by George Beahm
In an interview with Randy Lofficier in 1984, King explained what it was like growing up in the fifties:
That was my generation.… So, there are a lot of us who actually developed our understanding of life, and who grew to be, not adults, but thinking human beings in the fifties. Somebody once said that “Life was the rise of consciousness.” For me, rock-and-roll was the rise of consciousness. It was like a big sun bursting over my life. That’s when I really started to live, and that was brought on by the music of the fifties.… I don’t have any bad memories of the fifties.… There was stuff going on, there was uneasiness about the [atomic] bomb, but on the whole I’d have to say that people in the fifties were pretty loose.
The car itself, as King explained to Randy Lofficier, “is a symbol for the technological age, or for the end of innocence, when it plays such a part in adolescence and growing up.” In short, it’s King’s horror version of American Graffiti.
King sold the book to his publisher for one dollar. As he explained to Locus (January 1983), “I wanted not to be taking a lot of cash which I didn’t need, and it ties up money other writers could get for advances.… On Christine, the first time they sell a book, they’re in the black, I’m in the black. There are no staggered payments—it’s hard to stagger a dollar!”
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON CHRISTINE
Christine is a ghost story. Here, however, the Bad Place is not a house like the Marsten House or the Overlook Hotel, and the Bad Thing is embodied not as vampire or werewolf or monster but as a rust-ridden old car that catches the eye and the fancy of a passing teenager. A young novel in the sense that most of the central characters are in their teens, Christine explores ghostly possession with King’s characteristic energy and verve. If the basic story approaches absurdity on one level—a haunted Plymouth no less!—it at least partially redeems itself by the sheer force of its narrative movement. Christine creates a kaleidoscope of cars, rock music (the copyright page lists credits for over forty-five songs quoted in the text), archetypal teenage rebellion against equally archetypal overbearing parents (mostly Arnie Cunningham’s, since Dennis’s and Leigh’s parents hardly figure in the novel), fast-food joints, incipient sexuality explored in front—and backseats—all overlying the frightening insecurities and frustrations of adolescence.
Rage without a classroom held hostage or a teenaged terrorist as narrator, Carrie without telekinesis, The Long Walk without even the release valve of a socially sanctioned way to kill young people (although drivers licenses come close, as Christine ultimately suggests)—Christine is an anatomy of the ambivalences of adolescence. Perhaps not one of King’s “great” novels, it nevertheless has garnered its own following and performs well enough according to its own standards.
The King’s and Queen’s Cars
These days Stephen tools around in a Mercedes. He has one and Tabitha has her own. They also have other cars more suited for harsh Maine winters. Stephen King also has a Harley, which he used to ride down to Boston, to watch his beloved Red Sox play. (I suspect that because of his atrophied right leg, he’s less inclined to do so these days.) But in the early days, King’s chariots of fire were modest. His first car was a hand-me-down from his brother, a monstrous 1956 Plymouth. (In Christine, the haunted car was a 1958 Plymouth Fury.) King drove the aged black Plymouth when he was in college.
The first car he ever bought new, in cash, was a Ford Pinto, which Stephen could drive but Tabitha could not. In an introduction to the Collectors Edition of Carrie, Tabitha King wrote about her own horror story with that car: “We bought a better car, a Pinto, but I couldn’t drive it because it was a standard shift. I tried, but one day I stalled it on State Street Hill, the steepest one in Bangor. Some flaming asshole behind me pounded his horn and screamed at me.”
Currently parked in Bangor: a Toyota Prius, a black Pontiac GTO, a Mercedes coupe, and a Mercedes sedan. And, of course, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And when he’s in Florida, King tools around in a red Tesla, or a black Chevrolet Volt, which he bought as a birthday present for Tabitha. As Stephen told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2011, “I just love it because every time you [recharge it for free at a public, electric-vehicle charging station], it’s like saying to the oil cartel, ‘Here, stick this in your eye.’ … It is like a license to steal.”
