by George Beahm
King’s sale to Cavalier was no accident. Lacking a literary agent to do the legwork, King did what every other smart writer does: He did his own homework.
In “The Horror Market Writer and the Ten Bears,” published in Writer’s Digest in 1973, and reprinted in Secret Windows, King lays out the nuts and bolts of submitting professionally, a process he dutifully followed when submitting “Graveyard Shift” to Willden: He didn’t add gratuitous sex just because it was for a men’s magazine; he studied the market by reading what the magazine published; he took a critical eye to his own work, to improve it; he admonished against being influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft because both were “rococo stylists”; he pointed out that a story’s word length should fall within the published guidelines; and he said that rewriting, though painful, was necessary.
Even though another editor, Robert Lowdnes, was first to publish King professionally in Startling Mystery Stories, Cavalier gave King a more mainstream showcase and went on to publish numerous short stories by King—enough to help him fill a book (Night Shift, published in 1978).
As King pointed out over the years, those checks from Cavalier often appeared just in time to help stave off the wolves at the door, at a time when every dollar counted. Breaking editorial policy just for King, Willden, upon request, would send King a check on acceptance. That’s what guardian angels do, and that’s what he did for the Kings, who have never forgotten his kindness.
What follows, from the 1989 edition of The Stephen King Companion, is Nye Willden’s view of a young, talented, twentysomething writer whom he knew was destined for bigger and better things.
AN EDITOR’S REMINISCENCE
“Graveyard Shift” was King’s first story published by us, and “I Am the Doorway” was the second. As an editor for a men’s magazine which dealt primarily in sexually or erotically oriented fiction, Stephen’s story was an exception; and had it been written by someone less talented, it probably wouldn’t have made it. But to be honest, I was very impressed, sensing that there was something very out of the ordinary about this writing. I was so excited that I called our “freelance” fiction editor, Mr. Maurice DeWalt, on the phone—he read a lot of the slush material for us, and still does—and read him the story. He had the same feeling that I did, that here was a major talent in the making. I was not at all surprised by Stephen’s subsequent success and still am not, although the scope of it is a bit mind-boggling.
We never did much editing of his work. I recall one time we didn’t like the ending of a story, or there was something that had to be eliminated because it didn’t fit somehow, and I called him; he asked that he be allowed to make the change, which he did.
Cavalier pays on publication, but on occasion Stephen would call and ask if we could pay in advance, and we always did. He was having a difficult time financially.
Stephen was always a very friendly, easygoing, grateful, and accommodating young man who came down to New York fairly frequently, and he’d come to my office. We got to know each other fairly well and had lunch occasionally. He was a big, warm teddy-bear with a very boyish, impish grin and absolutely serious and dedicated to his writing. From the very beginning he struck me as someone with a purpose, and he was never deterred from that.
My last direct contact with Stephen was when he called me here in Florida and asked me if I knew of some out-of-the-way place where he and Tabitha and the kids could go just to get away. I called Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida and found them a house to rent for a week. The island was, at that time, very private and somewhat sparsely populated, and they had a wonderful time walking the beach and looking for shells. Sanibel’s called the shell capital of the world because there are literally millions of shells on the beaches.
He came back through Miami and came up to see me. Still the same, friendly guy.
Fiction editor DeWalt was invited to one of his editor’s parties. I think it was for Dead Zone and was at the Tavern on the Green. DeWalt had never met Stephen and reported that he was gracious and funny and expressed how grateful he was to me and Doug Allen, the publisher, for our kindness to him in the early days.
We did pay him a bit more than our usual rate after his first few stories, because we knew he was special. I think that was about $250 or maybe even $300 a story.
By 1977 Stephen King was world famous, but was still the same, gentle, nice, kind man he’d always been; and although I have lost touch with him, I’m sure he’d respond immediately if I wrote him.
I think his lack of egomania is what still makes his books so wonderfully believable for his public. I find it a bit amusing—no, charming—that he still expresses gratitude to us for giving him his chance at publication. My attitude is one of gratitude for having the opportunity to have rubbed shoulders with genius—and there’s sure as hell no argument that that is what he possesses in his genre—and to have my name included in some of his forewords and acknowledgments.
We’ve never tried to exploit our association with Stephen, and never would: the mentions have all come from him. We also signed over all rights to his stories immediately upon request.
But it’s great to pick up a book by or about him and see my name mentioned. It was, and is, a pleasure to know him, not just because of his fame but because he is a genuinely nice human being.
A cake in the shape of a rat, a refreshment for the world premiere of Graveyard Shift at a Bangor, Maine theater, where King held a press conference.
The Kings: Naomi, Joe, Owen, Tabitha, and Stephen
13
THE BONES OF THE FAMILY BUSINESS: WRITING
Of course, it is the family business.
—OWEN KING ON WRITING
(MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM, JULY 24, 2005)
We’ve always been a family that cares very passionately about books. Our dinner conversation was literary conversation … And after dinners, often we would have a family book we’d go and read together, we would pass the book around. Our framework for thought was built around writers and stories and literary content and scene-creation—so in that sense the [book] trade, not so much the art, but the trade, was constant conversation.
