunately for Jessie, Gerald had purchased significant amounts of life insurance—at his death, she receives several large checks, allowing her to live comfortably for the remainder of her life.

  ANDREW RAY JOUBERT: Joubert, who suffers from acromegaly

  (a progressive enlargement of the hands, feet, and face that causes his forehead to bulge and his arms to dangle all the way down to his knees), began to indulge his perverted sexual desires first by vandalizing graves, then escalated into looting crypts and mausoleums. From these grisly activities, he graduates to taking body parts—noses, arms, feet, hands—and having sex with male corpses. Although the police investigation lasts over seven years, it is kept very quiet, and is not reported in the press until he is apprehended in the act. Searching Joubert’s van, police discover a variety of body parts and cutting tools. On the front seat is a sandwich—a human tongue on Wonder Bread, slathered with yellow mustard.

  Before his arrest, Joubert comes upon the captive Jessie in the cabin at Lake Kashwakamak. She thinks he is a hallucination, but only when she is free, and realizes he was real, does he try to attack her. Later, Jessie appears at his arraignment, and spits in his face.

  GERALD’S GAME: TRIVIA

  • Joubert is later mentioned briefly in Insomnia (1994) by a stranger who is involved in a car accident with Ed Deepneau.

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  DOLORES CLAIBORNE

  (1993)

  In the 1990s, Stephen King spent a great deal of creative time broadening his approach to horror by exploring the psyche, and concentrating less on the supernatural, in a number of books including Gerald’s Game (1992), Insomnia (1994), and Rose Madder (1995). Primary among these is Dolores Claiborne, in which the author created one of his most complex and memorable characters.

  A novel executed in the form of a monologue, Dolores Claiborne is a well-conceived, marvelously executed work of art that also functions as a distorted mirror for the events of Gerald’s Game. The book explores themes similar to those explored in King’s previous novel, this time from the perspective of an older woman. In Gerald’s Game, a father molested a daughter, but the girl’s mother never knows, attributing her child’s subsequent odd behavior to a contrary personality. In contrast, Dolores discovers a similar problem and takes brutal action to stamp it out. In each case, the molestation has severe consequences some thirty years later. Both women are forced to confront their past, Jessie because of her perilous situation, Dolores because she has been accused of killing her long-time employer, the formidable Vera Donovan.

  The relationship between Dolores and Vera echoes situations in King’s own past, events about which he wrote in his memorable 1984 short story “Gramma.” There, as in Dolores Claiborne, an elderly, bedridden woman terrorizes a household.

  In “Gramma,” the title character turns out to be a witch who steals her grandson’s soul and takes over his body. In Dolores Claiborne, the character Vera Donovan fills a similar role, in a decidedly nonsupernatural manner. These plot elements may be a reflection of the uneasy relationship between King’s mother, Ruth, and his invalid maternal grandmother. Ruth King cared for her mother for many years, enduring her many demands and abusive tongue.

  Readers sympathize with Dolores, both because of the skillful way King builds her characterization and because of the totally unsympathetic way he renders her husband, the sniveling Joe St. George. As in Gerald’s Game, men are portrayed as the enemy, both for their actions and their complicity. Dolores’s father beats her mother, and Joe St. George beats Dolores. Dolores knows it’s a male-dominated world, but is nonetheless stunned when reminded, as when she confronts the bank manager who let Joe close out their joint accounts without even advising her. By adding on the injustices done to Dolores, the author deftly switches the expected sympathies on his readers—we quickly move from “Did she do it?” to “Why didn’t she do it sooner?”

  Although this book downplays the horror and the supernatural elements that his readers have come to expect in the majority of his work, there are discomforting glimmers of both in the narrative. One obvious supernatural touch is the strange link between Dolores and Jessie Burlingame (see the chapter on Gerald’s Game). King also betrays his lifelong fondness for EC Comics–type touches—Joe’s plaintive wails of “Duh-lorrr-iss” issuing from the well bring to mind the mutterings of the assorted reanimated corpses who rise up to torment their killers in those gleefully ghastly comic book stories.