40
ROCK AND ROLL HAVEN:
STEPHEN KING’S STATION, WKIT 100.3 FM
Well, for me, radio, and in particular, music, made me real as a kid. It’s where I discovered my identity. You reach out and find something that belongs to you and it’s yours. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s like a pair of shoes that fit you. My first record was a 78 rpm version of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” From that moment on I knew it’s what I wanted, and I wanted all I could get.
—STEPHEN KING, RADIO AND RECORDS, 1984
The former WZON sign outside of King’s radio station in Bangor.
King’s radio tower.
A disc jockey at a console at WZON (circa 1990).
A T-shirt design for WZON.
On Broadway, not far from Bangor High School, there used to be a large sign that read: z62, WZON, THE ZONE CORPORATION.
That sign has since been replaced with another, more colorful sign, with artwork by Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne, who has illustrated numerous books by King for Cemetery Dance. The art and King’s stylized signature is proof that if you’re looking for King’s rock and roll radio station, WKIT on the FM dial, you’ve just found it.
Online, it can be found at www.wkitfm.com, and it’s billed as “Stephen King’s Rock n’ Roll Station.” It’s where the rock jocks get into the groove, playing the platters that matter. From its Web site:
WKIT 100.3 is a radio station located in Bangor, Maine; and is owned by Stephen and Tabitha King, making it one of the few commercial stations in the country that is still locally owned. We have been a classic rock station ever since Bobby Russell became program director in 1990, and the ratings have always been consistently good, launching us to #1.
We can also say we’re the only station in the state (and one of the few in the U.S.) that is still LIVE 24-7, meaning we have rock jocks on at all times. If you call, someone is actually here to answer the phone.
Stephen King, who played guitar in a high school band, the Mune Spinners, and later played rhythm guitar as a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, had no intention of ever buying a radio station, but circumstances forced his hand. In “Between Rock and a Soft Place” (Playboy, January 1982), he spoke about picking up a rental car at Boston’s Logan Airport to drive home to Bangor. The car radio had AM radio stations only, which frustrated him. He “wanted to dial some good rock ‘n’ roll and turn up the volume until the speakers started to distort” but couldn’t do it because there was no hard rock station on the AM band. “That was when I began to worry—to seriously worry—about rock ‘n’ roll,” he concluded.
A year later, King decided to make a sound investment in Bangor: an AM radio station. As he explained in a piece for Castle Rock (October 1987), “I did it because the cutting edge of rock and roll has grown dangerously blunt in these latter days.” He bought WACZ, which became WZON, on the AM band at 620 kilohertz.
Back in the day, you could rock in the dead zone by tuning in on WZON, but today it broadcasts progressive talk-radio programs. For rock and roll, listeners tune in to WKIT-FM, which is owned by the Zone Corporation. On the Web, you can listen to its programming at: http://streamdb4web.securenetsystems.net/v5/WKIT.
King also owns WZLO (103.1 FM), which is billed as “Maine’s Adult Alternative,” playing “the very best adult rock music.” The station’s Web site notes:
On our station you’ll hear everyone from the geniuses who gave birth to the progressive sounds of the 60’s and 70’s, such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Jackson Browne & James Taylor, to the musical heirs of those legends, like John Mayer, Dave Matthews Band, Norah Jones, Ryan Adams, Sheryl Crow, David Gray
& Mumford & Sons, just to name a few.
WZLO’s site also boasts that the station is “locally owned and operated like so many other great Maine institutions. Not a big out-of-state conglomerate with a cookie cutter approach to radio and a boring playlist.”
King, clearly, no longer has to worry, seriously worry, about rock and roll.
41
PET SEMATARY
1983
Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.
—PET SEMATARY
The house the Kings rented when they lived in Orrington, Maine.
The stone wall that separates an open field behind the Kings’ home in Orrington, beyond which is the original “Pet Sematary.”
