by George Beahm
Stephen King: “I usually play chords on a word processor, which is a very private thing. It was great. It was a lot of fun.… If nothing else, at least I’ve improved my guitar skills.” (Bangor Daily News, 1992)
To an interviewer for Waldenbooks, when asked if there’s a career he’d like to pursue: “Yes. I’d like to play rock and roll. I play an adequate rhythm guitar but I’m not very versatile. So I guess I’ll stay with writing. I kind of like it.”
Dave Barry: “Recently I played lead guitar in a rock band, and the rhythm guitarist was—not that I wish to drop names—Stephen King.” (from his newspaper article “The Great Literary Band: If You Can’t Play It Well, Play It Loud”)
Diane Donovan, on their first concert: “Were they any good, these rock ‘n’ roll wannabees who gamely camped their way through a generous sampling of ‘60s singles? Well, they probably sang better than most rock musicians can write, and with a good deal more enthusiasm. Bolstered by three ‘real’ musicians, ear-splitting amplification and a wildly supportive crowd of more than a thousand booksellers and publishing types, the Rock Bottoms put on a good show. Stephen King dominated center stage with his almost preternatural sex appeal, matching chords with [Ridley] Pearson and [Dave] Barry, who apparently hasn’t changed a bit since 1965.” (“Writers Rock at Benefit for Literacy,” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1992)
Leland Gaunt from Needful Things illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.
66
NEEDFUL THINGS
1991
“I’ll never leave Maine behind,” King told Publishers Weekly (January 24, 1991), “but Castle Rock became more and more real to me. It got to the point where I could draw maps of the place. On the one hand, it was a welcoming place to write about. But there is a downside to that. You become complacent; you begin to accept boundaries; the familiarity of the place discourages risks. So I am burning my bridges and destroying the town. It’s all gone—kaput. It’s sad but it had to be done.”
Taking the name of the town from a child’s fortification in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Castle Rock is now forever linked to King. In interviews over the years, King’s said that home is where you know where all the roads go; in King’s case, he knows where all the roads go in Castle Rock. He has reiterated, however, that the town had become too familiar, as he did at a press conference at the American Booksellers Association convention in New York City in June 1991:
It’s easy to dig yourself a rut and furnish it. I’ve done that a little bit in Castle Rock. Going back to Castle Rock for me has been like going home and slipping into an old smoking jacket or an old pair of blue jeans and settling down. After a while, I started to feel excessively comfortable in Castle Rock.
I don’t think that’s a good state for a novelist to be in, particularly if you’re in my situation and you’ve sold a lot of books. Let’s face it: When you become extremely popular and you command extremely big bucks, bloat sets in no matter what you do. I’m just trying to postpone it as long as possible.
Needful Things received mixed reviews, leaning toward the positive side. Publishers Weekly, enthusing about the book, wrote, “King bids a magnificent farewell to the fictional Maine town where much of his previous work has been set. Of grand proportion, the novel ranks with King’s best, in both plot and characterization.… King, like Leland Gaunt, knows just what his customers want.”
THE VOICES OF UNREASON
On the negative side, in The New York Times, Joe Queenan gleefully took a whiz on the novel:
Yes, the maestro of the macabre, the czar of the zany, the sultan of shock, the liege of loathsomeness, is back with another of his gruesome novels, this time bidding farewell to Castle Rock, Maine, the site of so much mayhem in his previous books.… If [the plot] sounds a tad adolescent, well, it is. Needful Things is not the sort of book that one can readily recommend to the dilettante, to the dabbler or anyone with a reasonable-size brain. It is the type of book that can be enjoyed only by longtime aficionados of the genre, people who probably have a lot of black t-shirts in their chest of drawers and either have worn or have dreamed of wearing a baseball cap backward. Big, dumb, plodding and obvious, Mr. King’s books are the literary equivalent of heavy metal.
Queenan’s purported review, which was in fact a hatchet job, is equally insulting to King’s readers, but at this point in the game, such clueless remarks are par for the course, and King never responded. But when Professor Walter Kendrick of Fordham University attacked Needful Things in a review for the Washington Post, writing that “King has spat in his readers’ faces before, and they have lapped it up,” King responded and called the review “a combination of academic arrogance, elitism and critical insularity,” adding that the critical approach Kendrick took “says more about his shortcomings as a reader than his subject’s shortcomings as a writer.” King also said:
At one point in his jeremiad—one cannot quite call it a review—Kendrick states that I have achieved my success as a popular writer over the bleeding bodies of reviewers who have pointed out my lack of moral vision and inability to deal with any concepts larger, say, than my own bank account. That is absolutely not true. I have never stepped over a bleeding reviewer in my life. I have stepped over a few who were bleating, however, as I now intend to do with Kendrick.
THE VOICE OF REASON
Another academic, Michael Collings, professor emeritus at Pepperdine University, offered a more balanced view. Collings, unlike Kendrick, had approached King with the benefit of having read all of King’s published fiction and written several books about King for Starmont House. Collings’s “take” on Needful Things stands in stark contrast to the book’s detractors, for whom attacking and insulting King’s readers is standard operating procedure. He wrote:
What would happen if a twentieth-century reincarnation of Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger or his equally discomforting Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg decided to open a modest shop called “Needful Things” in the small New England town of Castle Rock, and began selling dreams? Or at least what seemed to be the answers to dreams?
