The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  Although dated by period references to the mid-1970s, The Dead Zone nevertheless reads well, even for [today’s] audiences. Unlike many of King’s other works (and even unlike the Bachman novels), this story of prescience and its devastating consequences on one individual and those nearest to him does not focus on a strong central character, an almost superman “hero” who, like Roland of Gilead, for example, clearly differs from the common run of humanity. King deftly defines his protagonist with his name—Johnny Smith. It is an ordinary name, a literary everyman kind of name that urges readers to see Smith less as exception and more as type. And in almost every respect, Johnny Smith is an ordinary man: he has goals and dreams; he loves and hopes; he must confront problems of both life and death.

  The novel’s gentle, haunting ghostly conclusion returns Johnny Smith and his treacherous gift to the realm of the private; his final touch is reserved for the woman he loved.

  27

  THE KINGS’ MAINE HAUNT IN BANGOR

  Bangor, Maine … is not a town calculated to make anybody feel famous. The only claim to fame is a big plastic statue of Paul Bunyan. You just live there and keep your head down.

  —STEPHEN KING, BARE BONES

  The Paul Bunyan statue facing Main Street in Bangor.

  The bat and spider-designed gate to the Kings’ Bangor home.

  Before Stephen King hit it big, the big man in town was Paul Bunyan—a towering presence, a statue in Bass Park standing in front of the town’s civic center. Dressed in a plaid shirt, wielding an ax in one hand and a peavey in the other, the thirty-one-foot-tall statue harkens back to the city’s origins as a major lumber town in the late 1800s, when Bangor was known for its prized white pine, which shipped worldwide. As Abigail Zelz and Marilyn Zoidis explain in Woodsmen and Whigs: Historic Images of Bangor, Maine:

  Bangor’s lumber exports peaked in 1872, when almost 250 million board feet were shipped from the port. Because of the tremendous volume of lumber that left the city on ships, Bangor became known as the “Lumber capital of the World.” The harbor and its surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity; between 1860 and 1872 an average of more than 2,200 ships entered the harbor each year. Today, Bangor shows little evidence of the once thriving industry. The waterfront is quiet, woodsmen and sailors no longer roam the streets, sawmills are gone, and the boarding houses, hotels, bars, and houses of pleasure have been torn down.

  It was back then that, in 1856, one of the city’s most distinctive houses went up. An Italianate villa, and the first built on West Broad Street, William Arnold’s house cost $6,000 to build.

  King and his family bought the villa in 1980. Although the “Queen City,” as Mainers call her, is no longer the king of the lumber industry, entire forests still fall to provide printing paper for the new king in town, whose books sell worldwide.

  The widow who sold them her house had no idea that, at thirty-three, Stephen King was already a multimillionaire because of the three-book deal with New American Library that McCauley engineered. After watching the Kings walk through the house and hearing Stephen say he wanted to buy it, the widow spoke to the Realtor afterward to express her concerns. He seemed like such a nice young man, she said, but could he really afford a house that cost $135,000?

  The Realtor assured her that the Kings could afford the house.

  For Tabitha King, the house—bought with money earned from books that tapped into people’s nightmares—was a dream come true. As reported in the Bangor Daily News:

  As a girl she strolled down West Broadway with a friend and dreamed of living in one of the mansions. She leaned toward the red one with towers. She certainly never thought she’d live there one day.

  But the wide-eyed girl grew up to be author Tabitha King and married the man who became the most famous horror author of our time, Stephen King. He decided the barn-red Victorian mansion at West Broadway replete with towers, secret passages, and unbeknown to them at the time of purchase, a ghost, was his kind of place.

  “I thought it was destiny,” said Tabitha.

  The twenty-three-room house was certainly big enough for the family of five: Stephen, Tabitha, and their three children. The house would also serve duty as home offices for both writers, and, at least temporarily, house secretaries, too. (Wanting to preserve what little privacy they could, the Kings eventually moved the office out of the house and into a nondescript building near the Bangor airport.)

  The major home renovations included a front porch, a carriage port, an indoor pool (forty-seven feet long) with windows, a climate-controlled underground library housing seventeen thousand volumes, and numerous interior modifications.

  In the beginning, the Kings were reluctant to put up a fence and had hoped a small placard near the door, explaining that the Kings were working writers and couldn’t be disturbed, would be enough to deter the tourists with books they wanted signed. But as they found out, that wasn’t enough to deter the curious. The tourists still came up to the door bearing books. Surely, they thought, Stephen King can make an exception this time just for me.…

  Stephanie Leonard, King’s sister-in-law, wrote in Castle Rock, “Why do they come by? To take a picture of the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of its residents coming and going? To get a book signed, or to knock on the door and hope to pass a word with the author of the books they carry? To see the house that is now familiar to them from magazines and calendar covers? All of the above.”

  TERRY STEEL ON THE KINGS’ FENCE

  FROM FINE HOMEBUILDING, OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1983

  The bat and spider-designed gate to the Kings’ Bangor home.

  The fence to the Kings’ Bangor home.