ORRINGTON, MAINE
On a cold day in December 1988, I went to see for myself what was left of the “Pet Sematary” in Orrington, Maine, located south of Bangor. I pulled my rental car into the parking lot of a nearby convenience store and asked a local where it was. He replied, “There’s nothing left up there, you know.”
I knew that, I told him. I wanted to see the house that the Kings had temporarily rented when Stephen returned to his alma mater for a one-year stint as a writer in residence and the actual site of the pet cemetery.
I soon found myself at a two-story white house with fading paint. It had a used tire hanging on a rope from a tree in the front yard. Past the house lay the site of the “pet sematary.”
There was nothing left because souvenir hunters took what they could, including the makeshift wooden gravestone markers. I took a few pictures and left. Coming back down the hill, I watched in fascination as an 18-wheeler came into view, rising taller as it crested a nearby hill. I was near the road, Route 15, and instinctively stepped back when the large truck passed by me, its wind buffeting me. The road was a winding ribbon of death for stray animals, claiming countless cats and dogs.
SMUCKY
Smucky was Naomi King’s tabby. As her father explained about Pet Sematary and its connections to real life, in an interview with The Paris Review (fall 2006):
That book was pretty personal. Everything in it—up to the point where the little boy is killed in the road—everything is true. We moved into that house by the road. It was Orrington instead of Ludlow, but the big trucks did go by, and the old guy across the street did say, You just want to watch ‘em around the road. We did go out in the field. We flew kites. We did go up and look at the pet cemetery. I did find my daughter’s cat, Smucky, dead in the road, run over. We buried him up in the pet cemetery, and I did hear Naomi out in the garage the night after we buried him. I heard all these popping noises—she was jumping up and down on packing material. She was crying and saying, Give me my cat back! Let God have his own cat! I just dumped that right into the book.
And the book went into the drawer, because “it was so gruesome by the end of it, and so awful. I mean, there’s no hope for anybody at the end of that book,” he concluded.
He told the Bangor Daily News (October 12, 1988):
In trying to cope with these things, the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind: it never ceased to trouble me. I was trying to teach school, and the boy was always there, the funeral home was always there, the mortician’s room was always there. And when I finished, I put the book in a drawer.
Pet Sematary is a grim read and an unremitting horror novel. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare that becomes reality. It’s a cautionary tale of a doctor named Louis Creed, whose credo is to believe in the world of science, until he feels it has abandoned him; lacking hope, he turns to a more primal belief, recalling a classic story, “The Monkey’s Paw.”
King’s wife agreed it was too dark in tone, and he decided that it should remain unpublished; if anything, it was a Richard Bachman book, not a King story, but circumstances eventually forced his hand and its publication.
By then King was feeling pressure from his readers as well, especially in the fantasy/horror field, because King had given interviews explaining that he had just finished a novel too nasty and too terrifying to publish, which set King fans clamoring for it. But King remained firm: Pet Sematary was buried deep in a drawer, and, as far as he was concerned, it would never be unearthed.
RESURRECTION
In The Writer’s Home Companion, James Charlton and Lisbeth Mark tell the tale of Doubleday and the IRS forcing King’s hand. As they explained, Pet Sematary was published because of a contractual dispute. The problem began when King agreed to take a fixed amount of $50,000 a year from Doubleday, which was drawn from his accumulated royalties. But when the balance kept growing and it rose to $3 million, it was clear that the inflexible payout schedule would take sixty years for King to recover his royalties, not including any new revenue. But Doubleday refused to simply write him a check for the balance in the account, citing contractual and legal issues.
The IRS decided that if “due consideration” was met, and King gave Doubleday Pet Sematary, the unfair contract could be terminated. King acquiesced, and Doubleday was now the publisher of what would prove to be one of King’s finest novels, which went to press with 500,000 copies in hardback, and went on to sell 657,000 copies.
