by George Beahm
In short, Dreamcatcher is a midrange book for King. It’s fun, entertaining reading, but it does show the debilitating effects of writing while taking painkillers, as well as how King persevered to pull a novel out of his imagination despite his physical and medicinal handicaps.
84
BLACK HOUSE, WITH PETER STRAUB
2001
I remember working on the end of Black House, the book I wrote with Peter Straub, and coming to a scene where one of the characters is talking about never being able to go back to this plane of existence—American life in the year 2001 or 2002—because this person would sicken and die if that happened. And I was thinking that it was an elegant way to describe where I was coming from at that time. I was in pain a lot of the time, but when I was writing, I felt fine, because I would be … wherever you go when you’re making these things up.
—STEPHEN KING, PARIS REVIEW, FALL 2006
When I think about the Dark Tower and all King’s fiction publications that tie into it, I don’t think of individual, small paintings but one large canvas that remains unfinished, because he’s always adding to it. It’s a “weaveworld,” to borrow the title of a Clive Barker novel, in which numerous threads are intricately interwoven.
Black House is another part of the large canvas known as the Dark Tower.
Black House—a sequel to The Talisman—takes Jack Sawyer on another journey. At first glance, it’s a journey set in this world, but that soon proves to be illusory. A former police detective for the LAPD, Jack comes out of retirement at the behest of a small-town police department in Wisconsin beset by a serial killer nicknamed “the Fisherman.”
What Jack finds is more than simply the work of a deranged serial killer intent on killing, and cannibalizing, children: He finds his way back into the world of the Dark Tower through the Black House, where he’s once again challenged by unimaginable and formidable forces.
Michael Collings, who admired The Talisman, puts The Black House in proper perspective, explaining that
It is not a commercially-driven sequel. It is in fact a linchpin narrative bringing together—explicitly, undeniably, and utterly—the mythic worlds King and Straub have drawn, pulling them together and knotting them at the core, providing for them, as had the original Talisman itself, a “nexus for all possible worlds.” Implicit in Black House are Straub’s signal accomplishments in novels as diverse as Ghost Story, Shadowlands, Floating Dragon, and the Blue Rose Trilogy. Black House fits seamlessly into the themes, the structures, and the styles of those books, those worlds, and expands upon them to give us a glimpse of a unity underlying Straub’s fictions. Even more explicitly—it links most of King’s major work over the past decade and looks directly forward to what may turn out to be the capstone work of his remarkable career: the completion of The Dark Tower.
Collings concludes, “For anyone interested in either King or Straub, and particularly for readers caught in the wonder of the Dark Tower, Black House is a must.”
85
THE ULTIMATE STEPHEN KING HORROR STORY: RETIREMENT?
I’m done … done writing books.”
—STEPHEN KING, LOS ANGELES TIMES
When Stephen King speaks, the media listens.
In January 2002, he told the Los Angeles Times that he was finally calling it quits after collecting the stories for Everything’s Eventual, the novel From a Buick 8, and completing the Dark Tower series:
Then, that’s it. I’m done. Done writing books.… You get to a point where you get to the edges of a room, and you can go back and go where you’ve been, and basically recycle stuff. I’ve seen it in my own work. People when they read Buick Eight are going to think Christine. It’s about a car that’s not normal, OK? You say, “I’ve said the things that I have to say, that are new and fresh and interesting to people.” Then you have a choice. You can either continue to go on, or say I left when I was still on top of my game. I left when I was still holding the ball, instead of it holding me.
In case people didn’t get the message, the cover story for the September 27, 2002, issue of Entertainment Weekly shouted it: EXCLUSIVE! STEPHEN KING CALLS IT QUITS: AMERICA’S MOST POPULAR AUTHOR TELLS US WHY HE’S WRITTEN HIS LAST BOOK.
It’s the one horror story King fans don’t want to read.
But some were properly skeptical, including his publisher at Scribner, Susan Moldow. In a phone interview with King’s hometown newspaper, she said:
That rumor is older than Methuselah, and yet he keeps writing and publishing. I’ve heard him describe a novel that I know he wants to write that isn’t a part of the Dark Tower series, and that doesn’t seem to duplicate anything he’s done before. And since he’s described it to me, it would be harsh and cruel for him to withhold it from me.
Years later, King recanted, explaining:
When I said to that lady from the LA Times I might retire, I was still recovering from the accident that I was in. I was in a lot of pain, and I was under the pressure of finishing The Dark Tower. At that point, retirement looked good. When the pain went away and The Dark Tower finished up, retirement started to look bad.
For King fans, it proved to be a false alarm.
Next time, Mr. King, how about not scaring us?
The Onion, on October 2, 2002, irreverently answered the question: “How does the King of Horror plan to spend his retirement?”
Devote more time to getting rammed by vans.
Trim front-yard hedges under alias of Richard Bachman.
