by George Beahm
Lilja: Last time you also mentioned “The Monkey.” Any news on that one?
Darabont: I’m hoping to write that script this year, too. We’ll see how it turns out. It might make a good theatrical feature. We’ll see.
Lilja: Any other King/Darabont collaborations that you can talk about?
Darabont: We’re going to have a baby through in-vitro fertilization. No, that’s not true. I’m just messing around. I should know better, because that’s how rumors get started.
Lilja: What else are you up to? I guess you might be taking a well-deserved break now that The Mist is done.
Darabont: Yes, I need it. I’ve never made a movie this quickly. We started prepping the film in January, and we finished everything at the end of October—ten months of production from start to finish. (Plus, I did a few months prior to that casting actors with Deb and designing monsters with Greg Nicotero, so maybe twelve months for me in all?) I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I proved I could do it, but I don’t want to do it that way often. It kills you. It’s intense and exhausting. What I learned making The Mist is that it’s just as hard making a seventeen-million-dollar movie as it is making a sixty-seven-million-dollar film like Green Mile. But with a bigger budget, you at least have the additional advantage of time.
31
CUJO
1981
A “Cujo” mask given out at the American Booksellers Association convention.
There is no higher tribute to the effectiveness of a writer of fiction than when a phrase or title becomes part of the greater lexicon … Cujo, as a word-image of the friendly and familiar suddenly turned monstrous, is another phrase that has entered our collective consciousness.
—DAN SIMMONS, INTRODUCTION TO CUJO, 1994
Over the years readers have asked King the question he most dreads: Where do you get your ideas? Like other writers, he usually makes a humorous joke out of it, because it’s a question that doesn’t lend itself to a sound bite. In this instance, however, King knows exactly where he got the idea for this novel. He told Winter in The Art of Darkness that in the spring of 1977, outside of Bridgton, Maine, he took his ailing motorcycle to a mechanic who had “this huge Saint Bernard” that “came out of the barn, growling.” The owner, recalled King, slapped the dog’s rump and got it to stop, and the idea of writing about a large, out-of-control dog leaped forward. It’s a great doggone story, but critics are divided about the novel’s status in King’s canon.
Writer Dan Simmons, in an introduction to the 1994 Collectors Edition of Cujo, explained that the novel is more than what it seems. It’s “a serious horror novel on more levels than one.… I am going to suggest that Cujo is not really about a rabid dog. I submit that it is about something even more terrifying. It is about a parent’s ultimate nightmare—the inability to protect one’s child when the universe suddenly grows fangs.”
Winter’s assessment is that it’s “one of King’s best novels” and cites its exploration of reality as a strength, its “stripping away … of supernaturalism to confront us with the mundane here-and-now” to support its thesis that “reality is an unnatural order.”
But others, including Michael Collings, have a bone to pick; specifically, “In Cujo, almost every key event seems accidental.” As he wrote in The Stephen King Companion (1995), “In King’s stronger pieces, there is frequently an underlying current of purposefulness approaching tragedy. Characters make important decisions and then must accept the consequences of those actions.… Cujo remains a ‘tweener,’ a novel captured between two opposing states of storytelling, and as a result, is it weakened.”
Originally conceived as a Bachman novel, it’s the story of a rabid Saint Bernard that attacks and kills both its owner, Joe Camber, and Joe’s pal, Gary Pervier, and then lays siege to Donna Trenton and her son, Tad, who are trapped in their Ford Pinto: Though Donna survives, Tad does not; he dies of dehydration, which understandably upset readers, who wanted him to live.
A relentless, grim, in-your-face novel, Cujo marks a departure from King’s previous novels, which have overt elements of horror or the supernatural. In this novel, though, the horrors of everyday life, told through the Trenton family’s efforts to simply stay alive during a difficult time economically, hits closer to home. The economic hardship experienced by the Trentons could happen to any of us, if the wheel of fortune spins and we find ourselves in an unfortunate circumstance.
RIDING WITH STEPHEN KING
By Suzi Thayer
One day in 1977 I went with three friends to see the movie, The Deep, at a theater in Westbrook, Maine. It had been my idea to take a taxi from Portland, so as we were leaving and realized we were all low on cash, it was up to me to find a ride back to Portland.
I spotted a lone man with a friendly-looking face leaving the theater and asked if he might give four poor women a ride to Portland. He happily obliged and led us to a big, sleek-looking black car. (I wouldn’t be so quick to hop in these days.)
I sat in the backseat, behind him, where I could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They looked familiar. Then I noticed a metal plaque on the dashboard that read: Stephen & Tabitha King. I said, loudly, “Oh my God guess who’s driving this car!”
