by George Beahm
“BAG OF TREASURES”
The company’s executives were dancing in the streets, and for good reason: If Bag of Bones was any indication, King was at the top of his game. Susan Moldow, the publisher at Scribner, was quoted in a company news release:
Bag of Bones is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers. It combines a story of a child in jeopardy with familiar elements from King’s other works such as a haunted house, an insular and isolated community, and forces no one can control. Its story of the numbing effect of grief, the endless manifestations of the creative process and the emotional richness of an April romance, introduce a host of issues and themes of interest to a very broad readership. The book offers an emotional resonance that does not take a back seat to special effects. Bag of Bones is a bag of treasures for a publisher’s promotional effort.
Gina Centrello, president of Pocket Books, said:
With Bag of Bones, Stephen King has proven he can still delight and surprise readers. It is exciting to launch King’s career with Pocket with this novel. King was one of the first writers to experiment with categories and formats—as seen recently in the widely imitated serial publication of The Green Mile—and has a history of making deals with publishers that emphasize growth.
Carolyn Reidy, president of the Simon and Schuster trade division, said:
From the appearance of Carrie in 1974, Stephen King has demonstrated not just an ability to capture an audience of unprecedented size with more than 225 million copies of 38 books in print, but has always demonstrated a unique sensitivity to the dynamics of the publishing industry. His career has been marked by experimentation and collaboration with his various publishers.
And Simon and Schuster’s Consumer Group president Jack Romanos said:
Stephen King has proven to be as creative with his deal-making as his writing. Our partnership is based on the value of the works. The actual performance of each title will determine the profit participation. The deal structure puts priority on growing the Stephen King readership to even greater levels.
As for the author himself, King concluded: “I’m happy that the search for a new publisher has ended so successfully. Bag of Bones contains everything I now know about marriage, lust, and ghosts, and it was essential to me that I find the right partner to publish it.”
It was a smart move for both King and Scribner, and this third time may prove to be the charm: It’s a relationship that shows every sign of continuing for the foreseeable future.
77
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON BAG OF BONES
1998
Bag of Bones was one of the strongest tales Stephen King had published in some time. Eschewing overt social criticism while simultaneously examining a number of such social issues as integral parts of the story, this new novel harkened back to the Stephen King who wrote such memorable novels as The Shining and It, yet it also suggested that he was looking forward to new possibilities.
That initial compliment delivered, it needs to also be noted that in some important ways, Bag of Bones resembles earlier successes perhaps only too strongly. The tone at times seems derivative—derivative of King at his best. As occurred in The Shining, It, The Dark Half, and elsewhere, this story focuses on the problems of a best-selling novelist confronting writer’s block. Now, while writer’s problems might certainly present persistent threats for a writer of King’s stature (although no one has even suggested that he himself has suffered from writer’s block—if anything, he is criticized more frequently for the opposite issue), their recurrence in novel after novel, story after story, makes it increasingly difficult for readers to empathize with the characters—especially, as in this case, when the writer in question, Michael Noonan, is worth over five million dollars. King does seem aware of the implicit complications involved in writing novels about novels, since he takes pains to shift his narrator-writer’s chosen genre from horror to quasi-erotic romance, and then pits him against an antagonist whose half-billion fortune makes Noonan’s five million seem paltry. But still, readers may have difficulty squaring precisely with the travails of a man with an abundance of ready cash, homes, and seemingly much going for him.
At heart, then, Bag of Bones is about humanity, about the bag of flesh and bones that encompasses each of us and links us with past and future. It is a generational story in several senses. Noonan’s ability to generate, whether it be novels or children, remains much in doubt; William Devore, on the other hand, has generated too much—too much wealth, too much power, too much greed and ambition, and, ironically, too many children. One of his sons is gay and will never generate children; another is dead and yet has given life to Ki. Not content with exploring his role as grandparent, Devore wants to possess—metaphorically devour—Ki; and, we discover eventually, there are several senses in which his compulsion to devour ceases being purely metaphorical. Other local families face similar problems in generating lasting progeny—and we are reminded again and again of the childless adults of It and of that novel’s close identification of adult responsibility with adult generation.
But it would not be surprising if Bag of Bones pointed to a shift in direction for King, as it does for his fictional author. The monsters—both human and supernatural—are sublimated to story, and in this way, King asserts triumphantly that whatever monsters may lie in the past, whatever loss and grief and death and sorrow colors the past, the future lies in human ties, human relationships, and human love.
78
STORM OF THE CENTURY
AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
1999
Some folks in New England still shudder when they recall major storms of two different centuries: one in 1978 and another in 2011. I remember the 1978 storm. I was working in the Boston area and saw the city paralyzed, when the then governor Michael Dukakis shut down traffic coming in and out of the city. Out in the ‘burbs where I lived, a goodly number of people, who couldn’t get around by car because the roads were unplowed and impassible, took to their skis. I, on the other hand, was housebound; a transplanted Virginian, I couldn’t ski. The storm in 1978 was “a classic Nor’easter. It moved up the coast, it stalled in the waters over Nantucket and it didn’t go anywhere,” recalled meteorologist “Dr. Mel” Goldstein of WTNH-TV, in The New Haven Register.
