The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  We cannot know for certain, but what we do know, and what we plan our lives around, is the undeniable fact that time is an irreplaceable resource: We only have a finite amount of it. As Gandalf reminded Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

  King, by choice and inclination, has spent his lifetime writing. It is his way of passing his time productively, of keeping his imagination active, of making sense of the universe in an attempt to understand it; writing also provided a one-way ticket out of the misery he suffered in the wake of the accident. In pain and on pain-killers, King wrote his way out of his bleak situation.

  In On Writing, he concluded:

  Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay?

  Okay.

  Let us hope that King’s optimistic appraisal of his remaining years of productivity is realized. And let us realize, too, that there will come a point when—by choice or circumstance—he will put down his pen and write “The End” to his stellar writing career, and know that he gave it his all. He writes like a man possessed because he wants as many stories as possible to take flight and soar out of his imagination, because he wants to create.

  Also, isn’t it high time that we dispense with the hoary stereotype that he is just a horror writer? For various reasons—including his self-deprecating comments about being the “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries”—King’s been tarred as a genre writer who writes only about spooks and monsters and things that go bump in the night. Make no mistake: He does write about monsters, but more often, especially these days, the monsters walk among us unnoticed; to paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo, we have met the monsters and they are us. (Read “A Good Marriage” in Full Dark, No Stars and you’ll see what I mean.)

  King will never shed, as he put it, his reputation as America’s best-loved bogeyman, but we know better. The man who wrote “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” “The Reach,” and “The Man in the Black Suit” is no mere genre writer, and it’s a disservice to him to even think so, despite the assertions of the literati who consider him little more than a bestselling outsider in the world of fiction.

  THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS

  When Stephen King and his best friend, Chris Chesley, went to the Ritz Theater in Lewiston for Saturday matinees, King explained in interviews that he carried his birth certificate to prove that he shouldn’t be charged an adult fare just because he was adult-size: He then stood six feet, two inches.

  Stephen was ungainly, according to his brother, Dave, who told Spignesi in an interview for The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia that “Stevie was husky, and he wasn’t too well-coordinated. He looked like Vern in the film Stand by Me.”

  Abandoned by his father, and physically distanced from his peers because of his height and lack of coordination, it was his passion for writing that proved to be his ticket to gaining social acceptance—especially when he lampooned authority figures, in a parody of the high school newspaper. Hilarity ensued among his admiring classmates when he self-published The Village Vomit, but his fledgling career as a satirist came to an abrupt halt: He earned a trip to the principal’s office because his “newspaper” took personal digs at teachers and staffers.

  The Village Vomit earned King a three-day suspension. Moreover, his teachers were not amused, least of all the draconian Miss “Maggot” Margitan, who, as King wrote in On Writing, “commanded both respect and fear.” She obviously didn’t share Steve King’s adolescent sense of humor; she was the one who had pressed for his suspension. She followed up with a veto when King was nominated for entry into the National Honor Society. She never forgot the sting of his juvenile jibes, and it came back to haunt him. King quickly learned that making fun of people at their expense would kick him in the ass.

  The next time he published his perceptions about high school, it would be Carrie, a novel about high school hell that drew on his position as an outsider. King saw high school as socially stratified, a caste system with reigning prom queens, cheerleaders, and jocks on top as part of the “in crowd” and everyone else far below, including Steve King, as part of the “out crowd.”

  In the professional world of fiction writing, King was also an outsider. Perceived as a horror writer early on, he got no respect. Fuming, King, as a sign of protest, spent twelve thousand dollars to buy tables at a National Book Award ceremony; he invited his friend John Grisham and others, to make their presence known. If he couldn’t get in through the front door, he was storming the gates from the back. He seemed to be saying, “We’re here; we’re writing; and you can’t ignore us, because we aren’t going away.” (Years later, when King received the National Book Award for “distinguished contributions to American letters,” some of the literati howled in protest.)

  Writing about people whom we’d recognize—our family, our friends, our neighbors—who get caught up in extraordinary situations, Stephen King’s body of work reflects our times to such an extent and in such vivid and memorable prose that in the future historians will look to him to show what it was like to live in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

  As King explained to The Paris Review, “If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it’s lived at the time that particular book was written.” He has captured American middle-class hopes and fears, brand names and subtle nuances, with remarkable fidelity. He is, simply, America’s storyteller, though he’s most often perceived and categorized as a horror writer.

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

  Although the book industry is going through a sea change, with the growing popularity of e-books and multiple devices, what hasn’t changed is, as King puts it, the primacy of the written word. As he explained in a Facebook posting (“Official Stephen King,” September 28, 2014), “Books have been around for three, four centuries … There’s a deeply implanted desire and understanding and wanting of [a] book that isn’t there with music. It’s a deeper well of human experience.”