  I brought a lot of magazines showing examples of ironwork to my first conference with the Kings, along with a lot of photographs I’d taken of fence and gate work around Beacon Hill in Boston. The Kings also had books with drawings of ironwork, and we discussed possible designs. It was important for the fence and gates to work with the architecture of the house, to be graceful and attractive, and yet reflect the personalities of the occupants as well. King, a writer of macabre fiction, wanted bats worked into the design. His wife wanted spiders and webs.

  We walked the property line, and I recorded the length of the fencing perimeter and the widths of the sidewalks where the gates would go. We got a survey map and found some old photographs of the property. It looked about five feet high, and we decided on the same height for the new fence.

  Next I studied the house’s architectural details. My eye was caught immediately by the attractive wooden applique on the south sidewall of the house, whose design had been borrowed, I was certain, from classic wrought-iron scroll work. I borrowed it back for the fence design—it shows up in the support sections, and in the side gate design.

  The stained-glass windows throughout the house offered another design possibility; their arches and radius lines gave me an idea for the design of the spider webs. The front gate, with its circles and arches, repeat motifs I found over the doors and the back barn’s circular windows.

  After the initial brainstorming session, I went home and worked up a proposal, including design drawings and cost. Once the Kings approved the picket and fence-section design, I drove back to Bangor to take exact measurements. After consulting with the Bangor Historical Society, we got a building permit.

  The commission took a year-and-a-half to finish—270 lineal feet of hand-forged fence, weighing 11,000 pounds, punctuated by two gates composed of spider webs, goat heads, and winged bats. The editor of the local paper called the project a major contribution to the architecture of the city of Bangor. A neighbor comes over to tell me the fence is “just what the house needed,” and turns to eye her own front yard.

  One thing’s for sure: Anyone touring Bangor trying to pick out the house where Stephen King lives will have little trouble finding it.

  A newspaper ad in the Bangor Daily News the Kings ran to discourage trick-or-treaters for Halloween.

&nbs
p; A hotel employee in Bangor dressed up for Halloween.

  Of course, on Halloween, the house is spook central. In the past, the Kings used to hand out candy, but when thousands of children began showing up every year, and the police cruisers parked on West Broadway to handle the crush of crowds, the Kings realized that even that simple pleasure would be denied to them: They couldn’t just blend in with the neighbors—especially not on Halloween.

  These days, the Kings are either gone on Halloween night or they’re home, with the main lights turned off to ward off the trick-or-treaters who are drawn to the house. Understandably, what was perhaps King’s favorite holiday quickly became his least favorite, at least in terms of trick-or-treating.

  “Bats and Spiders”

  A three-headed creature is perched on top of a fence in front of the Kings’ Bangor home.

  I had a design flash, a moment of creativity, as the design of the gate emerged. I had the concept and drew it on the chalkboard. Then I started making it, putting it together. I was pretty much done when Tabitha drove down [to my workshop in southern Maine] to take a look.

  Steve initially said he wanted creatures like bats and spiders, so the front gates incorporates them, drawn from the fear imagery that we as children had of the creatures of the night. That seemed to me to be where King was coming from in his writing. I wanted the gate to say something about the person behind the door.

  Also, on my visits, I noticed a lot of comic books lying around, including Superman and Batman.

  Remember the bat symbol that is flashed on the clouds in Batman? That’s what I used for the two bats on the fence—superhero, not demonic, characters.

  —Terry Steel, in an interview with George Beahm

  An aerial shot of the Kings’ Bangor home. (To the left is the other Bangor home the Kings own.)

  28

  FIRESTARTER

  1980

  INCENDIARY NOVELS

  In Art of Darkness, King remarked to Douglas E. Winter that when he ran into problems writing The Dead Zone, he put it aside to work on Firestarter instead and realized that it echoed, to a strong degree, his first published novel, Carrie. He told Winter, “I had this depressing feeling that I was a thirty-year-old man who had already lapsed into self-imitation.”

  Carrie is the story of a teenage girl with a “wild” talent who unleashes it to devastating effect; and Firestarter is the story of a teenage girl who has a “wild” talent that allows her to unleash her power also to devastating effect.

  But King, an English major who went back to teach at his alma mater, reconciled himself with the notion that he wasn’t simply rewriting Carrie; he was “attempting to amplify themes that are intrinsic to his work.”

  Firestarter, however, never became a household word like Carrie. As Collings pointed out, in a review published in The Stephen King Companion (1995), “With the possible exceptions of Cujo and Christine, probably no other single King work has attained to such a level of popular culture, mass name recognition.”

  Now, four decades later, Carrie still carries the day: As a movie poster for the 2013 Carrie movie proclaimed, “You will know her name.”

  Firestarter is the story of a teenage girl named Charlene “Charlie” McGee, who shares much in common with Carrie. As John Grisham explained in an introduction to the New American Library “Collectors Edition” of the novel, “The bad guys pursue with a vengeance, and the chase is on. The Government wants Charlie in custody, in a cell someplace so she can be drugged and controlled. The Government wants to study Charlie, to watch her make fires, to measure the incredible heat she generates, and to use her as a weapon.”

