by George Beahm
Annually, during the heart of winter, Stephen and Tabitha drive down to Florida, leaving the Bangor homes with caretakers; King returns by car in the spring, followed a month later by Tabitha, who flies back.
Having lived in Florida for over a decade, the Kings know where all the roads down there go, too. Now, as sure as the sun rises over the palm trees on the Keys, King can find horror lurking even in the “Sunshine State.”
King told Gilbert Cruz of Time:
If Desperation is a book that’s full of pain and unhappiness, Duma Key is a book where there actually is hope, because I was feeling in a more hopeful place. The two books are really the polarities of my recovery from my accident. I was feeling a lot better by the time that I wrote Duma Key, and I think it shows in the book.
This time, the main character is not a writer or teacher—both occupations he knows well—but an artist, which is a departure from his norm, as King readily admits he’s no artist.1 Set on the west coast of Florida, on Duma Key, a Minnesota contractor named Edgar Freemantle barely survives an on-site accident after a crane crushes his truck. He survives, but with significant injuries: He loses his right arm and also suffers from mental maladies—memory, vision, and speech problems. Filled with rage, he contemplates suicide. His wife also divorces him, after he attacks her.
Because life is falling apart around Freemantle, he seeks help from his psychologist, Dr. Kamen, who asks him what he enjoys doing. Freemantle tells the shrink that he used to enjoy drawing, and Kamen suggests he take that up again, and so he does. Freemantle also moves to Florida, to Duma Key, to recover; he takes up brush and paint and slowly recuperates.
In King’s fiction, there are several characters with paranormal powers: Carrie is telekinetic, Johnny Smith is precognitive, and Charlie McGee is pyrokinetic. Enter Edgar Freemantle, whose power is the ability to manipulate people, places, and events through his paintings; and he does so, with devastating effect.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times starts out her review of the book noting that, given the author and the setting, Dire Things Will Happen:
Stephen King’s Duma Key ventures to an all-but-uninhabited Florida island where the shells groan at high tide, tennis balls appear unexpectedly, foliage grows ominously quickly, and at least one heron flies upside-down. Given this combination of author and setting, it’s inevitable that something terribly undead will show up before the book is over.
And it does.
In Alison Flood’s review for The Guardian, she too remains close-lipped; after all, loose lips sink ships.…
I’m not going to explain what the horror is, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But rest assured, if you’ve been burned by not-all-that-scary-when-the-evil-is-revealed Stephen King novels in the past—The Tommyknockers, Dreamcatcher, I’m looking at you—the horror “inbound on rotted sails” in Duma Key is properly terrifying. Built up too slowly as Edgar makes friends with Wireman, who looks after an old lady with secrets of her own living down the beach, it’s given me no end of the jitters. Just what I was after.… For me, it was his best book in ages and the ending, although admittedly a little drawn out, more than justifies the slow build-up.
Flood explains that King, once again, has delivered the goods as the book reaches its climax:
[I]n these scenes toward the end, King not only thickened the shadows and made things move in my peripheral vision, he kept me awake for hours afterwards while every image he’d drawn came at me out of the dark. I didn’t go to sleep til it was light outside.
So there you go: horror for the beach, and even set on a beach, just to make it even more perfect.
1 King, though, did draw a cartoon for auction to benefit the Back Alley Theatre, which sold for $225 in 1987. It showed a sun setting behind a tombstone bearing the words: “Planet Earth / Someone Hit the Wrong Button / July 11, 1992 / RIP.”
99
THE KINGS’ MAIN HOME IN FLORIDA
In Bangor, tourists and fans make privacy impossible for the city’s most famous couple, but Florida hasn’t quite been a haven, either. The Internet makes it impossible to have privacy: On YouTube, for example, there’s a fan-shot video of a leisurely drive up the main road that terminates in a roadside view of the Kings’ home near Sarasota, Florida.
I recall that even before King showed up in Sarasota, a newspaper reported the impending move and quoted one man who said that when King arrived, he’d inquire about possibly putting on a “Stephen King Film Festival” to honor King. (It never came to fruition.)
The plain facts, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune: King, in 1999, rented a condo on Longboat Key, and in 1987, he had toured the Florida house he eventually bought in 2001 for $8.9 million, a record sum for a house in that area.
The house has three bedrooms, four bathrooms, and an outdoor swimming pool. As Neil Gaiman described it, in a profile piece for The Sunday Times magazine in the United Kingdom:
Stephen King’s house, on a key in Florida near Sarasota, a strand of land on the edge of the sea lined with houses, is ugly. And not even endearingly ugly. It’s a long block of concrete and glass, like an enormous shoebox. It was built, explains Tabby, by a man who built shopping malls, out of the materials of a shopping mall. It’s like an Apple store’s idea of a McMansion, and not pretty. But once you are inside, the glass window-walls have a perfect view over the sand and the sea, and there’s a gargantuan blue metal doorway that dissolves into nothingness and stars in one corner of the garden, and inside the building there are paintings and sculptures, and, most important, there’s King’s office. It has two desks in it. A nice desk, with a view, and an unimpressive desk with a computer on it, with a battered, much sat-upon chair facing away from the window.
