by George Beahm
Joe Hill also writes fearsomes. And, like his father, he’s much in demand by collectors, who snap up his signed, limited editions from Subterranean Press, which has also issued some of Stephen King’s limited editions. There’s obviously cross-over between collectors of the two writers, but Hill’s audience understandably skews younger.
On Joe Hill
Stephen King, when his son was nine years old:
The kid can write a story—he’s really got the bones of the business.
Stephen King, on the movie Horns:
I liked Horns for the crisp, bright cinematography, but what I loved about it is the fearless way it mixes humor and horror, creating an all new taste treat. Daniel Radcliffe’s performance encompasses both the laughs and screams effortlessly. I go to the movies to be entertained. Horns was big entertainment. (Vulture, October 2014)
Owen King:
Joe’s focused; he’s got a good work ethic—he’s everything that I’m not. There’s a lot more forward motion coming from Joe’s office than from mine, I think. We both work at it every day, like it’s a job, but he’s more confident. (Vulture, May 2014)
OWEN KING:
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
Well, the thinking goes, Stephen King writes horror, Joe Hill writes horror, so why wouldn’t Owen King write horror?
Because he doesn’t.
Owen, born on February 21, 1977, attended Vassar College, like his brother, then went on to get a M.F.A. at Columbia University. His first book, We’re All in This Together, was a collection of short fiction, published in 2005 by Bloomsbury USA; his second, a novel, Double Feature, was published in 2013 by Scribner, which also publishes his father’s fiction.
In interviews Owen makes it a point to inform readers that anyone looking for a horror fix in his work are bound to be disappointed. As he told Christian A. Larsen (thehorrorzine.com):
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: because I have the greatest affection for my father’s work, and the greatest appreciation for the readers who have read it so enthusiastically—whose money put clothes on my back and paid for my education—I do not want to give a false impression about the kind of things that I write about. This isn’t because I’m embarrassed by my father’s career or subject matter; it’s because the last thing I want to do is to leave anybody feeling cheated.
Author David Thomson, writing in The New York Times, called Double Feature
a novel that is epic, ambitious and dedicated to the uncontainable.… The novel is maybe a third too long, chiefly because as he wanders around King can hardly see a place, a face or a chair without embarking on a wordy, if not literary, description of it. This might have been cut by someone (why not King?) who can see that brevity is his best quality. But he may be a tricky man to edit or organize. He should persevere, for when he is good—and that is often enough to make a page turner of this book—he has a captivating energy, a precision and a fondness for people that are rare and that make the reader doubly impatient for him to do what he does best.
Thomson’s perceptive review suggests that Owen’s fledgling novel shows great promise, and that he is a writer to watch.
On Owen King
Joe Hill:
I sometimes think Owen is more architectural about his work. The pieces fit together and there’s an almost perfect stitching there. (Vulture, May 2013)
Kelly Braffet (a novelist, and Owen’s wife):
I can’t even come close to approximating how wild and cool his ideas are, so I’m going to stop trying. But his finished work combines that wild, sparkling inspiration with true, heartfelt emotion that’s always right on key. (Litpark, August 2006)
KELLY BRAFFET
I’m a writer. I swear a lot, and I write dark, creepy books about people who also swear a lot. Trying to succeed in the publishing industry while navigating the fairly choppy waters created by all of these factors swirling around me has been, and continues to be, an experience that swings from exhilarating to infuriating from one split second to the next.
—KELLY BRAFFET
Kelly Braffet, a relative newcomer to the King family, has published three novels: Fabulous Things (2005), which was retitled and republished as Josie and Jack (2005), Last Seen Leaving (2006), and Save Yourself (2013). Kelly is painfully aware that life is too short to waste time reading books that can’t hold her attention. “I already probably own more books than I can ever reasonably finish before I die,” she told My Bookish Ways in August 2013. “If a book feels too familiar to me and the prose isn’t blowing me away, I might put it down. If I have to force myself to pick it up, I might put it down.”
She never had that problem with Stephen King’s fiction, though, which she first encountered in high school. “In 1990,” wrote Susan Dominus of The New York Times, “when Kelly Braffet was a high-school freshman in Western Pennsylvania, her parents gave her, for Christmas, a Stephen King book-of-the-month subscription.… It was just what she wanted. She was in her ‘Stephen King completist’ phase, and she was trying to track down hardcover copies of his more obscure books.”
By now it’s a certainty that she’s got them all, even the obscure ones, since she has access to the original source: Stephen King is her father-in-law, and, because he values her opinion, she’s one of his early readers, who gets a copy of his latest manuscript for which he solicits feedback before sending it off to the publisher.
She talks easily and openly with her in-law, but it wasn’t always that way. The New York Times noted that
Braffet was nervous about meeting her future in-laws, nervous even at the sound of Stephen King’s voice on Owen’s answering machine. “It took me two years before I could actually speak in front of Steve and Tabby.” … Her first visit to the King family home, which is in Bangor, was unnerving: all those endless rooms and hallways, like a real-life version of the hotel in The Shining, and that crazy, famous fence around their home, with its wrought-iron bat and cobwebs. “Their underground library … was bigger than the entire library in the town I grew up in. It was … a lot.”