In Needful Things, the result is a chain of initially superficial pranks that escalate into an unbroken and irrevocable sequence of interlocking horrors. By design, the actions in Needful Things culminate in King’s starkest, most powerful confrontation to date of the Dark powers and the White. Along the way King touches upon and brings to final resolution the terrors and secrets revealed in earlier Castle Rock stories—The Dead Zone, Cujo, “The Body,” The Dark Half (with echoes of Christine, The Talisman, and The Tommyknockers)—and opens his reader’s imaginations to a place where love, belief, and magic tricks can fight evil to a draw. And by the end of Needful Things, he has also destroyed his most recognizable landscape, the haunted city of Castle Rock.
If Needful Things, with its destruction of Castle Rock, represents a capstone to one specific segment of King’s career, it is an appropriate one. The novel concludes with a sense of farewell, as readers take leave of a familiar landscape through a forceful, complex, and ultimately uplifting parable of good and evil … and the triumph of the good.
Nearly a quarter century later, though, Castle Rock was center stage once again, in a harrowing novel titled Revival, in which the lives of a young boy and a new young preacher who comes to town become intertwined, with disastrous results.
67
GERALD’S GAME
1992
Long before Anastasia Steele, a lip-biting, virginal college coed, meets Mr. Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey, the games—that is, the bondage games—received fictional treatment, including Stephen King’s 1992 novel, Gerald’s Game.
It’s Gerald’s game, though, not his wife’s; and she wasn’t bound to be pleased: At the last minute, she decided not to have any part in his kinky bondage fantasy, and her well-placed kick below the belt to Gerald prompted his inelegant swan dive off the bed, resulting in his death.
A CHANGE OF SCENERY
With Castle Ro
ck behind him—burning brightly, like the town in Carrie, like ’Salem’s Lot, like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, and like Las Vegas in The Stand—King turned his attention to exploring characters’ interior landscapes in Gerald’s Game and Insomnia. With the spotlight tightly focused on one room, Gerald’s Game recalls Misery. The protagonist of Gerald’s Game, Jessie Burlingame, is naked and has been handcuffed to a bed’s headboard by her husband in their summer home, far from help, as she ponders her dilemma.
Stephen King told Terry Gross of NPR that Gerald’s Game
started with the concept of the woman being chained to a bed.… And I thought, originally, this was the takeoff point for the book, wouldn’t it be interesting to see what would happen if you had one character in a room?
The question then became, what caused this woman to be in this room by herself? And the answer that I came up with was bondage. She’s handcuffed to a bed. And that forced me to consider what causes people to do this sort of thing. And so once I’d set up the situation, I knew what it was going to be. I went in and read a little bit about it, and thought a little bit about it, and the whole thing struck me as a little bit Victorian. There was something very Snidely Whiplash about the whole thing, and I tried to get that into the book.
Over the years Publishers Weekly has spoken positively of King’s books, but this one gave them pause. While admitting that it’s “one of the best stories King has ever published,” it noted that “[t]he gory stuff … is prime King, but this is subsumed in the book’s general tastelessness. A lame wrap-up to what might have been a thrilling short story only further compromises the enjoyment readers might have found in this surprisingly exploitative work.”
Publishers Weekly was not alone in its criticism. Responding to a reviewer’s comment that Gerald’s Game is more mature fare because it avoids the monsters and the supernatural in favor of realism and social relevance, Michael Collings points out that the admiration is misplaced, that the novel was being admired for the wrong reasons:
It is not that the story eschews horror, but that for the first time Stephen King subordinates his story to a specific political or social agenda. Rather than making Gerald’s Game King’s first true masterpiece, however, the decision to do so undercuts his primary strength—that of storyteller who along the way reveals important truths about human nature and social conventions.
The plot of Gerald’s Game is straightforward, almost blunt. Gerald Burlingame enjoys (if not requires) kinky sex games, including bondage. When he handcuffs his wife, Jessie, to the headboard of their bed in an isolated cabin near an equally isolated lake … she decides in a moment of feminist consciousness that she doesn’t have to put up with such humiliation any longer. She demands to be released; Gerald assumes that she is responding to the game and comes on anyway; she kicks him in two strategic places; and Gerald dies of a heart attack.
Leaving Jessie handcuffed to the bed.
For almost 250 pages, she tries to get loose. Then for the remaining eighty pages, she tries to adjust to post-Gerald life.
In the end, Gerald’s Game seems more single-dimensional than one expects from King. Everything is neatly explained away, including Jessie’s hallucinatory awareness that someone has been in the house with her. There seems little growth, little change. In important ways, she is still as handcuffed to herself and her past as she was handcuffed to her bed for most of the story.
68
PHILTRUM PRESS
We are, in other words, a very humble storefront in a world dominated by a few great glassy shopping malls.