That’s the desk that King sits at every day, and it’s where he writes.
According to the local paper, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, King sightings are common:
He has been spotted at the movies, at his beloved Boston Red Sox spring training game both here and in Fort Myers, at concerts, at Publix and browsing at Barnes & Noble.
He even drops by independent bookstores to sign book stock.
Back in Bangor, King tools around in several vehicles, including a Mercedes. Down in Florida, though, he gets a real charge driving the family’s electric cars, including a Chevrolet Volt. And although Bangor is his main Maine haunt, Sarasota’s environs are now his home away from home, where the streets are lined with palm trees, the roads are lined with sand, the weather is perfect year-round, the breezes are always welcome, and the palm trees throw dark shadows across an idyllic landscape, because King has come to town.
Touring “Duma Key”
On the visitflorida.com Web site, we’re told that “there’s nothing more thrilling than spending a day tracking down … many of the colorful, tropical sites and settings [King] mentions” in Duma Key, which are “actual shops, restaurants and galleries located in Sarasota and on the nearby keys.”
The Web site cites several examples:
Your self-guided tour will take you from reading on the beach to reading in the Selby Library, where Freemantle [the story’s protagonist] gives a lecture in the story. Nearby, stylish Palm Avenue beckons with its high-end art galleries—though the Scoto Gallery, where Freemantle shows his work, is a King invention—and Main Street’s boutiques and restaurants.
If you’re especially interested in gourmet rations, you can follow Freemantle’s path as he forks his way through Ophelia’s on the Bay on Siesta Key and Verona, the beautiful dining room at the Ritz-Carlton (though he masks the latter with a different name). And if you’re incredibly thorough, you can cover even the must mundane mentions, such as Dan’s Fan City.
But readers of all stripes enjoy two sites for sure: the John and Mable Ringling Museum, and the out-of-the-way establishment that King mentions by way of clothing and construction: Casey Key Fish House, where the conch fritters are crunchy and the vibe ultra-casual. After supping on almond-crusted snap
per, like King’s protagonist you can don a tank top emblazoned with the eatery’s logo before you can challenge the one-lane drawbridge.
100
JUST AFTER SUNSET
2008
Look, let’s be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.
—CRITIC LESLIE FIEDLER, TO A GROUP OF POSTMODERN WRITERS
In 1978, when King published Night Shift, his first collection of short fiction, one story, “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” was singled out by John D. MacDonald because it stood in sharp contrast to the others, which are all horror stories.
In 2008, when King published Just After Sunset, we find the opposite: Only one story is a traditional horror story: “The Cat from Hell,” originally published in Cavalier magazine (March 1977).The remaining stories in Just After Sunset are more mainstream, the kind of fiction to be found in Playboy, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, which in fact is where some of the stories in this collection originally appeared.
From horror fiction to mainstream fiction, King has indeed built a bridge from pop culture to literature.
What’s interesting is that although “The Cat from Hell” is in fact a bona fide supernatural horror story, there’s another tale that recalls King’s dictum from Danse Macabre, in which he wrote, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion. So I try to terrorize the reader.… But if I find I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify. And if I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”
In “A Very Tight Place,” King does just that: he goes for the gross-out. It’s about a man who is trapped in a portable outdoor potty and has to plumb its depths. King, as a writer, likes to break new ground; he likes to go where no man has gone before, just as the protagonist does in this story, which is a harrowing reading experience for claustrophobes, germophobes, and especially coprophobes. It’s a crappy story, if you get my drift, though you’ll have to read the story for yourself to see what I mean.
The other stories in this collection, though, are thankfully devoid of fecal matter.
Not surprisingly, two deal with death. (There’s a reason why the book’s epigraph quotes from Arthur Machen’s classic story “The Great God Pan.” King has cited it several times in his books, most significantly in Revival, because of its impact on him.)
In the hardback edition published in the U.S., one will find a DVD sealed and bound in a paper sleeve. The DVD contains a visual version in comic book format of a story intriguingly titled “N.” In the liner notes, King writes: “When the idea was pitched to me, I said okay at once, not because I was sure it would work but because new delivery systems interest me and turn my engines … although not as much as the core story, which remains the basis for everything.”
Charles Taylor, in his review for The New York Times, says the collection is “uneven … in both tone and execution, and it often reminds you of how King’s writing has moved beyond its genre roots.”
Had King stayed exclusively within the genre, his career would have suffered the same fate as the others who were rooted in place: He would have seen his readership move on when their taste for horror abated. But King broke new ground, and his faithful readers followed.
I could name scores of horror writers who rushed to fill the void when The Shining came out. Hoping to score sales off of King, their book titles sounded similar, as he noted: “I won’t mention any by name. But I see a lot of books that must have been inspired by some of the stuff I’m doing. For one thing, those ‘horror’ novels that have gerund endings are just everywhere: The Piercing, The Burning, The Searing—the this-ing and the that-ing.”