Learn how to build ship in a bottle, make thousands of them.
Finally get around to cleaning out that back room where for years he’d been throwing shopping bags full of cash.
Spend more time terrifying family.
Walk slowly down basement steps, each step creaking ominously as he descends into the darkness, to grab the weed wacker.
Hit his boneless leg over and over with hammer.
Rid flower garden of woodchucks in most disturbing way possible.
Scream “No! No! Never again!” at the typewriter for six hours a day.
86
FROM A BUICK 8
2002
For just cause, Stephen King hates to fly. Back in the day when he flew commercial, sitting in the first-class section, it meant being hit on for autographs because he’s a celebrity. Later, when King leased commercial private jets out of Bangor International, he got the privacy he wanted, but on one Learjet flight, the air turbulence was so bad that King, strapped into the seat, fell to the ground when the seat was torn free; he was sitting sideways on the floor, strapped in, as the multimillion-dollar jet was shaken like a toy plane.
That hair-raising experience goes a long way toward explaining why King has a fear of flying. (In a dedication to Four Past Midnight, he wrote: “This is for Joe [King], another white-knuckle flyer.”)
He prefers to drive. And when he’s not listening to audiobooks on CD, he’s woolgathering, mentally mulling over story ideas. It’s also an opportunity for King to get off the road and plant himself on a stool at Waffle House to enjoy a cuppa coffee, a plate of waffles, and eggs with cheese. Plain food for plain folks. (He’s also known to pull into rest stops and raid the vending machines for “a typical Steve King Health Meal: a soda and a candybar,” as he wrote in his afterword to Full Dark, No Stars.)
Though King always adds extensive notes to the short fiction collections, he rarely does so for novels, on the assumption that a novel must speak for itself.
I think a lot of his readers are interested in whatever he has to say about his work, be it short or long fiction. It’s an opportunity for the author to speak his mind, to share his thoughts on a novel’s creation.
In the “Author’s Note” to From a Buick 8, King explains its genesis: “I had a truckload of furnishings, books, guitars, computer components, clothes, and paper. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania. I needed gas and got off the turnpike at a rural exit.”
He went to
the restroom to take a leak, and afterward, when checking out what was behind the station, he slipped ten feet down its steep grade, checking himself by grabbing onto a random something. Had he continued the downward slide into the creek, how long, he mused, would it have been before the attendants at the gas station noticed he was missing? “How long before they’d have found me if I had drowned?”
The story is set in Pennsylvania, which is where King took his tumble. Its texture can be attributed to the face time he spent with state troopers, who shared their war stories, which gives the novel its verisimilitude.
Drawn from a Bob Dylan song, the story centers on a 1953 Buick Roadmaster stored in a shed near the state troopers’ barracks. As with the malevolent car Christine, this Buick is also not what it seems—and on that note, I should say no more, lest I give away too much about the plot.
The point of the novel, though, is really not the mysterious car that came from places unknown. The novel, wrote Andrew O’Hehir for Salon, “is that we don’t get any answers to the Big Questions. Strange things happen, and more often than not they can’t be explained. Life ends in death, and more often than not it’s a horrible, wrenching experience (at least for those of us left behind). Where have the dead gone? We don’t know, but from here it looks dark and far away.”
The big questions, as O’Hehir said, have come to the forefront in King’s fiction. But on those, he can only speculate; like the rest of us, he cannot know.
In the end, the book is a fun, fast read and belongs right next to Christine on the bookshelf. Christine, after all, is a haunted car; and the Buick 8 in this novel is haunted, but in a different, stranger way.
“The novel,” said Publishers Weekly in its review, “isn’t major King, but it’s nearly flawless—and one terrific entertainment.”
Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride.
87
STEPHEN KING RECEIVES THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
I’d like to win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize; I’d like to have someone write a New York Times Book Review piece that says, “Hey, wait a minute, guys, we made a mistake—this guy is one of the great writers of the 20th century.” But it’s not going to happen, for two reasons. One is I’m not the greatest writer of the 20th century, and the other is that once you sell a certain number of books, the people who think about “literature” stop thinking about you and assume that any writer who is popular across a wide spectrum has nothing to say. The unspoken postulate is that intelligence is rare. It’s clear in the critical stance; I hear it in the voices of people from the literary journals where somebody will start by saying, “I don’t lower myself.” But the fact is that intelligence is fairly common. What’s rare is education—or it used to be.
—STEPHEN KING, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, JANUARY 24, 1991
NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION PRESS RELEASE
September 15, 2003
The Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation today announced that its 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters will be conferred upon Stephen King, one of the nation’s most popular, imaginative, and well-loved authors.
Mr. King has published more than 200 short stories (including the O. Henry Award-winning “The Man in the Black Suit”) and 40 books during a career spanning three decades. He has earned the reputation among readers and book lovers as a genre-defying stylist, vivid storyteller, and master of suspense.
