The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  While the paper is supposed to “hit the streets” every two weeks editor Dave noted that “I think you had better not expect your paper every other Tuesday. Until I get a mimeograph machine things are going to be rather rushed.”

  At present each copy is individually typed.

  Six issues have been published since the paper first appeared with a circulation of two in January.

  In the manner of all good newspapers, Dave’s Rag probes deeply into the lives of its readers for news. One news story, for example, covered a fire in detail:

  “A few weeks ago, Doris’ house, in Scarborough, caught on fire. It leveled the barn, the shop, and the out-buildings. Doris was in Boston, but when she heard about it, she came home. The only fatality was the cat, Confucius. Oren is fixing it back up, at least the house. The cause is not known.”

  Local news of interest is also covered in detail. In a February issue the following item appeared:

  “Today the Pillsburys and Kings were surprised by the arrival of Francis and Phil. They also brought Aunt Gert. They arrived about 2:00 Sunday afternoon, and left at about 4:30. Dave took a picture of them which will probably be in next week’s pictures. Aunt Gert put her hands over her face when Dave took it, but you can still tell who it is.”

  And in a later issue:

  “Aunt Gert recently appeared in movies! While attending a Stanley Party at Jane’s, moving pictures were taken at the refreshment table. Aunt G. is seen juggling her coffee with one hand while she covers her face with the other.”

  The sports stories also cover every aspect of the games. The following story, written before the New England high school basketball tournament, ended on this note of doom:

  “On Feb. 25, Donald and Dave went to the basketball tournament in Lewiston. Brunswick kept up the pace in the first half, but in the second their best player broke his glasses. He cannot shoot without them. The final score was 59-50.”

  A weather story contained this interesting sidelight:

  “Friday the snow drifted something awful on Route No. 9. There were three cars stuck. A truck, and two cars. A road commissioner was stuck for about 2 hours, and I imagine he got plenty mad.”

  Or again:

  “On Donald’s birthday the three Kings were invited down to the Flaws estate for supper, at about 6:00 P.M. Dave was all dolled up in a tie, sports shirt and all the works. Everybody thought that he looked very funny.”

  The classified advertising department seems to be thriving. In one issue the following advertisements appeared:

  CAT WANTED!!!

  Do you have a baby or half-grown cat that you do not have room for? All we need is one! If so, contact Dave King.

  WATCH FOR THE NEW [STEPHEN] KING STORY!!!!

  Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago

  Exciting story of 21 people prisoners on an island that should have been extinct 1,000,000 years ago. Order through this newspaper.

  Editor Dave takes his responsibility seriously. He points out strongly that “anonymous letters go into the waste-basket.”

  Dave and Stephen are the sons of Mrs. Ruth King of Durham. Sports Editor Donald is the son of Mr. and Mrs. George Flaws of Durham.

  Dave and Donald are freshmen and sophomore students, respectively, of Brunswick High School. Stephen attends the West Durham school.

  Although Dave is probably the nation’s youngest newspaper editor, he doubts that he will make newspapering a career. Sports editor Donald thinks he’ll go into the field of mathematics as a teacher.

  What will be the fate of Dave’s Rag? Dave plans to continue publishing just as long as time allows. If he should cease publication to enter some other field, however, we’re certain that at least 20 subscribers (all paid) will be sorry to see it die.

  So will we.

  Chris Chesley in front of Runaround Pond.

  The United Methodist Church (Durham), which the Kings attended.

  Harmony Grove Cemetery in Durham

  The country road that runs past the Kings’ home

  Runaround Pond

  David King holding a ceramic dog named Cujo.

  5

  A SPECIAL OCCASION:

  CHRIS CHESLEY’S FRIENDSHIP WITH STEPHEN KING

  I never had any friends later like the ones

  I had when I was 12.

  Jesus, does anyone?

  —GORDIE LACHANCE, “THE BODY,” FROM DIFFERENT SEASONS

  To put things in proper perspective: Imagine collaborating with an eighteen-year-old named Elvis Presley before he walked into the Memphis Recording Service at the Sun Record Company, on July 18, 1953, and paid 3.98 to cut an acetate with two songs: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Or, perhaps, jamming on a regular basis with a baby-faced teenager named Paul McCartney who lived in the Allerton district of Liverpool, before he met a fellow guitarist and songwriter named John Lennon, on July 6, 1957.

  Likewise, Chris Chesley met Stephen King in 1958–59, when the King family—Ruth, David, and Stephen—made a permanent move to rural Maine, to Durham. Stephen, eleven years old, entered the same grammar school that Chris attended, and it didn’t take long for Chris to realize he had met a kindred spirit, someone who’d become a fast friend and shared many common interests. Chris and Stephen had a mutual love of rock and roll, movies, science fiction, and paperback horror books. They also collaborated on self-published “books.” Even at that young age, Chris saw exceptional promise in his friend’s writing, which would in time range far beyond the confines of rural Maine to encompass the world.