Between the two of them—Tabitha and Stephen King—there’s a lifetime of reading and writing; both are now accessible resources to Braffet, so for her latest novel, Save Yourself, when “she was worried that she lost her way,” the two gave her time-tested feedback. “Tabitha provided structural advice; Stephen, some notes on language. Mostly they told her to keep going.”
She’s kept going, and never stops.
On Kelly Braffet
Owen King:
She understands that writing requires constant fuel—sugar, Triscuits, hugs. At unpredictable times, Kelly often pops into my office with these things. She’s an incredibly insightful critic. She’s sympathetic to the primary difficulties of the job, rejection and uncertainty. (Litpark, August 2006)
Booklist, on Save Yourself:
Braffet’s excruciatingly rendered characters and locomotive plotting make her a writer’s writer, though this novel shows all the signs of a popular breakthrough.… Sex is the driving force here—as power, as weapon, and as shield—and the sweaty mechanics of a few characters recall Tennessee Williams … Perceptive, nervy, and with broad cross-genre appeal.
1 Their collaborations include “In the Tall Grass” (short story), “Throttle” (novella), and “But Only Darkness Loves Me” (unpublished short story).
PART THREE
DOUBLEDAY BOOKS
MAGIC TIME—THE MAKING OF THE MASTER OF HORROR
14
KING’S CLASSIC BOOKS:
AN OVERVIEW
Business is all about relationships with people. This is especially true in book publishing, which is a close-knit community: everyone knows everybody else, because editors frequently change publishing houses. Though authors occasionally gripe about their publishers, the marketing department, the advertising department, and others, they rarely complain about their editors, with whom fast friendships and lasting bonds are formed.
King,
who found a friend in Bill Thompson, had gotten a country music calendar from him in December 1972. In an essay, “A Girl Named Carrie,” Thompson wrote, “Country wasn’t trendy then, but he and I were both buffs and I thought he’d enjoy knowing Earl Scruggs’ birthday. But I also wanted to hear from this talented writer whose letters I enjoyed and who was going to make it as a published author.”
Thompson sent the calendar off, along with a note: “What have you been up to lately?” King responded with a thank-you and a query, asking if he’d like to see a new manuscript.
Because King could barely afford to buy paper to feed into the typewriter, he was typing his manuscripts single-spaced, which editors hate because they want room to make editorial comments and corrections. But the single-spaced manuscript went off to Thompson, and the Kings crossed their fingers. Maybe this time…
MAGIC TIME: THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD
“The script was Carrie, and it was magic time,” Thompson wrote.
In an interview conducted by Stanley Wiater and Peter Straub at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention (held in H. P. Lovecraft’s haunting grounds: Providence, Rhode Island), King explained:
But, in a way, with those early novels I felt like a guy who was plugging quarters in the machine with the big jackpot. And yanking it down. And at first they were coming up all wrong. Then with the book before Carrie, I felt I got two bars and a lemon; then with Carrie, bars across the board—and the money poured out. But the thing is, I was never convinced that I was going to run out of quarters to plug into the machine. My feeling was, I could stand there forever until it hit. There was never really any doubt in my own mind. A couple of time I felt like I was pursuing a fool’s dream or something like that, but they were rare.
After reading the manuscript, Thompson requested a rewrite on the last quarter of the book, which King admitted, in “On Becoming a Brand Name,” didn’t work. “I knew what he was talking about: tired and anxious to finish, the last fifty pages of the original draft bore a strong resemblance to a best-forgotten John Agar horror picture called The Brain from Planet Arous.”
King dutifully complied. Thompson’s suggestions were right on the mark, as King wrote in “On Becoming a Brand Name”: “It was as if he had seen the corner of a treasure chest protruding from the sand and had unerringly driven stakes at the probable boundaries of the buried mass.”
In other words, Thompson could see the direction in which King was going with Carrie, and his editorial suggestions helped King get back on track. The result was a manuscript that was ready to present to the editorial board, which had the final say.
In February 1973, the rewritten manuscript went back to Thompson, who recommended it for publication. Then King took a bus from Hermon, Maine, to New York City to meet Thompson.
The country mouse went to meet the city mouse, and with only ten bucks in his pocket and a return bus ticket home, the country mouse, who wanted to put his best foot forward, bought new leather shoes to make a good impression. He couldn’t afford taxi fare, and walked from the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square in New York City, to Doubleday’s offices at 277 Park Avenue, a long walk—a mile away.
When King arrived at the skyscraper housing Doubleday, Thompson took the impressionable young author to lunch, along with his secretary, and King had the first of what would be many publisher’s lunches. King’s recollection is that, among other topics, they discussed the possibility of Carrie’s selling.
In “On Becoming a Brand Name,” King recalled, “I asked Bill … to estimate the chances that Carrie would be published by Doubleday. He told me he thought they were 60-40 in favor.”
