Stephen King

by Rocky Wood

  Stephen King: Unpublished, Uncollected – 2014 Update

  By Rocky Wood

  Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished – 2014 Update © 2014, Rocky Wood

  Dust Jacket illustration © 2012 by Erik Wilson

  This edition is published and © 2014 by Overlook Connection Press

  Overlook Connection Press

  PO Box 1934

  Hiram, Georgia 30141

  OverlookConnection.com

  StephenKingCatalog.com

  overlookcn@aol.com

  First Trade Paperback edition

  ISBN: 978-1-62330-052-4

  E-book:

  ISBN: 978-1-62330-053-1

  Discover more about author Rocky Wood and his other publications on

  Stephen King, graphic novels, et el at his official web presence here:

  www.rockywoodauthor.com

  This book is a work of non-fiction, with fiction excerpts. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher, Overlook Connection Press.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Update to the Introduction

  Updates to Linking Stephen King’s Realities

  New to The Lost and Hidden Works

  Updates to the Lost and Hidden Works

  Update to Further Notes

  Update to The Uncollected, and the Unpublished

  New Unpublished Stories

  New Published but Uncollected Stories

  Afterword

  Appendix: Stephen King’s Fiction

  About the Author

  Introduction

  In 2006 Cemetery Dance published the First Edition of my ground-breaking work, Stephen King: Unpublished, Uncollected. Four years of research had resulted in a book that identified some 51 works by Stephen King that had not been published and a further 46 that had been published but not gathered in one of his fiction collections. That book and each subsequent edition exclusively published a complete chapter from King’s unpublished novel, Sword in the Darkness and reprinted an obscure poem, Dino.

  By the time the Fourth Edition was published by the Overlook Connection Press in 2012 research had uncovered many more unpublished works. King had also published the collections Just After Sunset and Full Dark, No Stars. At that time there were 54 unpublished and 54 uncollected works. Each is described fully in that Fourth Edition, including advice to readers as to how (and if) they might obtain a copy.

  This 2014 Update reveals my latest research, often with the gracious input of Stephen King. Many mysteries have been cleared up and more unpublished works identified. In many cases Steve kindly provided commentary and information, which is published here for the first time. Of course, as we investigate the past, King writes in the present and has published a number of short stories that have yet to be collected. Including material in this 2014 Update the count is now at 58 unpublished and 61 uncollected works of fiction by Stephen King!

  As you read through the latest research gathered here you will find full detail about:

  A poem lost since King’s college days

  Two unpublished short stories from the 1970s

  A story that won King a prize (and a lecture) when he was in High School

  Two lost stories from King’s fan fiction days

  A play he wrote when he was 12 for his boy scout troop

  Important updates are provided to information about these previously known works – After the Play; King’s senior Class Day play (including its title, content, and comments from King); and the story King wrote in fifth grade about his classmates being taken hostage.

  A number of stories King is rumored to have written are dealt with.

  Some obscure stories have been republished in easy to access form and that information is provided for readers.

  A centerpiece of this Update is the full description of a lengthy busted novel – Phil and Sundance. In addition a new busted story that appeared to have great promise is described.

  The latest published but uncollected works are analyzed, including:

  A Face in the Crowd

  Afterlife

  Bad Little Kid

  Batman and Robin Have an Altercation

  11/22/63 – Final Despatch

  In the Tall Grass

  The Rock and Roll Dead Zone; and

  Summer Thunder

  All this new information has been discovered in just two years, proving again how prolific King is – in the present, as well as the past!

  Update to the Introduction

  This section updates material in the Introduction to the Fourth Edition of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.

  The Bram Stoker Awards® for Superior Achievement have been presented since 1987 by members of the Horror Writers Association. King has won the Novel Award for Misery (in a tie with Robert McCammon’s epic, Swan Song), The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story and Duma Key; Fiction Collection for Four Past Midnight, Full Dark, No Stars and Just After Sunset; Long Fiction for Lunch at the Gotham Café; Short Fiction for Herman Wouk is Still Alive and Non Fiction for On Writing. Through 2013 he has been nominated a further 19 times, the latest for Doctor Sleep (his son Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 was nominated in the same category - Superior Achievement in a Novel. In 2003 he received the HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

  We now know of 58 unpublished[i] and 61 uncollected works of fiction by Stephen King.

  The general King readership can easily access over 150 individual Works of Fiction, in some 46 published novels[ii], with 109 shorter works compiled in his nine collections[iii].

  In total there are at least 289 separately identifiable King story-lines, including other fictional works such as poems and screenplays. When all the differing versions, variations and titles of these works are taken into account there are about 402 different variants!

  King is famed (and sometimes brick-batted) for the sheer volume of words he produces. Many novels are in the high hundreds of pages, with three exceeding 900, epics in their own right. One mythology (The Dark Tower) is barely contained in eight novels, two novellas, a raft of related tales and a series of Marvel comic extensions.

  Updates to: Linking Stephen King’s Realities

  This section updates material in the Linking Stephen King’s Realities section of the Fourth Edition of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.