—STEPHEN KING, FORENOTE TO DON ROBERTSON’S THE IDEAL, GENUINE MAN
(PHILTRUM PRESS)
In many ways, Philtrum Press shares much in common with other, high-quality small presses: It’s small in size, publishes infrequently, operates with a skeleton crew, and takes exquisite care in the manufacture and design of its publications.
What makes Philtrum unique is that, unlike most small presses, funding is not a problem: The publisher, Stephen King, not only has deep pockets, but every publication offered for sale sells out immediately upon announcement. Moreover, the books are mostly his own, so it’s self-publishing. (The exception was Don Robertson’s novel, The Ideal, Genuine Man, about which King said he could not not publish it.)
All of their publications to date have been designed by Michael Alpert, who is currently the director of the University of Maine Press. (Alpert was one of the students in Burton Hatlen’s writing workshop at the University of Maine at Orono, along with Stephen and Tabitha King.) Also, all Philtrum Press’s printed publications are now collector’s items and long out of print.
Philtrum Press publishes infrequently and maintains no mailing list.
Its first publication was The Plant, in chapbook form. “It’s sort of an epistolary novel in progress,” King said on The Larry King Show. “A couple of years ago, I got to thinking about Christmas cards and how mass-produced they were. It didn’t seem like a sincere, personal thing. So I thought, well, I’ll do this little book … and send it out to friends.”
What made all the chapbooks unique was that each was inscribed to its recipient. The three chapbooks, designed by Alpert, went out to friends and family. The small print run was two hundred copies plus twenty-six lettered copies.
Though The Plant was never completed, it’s one that King’s fans hope to see completed. (Parts 1-6 are currently free in two PDF downloads on King’s Web site.)
“The Plant is a present,” Stephen King explained in Castle Rock. “If I gave someone a coffee-maker and they sold it at a yard sale, it wouldn’t bother me. If they want to sell The Plant, fine. It’s theirs. They can tear out the pages and use ‘em for toilet paper, if that’s what they feel like doing. For the record, I’ve never seen an inscribed copy for sale. Some that are sold may be printers’ overruns.” (For the record, inscribed copies have gone up on the marketplace.)
Philtrum’s list includes:
The Plant, parts 1 to 6, in PDF; parts 1-3 published as an e-book (2000)
The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), a limited edition, signed, and numbered hardback book, with slipcase
The Ideal, Genuine Man (1997), by Don Robertson
Six Stories (1977)
The New Lieutenant’s Rap (1999), with some copies distributed as keepsakes at a party in New York City, on April 6, 1999, at the Tavern on the Green, to celebrate King’s silver anniversary in book publishing
Guns (2013), an essay published in Kindle format and as an audiobook
There’s room in the Stephen King universe for his books that, like Doctor Sleep, sold over 900,000 copies in trade hardback (Publishers Weekly), just as there’s room for small, elegant self-published books with modest print runs, the kind Philtrum Press excels in publishing.
69
NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES
1993
The cover of the “Special Stephen King Issue” of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (December 1990).
In King’s lengthy introduction to this collection totaling 816 pages in the trade hardback edition, he explains that “[t]here are some genuine curiosities” in the volume and concluded that it is “an uneven Aladdin’s cave of a book.…”
In other words, it’s a stew in which King serves up something for everyone’s literary tastes; there’s even a long nonfiction essay about Little League baseball titled “Head Down” that at first glance seems out of place. “It doesn’t really fit in a collection of stories which concern themselves mostly with suspense and the supernatural … except somehow it does,” wrote King in his introduction.
The value of this miscellany is its breadth. Trying to find the originally published versions of these stories would be time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating. The original sources variously include a newsletter for King fans only, mainstream magazines, original anthologies, specialty magazines, small press releases, and limited edition books.
“Dolan’s Cadillac” was serialized
in five consecutive issues of Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter. Inspired by Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” King’s updated version features a Cadillac. (Note: If you are claustrophobic, you may want to avoid reading this story.) It was then published as an expensive limited edition from Herb Yellin’s Lord John Press, best known for its broadsides with handset type, chapbooks, and limited edition books.
“The Night Flier” appeared in an original anthology, Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter, a longtime King friend and author of Stephen King: The Art of Darkness.
“Chattery Teeth,” in Cemetery Dance magazine, was published by the good folks at Cemetery Dance Publications, which issues more books by and about King for the specialty market than any other publisher.
“The Moving Finger” appeared in a special issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction honoring King.
“Head Down” came from The New Yorker magazine.
“My Pretty Pony” was published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, in what King correctly considered an overpriced and overdesigned edition. The limited edition run was composed of 280 copies, of which 150 were for sale for $2,200. The Knopf trade edition, at $50, was still overpriced for a short story, no matter how elaborate the final package. In King’s opinion, “My Pretty Pony” gets the award for being a triumph of form over function: The design is wonky, the book is needlessly oversized considering that it’s a short story, and it’s heavy. The cover is brushed aluminum, with a liquid crystal display watch embedded on the front cover.