—JOE HILL, ON THE KING FAMILY (VULTURE, MAY 2013)
One of two bats flanking the main gate to the Kings’ Bangor home.
WE ARE FAMILY
The “typical” American, according to one source, reads five books a year.
The Kings aren’t typical Americans: They’re biblioholics and consume books like the typical American gobbles down a Big Mac with fries. If there’s one thing that defines them, it’s their love of storytelling, so it’s no surprise when a major profile, “Stephen King’s Family Business,” in The New York Times magazine, focused on that theme.
Consider the published novelists in the family: Stephen King, who in recent years has published two books annually; Tabitha King, who has published eight novels, the last a posthumous collaboration with Michael McDowell, whose family approached her to complete his novel, Candles Burning; Joseph Hillstrom King (who uses the pseudonym Joe Hill, following that used by Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, a Swedish-American labor activist), who has published one collection of fiction, numerous comics (notably the long-running series, Locke and Key, with illustrator Gabriel Rodriguez), and three novels, with more in the pipeline; Owen King, who published a collection of short fiction, edited an anthology, and published a novel; and Owen’s wife, Kelly Braffet, who has published three novels. (Naomi King is the exception, and does not write fiction.)
The fiction-writing gene, apparently, has now extended to the third generation of the King family tree: In Susan Dominus’s profile “Stephen King’s Family Business,” in The New York Times, Joe Hill’s youngest of three sons, only ten years old, is working on two stories: “Scrap” and “The Bad Thing,” a title both his father and grandfather admire. (Stephen King, upon hearing it, said, “I’m sorry. I might have to use that.” Echoing his father, Joe replied, “I know. I had the same thought
myself.”) Whether the family’s talent is due to nature or nurture (genes or upbringing) is immaterial; I believe it’s both.
In terms of book sales, Stephen is the king whose book sales overshadow everyone else’s, but Joe Hill, who taps the same vein, is the rising dark prince. As Joe told Vulture in 2013:
Our dad is a really unique figure in the history of American letters. With NOS4A2 [I will have published] four books in nine years, which feels like it is pretty prolific but isn’t in our comparison to our dad. I think compared to most working, professional writers, Owen and I are both about as prolific as any of ‘em.
Numbers, though, are only a small part of the picture; the American landscape writ large can be found in their various fictions. As much a family business as it is a family passion, they celebrate what John D. MacDonald said about their patriarch’s fiction in his introduction to Night Shift:
Diligence, word-lust, empathy [and] equal growing objectivity and then what? Story. Story. Dammit, story! Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.
That is the secret sauce in the Kings’ fiction: It’s all about people.
In his acceptance of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters in 2003, Stephen properly credits Tabitha as his inspirational force; in his heartfelt acceptance speech, Stephen made it a point to go out of his way to praise Tabitha, even asking her to stand up so people could see her:
The only person who understands how much this award means to me is my wife, Tabitha.… When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single-spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on.… My point is that Tabby always knew what I was supposed to be doing and she believed that I would succeed at it.
She was there during the early years when he wasn’t Stephen King the bestselling writer—when he was just an aspiring, hardworking teacher/writer named Steve King who earned $6,400 a year teaching, when he was perceived by locals as just another working Joe.
TABITHA KING
Just as Stephen had staked out Jerusalem’s Lot, Tabitha has staked her claim to Nodd’s Ridge, Maine. Depressingly, the sales of her novels compared with those of her husband’s are, as she put it, a faucet to his river. It’s an apt metaphor, which is not surprising given that Tabitha was trained as a poet.
As Stephen has pointed out, Tabitha took her study of poetry seriously. He recalled sitting with her in a poetry class at the University of Maine at Orono listening to the sophomoric scribbling of wannabe Sylvia Plaths whose work reeked of pretension. But when it was Tabitha’s turn, his attention perked up because she read a poem titled “The Bear” that was so good it immediately earned his respect. She wasn’t screwing around; she was serious about her work, and it showed. Not surprisingly, her first book was a collection of poetry, Grimoire.
Likewise, Stephen King’s serious interest in writing was one of the things that attracted her to him: They were of like minds. He was, as she recalled in Winter’s Art of Darkness, interested in “getting everything he could out of school and writing his head off.” And as Stephen recalled in On Writing, aside from her interest in writing, he was attracted to her; he appreciated her comeliness and down-to-earth qualities. Tabitha was “a trim girl with a raucous laugh, red-tinted hair, and the prettiest legs I had ever seen, well-displayed beneath a short yellow skirt. She was carrying a copy of Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver.… Also, heavy reading or no heavy reading, she swore like a millworker instead of a coed.”
In other words, she was Stephen’s kind of girl; she wasn’t Betty Coed looking for a MRS degree. As King explained in an interview for Faces of Fear, he had no truck with snooty coeds whose lives revolved around superficialities:
[T]hese little dollies were bopping into their eight o’clock classes with nine pounds of makeup on and their hair processed to perfection, and the high heels and everything, because they wanted husbands, and they wanted jobs, and they wanted all the things their mothers wanted, and they wanted to get into a big sorority. Big deal.