The editorial board was the final hurdle. If he cleared that, King knew, he was home free—and a first-time published novelist. But if they passed on it, as they had his earlier submissions, he was back where he started: living in a writer’s nightmare with 1,500 pages of unpublished manuscripts, his hopes dashed, and his prayers unanswered.
King took the bus back to Maine. It was an eleven-hour ride to Bangor and, from there, a half-hour ride to Hermon. All he could do was go home and wait for the word. It was out of his hands.
As Thompson wrote in an essay, “A Girl Named Carrie,” published in Kingdom of Fear, “I was determined to see Carrie published, but this time I downplayed reactions from editorial colleagues in favor of the profit-center types—sales, publicity, subsidiary rights.”
When the editorial board met to discuss buying Carrie, Thompson knew the book had gotten a thumbs-up when the advertising manager called it a “cooker.” King was home free. His talent, persistence, and bridge building with editors would finally pay off.
Knowing the Kings had no phone in their trailer on Klatt Road, Thompson sent a telegram in March or April. Addressed to Stephen King at RFD #2, Box 499D, in Carmel, Maine, 04419, it read: “Bingo. Carrie officially a Doubleday book. $2500 against royalties. Call for glorious details. Congratulations. Love. The future lies ahead.”
Stephen King recalled, in “On Becoming a Brand Name,” that
Tabby called me during my free period at school. I went up to the office to take the call, aware that it was necessary for her to go next door to make the call, and quite sure that one of two things had happened: Either Doubleday had decided to publish Carrie or one of the kids had fallen down the front steps of the trailer and fractured his or her skull.
Kevin Quigley below a road sign, “Welcome to Hermon” Maine.
In an interview in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, Chris Chesley vividly recalls the day that changed the Kings’ lives forever:
Steve was living in Hermon then, and I was again boarding with him. I would hitchhike from Hermon to Orono and back again at the end of my school day. So one day I hitchhiked home, and I came down this little dirt road that his house was on, and I had just gotten in the yard, when Tabby ran out the front door … and she was waving a telegram. “Look, look at this!”
She handed me the telegram—it was just a few words—and I read it.
And Tabby jumped and shouted, and I jumped and shouted, and when Steve got home, I got out of the way. They just hugged each other and cried. I could hear them from the next room; not that I was eavesdropping, but you just couldn’t avoid it. It was one of the best days that I have ever spent.
Chris Chesley recalled that night when Stephen King got home, which Chris discussed in an interview published in a King zine, Phantasmagoria. He went over the contract with King.
He stroked the neck of his beer and grinned like a pimp as I kept poking my finger at one pretty clause after another: percentage for foreign sales, percentage for film deal, percentage for T-shirts.
Stephen King sat and grinned like a man capable of high and fancy rolling.
I remember looking up from the contract and watching him finish his beer. He started talking about the second draft of Second Coming. Soon he had got up and went to work on it, down the hall in the little room with space enough only for him, his typewriter, the loud furnace, and the louder radio. The kids came in while he banged the keys.
As it got dark, in the kitchen Tabby sang along with Steve’s radio.
I remember the carton of cigarettes still gracing the living room table, the packs fanned out, gleaming luxuriously under the ceiling light.
They moved out of Hermon and moved into an apartment in Bangor.
“CH-CH-CHANGES”
Tabitha King’s recollection of the move from Hermon was a little more grim. In a collector’s edition of Carrie, she wrote that “it was the end of a cycle for us, though we didn’t know it.… We got evicted from the trailer in Hermon and moved back to Bangor.”
They moved into a second-floor walk-up apartment with four rooms in a modest house at 14 Sanford Street, which rented for $90 a month, but at least they could afford a phone now. (The house has since been torn down.)
Despite the book sale, Stephen King couldn’t afford to simply quit teaching. The $2,500 was an advance against royalti
es; and once the book was published, the publisher would wait a half year to gauge and report sales and then give him a royalty check if the book’s advance earned out. (The original advance was only $1,500, but Thompson got it goosed to $2,500.)
Now nearing the end of his second year of teaching, King had two more months left on his contract to finish out the school year. King hoped he would be leaving the teaching profession behind him, just as he permanently left behind what he termed “shit work,” the low-paying, menial work that paid the bills when he was in high school and college, as well as after college: janitor, bagger, dyer and sewer in a textile mill, gas station attendant, and laundry worker—the kind of poorly paid work his mother had also stoically endured after being abandoned. Therefore, that summer, he planned to write and hoped to make another book sale or more sales to Cavalier, because the Kings always needed the money: The book advance could only stretch so far.
In a cover letter dated April 20, 1973, King returned the contract for Carrie and wrote that he could “see himself in a big yella Cadillac” and hoped Doubleday could “sell the rights forty different ways.” They weren’t sold forty different ways, but there was one significant sale, and it would make all the difference in the world: It would change his life forever.
As it had turned out, NAL (New American Library) made a preemptive bid for Carrie, to keep it from going up for auction, fearing it’d set off a bidding frenzy. The bid shut the auction down even before it started, and soon King would get the good news.