  Lifelong Mainers are by nature wary of outsiders who come knocking at the front door, and Chris is no exception. After Chris and I spent a long day together, we ended up at Harmony Grove Cemetery, and he turned to me as the sun set behind us and said that he had been checking me out to see if I was “genuine.” Once I earned his trust, and he was convinced that I wasn’t a phony, he lowered his shield and opened up. He was kind and warm and generous. We had hit it off. It wasn’t a sit-down, formal interview; instead, we drove around Durham, parked the car, got out and walked around, and just talked. To ensure I got the quotes right, instead of relying on a notebook, I carried a portable tape recorder.

  Chris has only given two interviews about King. The first was in Spignesi’s The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia (published in 1991), and the second was in the last issue of Phantasmagoria (2001), a King fanzine with a circulation of only three hundred copies.

  Covering a lot of ground, this interview limns the background and sets the stage for discussing King’s family, the remoteness of rural Maine, and the significant influence of pop culture on his writing, all of which combined to shape his worldview: his main, and Maine, roots.

  A talented writer, Chris has imagination and passion, but for unknown reasons never pursued writing professionally. That’s unfortunate, because he could have gone on to a successful writing career in fiction or nonfiction had he—like his friend Steve King—persisted.

  The interview was conducted in the spring of 1990.

  GB: When did you first meet King?

  Chris Chesley: [Pointing to a building] That was the schoolhouse where he and I went to school. I had been going to another one-room schoolhouse on the other end of town, but my parents switched me over to this one, mainly because it was closer to the house. That’s where I first met him. It was his first year in Durham, around 1958 or 1959.

  He wore old-fashioned, black-rimmed “fifties” glasses. His hair was kind of messy. He was kind of slow. He was chunky but he wasn’t fat. But, interestingly enough, he did have an ability to really talk, which he got from his mother. When I went to his house, it was so interesting because he and his brother and mother talked like no one you ever heard.

  GB: What was the schoolhouse like?

  Chris Chesley: It was a one-room schoolhouse with twenty-five or thirty kids, grades one through eight. It had a wood stove in the back of the building. Beyond that, there was a two-hole outhouse.
There was one teacher, Miss Heisler. She wasn’t married. She pretty much devoted her life to teaching. She was very good. She was strict and had a lot of respect for learning. When you did well, she let you know she appreciated it. That was very important encouragement for people like Steve, who did well on pretty much everything.

  The one-room schoolhouse Stephen King attended in Durham.

  GB: In Danse Macabre, King cites a turning point in his life. It’s when he discovers a box of old, forgotten paperbacks that belonged to his father. Since you were there at the time, what do you remember?

  Chris Chesley: The books that he got from his aunt and uncle’s attic included an Avon paperback by [Abraham] Merritt, and an H. P. Lovecraft book—the first Lovecraft story he and I had read. There was also an anthology of Lovecraft stories that were completed by August Derleth.

  But I swear what I remember is that there was another gift of books beyond that first box. This other was much larger, nearly two hundred books. A friend of one of his aunts was a teacher who had a big collection of fantasy and science fiction. When she died, they got this big collection. So Steve, who didn’t have bookcases in his room, put them all the way around the baseboard.

  There were a few more Lovecraft books, including The Color Out of Space. But most of the books were science fiction, and it was there we began a literary parting of the ways.

  Although I liked Lovecraft more than he did, what Steve learned from him was the possibility of taking the New England atmosphere and realizing that one could use that as a springboard, a place to tell your stories, as he did with ’Salem’s Lot, in which Dracula was basically moved to Durham.

  Forget Lovecraft’s prolix language; he showed Steve that there was definitely a New England horror, a milieu. Steve didn’t keep reading Lovecraft, but in terms of his development, he took that kind of European horror and set it here.

  GB: King credits Richard Matheson for that.

  Chris Chesley: I think stylistically he learned more from Matheson, who was innovative in working the aspect of daylight horror, finding it in everywhere U.S.A. Steve got a degree of inspiration from that.

  GB: I think too much has been made of it. King was also influenced by other writers, to varying degrees.

  Chris Chesley: Well, in his twenties, Steve read Evan Hunter’s novels and, of course, Ed McBain. In fact, that’s where he got some of the stylistic devices he uses, putting thoughts into italics and writing snappy dialogue, which is why he really liked McBain.

  GB: Did he read a lot of science fiction?

  Chris Chesley: He read a lot of science fiction mainly because he had this big collection. The person who had gotten that collection of fifties’ science fiction had great taste. She had the best that was published back then.

  Steve liked Ray Bradbury, but not his science fiction. Steve liked the Bradbury that wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  There was also an anthology by William Tenn, Children of Wonder, a great collection. It dealt with children and the supernatural. We read those stories together, which I think were very important in his seeing the possibilities of working with children in fiction. One of them was called “The Idol of the [Flies],” which is one of the oddest stories I’ve ever read. It’s about a kid who likes to pull the wings off flies. It’s a fascinating story, but extremely weird and very offbeat.

  I found one of the best science fiction novels of all time in that collection, A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  GB: What was your relationship with King like? How did you see him grow as a fledgling writer?

  Chris Chesley: When we were in grammar school, we saw each other quite a bit, but when we got into high school, I would see him only on weekends, and during vacations I’d see him in the evenings.