Tabitha King’s novels include: Small World (1981), Caretakers (1983), The Trap (1985), Pearl (1988), One on One (1993), The Book of Reuben (1994), Survivor (1997), and a posthumous collaboration with the late Michael McDowell, Candles Burning (2006).
Sports fans will want to check out Tabitha’s self-published book in magazine format, Playing Like a Girl: Cindy Blodgett and the Lawrence Bulldogs Season of 93–94 (1994).
Inevitably, the subject of Stephen’s sales when contrasted to Tabitha’s provokes an understandable reaction in the family. As she told People magazine in 1981, “I put 10 years into helping his career,” she reasons, “so if his name helps me with mine, I think it’s legitimate.” But Tabby scoffs at the notion of ever being a rival for his readers. “I’d be nuts to compete with him.”
On Tabitha King
Harlan Ellison:
There is a quality of kindness in [her work] that is missing from Stephen’s work. There are a number of women writers I read specifically because there is a quality of humanity, a kindness in their work. Tabby’s stuff is quite different from Stephen’s, and in some way is far more mature.
Douglas E. Winter:
There is an aspect of her work in which she is a very strong regional writer, and I say that in a complimentary sense. We’re talking about Faulkner, O’Connor, or a Steinbeck. There is regional power in her books. In other words, part of the power of her fiction is its setting, its people. It is a peculiar kind of setting. Now, on the other hand, I don’t think that limits her powers, as it does some regional writers. I think that she’s also very capable of communicating the peculiarities of that region to outsiders like me. I’ve read, for example, some other Maine writers who make the society so alien that essentially it becomes an alien society, and you don’t feel that you understand that much about it.
JOE HILL AND THE BONES OF THE BUSINESS
On June 4, 1972, around the time when Stephen King began writing a short story called “Carrie,” his first son, Joe Hillstrom King, was born. Joe, now divorced, has three sons, one of whom shows signs that the third generation of Kings may take up storytelling, the family business.
In a competitive field like writing in which every advantage is used by first-time writers to get ahead, Joe King adamantly refused to play the trump card: Hey, I’m STEPHEN KING’s son! That got him in print as a teenager when writing a nonfiction piece that was published in the hometown newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, but it proved to be an object lesson when he realized it was published because he was King’s son. Either he could ride in on his famous father’s coattails, or he would be judged by his own work’s merits and demerits. To his credit, he chose the latter.
Early on, he asked his parents about what was required to legally change his name, which he eventually decided not to do. But he did submit under his real name, without the famous last name appended: Joe Hill, not Joe King.
Securing a literary agent, Joe Hill kept his identity carefully hidden, but when he began giving interviews, people noticed the uncanny resemblance between him and Stephen King at the same age, and tongues wagged. And, just like his father who eventually came clean and admitted he wrote the Richard Bachman books, Joe Hill got to the point where denial was neither plausible nor possible: He admitted it after Variety broke his cover.
For Joe Hill, in the beginning, writing fiction wasn’t a bed of roses; it was a bed of thorns. A writer for Wired explained:
Much of Hill’s early work was rejected by publishers, including several novels and dozens of stories, which he sees as the pseudonym doing its job. He did eventually break through with the short story collection 20th-Century Ghosts and the novels Heart-Shaped Box and Horns, and is now widely acknowledged as a leading horror author. He’s also come to accept that people will inevitably compare him to his dad. His latest novel NOS4A2 is peppered with Stephen King references.
> Working in the same field and being related to a famous parent may open doors, but in the end it’s the work that’s important; his fiction has garnered multiple awards, attesting to the quality of his work: a Ray Bradbury Fellowship, a World Fantasy Award, the A. E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize, a Bradbury Fellowship, three Bram Stoker Awards, five British Fantasy Awards (including two for comic books, with Gabriel Rodriguez, and a newcomer award), an International Horror Guild Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award.
In terms of his fiction, his work—in tone and style—closely resembles his father’s, to such an extent that their collaborations are seamless.1 If Stephen King suddenly stopped writing for some reason (perish the thought), he has said that Joe could pick up his unfinished manuscript and complete it.
In another parallel, Joe Hill’s fiction has also seen adaptation to the silver screen: Horns, starring Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, was released as a major motion picture—appropriately, on Halloween day 2014. Critics gave it a 50 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but fans took a shine to it, and gave it a 94 percent rating.
For critics who opine that Joe Hill capitalized on his father’s commercial writing style, I would respectfully disagree. Hill’s literary leanings recall the observations made by his father in Night Shift:
Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours.… So each day I sift through the sludge anew, going through the cast-off bits and pieces of observation, of memory, of speculation, trying to make something out of the stuff that didn’t go through the filter and down the drain into the subconscious.… Louis L’Amour’s “obsession” centers on the history of the American West; I tend more toward things that slither by starlight. He writes Westerns; I write fearsomes.