King laughed. When asked what he was working on, he told us he was just starting a story about a rabid Saint Bernard. Cujo hadn’t even been named yet.
Coming Clean: King’s Addiction
Most of King’s Constant Readers, who thought they knew everything there was to know about him, were surprised to discover that, as he confessed in On Writing, he is a recovered alcoholic and drug user.
It got so bad that, as he explained, “At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don’t say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.”
King’s choices: Straighten up and fly right or crash and burn. Pilots call it auguring into the ground.
To King’s credit, he straightened up and flew straight.
At its worst moments, though, things looked pretty bleak. During an intervention, Tabitha King had gone around the house, collected the detritus of his various addictions, and, as he recounted in On Writing, dramatically emptied “a trash bag full of stuff from my office out on the rug: beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash.”
The reader engaging in pop psychology might speculate that King suffered from self-esteem problems, or that he was clearly running away from reality and seeking escape through substance abuse, but the simple fact is that it takes trained medical professionals to diagnose and treat such addiction, which is a very serious matter. So let’s not speculate.
You have to give King credit: He came clean—both in stepping forward to admit it and in taking steps to overcome it—and accepted full responsibility for his actions. In the end, he realized that “[c]reative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”
King, finally, conquered his demons.
32
DANSE MACABRE
1981
I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King’s book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you’d have a novel. It was immensely reassuring—suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it’s how I’ve written books I haven’t had the time to write, like my children’s novel Coraline.
—NEIL GAIMAN, “THE KING AND I,”
SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE (U.K.), APRIL 28,
2012
In the dedication to Danse Macabre, King writes, “It’s easy enough—perhaps too easy—to memorialize the dead. This book is for six great writers of the macabre who are still alive.” He cited Robert Bloch, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei, and Manly Wade Wellman.
When King’s book was published in 1979, all six were alive and well; now, with the passage of time, they are all gone, but we are left with a body of work that continues to impress, delight, and entertain; to borrow a phrase from Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., they care enough to scare.
I was fortunate enough to see Bradbury at several public events, at which he was always accommodating to fans. He especially loved to attend the San Diego Comic Con, even if it meant having someone transport him in a wheelchair. The last time I saw him was at SDCC, with a big smile, like a kid in a candy store, as he took in the sensory overload and spectacle of the event, in all its splendor and gaudiness. I also met Manly Wade Wellman, a gentleman from North Carolina who attended the one-day Durham minicons, which were held at the home of Edwin and Terry Murray, whose unparalleled collection of pop culture—comic books, science fiction, fantasy, and horror—now resides in the special collections of Duke University, which both men attended.
Like Bradbury and Wellman, Stephen King is a master in the horror field, and, like them, he’s a fan at heart. Attendees at the fifth World Fantasy Convention recall seeing him walk around the dealer’s room, where stacks of pulp magazines, hardback books, and other collectibles commanded his attention. It was the time for him to round out some holes in his collection and get them signed by other writers in attendance, who shared with him their love of the field. That’s what fandom is all about.
What makes Danse Macabre unique among King’s works is that it is his first nonfiction book. An extended love letter to the genre of fantastic literature—science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror—and its practitioners, the book was written at a time when researching the subject meant spending time in the library, calling up people to get information, buying or borrowing publications of interest, and hunting down rare items from rare book dealers.
These days the Internet makes such tasks immensely easier, but what it can’t do is take all these disparate elements and bring them together in a whole. That requires a lot of analysis and synthesis, which is what English majors are trained to do, and King, a former English major, did just that in Danse Macabre, an accessible text written for a general audience.
The book’s genesis, as King points out in his forenote, can be credited to King’s former book editor at Doubleday, William G. Thompson. It was Bill who called King, in November 1978, with a suggestion—and a challenge: “Why don’t you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? Books, movies, radio, TV, the whole thing.”
The timing was right. King, who was preparing to teach a class at the University of Maine at Orono, Themes in Supernatural Literature, realized that it was his opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: In doing the homework for the book, he’d be prepping for the class itself, and he’d be able to publish a book that shared his enthusiasm for the field with his readers.
Everest House issued the trade edition, and Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press issued the signed limited edition. The editor at Everest House was—you guessed it—William G. Thompson, who had moved there after being forced to leave Doubleday.
The resultant book is a detailed, informal, and entertaining overview of the horror field. Appropriately, the book’s title is referred to in “October 4, 1957, and an Invitation to Dance,” the first chapter’s title.
I think the The Milwaukee Journal nailed it when describing the book: “Danse Macabre is a conversation with Stephen King … It’s comfortable and easygoing. At the same time it’s perceptive and knowledgeable, a visit with a craftsman who has honed his skills to an edge that cuts clean and sparkles with brilliance.”