The mother of all storms, though, was the blizzard of 1888, when a record fifty inches of snow fell. History repeated itself in 2011, when a storm dumped thirty inches of snow the first day and, over three days, fifty inches total. As Goldstein remarked, “I was so amazed that, yes, I was living through a period of time that was duplicating the Blizzard of 1888!”
There’s nothing like a major meteorological event to make everything in life grind to a complete halt, as depicted in the made-for-TV movie Storm of the Century (air date: February 14–18, 1999), based on King’s screenplay of the same title, which was published in book form with his introduction.
TRAPPED!
Stephen King has frequently used the device of being trapped in place for several novels and short stories: a town (Under the Dome), a supermarket (“The Mist”), a hotel (The Shining), a car (Cujo), a bedroom (Gerald’s Game, Misery), an interrogation room (“In the Deathroom”) … even a toilet stall and a port-a-potty (no shit).
In Storm of the Century, the location of entrapment is once again a town, but this time the entrapper is a snowstorm, not a massive dome that descends on the hapless townsfolk. King’s screenplay is a contemporary revisiting of a time-honored literary device, “the stranger who comes to town,” which recalls Richard Straker and his master, a vampire named Kurt Barlow in ’Salem’s Lot and Leland Gaunt in Needful Things. As King writes in the introduction to the screenplay, published in book form, Andre Linoge in Storm, is “an extremely evil man. Maybe not a man at all”—an entity so terrifying that Mike Anderson’s wife has no compunctions about asking her husband, the constable on Little Tall Island, to ensure Andre Linoge has an “accident.” In other words, she’s asking her husband to kil
l Linoge for the good of the community; she feels murder, in this case, is justified … and she’s right.
What makes Storm of the Century unique among King’s publications is that it is a screenplay, though it could just as easily have been written as a novel. The $33 million production, which began shooting in late February 1998 and ended eighty days later, airing on ABC, is quintessential King. It exposes the dark heart of an insular community isolated from the mainland and left to its own devices. What’s at stake: whether the townsfolk will unanimously agree to Linoge’s unthinkable demand.
“Give me what I want,” Linoge says, “and I’ll go away.”
But it’s too high a price to pay. As Mike Anderson, the town constable, tells us on the first page of the screenplay, “I know one thing: in this world, you have to pay as you go. Usually a lot. Sometimes all you have. That’s a lesson I thought I learned nine years ago, during what folks in these parts call the Storm of the Century.” He should know.…
The raging storm mirrors the internal angst, indecision, and roiling turmoil that churns within each member of the community; they are forced by Linoge to literally choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.
In his introduction, King takes a neutral stance on whether a screenplay trumps a novel. “I won’t argue, either pro or con, that a novel for television is the equal of a novel in a book; I will just say that, once you subtract the distractions [ads] … I myself think that is possible.” Perhaps, but I think most people will pass over reading the screenplay and pop the DVD in their player, turn the lights low, snuggle up to their honey-bunny on the couch, and munch on popcorn while viewing it.
King explains that, like The Green Mile, “Storm of the Century also started with a jailhouse image.” He elaborates:
[T]hat of a man (white, not black) sitting on the bunk in his cell, heels drawn up, arms resting on knees, eyes unblinking. This was not a gentle man or a good man, as John Coffey in The Green Mile turned out to be; this was an extremely evil man. Maybe not a man at all.
I find it easy enough to read screenplays, and I think you will, too. The Pocket Books edition, published in 1999, I’m happy to say, provides screenshots from the TV movie, so you’ll get a visual sense of the movie itself. I’m confident in saying that once you start reading the screenplay or watching the TV movie, you won’t want to stop. Because, as Kathy Bates so eloquently explained when she introduced King at a public reading in New York City, Stephen King’s got “the gift of gotta.” Gotta read, gotta keep reading, gotta finish. Gotta.
And on that note, I gotta go … to my well-worn copy of Storm of the Century, because I want to again read about the mysterious stranger who is wicked bad and comes unbidden to an unsuspecting town to claim what is not his own. As a result, we are properly horrified.
On Storm of the Century
This series also makes it clear that Steve knows a lot more about Maine than the people who put together the TV show Murder, She Wrote. Storm of the Century doesn’t offer much aid and comfort to the people who want to promulgate a sentimental vision of quaint, old Downeast folks, for like most Maine natives Steve feels a good deal of ambivalence about his state: He loves AND hates it, and sometimes the love feels like hate … or is it plain old fear? Surrounded by all that gorgeous but inhuman nature, we can never forget how fragile are the communities that we create, and this sense of vulnerability creates a certain claustrophobia. “You mean I’m going to live out the rest of my life with these people?” At some point these words go through the mind of every one of us, and it is this peculiar combination of dependence and paranoia that defines the Maine character. So, too, what makes Steve King a Maine writer is his persistent, even obsessive exploration of this claustrophobic territory.
