The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

A cautionary tale about technology gone amok—think The Tommyknockers—inspired by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead zombie movie, Cell is the story of an impoverished Maine artist named Clayton Riddell who is in Boston when the Pulse hits, turning cell phone users into zombies.

  If only…

  “Stripped of social constraints, the Pulse people create a Hieronymus Bosch tableau of hellish depravity,” wrote Janet Maslin of The New York Times. “They can be found reeling, staggering, biting their own mothers or fighting over Twinkies.” (Truth is stranger than fiction: As I was writing this, a story on a local television station, WAVY 10, told about an arrest after a man in Newport News, who bit his mother in a fight, was charged with malicious wounding.) Maslin continued:

  The cell-from-hell premise gives this story an instantly powerful book. But there are times when the book threatens to become all hook and no fish. Though Cell is not unduly long, it moves slowly and somewhat repetitively along its highway of horrors. And Mr. King is in no hurry to build upon the Pulse idea after he has deployed its initial shock value.

  As King told The Paris Review:

  I came out of a hotel in New York and I saw this woman talking on her cell phone. And I thought to myself, What if she got a message over the cell phone that she couldn’t resist, and she had to kill people until somebody killed her? All the possible ramifications started bouncing around in my head like pinballs. If everybody got the same message, then everybody who had a cell phone would go crazy.

  Eli Roth, who was set to direct it for Dimensions Films but in the end did not, had a great take on how he’d handle it, in a story reposted on a Stephen King fan Web site, Lilja’s Library:

  I love that book. Such a smart take on the zombie movie. I am so psyched to do it. I think you can really do almost a cross between the Dawn of the Dead remake with a “Roland Emmerich” approach (for lack of a better reference) where you show it happening all over the world. When the pulse hits, I wanna see it hit EVERYWHERE. In restaurants, in movie theaters, at sports events, all the places that people drive you crazy when they’re talking on their cell phones. I see total Armageddon. People going crazy killing each other—everyone at once—all over the world. Cars smashing into each other, people getting stabbed, throats getting ripped out. The one thing I always wanted to see in zombie movies is the actual moment the plague hits, and not just in one spot, but everywhere. You usually get flashes of it happening around the world on news broadcasts, but you never actually get to experience it happening everywhere. Then as the phone crazies start to change and mutate, the story gets pared down to a story about human survival in the post-apocalyptic world ruled by phone crazies. I’m so excited, I wish the script was ready right now so I could start production. But it’ll get written (or at least a draft will) while I’m doing Hostel 2, and then I can go right into it. It should feel like an ultra-violent event movie.

  The movie, which at the time of writing is in postproduction, is set to come out in 2015, directed by Tod Williams. (Roth explained that he told Dimension Films’ Bob and Harvey Weinstein, “I’m not really interested in doing the film [your] way. You guys go ahead and I’m going to make my own films.”)

  Given the book’s zombie apocalypse, Cell was bound to take a few knocks. Dave Itzkoff, reviewing it for The New York Times (February 5, 2006), confuses King himself with King as writer. “They say it pays to steer clear of one’s heroes, and after reading Cell, I can honestly admit I am scared as hell about the prospect of ever crossing paths with Stephen King. Because if King regards actual human beings the same way he thinks about the characters in his latest novel, his passion for enforcing rules of etiquette would most likely place him somewhere on the spectrum between Emily Post and Vlad the Impaler.”

  Just so you get the point—or in this case, the shaft—Itzkoff adds, “In Cell, the author’s latest work of sadistic wish fulfillment, his wrath is largely directed at those little Lucifers who have cast God’s natural order into disarray by talking constantly on their cellphones (‘the devil’s intercoms,’ as one character calls them).”

  Well, you can’t win them all.

  Bookslut’s Ned Vizzini, though, sees things differently. While admitting it’s “not a hopeful book,” he explains that “[t]his is less a horror novel than one of extreme pessimism. Whatever cell phones are a stand-in for … it is here, now, and it can bite us at any time. The apocalypse takes away a lot of responsibility, and our fascination with it is in part due to our desire to escape through it; once the bombs go off, we won’t have to pay our cell phone bills anymore. King is here to remind us that when we pick an apocalypse, we had better take seriously what we’re talking about.”

  Now that’s a message we can all understand and appreciate. In other words, Cell is, like The Stand, a cautionary tale for our times. Trust me, Dave Itzkoff, Cell is not about King sublimating his anger; it’s about King sounding an alarm, if only we’ll listen.

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  LISEY’S STORY

  2006; ORIGINAL TITLE: LISEY LANDON

  That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I’d never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there’s still things that we don’t know about each other.

  —STEPHEN KING, ROLLING STONE, NOVEMBER 6, 2014

  STEPHEN KING WAS A “BAG OF BONES”

  At “Dialogue with Stephen King,” a public talk on November 3, 2006, in Beverly Hills, King recounted the inspiration for Lisey’s Story: Recuperating from the run-in with a careless driver on June 19, 1999, Stephen King, in an ICU room at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, was, as he put it, “a bag of bones.” He had dropped thirty-five pounds and now weighed 145 pounds, and it showed. His wife, Tabitha, told him, “I’m going to take this opportunity to redo your study.” (Stephen’s writing room is on the second floor of his main Bangor home.)

