The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  THE THREAD UNRAVELS

  In January 1985, a Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk who had researched copyright forms filed for Bachman’s books discovered that all were registered to “Richard Bachman” except his first book, Rage: That one was registered to … Stephen King.

  Filed by someone at the literary agency owned by King’s agent at the time, Kirby McCauley, the error proved to be incontrovertible evidence: further denial was useless.

  The bookstore clerk wrote to King, explaining what he had discovered.

  By then, the thread was already unraveling fast.

  By late January, a major television show, Entertainment Tonight, ran a story speculating that King and Bachman were one and the same.

  Also, in its second issue, the official King newsletter, Castle Rock, announced that it had big news, “a secret revealed at last.”

  Then in February, Joan H. Smith, of the Bangor Daily News, told King that she going to run the King-Bachman story, confirmation or not.

  The story, unfortunately, was rushed to print and filled with factual errors. Haste, as the saying goes, makes waste. The story prompted King to write a letter to the editor, which was published, setting the record straight. Here’s how it looked to me:

  1. King did not try to time the release of the information to benefit two Bachman books optioned for the movies; both had sold on their own before the revelation came to light;

  2. King had in fact confirmed the pen name to Steve Brown, a bookstore clerk, a month before the newspaper article was published.

  3. King felt that there was no point in further denial and opted to confirm Joan Smith’s story, since it was scheduled to run anyway.

  4. Noting fan criticism about his use of a pen name, King asserted that the fans had confused “enjoyment with ownership.” He was not being mean-spirited and deliberately withholding the Bachman books from his Constant Readers.

  Before the confirmation, Bachman, unassisted, had sold 28,000 copies of Thinner, which had gone into a second printing—a very respectable showing for a midlist author who was slowly building his readership.

  The anthology Fangoria: Masters of the Dark, published in 1997 and edited by Anthony Timpone, prints an interview with King by Edward Gross (“Stephen King Takes a Vacation”) in which King explained that

  With the last Bachman novel, Thinner, my wife said, “You know, it’s your own goddamned fault. You knew it was like the other ones. Somebody was bound to recognize it.” If it was Joe Schmoe, nobody would have cared. Instead, you’ve got this guy who was familiar with the Library of Congress and works at a bookstore. He deliberately tracks down the copyrights, and our tracks were covered except for the first one.

  Thinner immediately went back to press to meet the increasing demand, and by the time the presses stopped, 280,000 copies were in print.

  But the hunger games had just started: Fans also wanted the earlier Bachman books, but only two of them were in print. New American Library then issued an omnibus edition to satisfy the growing demand. The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels included Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), and The Running Man (1982). The book also included an introduction, “Why I Was Bachman.”

  Though King had put on a brave face in public, in private he seethed. As he told the Maryland Coast Dispatch:

  I was pissed. It’s like you can’t have anything. You’re not allowed to, because you are a celebrity. What does it matter? Why should anyone care? It’s like they can’t wait to find stuff out, particularly if it’s something you don’t want people to know. That’s the best, that’s the juice. It makes me think about that Don Henley song, “Dirty Laundry.” Hell, give it to them.

  As for the book itself, Michael Collings pointed out that it “is the first Bachman novel to approach the intensity, complexity, horrific texturing, and wide market appeal that the King books had long since demonstrated” and that King’s “private hope was that ‘Dicky’ might gradually build his own faithful audience, unhindered by the expectations and hoopla that automatically attached to a novel under King’s name.” King, Collings wrote, “notes that Misery might have been Bachman’s breakthrough novel.”

  THE FIRST BACHMAN BOOK: RAGE

  Rage, the first Bachman book, has a singular distinction among King’s published fiction: It is out of print, and deliberately so: Four separate school shootings were linked to the novel. In each case, a connection to Rage had been established; in one particularly deadly case, three people were killed by a fourteen-year-old in Kentucky whose school locker contained a copy of—you guessed it—Rage.

  King told his publisher to take the book out of print immediately. “I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do,” he wrote in Guns, an e-book published on Amazon in 2013. The book, King said, was a “possible accelerant.”

  Tapping into his feelings of alienation as a young student himself, King had written too convincingly of an angry teenage boy who held his class hostage at Placerville High School: “The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning. What made it nice was that I’d kept my breakfast down, and the squirrel I spotted in Algebra II.… Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was about the time I started to lose my mind.”

  “H-E-R-E’S JOHNNY!” … ER, “DICKY!”

  Richard Bachman died of “cancer of the pseudonym,” as King said, but two novels were posthumously published. King published The Regulators in 1996 and Blaze in 2007 under the name Bachman.

  Obviously, dead men do tell tales.

  43

  THE TALISMAN

  1984

  As Casey Stengel used to say, you’ve got to put an asterisk by it.

  —STEPHEN KING, QUOTED IN WINTER’S

  STEPHEN KING: THE ART OF DARKNESS

  When you combine Stephen King with Peter Straub, what do you get?