The Medal will be presented to Mr. King on Wednesday evening, November 19, at the 54th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. Mr. King will deliver a keynote address to an audience of more than 1,000 authors, editors, publishers, friends, and supporters of books and book publishing. The evening benefits the National Book Foundation’s many educational outreach programs for readers and writers across the country.
The annual award was created in 1988 by the Foundation’s Board of Directors to celebrate an American author who has enriched the literary landscape through a lifetime of service or body of work.
The previous recipients are Jason Epstein, Daniel Boorstin, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, James Laughlin, Clifton Fadiman, Gwendolyn Brooks, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Studs Terkel, John Updike, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Miller, and Philip Roth.
In making the announcement on behalf of the Board of Directors, Neil Baldwin, executive director of the Foundation, said, “Stephen King’s writing is securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative. He crafts stylish, mind-bending page-turners that contain profound moral truths—some beautiful, some harrowing—about our inner lives. This Award commemorates Mr. King’s well-earned place of distinction in the wide world of readers and book lovers of all ages.”
Mr. King will receive $10,000 along with the Medal.
“This is probably the most exciting thing to happen to me in my career as a writer since the sale of my first book in 1973,” Mr. King said. “I’ll return the cash award to the National Book Foundation for the support of their many educational and literary outreach programs for children and youth across the country; the Medal I will keep and treasure for the rest of my life.”
88
TAKE STEPHEN KING. SERIOUSLY.
I never felt a conflict in my own soul between popular fiction and so-called literary fiction; when I sit down at the word processor, I just do what I do. I am always disappointed, however, when my work or another writer’s work is relentlessly ghettoized by people who would protest vehemently if blacks were excluded from their local country club.
—STEPHEN KING, “THE BOOK REVIEW,” AOL, NOVEMBER 1997
King driving home a point about censorship at a lecture in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
King teaching at UMO.
On one side of the bridge is popular fiction, and on the other, literary fiction, and never the twain will meet. The unbridgeability of the two is an elitist view that Stephen King adamantly rejects. In college, King was frustrated at the faculty members in the English department who had no time for popular culture, until King—an undergraduate—suggested a college course on the topic and offered to teach it. (He did so, with a front man; it was the only time at the University of Maine at Orono that an undergraduate taught a class.) Like Rodney Dangerfield, whose famous line was “I don’t get no respect,” popular fiction has always been dissed and dismissed.
As King told Publishers Weekly in January 1977, “Everyone should study [James M. Cain] in writing class, instead of the marsh gas they put out for us to admire.”
What’s admired, and celebrated, by the National Book Awards, is literature, the kind written by Shirley Hazzard, who won the award for fiction the same year King got an award for his contribution to American letters.
Hazzard, born in 1931, is clearly a card-carrying member of the literati: She’s won several notable literary awards, including a National Book Award for fiction for The Great Fire.
When asked if she had ever read a Stephen King novel, she told the Associated Press, “I just haven’t had time to get around to one.” She further explained that she’s too busy reading Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad.
It’s not likely she’ll ever find time to read a Stephen King novel; moreover, she doesn’t endorse King’s suggested list of popular culture novels. “I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction,” she said.
As Stephen King likes to say: Oh, man, who farted?
The popularity of King and his fellow bestselling writers is a sore point with the literati, who once commanded book advances disproportionately large in contrast to their net sales. In short, the literati saw pop writers as overpaid interlopers hogging the limelight in terms of media attention and book sales; morever, they contended, pop writers were inferior craftspeople when compared to their own work. But the fact remained that the bestselling books subsidized the literary books.
The inevitable sea change came when investors and their corporate bean counters weighed in, took control of the sinking publishing ships, and decided it was time for all authors to fish or cut bait. In the end, it was all about the lucrative catch—the bounty they brought in.
What most people present at the ceremony didn’t know was that King had almost killed himself to make an appearance to accept his award. Sick with pneumonia in his right lung, King spent Thanksgiving recovering at a Maine hospital. As Warren Silver, his lawyer and spokesman, explained, “He had been walking around with it, and it got worse and worse.”
King was so proud of being the recipient of an award that he had spent $60,000 for five tables for family and friends. This was his moment to shine, and he took advantage of it: He wanted to share the moment with his nearest and dearest.
The full text of King’s acceptance speech is free online (nationalbook.org). It’s also available as a downloadable audiofile from Amazon (Building Bridges: Stephen King Live at the National Book Awards). Not surprisingly, his acceptance speech is a love letter to his wife, whom he credited in large part for her role in supporting him over the years, when encouragement was sparse: Tabitha kept the faith, and kept him going when he was plagued with self-doubt and, at times, writer’s block.
Stephen King graciously ended his 2003 acceptance speech:
I want to salute all the nominees in the four categories that are up for consideration and I do; I hope you’ll find something to read that will fill you up as this evening filled me up. Thank you.