  Dolores Claiborne is also a remarkable example of King as a regional writer, an aspect previously revealed in shorter works like “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” (1984), The Sun Dog (1990), and the prologue to Needful Things (1991). Dolores is clearly a product of her environment, from her practical, pragmatic morality to her thick Maine accent. Her home, Little Tall Island, is a microcosm for her rural state, revealing both its glory and its blemishes.

  DOLORES CLAIBORNE: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  DOLORES CLAIBORNE: Suspected of murdering Vera Donovan, the ancient, rich, “off-island” woman who employs her first as a maid and then as a caregiver/companion, sixty-six-year-old Dolores Claiborne insists she is innocent. Even though the foul-mouthed, hardheaded, outspoken islander denies that crime, she readily admits to the police, by way of explaining more recent events, that she killed her reprobate husband, Joe St. George, some thirty years before.

  As Dolores tells it, Joe was a mean, ill-tempered, dishonest alcoholic who, after physically abusing her, was likely to brag about it to his low-life friends. One night, Joe hits her in the back with a piece of firewood, hurting her very badly. When she is finally able to stand again, Dolores takes swift action, smashing Joe in the side of the head with a cream pitcher, then holding him off with a hatchet.

  Dolores promises Joe that if he ever hits her again she would bury the hatchet in his head. Joe, agreeing to end the abuse, finds he is no longer able to perform sexually in bed. Flaunting his behavior, he begins abusing their daughter Selena, first by playing on her sympathies, then by demanding sexual favors. This, together with his mistreatment of their sons, proves too much for Dolores, who decides to leave Joe and move to the mainland with her children.

  However, when Dolores seeks to withdraw the money from the local bank she had been saving to send the children to college, she discovers that Joe had secretly transferred her savings to his own account. Later, the frustrated Dolores breaks down in front of her long-time employer, widow Vera Donovan, who, comforting her, told her that sometimes an accident can be a woman’s best friend. She cited herself as an example, pointing out that she inherited her husband’s estate when he passed away. Vera gives Dolores the impression that she may have been instrumental in her spouse’s demise.

  Inspired by Vera
’s example, and desperate to save herself and her children from further abuse, Dolores devises a plan to dispatch her husband. On July 20, 1963, the day of a total eclipse of the sun, Dolores gets Joe drunk, then tricks him into running over the rotted wood covering of an abandoned well she’d discovered near their home. He falls through the flimsy covering over that well, a tumble that proves fatal.

  The widowed Dolores raises her children and sends them out into the world. She continues working for Vera Donovan, evolving from maid into primary caregiver. Over the years, Vera deteriorates mentally and physically, and lives in irrational fear of the “dust bunnies” under her bed, afraid they will kill her. One morning, she becomes so frightened by them that she flees her bedroom and in a panic throws herself down a staircase. Near death, she pleads with Dolores to kill her. Dolores reluctantly agrees, but is saved from performing this grisly duty when Vera expires. The police, however, suspect foul play. At the police station, Dolores reveals her involvement in Joe’s death.

  Eventually cleared of a possible “wrongful death” in the demise of Vera Donovan, it is presumed that Dolores Claiborne still resides on Little Tall Island.

  VERA DONOVAN: Vera Donovan is a wealthy widow who lives on Little Tall Island, Maine, and who employs Dolores Claiborne as a maid and later general caregiver for over thirty years. During that time, in a strange way, Vera and Dolores became best friends. The two women understand and respect each other, accepting abuse from one another they simply would not tolerate from anyone else. It is Vera, who very likely murdered her own abusive husband, who gives Dolores the idea to kill Joe St. George. Vera becomes quite mentally unstable in her later years, terrified of the “dust bunnies” living under her bed. One day she flees her bedroom in abject terror and leaps down a flight of stairs, an irrational act that causes her death.