  You get a book with a print run so large that it took nine warehouses strategically placed around the country to ensure a national laydown on the same day—October 8, 1984; a major book from two major authors with no book club sales to erode trade bookstore sales; and gleeful critics lined up to take a swing at King and Straub as they ran the proverbial gauntlet.

  King, who termed himself a “Bestsellasaurus Rex” and who was used to suffering the slings and arrows that accompanied his outrageously good fortune, found that this time criticisms were more barbed.

  “In horror fiction,” People magazine asserted, “two heads are better than one only if they’re on the same body.” Ouch.

  It began to really hurt, though, when Esquire magazine wrote:

  King, whose own style is American yahoo—big, brassy, and bodacious—has always expressed admiration for Straub’s cooler, less emotional diction, and Straub in turn has praised the grand, “operatic” quality of King’s work. Their collaboration is both cool and operatic—and very, very scary. It’s a horrific work of art. But is it really art? Probably not. We are talking about mass-market books and popular music here. People consume horror in order to be scared, not arted.

  Regardless of whether the reading audience was scared or “arted,” The Talisman quickly racked up sales, totaling an impressive 880,000 copies within two months of publication. An ambitious novel of 653 pages, The Talisman was followed by a sequel in 2001, Black House. (During a book tour in November 2014 for Revival, King announced that he and Straub planned to write in 2015 a third book in the series.)

  Perhaps what the critics expected was a horror novel in which the two would collaborate and bring their respective strengths to the table; instead, what The Talisman delivers is an ambitious, cross-genre novel in which the two writing styles are seamlessly integrated, to the point where it’s not certain who wrote what, which was by design.

  As Peter Straub recalled, in an interview for Tenebres, for its special double issue on Stephen King, he and King had discussed collaborating on a novel when King was living in England, where Straub also then liv
ed. But because of their respective contractual obligations, the planned collaboration had to be postponed for the next four years. It became logistically possible to collaborate when the Straubs moved back to the United States (as had the Kings). Straub told Tenebres:

  Steve drove from Maine to my house in Westport, Connecticut, to start the actual writing. He stayed maybe four days, during which we wrote the first fifteen or twenty pages, taking turns at my word processor. Then he went back to Maine, and I spent ten days writing up a seventy-page, single-spaced outline based on everything we had discussed. After that, he continued from where we had left off, transmitted his pages to me, and I picked up from his last sentence. We went on like this for about a year and a half, each of us firing off hundred-page, hundred-and-fifty-page segments at intervals of a month or so. When we were nearing the end, my wife and I went back to Maine, and Steve and I wrote the last fifty or so pages at his house, taking turns sitting down before his machine.

  Not long after submission, our editor joined us at Steve’s place, and we went through the book, making whatever cuts and changes seemed necessary.

  The final result was a book that was neither in King’s voice nor in Straub’s but in a third voice that was only possible as a result of careful collaboration. For that reason, the book wasn’t exactly what King fans expected, and it wasn’t exactly what Straub’s fans expected, but it did find a ready audience willing to go along for the ride.

  MICHAEL COLLINGS ON THE TALISMAN

  [The Talisman] was an intricately interlaced combination of horror and fantasy, or real-world terror and alternate-universe science fantasy, in which atomic testing in our world can create vast expanses of the wastelands in the Territories (and perhaps, in the world of Roland of Gilead as well). Instead of allusions to Poe and Lovecraft, The Talisman echoes Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Mark Twain and The Wizard of Oz. Its structure echoes the immensely popular Xanth and Proton/Phase novels of Piers Anthony—both ultimately amalgams of science fiction and fantasy, of “this world” and “others.” Instead of King’s vividly colloquial prose, or Straub’s coolly ironic academic tone, a third, almost wholly unexpected voice emerged, one appropriate not to the ultimate in horror but to an extended narrative that takes on a pacing and movement of its own. And instead of a single-minded quest to destroy (or at least incapacitate) a monster, there is the open-ended epic quest for the Talisman, the mystic nexus of possible worlds—an image as ethereal and powerful as Jake’s vision of the Dark Tower itself in The Wastelands. Even given the length of The Talisman, it would be nearly impossible to do justice to the mythic echoes the Talisman evokes, or to the multiple landscapes in this world and in the Territories that lead to the Black Hotel and the confrontation between light and darkness.

  Anthologist Peter Straub

  Readers who know Straub’s work only through his two collaborations with Stephen King or through his novels—Ghost Story, Julia, Floating Dragon, Shadowland, to name a few—shouldn’t be surprised to discover that he is a first-rate anthologist as well. Published as a two-book set, in slipcase, with 1,500 pages, American Fantastic Tales spans horror stories from the Edwardian era to the twentieth century. As with any anthology, depending on your taste, some of your favorites are bound to be missing. What is important is that it’s a very good representative sampling of horror fiction that offers something for everyone.