The The Baltimore Sun stated, it “succeeds on any number of levels, as pure horror memorabilia for longtime ghoulie groupies; as a bibliography for younger addicts weaned on King; and as an insightful non-credit course for would-be writers of the genre.”
Michael Collings wrote:
Anyone associating the terms “critical,” “academic,” and “scholarly” with a book claiming to be the results of university courses or a disquisition on the development of a literary genre will be pleasantly relieved to discover, early in Danse Macabre, that just because King is writing nonfiction he has not left behind the distinctive narrative voice that had already become his trademark. Although the book is a cogent and concise study of dark fantasy, it is also clearly from the mind and pen of Stephen King, replete with personal reminiscences that in turn set the stage for conclusions about the functions, nature, and purposes of horror.
Amply illustrated with black-and-white photos, the book covers radio, movies, television, and books; in other words, it thoroughly covers the field. The book is especially useful for its discussion on radio. As King explains, “I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active force—a dramatic art form with its own set of reality.”
If you have any interest in the field whatsoever, the book will repay multiple readings. For newcomers, King’s list of recommended movies and books is a good starting point: There’s plenty of source material here, and it’ll take a chunk of time for you to watch the movies and read the books.
Now thirty-five years down the road, it’s time for a young writer to assay the field anew, bringing the book’s contents current, because so much has happened in the field, notably with films and books.
But King’s book still remains the best single source overview of the field that he so obviously loves, and loves to write about when the opportunity arises.
33
STEPHEN KING’s CREEPSHOW
1982
It’s like the proverbial rollercoaster ride, where you laugh and you scream, and it doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. You just feel like, “Wow, that was great! Let’s go do it again!”
—STEPHEN KING, ON THE MOVIE CREEPSHOW (CREEPSHOWS BY STEPHEN JONES)
King’s graphic novel Creepshow consists of five stories drawn in full color by Bernie Wrightson. It’s unique among King’s books because it’s drawn from a movie with a screenplay written by Stephen King.
The 1982 movie, which took $8 million to make and had veteran horror film director George Romero at the helm, grossed—a rather apt word, I must say—$21 million domestically at the box office. (A sequel, Creepshow 2, released in 1987, didn’t fare as well: It earned only $14 million in domestic box office receipts.)
The film was inspired by editor Bill Gaines’s Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) line of horror comic books: Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. The comics are collector’s items, which prompted Russ Cochran to reprint them in sturdy, full-color hardback books, which have a place of honor in Stephen King’s book collection.
The movie opens with a scene familiar to all too many comic book fans, whose parents—mine included—considered comic books to be trash, to which they were quickly consigned. The eight-year-old boy in bed, reading his comic at night, looks familiar; he’s Joe Hill King.
The cover to the graphic novel, Stephen King’s Creepshow, with art by Jack Kamen.
Joe Hill makes a brief appearance, but Stephen King is front and center in one of the five stories, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” The short story version, titled “Weeds,” appeared in the May 1976 issue of Cavalier magazine. In the film version, King plays the part of a Maine farmer who discovers that a meteor has landed on his property; he hopes to cash in by selling it to the local university … until it breaks open, spilling its green-colored goo, causing him to itch insanely. Like an alien kudzu, the “meteor shit” slowly covers his house, his yard, and finally him. (For his role, noted Stephen Jones in his film study Creepshows, “To create the plant effect, King wore lat
ex make-up appliances created by Tom Savini for the early stages of the growth and dyed yak and horse hair was glued directly onto his face and hands. ‘I just wanted to cover him in moss. Make him itch!’ joked Romero.”)
The bottom line, according to King, from Ann Lloyd’s The Films of Stephen King: “I’m happy with Creepshow because I was involved with the entire thing, from beginning to end, and the writing process was original.” It was all in good fun for King, who loved its connection to the horror comics of the past. “As a kid,” wrote King in Danse Macabre, “I cut my teeth on William B. Gaines’ horror comics. These horror comics of the fifties still sum up for me the epitome of horror, that emotion of fear that underlines terror, an emotion which is slightly less fine, because it is not entirely of the mind.”
THE STEPHEN KING COMPANION
THE COMIC BOOK
The original idea the studio pitched was a straightforward novelization, which King rejected because it wasn’t in the spirit of the movie. The only way King would allow a tie-in was if it made sense visually, and that meant a comic book adaptation.
King turned to Bernie Wrightson, who cut his teeth illustrating horror comics for Marvel, DC, and Warren Publishing. Working from the movie and King’s script, Bernie had a blast illustrating the sixty-four-page comic published as a trade paperback, for which he rendered pencils and finished ink; the coloring was done by his former wife, Michele.