  King, in drawing from that well, has drawn unique and memorable portraits of people whom we remember, some drawn with fondness, some with love, and others with well-earned revulsion. From the put-upon, victimized Carrie White (Carrie, 1974) to a fallen-away minister named Charles Jacobs (Revival, 2014), we see an endless parade of the good and the bad reflected in the mirror King holds up to the world—and in the end, we see, with startling clarity, ourselves.

  PART ONE

  MAINE ROOTS

  Durham at that time was a different place than it is now. The old small farm ethic—which had been the rule for many generations past—was just on its way out; and what we had was a community where people got up in the morning and went to work in the factories in the surrounding towns. It was a working class rural town.

  —Chris Chesley, interviewed in

  The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia

  A screenshot of King in his summer home in Florida with Dr. Gates, from PBS’s televison show, “Finding Your Roots.”

  1

  FAMILY ROOTS

  DONALD EDWIN POLLOCK

  At his winter home in Florida, Stephen King sat down with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for an appearance on the PBS television show Finding Your Roots. Combing genealogical and military records, Gates’s research team turned up a wealth of information about King’s father, Donald.

  The compiled information, assembled scrapbook-style for King’s perusal, was an eye-opener for King, who understandably wanted to know more about the father who abandoned his family in 1949, when Stephen was two years old. According to what he remembers his mom said, his dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned.

  Leafing through the le
ather-bound scrapbook, Stephen King turned the page and saw a black-and-white photograph of a six-foot-tall man with glasses.

  Gates asks, “Now you know who that is.”

  A military file photo of Donald Edwin Pollock (Stephen King’s father), from PBS’s television show, “Finding Your Roots” with Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

  Stephen King replies, “Not right offhand.” He pauses. “Is that my dad?” In a shock of late recognition, Stephen exclaims, “He looks like me! … a little bit.” He shakes his head, and has a wistful expression on his face.

  “No kidding,” says Gates.

  It was Stephen King’s father. But his birth name isn’t Donald Edwin King. As Gates pointed out, a record of birth and military records show that his name was Donald Edwin Pollock.

  Twenty-five at the time of his marriage to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, Donald listed his occupation as “seaman” in the merchant marine. On David King’s birth record, his father’s occupation is listed as “master mariner.” And on Stephen King’s birth certificate, he’s listed as “captain, merchant marine.”

  From there, Gates takes Stephen King on a genealogical trip into the past, showing that his roots go all the way back to Ireland on his father’s side.

  Despite the considerable passage of time, there are still unresolved issues and anger that fester in Stephen King, who is upset at the circumstances and consequences of his dad’s unexplained departure.

  Stephen King tells Gates, “I can remember as a kid, thinking of myself, well, if I ever meet my dad, I’m going to sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother. And as I got older, I would think, well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I’ll sock him.”

  King and Gates have a good laugh over that, but the question that’s haunted Stephen King for all those years will forever remain unanswered: Who was Donald E. Pollock?

  Stephen King’s father died at age sixty-six in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, but as to which cemetery, I couldn’t determine. The largest, though, is Fairview Cemetery, near a town called … Bangor.

  As to his public records, they show that he remarried, and genealogical records online indicate five children by that marriage.

  As to what he left behind in the wreckage of his first marriage: What we do know is that Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King picked up the shattered pieces of her family’s lives and heroically moved on. Scrambling to make ends meet in her new, and unexpected, role as the family’s breadwinner, survival became an extended family affair, with her four sisters helping out.

  David King recalls moving all over the map, until they finally dropped anchor and settled in for the long haul in Durham. Aided financially by her siblings, Nellie Ruth was a single mother who not only raised two young boys but also her aging parents in a small, two-story house in Durham, Maine, that lacked a shower. It’d be difficult enough to be a caregiver even with a spouse to share the burden, but to do it essentially alone was an act of quiet courage and iron resolve: She was not going to abandon her family as her husband did.

  A CHILD’S WORST NIGHTMARE

  The emotions of fear and horror are inextricable in King’s fiction, and justifiably so. There was, as Chesley pointed out, no respite for Stephen King’s powerful imagination, which conjured up awful possibilities.

  A road sign showing the way to Freeport, Pownal, and Bradbury Mountain in southern Maine.

  But the fear began early on in King’s life when he was abandoned by his father—a small child’s worst nightmare. Parents, after all, are supposed to be a bedrock, a solid platform on which children build their lives. But when one parent leaves for whatever reasons, children often blame themselves (“Was it something I did?”); they endlessly torture themselves asking a question that can’t be answered: “Why?”