  All true King fans note these many links between his works, often deliberately put there by King for the enjoyment of ‘Constant Readers’. In a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly about Doctor Sleep King had this to say about the subject, ‘My son calls those things Easter Eggs. There’s a little Salem’s Lot Easter egg in Doctor Sleep. I don’t know if anyone will spot it or not but it’s there. All of the books kind of relate to other ones. The only exception is The Stand, where the whole world gets destroyed. I guess it’s sort of like Stephen King World, the malevolent version of Disney World, where everything fits together.’

  The following stories have either been published or identified as newly discovered unpublished works since the Fourth Edition, and have been assigned to Realities as follows:

  America Under Siege

  Afterlife

  Bad Little Kid

  Batman and Robin Have an Altercation

  Doctor Sleep

  11/22/63 – Final Dispatch

  A Face in the Crowd

  In the Tall Grass

  Joyland

  Mr Mercedes

  The Dark Tower

  The Wind Through The Keyhole

  Maine Street Horror

  Batman

  Phil and Sundance

  The Rock And Roll Dead Zone
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  New Worlds

  Summer Thunder

  Update to The Dark Tower section

  In 2012 King published an extension to the mythos, with a novella that falls mid-stream in the narrative (King described it as the Dark Tower 4.5), The Wind Through Keyhole.

  In October 2005 King and Marvel Comics announced the Dark Tower mythos would be extended with the publication of an initial six comic arc (to be collected in a hardcover edition). A series of arcs were published from 2007 and can be also purchased in collected hardback editions. Readers should note the original comic ‘arcs’, while collected in the hardcover graphic novels, contain a lot of background material about the Dark Tower Universe that are not included in those collections. This background is described by King’s former research assistant and writer of the comic series, Robin Furth. The comics and graphic novels may be purchased from specialist stores or on the internet without difficulty.

  The series released to April 2013 when it went into hiatus (in reading order) are:

  The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born; The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home; The Dark Tower: Treachery; The Dark Tower: The Sorcerer (one-shot comic, not collected); The Dark Tower: Fall of Gilead; The Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill; The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger – The Journey Begins; The Dark Tower: The Little Sisters of Eluria; The Dark Tower: The Battle of Tull; The Dark Tower: Way Station; The Dark Tower: Man in Black and The Dark Tower: Sheemie’s Tale.

  Update to the Maine Street Horror section

  Story: Primary Settings:

  Batman — Lisbon High School

  Phil and Sundance — Derry

  New to: The Lost and Hidden Works

  The following are new discoveries to be added to the The Lost and Hidden Works chapter. That chapter reviews the works of fiction that have never been seen by researchers and King experts, let alone fans. They have either been lost or King has held them so closely that they have not been read by anyone outside his inner circle. The search for ‘lost’ King work will continue unabated for decades. King himself still seeks the lost manuscript of The Float. The works covered here have either been completely lost; or it is known King holds them. Stories only ‘rumored’ to have been written or to exist are not surveyed.

  The Arguments Against Insanity

  King gave an interview to Powells.com in November 2006, in which he revealed a lost poem from his university days:[iv]

  Interviewer: ‘The line of poetry that Scott writes in Lisey's Story is a beautiful line, and seems to sum up a theme you come back to frequently: that madness, insanity, is never very far away.’ / King: ‘It’s actually a version of a poem I wrote in college. I looked and looked — you know how you do workshops, and they make offprints of material. I thought I had some offprints from that, and I didn’t, and so I called the prof who taught the class, and I said, Do you have any of those offprints? He looked, and he couldn’t find it, either. Really, all I remembered of the poem was the first line, “The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound,” and I really didn’t have much of a clue beyond that. So I worked on it a little bit, and it actually worked better, because it was more specific to the book.’

  When queried about this King responded: ‘The title was “The Arguments Against Insanity.” I remember a few lines that went something like,

  “The moon,

  a disembodied custard pie

  floating in the sky.”[v]

  The fact that King wrote this poem while at the University of Maine dates it in the period 1966-1970.

  The Insanity Game

  Justin Brooks lists this as an early 1970s twelve page typescript manuscript in the second edition of his Bibliography.[vi] When queried about this King responded: “If there was such a story, it would have been written in the 60s, and is probably not complete. I wrote a lot of stuff back then, Rocky, but a lot of it never got finished.”[vii]

  The Null Set

  Justin Brooks lists this as an early 1970s twelve page typescript manuscript in the second edition of his Bibliography.[viii]