—Burton Hatlen, from joshuamaine.com
79
THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON
1999
The woods themselves are real. If you should visit them on your vacation, bring a compass, bring good maps … and try to stay on the path.
—STEPHEN KING, “AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT,”
THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King wrote in a letter to book reviewers that accompanied galleys, was Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” without Hansel. In Grimm’s grim tale, it’s Gretel who saves the day; and in King’s short 219-page novel, it’s Trisha McFarland who saves herself. She’s on her own, and her Hansel, as it were, is Tom Gordon. A nine-year-old-girl wandering in the great and terrible wilderness for nine days and eight nights, Trisha is far from home and faces possible death.
“The world has teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted,” King writes in the first chapter, “Pregame,” and, indeed, Trisha’s world is filled with predators, with something stalking her … and it has teeth.
What helps sustain Trisha through her ordeal is an imagined Tom Gordon (who, of course, in real life, was a Major League baseball pitcher for the Red Sox from 1996 to 1999). Listening to the Red Sox games on her Sony Walkman sustains her; and in her fevered imaginings, Tom Gordon appears to come alive.
Distracted, perhaps, by the werewolves and the vampires, the monsters within and without, readers may not necessarily notice a running thread that binds all King’s fiction together: an ongoing exploration, and examination, of God. Raised in the Methodist faith, Stephen King “walked away,” as the saying goes, at an early age. Life is a mystery, as King postulates in this novel, and God is even more of a mystery—the ultimate one, because it requires faith; and without faith, we, too, like Trisha McFarland, are lost in the wilderness.
But this is a story, and like the revised version of the “Hansel and Gretel” story, this one also ends well. (I don’t think anyone would be surprised by that revelation.) But as King continues to ponder the nature of existence, in this world and in whatever world beyond when one “crosses over,” his vision has gotten darker: King’s Revival, for example, is not so much an exploration of God but of His absence.
Novelists write books as a form of internal dialogue, to think aloud, to make sense of the world, and to grapple with the mysterious on a regular basis.
In the end, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is an optimistic tale.
There’s room in the Stephen King universe for stories about the ghosts and the ghoulies, and the werewolves and the vampires, just as there’s room for courageous little girls—the Gretels of the world—who rise to the occasion and find solace by discovering the strength in themselves to persevere and overcome obstacles, no matter how seemingly insurmountable.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (New York Times, April 15,1999) wrote:
[R]eading the novel produces several satisfying moments of feverish terror where you can picture Trisha’s bones bleaching in a sunlit landscape utterly indifferent to her being.
As the narrator puts it: “The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only 9, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it.”
Thanks to King’s gruesome imagination, you as a reader feel the sharpness of those teeth.
80
THE DAY THAT CHANGED KING’S LIFE
THE ACCIDENT—JUNE 19, 1999
The imaginative person has a clearer fix on the fact of his/her fragility; the imaginative person realizes that anything can go disastrously wrong, at any time.
—STEPHEN KING, “A FORENOTE TO THE 2010 EDITION,” DANSE MACABRE
The phone call came in late in the evening from Stephen Spignesi, a good friend and pop culture writer.
“Did you hear Stephen King just died?” he asked.
I thought he was kidding, but he was not. Further conversation revealed that cyberspace was abuzz with speculation about Stephen King’s current condition, after the media reported that he had been hit by a careless driver in Maine near his summer home. As is always the case with breaking news, the rush to report supersedes accuracy.
The fact was that King had been involved in an
accident in which he was seriously injured. He was struck by a van driven by Bryan Smith, or Mr. B.S., whose driving record was blemished. Put differently, he should have had his driving license revoked years before, because he was an accident waiting to happen. But the courts in Maine saw differently and continued to let him drive, even after the evidence suggested he was a danger. His list of moving violations incontestably proved that the state of Maine is reluctant to “pull” licenses from their drivers, no matter how justified.
Smith had gone out on the road because he wanted to go to the store and get a Mars bar. Smith was driving on the highway near Center Lovell, where the Kings maintain a summer home, and Stephen King was walking on the shoulder of the road when he saw Smith’s minivan come over the hill, rapidly bearing down on him at forty-five miles per hour.
Because King has brilliantly told his harrowing tale—a real-life horror story—in “On Living: a Postscript,” I won’t repeat what he said. Instead, you should read it for yourself. But what’s important here is that he realized it was a turning point in his life; depending on what happened afterward, it would either be very bad or passably good: He could die, or he would survive after rounds of operations and physical therapy. It was a throw of the dice.
“I don’t want to die,” he wrote in his essay, “and as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright summer sky, I realize that I am actually lying in death’s doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it’s mostly out of my hands.” In point of fact, it was entirely out of his hands.