  Sometimes he’d show me things he had written, and sometimes he wouldn’t.

  What I remember seeing was a progression: When we started hanging out together, he was writing short stories. Then they got longer and turned into novellas. Finally, the novellas turned into novels. It was a very gradual progress.

  The full-fledged novel he showed me was the high school novel about a race riot, Sword in the Darkness. I read that and thought, He finally broke through the short-story length and had the ability to create something novel-sized.

  GB: Tell me about his writing process.

  Chris Chesley: We were speaking earlier of the fact that he writes intuitively. He’d say, “I’m going to write a story about this,” and that would be the inspiration. He would sit down, put paper in the typewriter, and write. It sounds rather obvious to say, but that first page would lead to the next. He wouldn’t know where the story was going. He’d have ideas that he would be tossing and turning around in his mind, but beyond that he wrote what simply came to him.

  GB: What about his famous rejections?

  Chris Chesley: Steve got a lot of rejections. He used to put them up on the wall, on a nail. In an odd way, they were trophies. He was paying his dues, and he wanted to see that with each rejected story, he could see beyond it. He submitted to science fiction magazines and also mainstream magazines. The rejections depressed him, but he still had the sense that with each form rejection slip, he was moving forward.

  GB: What did his teachers think of him as a writer?

  Chris Chesley: I don’t know if they ever saw that he was going to be a writer, but they certainly knew that he had a talent for writing. We could all see that.

  In the last years of grammar school, in the seventh or eighth grade, he wrote what was his first novel-type story, twenty pages long, in which he used real kids—he used us—in which we had taken over the grammar school. Because of things like that, Steve was lionized.

  He could take real people and set them into a novelistic setting in which we were heroes who died fighting the National Guard. And the people he liked best died last. We all wondered when we were going to “die.”

  GB: What about his visual style of writing?

  Chris Chesley: People talk about his cinematic style, which he learned from going to the movies. For example, after seeing The Pit and the Pendulum, he novelized it. It wasn’t merely a takeoff on that story. He learned to write from what he saw on the screen at the Ritz theater.

  It was like what Shakespeare plays must have been during the Elizabethan times: the audience did not sit quietly; they interacted with what they saw.

  We were all between two and fifteen years old, so if you didn’t like something, you’d shout at the screen. If there was a suspenseful scene when the heroine was walking up the dark stairs, everybody would holler, “No, no, don’t go up there!” It’s just what those B-movie makers would have wanted their audiences to do.

  We saw some pretty good movies there, including Dementia 13, by Francis Ford Coppola. We thought that was great.

  GB: You mentioned David King in passing but didn’t elaborate. As you know, David’s the “invisible” King. What are your thoughts about David and his relationship with his little brother?

  Chris Chesley: I didn’t see much of David. He was older and had his own friends. He was more mature, in a way, and a very self-sufficient kid. Very smart. He did a lot of reading; he read a lot of science fiction. He ran a newspaper that he put out for a while. He was a kid with a lot of ideas.

  I think David and Stephen probably had, in a way, a similar relationship to each other and to their mother like William and Henry James had. Henry always felt slighted when he was growing up because William was thought to be the heir apparent.

  You felt that David was the heir apparent. I think of “The Body” when I think of that, because there’s the older brother who was looked up to … but in the story, he dies. There’s the same sense that David was the one from whom they expected great things to come.

  As for Steve, we have to go back thirty years, relative to the time, to think of what people thought of him.

  Everybody thought, considering how much he read and wrote, that his behavior
was not normal. He was thought to have spent way too much time in his room, in his imagination, and it was generally thought to be unhealthy.

  I think he felt that and was sensitive to it. It was very difficult for him to be who he was and also be accepted for it. In that respect, I think Steve felt more alone; he felt a sense of isolation, but I think it went with the territory. Given who Steve was, the isolation was necessary to make him who he eventually became.

  He is aware of what he needs to do to preserve himself, aware of the time and space and distance that allows him to write. That’s pretty much what he is, and that’s pretty much the way he always was. He was certainly not a recluse. He had friends like the rest of us, but when he was done with them, he would always return to the typewriter. And watching him with his writing, well, you knew that was where he belonged.

  I liked to go see him. To me, it was important to have a friend like Steve because of what he was doing.

  GB: What’s the connection between Runaround Pond and “The Body”?

  Chris Chesley: A friend of mine came over to where Steve and I were and asked, “Do you want to see a dead body?” We said, “Sure!”

  They had dragged the body up. It was lying on this muddy stretch, and they had lights shining on it. They had not covered up the corpse yet because he had just drowned an hour ago. He was out in a boat, drinking with some friends, and fell overboard. He couldn’t swim. It used to happen once a year or so. They fished him out and had gotten him up on the bank. It was summertime, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

  We used to come down here. Some of the other stuff in “The Body” comes from here: The bloodsucker incident probably had its origins here. On hot summer days when you went swimming, we learned early on that you couldn’t swim near the shore because the bloodsuckers would be in the warm, shallow water. If you walked around on the mud on this side of the rocks, you’d come out covered with bloodsuckers.