  The Points Dig Deep

  King Bibliographer Justin Brooks ran across an interview in The Guardian (a prominent UK newspaper), dated September 30, 1977. In it King is quoted as saying, “However, he did win a pen that didn’t write, plus 10 dollars, for an essay in a competition in National Scholastic magazine …” When I asked King about this during a meeting in Atlanta[ix] he told me the story was called The Points Dig Deep. He said he was about fifteen when he wrote it and it was not very good. It is set in the Old West just after the Civil War. The Sheriff of the town gets word by telegraph that the Confederacy has surrendered. So he decides he will need to lower the Confederate flag flying over the town and raise the United States flag, in recognition that the War is over. But a mob forms in opposition and a man shoots him in the chest, which King described as a downer ending. He was attending Lisbon High School when he entered the competition and they were notified he had won the prize. He was called to the Principal’s office, where he expected to be congratulated. The Guidance Counselor was also there and they asked him if he knew what plagiarism was. He said he did, copying someone else’s work. They said if anything like that happened here we need to know - now is the time to tell us. Of course, King told them he had not plagiarized and they accepted that. He told me, “This is a problem with any writer with a young talent, people don’t believe you can do it.” When asked later if the story was published he said, “Alas, I only got an honorable mention for that story. And a pen that splurted ink all over my fingers. And a scary lecture about plagiarism. I have no copy …”[x]

  Trigger Finger

  A possibly unique piece of King Ephemera appeared on eBay in late 2012. The seller offered a one page flyer Stephen King had created to advertise stories from his cottage publishing venture, Triad Publishing Co. This was also the name King used to publish People, Places and Things (1960 and 1963) and The Star Invaders (June 1964). The flyer was posted to a fellow fan in New York and is postmarked 5pm, 6 September 1963 at the Pownal, Maine Post Office. It advertises three stories for sale – King’s print adaptation of the American-International Film, The Pit and the Pendulum (King talks about creating and selling that tale in section 18 of the C.V. part of On Writing and there is a separate section about that tale in Stephen King: Unpublished, Uncollected[xi]); Trigger-Finger and The Undead.

  This is the full text of the flyer:

  Dear Monster-Fan, / The crypt has just opened, and we here at Triad are letting out three of the most MONSTROUS tales to come your way in a blue moon. Here they are: / THE UNDEAD – a chilling excursion into the twilight world of Vampires, Terror, and…THE UNDEAD! Here’s a sample: “Madly tumbling over each other, the kids piled back into the rod. One didn’t make it. His head was split open like a ripe melon. The rod peeled out, spot-lighting one of the horrors in the glare of its headlights. It skidded…” 20 pages of TERROR! A Triad classic, only 35¢. / TRIGGER-FINGER – what happens when a trigger-happy intelligence agent invades Castro’s Cuba in search of a beautiful U.S. space-scientist? PLENTY! Only 20¢. / THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM – this is NOT Poe’s classic. It’s adapted from the A-I shocker, starring Vincent Price. What’s it about? Torture…premature burial…and the shambling horror that walked the darkened corridors of the storm-ravaged castle! Also, only 20¢. /

  These horrors are brought to you by TRIAD, INC. They are guaranteed to shock, or your money back! So get on the hearse, and read these terrors on the way to the crypt! / YES!! I wanto (sic) be scared outta ten year’s growth! Send me the Triad Horrors I’ve checked. / THE UNDEAD 35¢ / THE PIT & THE PENDULUM 20¢ / TRIGGER-FINGER 20¢ / SEND TO: TRIAD PUBLISHING CO., C/O STEVE KING, R.F.D. #1, POWNAL, MAINE / (Enclose payment with money-order, please!)

  When queried about Trigger-Finger and The Undead King said, ‘I don’t remember either one, which isn’t surprising. Around the time I discovered Famous Monsters, Spacemen, Creepy and Eerie, those stories just poured out!
’[xii]

  The Undead

  A possibly unique piece of King Ephemera appeared on eBay in late 2012. The seller offered a one page flyer Stephen King had created to advertise stories from his cottage publishing venture, Triad Publishing Co. This was also the name King used to publish People, Places and Things (1960 and 1963) and The Star Invaders (June 1964). The flyer was posted to a fellow fan in New York and is postmarked 5pm, 6 September 1963 at the Pownal, Maine Post Office. It advertises three stories for sale – King’s print adaptation of the American-International Film, The Pit and the Pendulum (King talks about creating and selling that tale in section 18 of the C.V. part of On Writing and there is a separate section about that tale in Stephen King: Unpublished, Uncollected[xiii]); Trigger-Finger and The Undead.

  This is the full text of the flyer:

  Dear Monster-Fan, / The crypt has just opened, and we here at Triad are letting out three of the most MONSTROUS tales to come your way in a blue moon. Here they are: / THE UNDEAD – a chilling excursion into the twilight world of Vampires, Terror, and…THE UNDEAD! Here’s a sample: “Madly tumbling over each other, the kids piled back into the rod. One didn’t make it. His head was split open like a ripe melon. The rod peeled out, spot-lighting one of the horrors in the glare of its headlights. It skidded…” 20 pages of TERROR! A Triad classic, only 35¢. / TRIGGER-FINGER – what happens when a trigger-happy intelligence agent invades Castro’s Cuba in search of a beautiful U.S. space-scientist? PLENTY! Only 20¢. / THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM – this is NOT Poe’s classic. It’s adapted from the A-I shocker, starring Vincent Price. What’s it about? Torture…premature burial…and the shambling horror that walked the darkened corridors of the storm-ravaged castle! Also, only 20¢. /