Even when King was twenty-five years old and writing short fiction for Cavalier, he gave a good bang for the buck; he never cheated the reader, never took the easy way out, never pandered. In Night Shift, with the exception of one story told in epistolary form, all the stories were optioned for motion pictures and several were made, from the sublime (a “dollar baby” by Frank Darabont, The Woman in the Room) to the ridiculous (Children of the Corn and Lawnmower Man).
This collection, though admittedly uneven, is still impressive. As Taylor pointed out in his review:
So let’s be clear. King isn’t good because he’s popular. But any critic who puts King’s popularity down to the dreadful taste of the masses (cue Harold Bloom) has failed to do the basic work of a critic, which is to understand and probe and not simply to judge. King gets to readers because he renders everyday life so exactly and because he understands it is always ready to rupture.
Taylor falls short of saying King is a literary writer, but NPR’s Lizzie Skurnick makes no bones about her assessment of King’s work: “After years of advocacy from fans and critics, several appearances in the New Yorker, and the 2000 publication of his marvelous On Writing, it is now generally agreed that Stephen King is as ‘literary’ as any moody Whiting-award nominee.”
In his review of Just After Sunset, Matt Thorne of The Independent sees only two clunkers in the collection, arguing that “the other 11 stories in this collection are all brilliant and, taken as a whole, this is King’s finest book of short fiction since 1985’s Skeleton Crew.”
The Story Behind “The Cat from Hell”
I came across this marvelous photo of a cat’s face (from UPI, I believe) and half of it was black and the other half white. And it looked very intriguing. I thought up the idea of a short story contest to be based just on that photo. Then I thought how much more interesting it would be if Stephen would write just a short beginning to the story to kick off the contest and writers would then expand on it. So, I sent the photo off to Stephen and he wrote back shortly after, enclosing a complete short story titled “The Cat from Hell.”
“I can’t write part of a story,” he explained. “That would be like having half a baby. So, take part of the story for your contest and then perhaps you’d like to publish my story in its entirety later on as a comparison with your contest winners, or do whatever you wish with it.” Which is what happened: We published the winning story, which was very good, and then the next month we published “The Cat from Hell” in its entirety.
—Nye Willden
101
UNDER THE DOME
2009
The dome is a microcosm of life. We all live under the dome. We live on this little blue planet and so far as we know that’s all we’ve got. The resources that we’ve got are the resources that we’ve got; they’re finite.
—STEPHEN KING, THE TELEGRAPH, 19 AUGUST 2013
The genesis of this 1,072-page novel goes back to 1976. King tells us in his “Author’s Note” that he wrote seventy-five pages before abandoning it. In a Simon and Schuster video interview, King explains that in 1979 it was The Cannibals. “It was great to work on a big canvas again,” he explained. As he told The Telegraph:
It was a time around when gas prices started to shoot up and OPEC decided they were the tail that wags the dog. Then came Chernobyl and concerns about pollution and global warming. For the first time, people started to ask: “What are we doing to our planet?” I thought, why not put all these people under a glass dome and see what happens to them?
As King told The Telegraph, he thought about it more, which prompted more questions. “What if you have someone in power who is making bad decisions and you can’t get out? What if you have diminishing resources, diminishing propane, diminishing gasoline, diminishing food, water, medicine?”
He revisited the story on November 22, 2007, and completed it on March 14, 2009, as noted in the book.
Like the residents of Little Tall Island, who are held hostage by a freak blizzard, the residents of Chester’s Mill are imprisoned—this time, by a translucent dome that encapsulates the town, sealing it off from the rest of the world. The inversion of normality brings out the best in some people, and in others, like Chester’s Mill’s James “Big Jim” Rennie, the worst.
When its police chief is killed, Bi
g Jim, who runs a used-car lot, steps up to assume command as the town’s second selectman. One of his first tasks is to appoint a new police chief, Peter Randolph, who is clearly incompetent. He then deputizes others, including his son, as he lays down the law, and the situation soon becomes—as Big Jim would say—a “clustermug.” (It’s a polite variation of a popular, albeit obscene, military expression.)
As Stephen King explained to The New York Times:
I was angry about incompetency.… Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people.… I want to use the Bush-Cheney dynamic for the people who are the leaders of this town. As a result, you have Big Jim Rennie, the villain of the piece. I got to like the other guy, Andy Sanders. He wasn’t actively evil, he was just incompetent—which is how I always felt about George W. Bush.
The good guys are led by a former army lieutenant, who is recalled to active duty and received a “jump-step” promotion to full colonel. Major, maybe, but full bird? No. But the authorities feel that law and order under the Dome, which is quickly descending into lawlessness and disorder, is best restored by a military veteran who needs the gravitas of high rank, because they feel Big Jim is simply rank.
Just as Mrs. Carmody and her disciples unite against David Drayton and his followers in “The Mist,” the warring factions in Under the Dome split between Big Jim and Dale “Barbie” Barbara.
As the drama unfolds, the body count escalates. A town of more than a thousand people suddenly dwindles dramatically as life grows progressively worse.