  In the end, stated Collings in The Stephen King Companion (1995), Firestarter is

  a midrange King novel, certainly an interesting read, but representative neither of his strongest nor of his weakest works. It lacks the breadth of plot and setting that elevate earlier novels such as The Shining or The Stand to the level of masterworks and potential classics of contemporary American letters; and it equally lacks the cosmic scope of later works, including IT, The Talisman, and Insomnia, that expand readers’ horizons and expectations to something approaching epic intensity.

  MICHAEL WHELAN’S FIRESTARTER PAINTING

  As can be seen in Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King, Michael Whelan’s art has graced several King books, the first being a cover painting for the Phantasia Press limited edition of Firestarter, which was issued in a run of 725 signed copies.

  King, though he’s no artist himself, has a fine sense of art and design and is an ardent collector of original art based on his fiction.

  In October 2014, Whelan’s original 24-by-32-inch painting for Firestarter went up for sale at Heritage Auctions in Dallas. It had belonged to bookseller John McLaughlin of the Book Sail in California, who had offered it years ago in a book catalog for $35,000.

  King admired the painting so much that he chose Whelan to illustrate The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982). Whelan was asked to illustrate the second book in the series, The Drawing of the Three (1987), but previous commitments to other publishers made that impossible. (Whelan even turned down what he termed two “dream” assignments, illustrating The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for their fiftieth-anniversary editions, citing a too-heavy workload.) As Whelan said in The Stephen King Companion (1995), “Both nearly drove me crazy because I tried every way I could to work them into my schedule, but it was impossible.”

  Whelan’s Firestarter painting is a high watermark in the fantasy illustration field. Your eye is immediately drawn to the young girl in the wraparound cover art, Charlie McGee, the focal point of the novel and the illustration. Look closer, though, and you’ll see in the foreground charred bodies, which graphically display her wild talent, her pyrokinetic power.

  But for all of her power, she’s an orphaned child, an outsider, though perceived by one of the characters in the book as a “monster.” But she’s no monster; she’s just a scared teenage girl on the run, though she harbors a latent, devastating power.

  As Whelan wrote in his coffee table book, The Art of Michael Whelan:

  After reading Stephen King’s Firestarter, there was only one image I could envision for the cover: the moment of the supreme realization of the protagonist’s power.… A look of trancelike fascination, as if she were enthralled by the experience of her power blossoming into fullness.

  To me, Carrie must have had a similar moment of awareness when she, too, realized she had a devastating power that remained hidden until triggered by external forces.

  In Knowing Darkness, Whelan explained, “In three of my favorite books of his—’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and Firestarter—it’s the sense of love and self-sacrifice between the protagonists that’s very convincing to me as a father; I find myself identifying with the main character in these three books.”

  PHANTASIA PRESS

  In a footnote in Danse Macabre, King writes affectionately about Arkham House, a small press well known to aficionados of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. What he says about Arkham House can also be said about all the small presses—of which there are many—that have published King’s own limited editions:

  There is probably no dedicated fantasy fan in America who doesn’t have at least one of those distinctive black-bound volumes upon his or her shelf … and probably in a high place of honor. August Derleth was the founder of this small Wisconsin-based publishing house … and an editor of pure genius: Arkham was the first to publish H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Bloch in book form … and these are only a few of Derleth’s legion. He published his books in limited editions ranging from five hundred to twenty-five hundred copies, and some of them—Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and Bradbury’s Dark Carnival, for instance—are now highly sought-after collectors’ items.

  It’s worth noting that Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s first book, Skull-Face and Others, was also published by Arkham House. And, yes
, Arkham House titles are collectible, some commanding thousands of dollars.

  The publisher of the first limited edition of any Stephen King book, Phantasia Press opened the way for the other presses who followed, issuing splendidly illustrated, beautifully bound books in small print runs: Whispers Press; Everest House; Mysterious Press; Donald M. Grant, Publisher; King’s own Philtrum Press; The Land of Enchantment; Scream Press; Lord John Press; Alfred A. Knopf; Doubleday; Mark V. Ziesing Books; Cemetery Dance Publications; Centipede Press; Subterranean Press; PS Publishing; and others. (Much of the art from these limited editions can be found in Knowing Darkness.)

  29

  DARK FORCES: “THE MIST”

  You’re supposed to visualize that entire story in a sort of grainy black-and-white.

  —STEPHEN KING, TAMPA TRIBUNE, 1980

  This is what happened: Anthony Cheetham, the publisher of Futura Publications Limited, recommended that Kirby McCauley “edit an anthology of new stories of horror and the supernatural for him to publish, which … could in turn [be] published elsewhere around the world,” as McCauley recalled in the introduction to his anthology Dark Forces. Published in 1980, Dark Forces had to have a contribution by Stephen King, then one of McCauley’s clients. In short order, King contributed “The Mist,” which became the lead story in Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror. (It was also the lead story in King’s anthology Skeleton Crew, for the same reason: The strongest story in the book gets the lead position, to draw in readers.)