  Of course, there’s Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, but there’s much more. As Straub told Scott Simon of NPR (October 31, 2009), “I wanted to get a good representation of stories from across the decades, from as early as possible to the present. And otherwise I was looking for really, really good stories. In some cases when I got into the pulps, I was looking for very bizarre stories of the sort that only flourished in pulp fiction.” In other words, it didn’t matter where the stories originally appeared; it only mattered that they were good.

  How good?

  In a Washington Post review (October 31, 2009), Dennis Drabelle wrote:

  Inside this double-decker set lurks more spookiness than you can shake a broomstick at: four score and more tales, written by horripilating favorites (H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite); mainstream powerhouses (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, John Cheever); and revenants from the crypt of literary obscurity (Madeline Yale Wynne, W. C. Morrow, Seabury Quinn). Until now, the best and bulkiest anthology of its kind was Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944). But these new, paired volumes, edited by novelist Peter Straub of Ghost Story fame, almost double the length of Great Tales while casting a wider net. Wise and Fraser eschewed authors who published mainly in pulp magazines (with the notable exception of Lovecraft), but Straub embraces pulpiness in the first volume’s subtitle. The idea seems to be that, whatever the source, all goose bumps are created equal. I’ll shiver to that.

  That King and Straub also incorporated critiques of contemporary politicians and writers, of social and economic conditions, of education, of parenting—all of this made The Talisman more difficult to approach, and hence seemed to justify the cavils of reviewers and critics.

  It did not, however, keep the novel from reaching literally millions of readers.…

  In the decade that has followed its first appearance, The Talisman has emerged to be ranked as one of King’s (and Straub’s) stronger novels.…

  The Talisman leaves behind the antiheroic naturalism of much modern fiction and returns to the same roots that underlie Tolkien and Lewis and even, in its own way, the Mark Twain of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—to the prose-epic impulse that King has already evoked in The Stand and The Dark Tower.

  PETER STRAUB ON FICTION

  Peter Straub, interviewed by Rick Kelley for the Library of America newsletter online, had the following to say about fiction:

  All fiction, literary or genre, seeks to manipulate its readers. Every novel is an effort to present a completely formed and coherent view of the way its particular world works, and every novelist is doing her best to make her case persuasive. As Marilynne Robinson once remarked, novelists are always standing on top of a hill, shouting, “No, you’re all wrong, this is how the world works.” In this regard, there is no essential difference between the writer of a literary novel and the writer of a crime novel. The differences have to do with matters other than manipulation: open-endedness, psychological acuity, formal beauty, the quality of the prose, depth of feeling, alertness to ambiguity, suggestions of the world’s depth and richness, supple transitions, and a hundred other things. A writer of the fantastic may or may not possess the kind of writerly authority implied by these considerations, but if she does, her work might as well be called “literary.” It won’t be, though; the fences are too high. However, to be completely frank, work of this kind is always as good, in a literary sense, as most “literary” efforts, and often better than most.

  44

  DOUGLAS E. WINTER’S

  STEPHEN KING: THE ART OF DARKNESS

  Eight years after Stephen King published Carrie, two books not by but about Stephen King were published. The books came out from specialty presses, one from Underwood-Miller, and the other from Starmont House.

  The first was Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, which included essays from eleven contributors, including King’s “On Becoming a Brand Name,” reprinted from Adelina (February 1980). The book featured an introduction by Peter Straub, “Meeting Stevie.” (One of the other contributors was Douglas E. Winter, whose essay “The Night Journeys of Stephen King” was reprinted, with revisions, from an issue of Fantasy Newsletter.) The second was titled, simply, Stephen King and written by Douglas E. Winter. Both publishers—Underwood-Miller and Starmont House—went on to publish additional titles about King, but these two were the first of many to appear in print.

  Douglas E. Winter in his living room.

  The vampire from “The Night Flier” illustrated by Glenn C
hadbourne.

  Of the two, Stephen King proved to be more influential, paving the way for its extensively revised and updated version: In 1984, Douglas E. Winter’s authorized study/appreciation, Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, was published in hardback by New American Library Books to critical acclaim.

  Then a lawyer by day (now a retired partner) and writer, editor, anthologist, novelist, and rock musician by night, Winter described his book “as a critical appreciation; it is an intermingling of biography, literary analysis, and unabashed enthusiasm, spiced with commentary by Stephen King transcribed from our more than twelve hours of recorded conversations—including the only interview that he intends to give on the subject of his novel Pet Sematary.”

  Following the introduction is a chapter titled “Notes Toward a Biography,” which implied that he intended to write an authorized biography of King. Though Winter did go on to write a full-length, authorized biography, it would be on Clive Barker, not Stephen King.

  For the 1989 edition of The Stephen King Companion, Winter consented to an interview. As expected, his answers were thoughtful, deliberate, and illuminating. I asked, “What kind of reaction have you gotten from people who’ve read your book on King?” He replied: