by George Beahm
King survived his harrowing, near-death experience; and like others who have had similar experiences, he came away with four immutable truths: first, life is fragile; second, every new day is a gift, and a new lease on life; third, it’s later than you think, so it’s time to get your life in high gear and get what you want done; and fourth, you cherish the people in your life because they are your nearest and dearest, and everything else is a distant second.
By the grace of God—if you believe in Him, and King, like most Americans, wants to believe—King miraculously recovered, and in the years since, King has completed numerous books, including the Dark Tower series, putting an end to questions about when he’d ever complete it.
His other fiction, too, reflected the growing concerns of his inevitable aging. In a career known—indeed, celebrated—for fear, that old bogeyman has never left the building. What changed was only the nature of fear. Back when he was a new dad and a recent college graduate, his fears concerned not being able to provide for his family and his children getting injured.
Now King is a wealthy man, and his kids are adults and have their own kids. His fears are those of his fellow aging baby boomers, including the fear of memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. That he’d lose the ability to write because of mental incapacitation is King’s greatest fear. For him, it’d be the equivalent of a debilitating stroke for an artist, the kind suffered by the late Frank Frazetta, an athletic, healthy man for most of his life, who was forced in his last few years to learn how to draw with his left hand after losing control of his right.
Not surprisingly, King’s thoughts of death and the afterlife are increasingly the subjects of his fiction. It’s one reason why King is driven to write. He knows that at his age, he doesn’t have time to waste. In On Writing (Scribner, 2000), he expressed his exasperation of fellow writers who publish infrequently: “… I always wonder two things about these folks: how long did it take them to write the books they did write, and what did they do the rest of their time? … If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”
I am reminded of what King wrote many years ago, in an essay for Fear Itself, which still holds true today:
But the writer’s job is to write, and there are no brand names in the little room where the typewriter or the pen and notebook sit waiting. There are no stars or brand names in that place; only people who will try to create something out of nothing, and those who succeed and those who fail.
It’s not a bad life. It’s a writer’s life. It’s Stephen King’s life, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The Bonus Round” and Gallows Humor:
An Interview by Katie Couric, Dateline, November 1, 1999
In the King household, the phrase “the bonus round” is a reference to Stephen’s life after the accident. (It was inspired by the TV show Wheel of Fortune and its “bonus round” puzzle.)
Stephen King: I never shut up. I was thinking, I’d like to have an open-viewing coffin with a pull ring, so I could actually prerecord things like, “Aren’t I looking natural? Isn’t it nice that I didn’t suffer.” You know, things like that.
Tabitha King: And I tell him, “Don’t get too excited; you’re getting a coffee can. A nice, old Maxwell House coffee can.”
Katie Couric: You are all sick.
Stephen King: We joke about it because we had a close one. Nobody makes you any promises. They’re saying you have a good chance to walk again. Look, I’m really delighted not to be a quadriplegic. It’s great to be alive, and they don’t have to promise anything.
The minivan that struck him was bought by the Kings for $1,500 through his attorney, to prevent it from being sold to fans who might try to sell pieces of it as a macabre souvenir on eBay; the minivan was taken to a junkyard, crushed into a square, and likely sold for junk metal. As for Mr. B.S., he died a year later on September 21 … Stephen King’s birthday.
81
HEARTS IN ATLANTIS
1999
Stephen King was a BMOC, a big man on campus, at the University of Maine at Orono. A baby boomer who graduated in 1970, three years before the United States formally ended its involvement in Vietnam, King was an imposing figure at college. A tall man with long black hair and a beard, King manned the ramparts at student rallies and protested the ill-conceived and futile American involvement in the Vietnam War. In one yearbook photo, he’s captured in an angry pose: an arm upraised as he rallies students to get involved and denounce the war.
As every military veteran says about their experiences during wartime: You had to have been there to know what it was like. But if you were fortunate enough not to have an all-expenses-paid trip to the rice paddies of South Vietnam, count yourself lucky. (There’s been a lot of books written about the war, but if you read only one, which captured its true essence, read Dispatches, by Michael Herr.)
Stephen King never saw South Vietnam because he flunked his army physical. He had high blood pressure, flat feet, and burst eardrums, but even if he hadn’t, he would have qualified for a student deferment. Counting his lucky stars, King sat out the war, but he sure as hell let the establishment know how he felt: He and his fellow college students supported the troops, but not the freaking war.
THE LOTTERY
Back then, all males eighteen and older had to register for the draft. It was a lottery, pure and simple, a spin of the wheel of fortune that, if you were lucky, kept you stateside.
The U.S. involvement in South Vietnam ended on March 29, 1973, but the war itself dragged on for another two years, and on April 30, 1975, South Vietnam was easily overrun by the North Vietnamese. We knew then that the bitter and bloody war was lost … and it had all been for nothing.
Not counting the MIAs, which we’re still trying to account for forty years after the fact, 58,282 body bags came back, and another 303,644 troops came back wounded, their lives forever changed, and not for the better: Back then, we didn’t know enough about post-traumatic stress disorder to effectively treat it.
“We blew it.”
That line, from Easy Rider, spoken by Captain America (played by Peter Fonda) to Billy (played by Dennis Hopper), encapsulated our involvement in the Vietnam War. Tragically, it was damn true, and for that reason it became the epigraph to Hearts in Atlantis.
SURVIVOR GUILT
In “There but for Fortune,” a book review of Hearts in Atlantis in The New York Times, Caleb Crain writes:
We now know what Stephen King, the master of horror, is afraid of. In Hearts of Atlantis, King takes up the Vietnam War, and it scares him so bad he won’t let his hero act imprudently. Only the book’s minor characters enlist and serve. At the last minute, and with a touch of regret, the book’s central figure thinks better of flunking out of college in 1966. He stays enrolled, and he stays civilian. This time, instead of horror, King has written something with an emotional strategy much slower and much more diffuse. Hearts in Atlantis is a book about survivor guilt.
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL
King’s dedication for Hearts in Atlantis: “This is for Joseph and Leanora and Ethan: I told you all that to tell you this.”
Joseph (Joe Hill) is his firstborn son; Leanora is Hill’s ex-wife; and Ethan is their son. In telling the stories—two novellas, two short stories, and an epilogue—that compose this book, Stephen King has written a cautionary tale for them and other young people everywhere.
Crain, in his lengthy review, calls the book “messy.” Perhaps, but if it is, it certainly mirrors the nature of the Vietnam War itself, which stands at the dark heart of this lengthy 522-page book. It ends with a brief author’s note that includes this illuminating observation: “Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.”
These stories are not so much filtered through the war as they are permeated with it; thus the stories serve as much more than cautionary tales. They deserve to be read, and they do what fiction does best: They
make us feel human.
Coda: “Squad D”
The stories in Hearts in Atlantis, as far as most of King’s readers know, comprise the bulk of his meditations on the Vietnam War and its aftermath, but there’s another story, which serves as a coda, that remains unpublished: “Squad D,” written for Harlan Ellison’s unpublished anthology titled Last Dangerous Visions, which was originally scheduled for publication in 1973. “Squad D” is a short story that needs work, according to Harlan, who asked Stephen King for a rewrite because he thought there’s more in the story than what King delivered.
As to when we will see King’s story, no one—not even its editor, Harlan Ellison—knows: Last Dangerous Visions remains unpublished.
82
ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT AND SECRET WINDOWS:
ESSAYS AND FICTION ON THE CRAFT OF WRITING
2000; ORIGINAL TITLE OF ON WRITING: ON FICTION
Most of what writers write about their work is ill-informed bullshit.
—STEPHEN KING, FOREWORD,
THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA
WRITER’S BLOCK
“After the accident, I was totally incapable of writing,” King told Katie Couric on Dateline, in an interview that aired on November 1, 1999, adding:
At first it was as if I’d never done this in my life. It was like starting over again from square one; I mean, from like being twelve, thirteen years old. There was this one awful minute when I sat there and I thought, “I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this anymore.”
I don’t know whether it was a confidence thing or whether it was a memory thing. It took about four days to actually look at the sentences and see that they still made sense. But I thought if I didn’t go back to work, maybe I wouldn’t go back to work.
Even before Carrie was published in 1974, Stephen King was fielding questions about how to get professionally published: several of his English students at Hampden Academy asked for his advice, which he gladly gave.
In interviews, at public speeches, and in profile pieces, King has generously provided detailed information on the art and craft of writing fiction, but it wasn’t until 2000 that he published two books codifying his thoughts on the subject.
In the wake of the near-fatal minivan accident, King found himself suffering from writer’s block, for the first time in many years. At the time of his accident, he was working on On Writing. In that book, he wrote, “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.”
On Writing’s subtitle is “A Memoir of the Craft.” It is organized in four sections: The first, “C.V.” (curriculum vitae), is an autobiographical overview, with an emphasis on his writing efforts; the second, “On Writing,” explains the nuts and bolts of how to write; the third, “On Living: A Postscript,” brilliantly recounts in detail his near-fatal accident; and, last, “And Furthermore,” shows King’s editing process at work, using “The Hotel Story” as an example. The book ends with a detailed reading list.
I’ve read countless books about editing, writing, and publishing, and if I had to pick just two, I’d recommend, as does King, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White; and for a how-to manual, I’d recommend On Writing, for several reasons:
1. It’s compulsively readable and entertaining.
2. It gives you a very good sense of what a writer’s life is like.
3. The practical section is filled with time-tested advice.
4. The nonfiction essay about King’s accident is a brilliant example of how to write. (In other words, he first tells you what to do in this book, and then shows you how to do it.)
5. He provides an example of his own editing, to show you how to tighten and improve the work.
6. He provides a useful reading list—consider it enjoyable homework.
Boiled down to its essence, King’s advice is “read a lot and write a lot,” which is easy to say but a lot harder to implement. Remember, King started writing in his early teens, and even then took his craft very seriously: He learned, at age twelve, how to write a professional cover letter, how to properly format a manuscript, and how to deal with editors.
King’s cinematic style of storytelling developed early, but he honed it to a sharp edge over the years. By the time he submitted Carrie, he was an unpublished novelist but no novice: Six books had preceded Carrie, including two trunk novels, one of which was eventually published (Blaze, 2007), and four Richard Bachman books that were also subsequently published, attesting to his early mastery of storytelling skills.
If you are interested in publishing fiction professionally or want to give a young, aspiring writer a book on the subject as a starting point, On Writing is right on the mark.
SECRET WINDOWS: ESSAYS AND FICTION ON THE CRAFT OF WRITING
Taking its title from a King story (“Secret Window, Secret Garden,” in Four Past Midnight), this 431-page book from Book-of-the-Month Club is, unfortunately, out of print. BOMC has been absorbed by the Literary Guild, which has not reissued this companion book to On Writing.
The book’s introduction, by Peter Straub, was done especially for this book, and properly sets the stage for what follows.
The book, though, needed a good editor to serve up this collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces, which are haphazardly arranged, with no contextual notes.
In anthologies, the rule is that you start and end with a big bang, so with this book, I’d put “On Becoming a Brand Name” as the lead-in piece instead of King’s juvenilia and end with “An Evening with Stephen King” instead of a piece of fiction, “In the Deathroom,” which is an odd choice for this collection, and especially odd for its placement as the final piece. Moreover, it’s a weak story: King could have written a horrific piece but instead wrote one that reads more like a badly told joke, with stereotyped characters and an implausible plot hole through which one could drive a Mack truck.
Most of the pieces are readily available in King’s other books, which makes you wonder why they appear here: the lengthy introduction to Night Shift; the short story, “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” from Skeleton Crew; and the introduction to “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” from Four Past Midnight. The space would have been better utilized to reprint unpublished pieces or interviews on King talking about writing.
Perhaps the next time around—and there’s plenty of pieces yet to be reprinted—King will find a capable editor who can do a better job.
Am I saying you shouldn’t buy the book? No, I’m not. Buy it because it does have some pieces that are otherwise difficult to find, but skim the outdated pieces and give your full attention to the set pieces: “On Becoming a Brand Name” (reprinted from Fear Itself) and the two talks he gave to library groups, including a long one for his Virginia Beach fans.
I recommend the book but wish it had been more rigorously edited; as is, it seems rushed and thrown together in a hurry to meet a deadline; its contents are not carefully culled to serve up King’s choicest tidbits of writing wisdom.
83
DREAMCATCHER
2001; ORIGINAL TITLE: CANCER
In the “Afternote” to Dreamcatcher, Stephen King wrote that Tabitha used to call this novel “the one about the shit-weasels.” It’s certainly an unappealing subject, but as King told Time magazine:
I’d never really read a story about something terrible happening revolving around bathroom functions, eliminatory functions. And I wanted to do that because it just occurred to me that so much of the really terrible news we get in our lives, we get in the bathroom. Either because we discover a lump or because there’s blood in our stool or even when you look in the mirror and all at once you say, “Shit, man, I’m going bald!” All those things happen in the bathroom. Half of really scaring people is getting them in a place that’s undefended. Nobody’s as defenseless as they are in the bathroom, with their pants down.
Putting all that aside, what’s left in the end is, as The Guardian pointed out, a novel that’s “slightly heavy going, but by no means a disappointment. King retains his crown.”
But it’s not a favorite of King’s, who in 2014 told Rolling Stone, “I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much.” Written while under the influence of the painkiller Oxycontin, Dreamcatcher was the first novel he wrote after The Accident. Finding it difficult to sit up and type on his portable Mac, he wrote in longhand with a Waterman fountain pen; the ink, as well as the story, flowed out.
Recalling It, as four buddies from Derry, Maine, come together for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woods, Dreamcatcher quickly moves from the mundane to the bizarre straight out of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” But the four lifelong friends are forced to believe the impossible when things go south in a hurry, and the hunters become the hunted.
The Guardian said:
Dreamcatcher falls squarely into the baroque category, and will probably be most enjoyed by fans of The X-Files. … The first surprise is that King makes explicit reference to his accident; one of his characters is hit by a car within the first few pages. In his afterword, King explains that several elements of his physical discomfort during the time of writing followed him into the narrative, and there is a painful, nightmarish quality to much of the action.
It is a familiar device in King’s fiction to have groups of characters united by a stand they have taken together in the past. Here it was a stand for good, when they stopped a gang from bullying a child with mental difficulties. It is not until much later in the novel that the men realize exactly how this good deed has changed their lives.