  When he was finally released from the hospital and sent home, he noticed the door to his study was shut.

  “I wouldn’t go in there,” Tabitha said. “It’s disturbing.”

  He refrained, but because of his insomnia, he was up at two A.M. and decided to take a look at his study.

  “I did go in there and it was disturbing because all the books were off the shelves and in cartons. The rugs had been rolled up, and the furniture taken away for reupholstering. I thought, this is what it would look like if I died. I feel like a ghost in my own study; I feel like a ghost in my own place. This is what it WILL look like when I die, because I will, and somebody will have to clean this place out, and have to go through all the papers and inventory them, and see what I’ve left behind, what’s worth keeping, and what needs to be taken to the library collection [at the University of Maine at Orono]. A light went on in my head. What if someone wanted to steal those papers, and they came in and started to bother Tabby about it? That became Lisey’s Story.”

  King cites Lisey’s Story as his personal favorite among all his works and cautions readers, despite the obvious similarities to his real life, that it shouldn’t be taken as a portrait of his marriage.

  Sam Leith of The Guardian wrote that the book “also has serious and moving things to say about the private language of marriage and the workings of grief, about relationships between siblings, about where fiction comes from and how it works.… I think Lisey’s Story stands among the best things this formidable writer has done.”

  Ron Charles of the Washington Post proclaimed:

  With Lisey’s Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he’ll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom. His new novel is an audacious meditation on the creative process and a remarkable intersection of the different strains of his talent: the sensitivity of his autobiographical essays, the insight of his critical commentary, the suspense of his short stories, and the psychological terror of his novels.…

  But what works
beautifully throughout Lisey’s Story is the rich portrait of a marriage and the complicated affection that outlives death. Who would have thought that a man who’s spent the last 30 years scaring the hell out of us would produce a novel about the kind of love that carries us through grief?

  Bestselling novelist Nora Roberts, who wrote that King had “hooked me about three decades ago” wrote that

  With Lisey’s Story, King has accomplished one more feat. He broke my heart.

  Lisey’s Story is, at its core, a love story—heart-wrenching, passionate, terrifying, and tender. It is the multi-layered and expertly crafted tale of a twenty-five year marriage, and a widow’s journey through grief, through discovery and—this is King, after all—through a nightmare scape of the ordinary and extraordinary. Through Lisey’s mind and heart, the reader is pulled into the intimacies of her marriage to bestselling novelist Scott Landon, and through her we come to know this complicated, troubled and heroic man.

  Lisey’s Story is bright and brilliant. It’s dark and desperate. While I’ll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King’s wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems.

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  BLAZE

  2007

  Blaze is likely the last Richard Bachman book to be unearthed from King’s fabled trunk. Its publication history goes back to early 1974, when William G. Thompson had gotten two manuscripts, Blaze and Second Coming (a preliminary title for ‘Salem’s Lot), for consideration as a follow-up to Carrie.

  Thompson wisely chose Second Coming, and King was well on his way to becoming a brand-name horror writer.

  As King wrote in the afterword to Different Seasons, Blaze “was a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby, planning to ransom it to the child’s rich parents … and then falls in love with the child instead.” King explained that it was something of a literary imitation of John Steinbeck’s short novel Of Mice and Men.

  Blaze (born Clayton Blaisdell Jr.) recalls John Coffey of The Green Mile; both are outsiders, large men with dreams that are doomed to fail. Failure is a central theme in both works, just as it is in Of Mice and Men, through its depiction of Lenny.

  In an introduction to The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, Joseph Henry Jackson wrote that in Of Mice and Men Steinbeck is championing

  the man-without, the dispossessed, who nevertheless cherished The Dream. But something else should be noted. Because he was the artist, Steinbeck also saw that the reasons The Dreams failed, would always fail, lay with Man himself. It would have been simpler to declare that Man’s frustrations might all be laid at the door of an evil social system.

  So it is with both Blaze and Coffey, who are tragic figures doomed to fail.

  In the summer of 1974, Stephen King and Eric Flower, then the special collections librarian at the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, discussed the possibility of Stephen King depositing his papers at his alma mater. In November 1975, Flower followed up. King, as it turned out, had gathered a large quantity of manuscripts for the collection. In 1980, King added three unpublished novels, including Blaze.

  The library’s collection is a treasure trove for King researchers that contains unpublished material, which used to include Blaze, which had gone undisturbed until 1988, when I spent a week reading it and the other two unpublished manuscripts, “The Aftermath” (a science fiction work of juvenilia) and “Sword in the Darkness” (a lengthy novel about a race riot).

  Blaze recalls the famous 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son and also Of Mice and Men. King’s fusion of the two yielded a rich novel, a tragic story about Blaze, who we know will come to a bad end.

  In an interview with Hans-Åke Lilja (posted on Lilja’s Library), Stephen King explained his thoughts about Blaze:

  I have been thinking about [Blaze] off and on for a while … I did the early books as Richard Bachman books, and this is going to be a Bachman because it came from the same time. It was written right before Carrie … the reason I’ve never done it was because it was a tearjerker of a book.