Unlike Christine, published earlier in the year, Pet Sematary was enthusiastically embraced by critics and readers alike. The Portsmouth Herald said it was “a work of such skill and quality that it transcends the horror genre to become an unforgettable piece of literature about death and bereavement. At 36, [King] is not only far from running out of steam but becoming a better novelist.”
The book industry’s trade publication, Publishers Weekly, also sang the book’s praises, in effect saying King had hit the high notes with his latest tale:
King’s newest novel is a wonderful family portrait that is also the most frightening novel he has ever written.… [T]he last 50 pages are so terrifying, one might try to make it through them without a breath—but what is most astonishing here is how much besides horror is here.… Witty, wise, observant, King has never been a more humane artist than he is here.
Michael Collings’s eerily prescient review of Pet Sematary, in the Stephen King Companion (1995), explains why it is a work of unspeakable horror:
Pet Sematary is King’s darkest novel in part because of the underlying theme that there are things worse than death, and in part because he has spent so much time in the first half lovingly creating an intense relationship between Louis Creed and his son, Gage.… [The novel is] one unrelenting horror following immediately upon, and in fact initiated by, another. Without an emotional or narrative break, the novel penetrates darkness within darkness within darkness, until all that remains is madness or death … or both. The result is one of the few King narratives that move unrelievedly into obsessive pessimism. The cautious optimism of Pet Sematary, where, in the final moment, midnight darkness reigns as undisputed monarch over all.
42
THINNER
1984; ORIGINAL TITLE: GYPSY PIE
Richard Bachman is an incredibly talented writer, and Thinner is a riveting novel that gives a new meaning to the word “horror.”
—PROMOTIONAL LETTER, ADVANCE COPY OF THINNER
A “DEAD” GIVEAWAY
It’s 1984 and I am at the American Booksellers Association convention in Washington, D.C. There are too many publishers’ booths to count, each pushing its fall list—among them, New American Library, which promoted a little-known writer named Richard Bachman. His four previously published novels, issued in mass market editions only, built up his fan base sufficiently to justify publishing what they hoped would be his breakout book, Thinner. New American Library spared no expense beating the drums, and drumming up sales for, Bachman. In front of the display, in the aisle, were two square pallets of wood, forty-six inches on each side, stacked four feet high with advance copies of Thinner, free for the taking.
Booksellers, though, rush by the stacks, ignoring Bachman’s free books in their eage
rness to get to the Viking booth, because they were promoting the biggest book of the season, The Talisman, a collaboration between Stephen King and Peter Straub.
BACHMAN—OR KING?
Thinner was published in hardback ($12.95 retail) in November 1984. The author’s photo depicted a friend of Kirby McCauley. Careful readers smiled when they ran across references in the novel to Stephen King. In one scene, Dr. Houston warns Billy Halleck that his tale of a curse had begun to “sound a little like a Stephen King novel.…” Later, this telling line: “[I]f you add Cary Rossington with his alligator skin and William J. Halleck with his case of involuntary anorexia nervosa into the equation, it starts to sound a little like Stephen King again.”
It was, in fact, King having a little literary fun with himself.
But a careful reader could have picked up the clues that King was Bachman. As Michael Collings wrote in the Stephen King Companion (1995):
The fifth “Bachman” novel is also closest to what readers have come to expect from Stephen King. The first four contained implicit clues (particularly when we read with the gift of superior hindsight) as to who Richard Bachman really was. Place names connect, as when one notes that Ray Garraty’s mailing address is apparently the same as Johnny Smith’s father’s in The Dead Zone (1979)—rural delivery, Pownal, Maine. Brand names connect, especially the Blue Ribbon Laundry in Roadwork, in a branch of which Margaret White working in Carrie. Dedications to Jim Bishop, Burt Hatlen, and others already familiar to King’s readership add to these connections, along with a gritty, tough-talk tone that King had already mastered when Carrie appeared, and stories that were consistent with King’s recurrent themes.