  Conjecture is no replacement for knowledge, and understandably the fear of abandonment prefigures largely in King’s early fiction: Carietta White (Carrie), whose mother is a fundamentalist Christian, raising her alone; Danny Torrance (The Shining), whose dysfunctional father is slowly spiraling out of control; Charlene “Charlie” McGee (Firestarter), whose mother dies at the hands of the nefarious federal agents at “The Shop”; and others. The repercussions of parental abandonment reverberate in King’s fiction, as they clearly do for Stephen King himself, who was never able to take out his long-simmering anger on his dad and punch him out. He can only live with the knowledge that, as Dick Hallorann tells Danny Torrance in the epilogue to The Shining,

  The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain.… But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.

  With his mother as his shining example, Stephen King went on to do just that: He went on.

  FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

  The expression around the King family was that “Daddy done gone,” and what he left behind, the physical artifacts from his past, had been boxed and stored at a relative’s house down the street. Aunt Ethelyn and her husband, Oren, kept the flotsam and jetsam of Donald King’s life in their attic, where one day Stephen went to see what he could find, the only physical remains of what once was presumed to be a good marriage.

  In Spignesi’s The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, David King was asked, “What do you remember about your father?”

  David King replied:

  Nothing. I don’t remember the man personally at all. I do remember that at one point—I guess when we got back to Durham, Maine—Stevie and I found a trunk up in Aunt Ethelyn’s garage that contained a lot of books on seamanship and that sort of thing, and in fact, there was even one of his Merchant Marine uniforms in it.

  We also had several still pictures of him and one sixteen-millimeter film that he had taken. One scene from that film that I can remember was of the ship he was on going through a storm. There were waves crashing over the bow and everything. And surprisingly (since this was the mid-1940s), there were also some shots on that reel in color—footage of both Stevie and I as little kids running around.

  In Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote that he found in their attic boxes of his father’s past, now gathering dust and long abandoned: merchant marine manuals and scrapbooks of his travels worldwide, including an 8mm movie reel, sans sound, which he shared with David; they saw, for the first time, their father waving to them in absentia. From Danse Macabre:

  He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now.

  Their dad, as it turned out, left Maine permanently and headed to Pennsylvania, where he would settle down permanently. But the boys had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that their father had left.

  One thing Donald did leave behind, a blessing in disguise, was a box of cheap paperbacks, science fiction and horror, which Ruth said were his main interests, the kind of fiction he enjoyed reading. An aspiring writer, Donald King had tried his hand at writing fiction, even submitting items for publications, collecting a few rejection slips.

  In time, if Donald King had applied himself to the craft of writing fiction, he might have produced a salable manuscript. But that never happened, possibly because, as Stephen, in Danse Macabre, recalls Ruth explaining, “Your father didn’t have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature.”

  That afternoon in the dusty attic was a defining moment for a young Stephen King, who in Danse Macabre recalls what happened afterward: “The compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north” when he found a “treasure trove” of horror novels published by Avon. It was his first fictional encounter with the bogeyman of Providence, Rhode Island, a tall, saturnine-looking man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, better known as H. P. Lovecraft.

  A Lovecraft collection was, recalled King, “the
pick of the litter.” Lovecraft, “courtesy of my father … opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them.”

  Had Stephen King not found the box of horror books, would he have eventually turned to horror fiction? Or would he had turned in another direction, perhaps the books he’d eventually write under the Richard Bachman pen name?

  It’s a moot point because King found himself comfortably at home with the horror writers, the fantasists, the dark dreamers. Stephen, as a fledgling writer, would ironically follow in his father’s footsteps, but where his father ultimately failed, Stephen would eventually succeed, and brilliantly so, because unlike his father, Stephen had, as his mother termed it, a “stick-to-it” nature, which must have come from his mother.

  Avon paperback book cover

  2

  DURHAM, MAINE

  STAND BY ME

  The King family, particularly David and Stephen, bounced around like pinballs among relatives on both sides of the family all over the map. As David King recalled in an interview with Spignesi in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia:

  When we were very small, I heard that we lived in Scarborough for a while, and then we lived in a place called Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That part is just hearsay, of course, because I really don’t remember that. And then there was a period of time when Stevie stayed with Ethelyn, my mother’s sister, and Oren Flaws, in Durham, and I stayed with Molly, another of her sisters, down in Malden, Massachusetts. Mother was working. I don’t remember too much of that. I do remember one thing, though. Mom came to visit me at Molly’s once, and I remember at breakfast time Molly always used to put wheat germ on our cereal, and I told my mother that my aunt was feeding us germs.