  The original dedication to Blaze, which was submitted for publication in 1973, read: “This book is for my mother, Ruth Pillsbury King.”

  The book was published in 2007, with a new foreword to explain its history. It’s an atypical novel, certainly for a King book, but even for a Bachman book. Nonetheless, the short novel enjoyed generally positive reviews. David J. Montgomery of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “By showing us the tortured life that [Blaze] has suffered since childhood, Blaze makes us feel for this poor, damaged man. We don’t excuse his crimes—it’s unlikely that anything could make us do that—but in the end, we do at least understand.”

  Once again, it’s helpful to go back to Steinbeck for context.

  In Jackson’s introduction to The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, he quotes a letter from Steinbeck to his publisher: “My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other.” Stephen King shares this impulse, which is evident in much of his work, including Blaze. “Steinbeck is always aware of mankind’s weaknesses, frustrations, failures, grotesqueries,” writes Jackson. And so is Stephen King.

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  THE HAVEN FOUNDATION:

  A PLACE FOR FREELANCE ARTISTS

  Among King’s books, Blaze is unique in one regard: All the income from the book goes to fund the Haven Foundation, which exists to provide money to freelance artists who have suffered a catastrophe, especially health-related, resulting in financial ruin.

  King, who had health insurance when he was struck by a minivan near Center Lovell, sued Commercial Union York Insurance Company for $10 million, “claiming it didn’t provide full coverage for the injuries he received,” according to the Bangor Daily News (February 13, 2001).

  ABC News reported that “Attorney Warren Silver said the $10 million insurance policy will not cover all of his client’s losses from the accident. He estimated that medical bills, future surgeries, and lost writing income as a result of the accident would add up to between $65 million and $75 million.”

  OneBeacon, which took over coverage from Commercial Union, settled for $750,000, which King donated to the hospital that treated him, Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. Both parties agreed it was best to avoid prolonged and costly litigation.

  But King, unlike most freelancers, is wealthy, and he can weather almost any financial storm. As he told Rolling Stone in an October 2014 interview, he’s debt-free, which can’t be said for most people in the country.

  It certainly wasn’t true of the late Frank Muller, a classically trained actor who turned to voice narration to make a living; he read numerous books in unabridged form for Recorded Books. On November 5, 2001, Muller was riding his motorcycle when he had a near-fatal accident, sustaining severe head trauma that required seven expensive and painful surgeries. Unlike King, though, Muller had no health insurance and wasn’t wealthy. From his Web site:

  Frank lost control of his motorcycle on the freeway when he accidentally clipped a construction barrel and was sent skidding into a median barrier at about 65 miles per hour. Frank flew off the bike, landing on his head on the concrete. He sustained multiple fractures, lacerations and abrasions, and went into cardiac arrest three times. He suffered severe head trauma, which was subsequently diagnosed as Diffuse Axonal Injury.

  His career as a reader for Recorded Books ended abruptly that day, and he never worked again. Muller, though, was fortunate to have a good friend in Stephen King, who held a benefit in 2002 to raise money to fully cover Muller’s medical bills. King, recognizing that Muller wasn’t alone, later set up the Haven Foundation: Many freelance artists are pursuing their craft on a wing and a prayer, hoping they’ll stay healthy, but when sudden illness strikes and they’re faced with debilitating medical injuries that even insurance (if indeed they have any) won’t cover in full, life becomes a matter of not only physical but financial survival.r />
  Frank Muller, though, passed away in June 2008 as a result of complications from the injuries he sustained. As King wrote on the Haven Foundation’s Web site (www.thehavenfdn.org),

  My luck was infinitely better than Muller’s, but the two events set me thinking about the uniquely perilous situation of many freelance artists. The majority of mid-list writers, audio readers, and freelancers in the book and publishing industry have little or no financial cushion in the event of a sudden catastrophic accident such as that suffered by Muller and myself.

  The foundation accepts donations. For more information about the foundation and how to donate, contact it through www.thehavenfdn.org/contact-us.

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  DUMA KEY

  2008

  There’s a charm-bracelet of keys lying off the west coast of Florida. If you had your seven-league boots on, you could step from Longboat to Lido to Siesta, from Siesta to Casey. The next step takes you to Duma Key, nine miles long and half a mile wide at its widest, between Casey Key and Don Pedro Island. Most of it’s uninhabited, a tangle of banyans, palms and Australian pines with an uneven, dune-rumpled beach running along the Gulf edge. The beach is guarded by a waist-high band of sea oats.… I know nothing about the history of Duma Key. I only knew one reached it by crossing a WPA-era drawbridge from Casey Key.

  —STEPHEN KING, DUMA KEY

  King is fond of saying that home is where you know where all the roads go. Lifelong Mainers, the Kings know where all the roads go in “Vacationland” (Maine’s state motto on its license plates), but the real Vacationland is Florida, where the climate is hospitable year-round, the pace of life relaxed, the locals are friendly, and the seafood is always fresh.