by George Beahm
But everything’s not jake. Dying of lung cancer, Al lets Jake in on his big secret and enlists him in his lifelong quest: to go back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. As Al tells Jake: “You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live.”
History is changed, but not the way Al and Jake had foreseen: He discovers the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Father Time, who is dead set in his ways, doesn’t like to see his timeline manipulated.
What binds this braided novel together is a love story that remains intact despite time’s passage. It’s Jake’s love for Sadie Dunhill that motivates him to go back in the past to change history and save her from an untimely fate.
Early on, when he first meets her, he’s torn between accomplishing his mission or abandoning it for her, so they can live out the remainder of their lives together. It recalls the classic setup posed by Harlan Ellison in the Star Trek television episode he wrote, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Captain Kirk must choose between letting history run its course and letting the woman he loves die … or rescuing her and, in doing so, irrevocably altering the future, clearly not for the better.
Errol Morris, in the The New York Times Book Review, called King’s novel “a meditation on memory, love, loss, free will and necessity.… It all adds up to one of the best time-travel stories since H. G. Wells.”
In Janet Maslin’s review, also in The New York Times, she wrote:
The pages of 11/22/63 fly by, filled with immediacy, pathos and suspense. It takes great brazenness to go anywhere near this subject matter. But it takes great skill to make this story even remotely credible. Mr. King makes it all look easy, which is surely his book’s fanciest trick.
Don Oldenburg, in USA Today, enthusiastically wrote, “It is not typical Stephen King. It is extraordinary Stephen King.”
Notably, Jeff Greenfield (Washington Post) reiterates in his review and echoes Leslie Fiedler’s prescient comment that “his work suggests that if a time traveler found a portal to the 22nd century and looked for authors of today still being read tomorrow, Stephen King would be one of them.”
11/22/63 is the work of a mature writer at the height of his powers. As Mark Lawson of the British newspaper The Guardian wrote, “In these books, the reader feels the benefit of 40 years of narrative craftsmanship and reflection on his nation’s history. Going backwards proves to be another step forward for the most remarkable storyteller in modern American literature.”
“Q&A: Russell Dorr, Stephen King’s Researcher”
Interviewed by Stephanie Klose
Library Journal (December 4, 2013)
Library Journal: How did you start working with Stephen King?
Russell Dorr: Thirty-five years ago, I was in practice in Maine, and Steve came in with food poisoning. He’d listed “author” as his occupation on the form, so I asked him what he wrote.
He said he wrote a book called Carrie, and I asked him what it was about. He said it’s about a young girl who sets things and people on fire. And I said, oh, that’s nice. Have you written anything else? And he said he had a book called ’Salem’s Lot coming out the next week that was about vampires invading a small Maine town.
We were both young, and we’d run into each other around town and got to be friendly. I was working on a master’s degree and asked him to come talk to my class, then he asked me to help him. He was working on a book about a virus that was going to kill off 98 percent of the world’s population—would I read it? I was taking three courses and it was 1,500 pages long! I didn’t have time, but I told him I’d sit down and help him craft the virus and figure out how it would morph over time.
Then I started reading whole books. Back then, he’d hand me a typewritten manuscript. I’d read it and put in changes for the medical stuff. I can’t even remember all the books. I didn’t touch every book, but I did work on most of them.
I’ve morphed from being a medical consultant to being his research associate. For Under the Dome, he approached me ahead of time with an idea for a story—a small Maine town that would be sealed off for months—and asked me to think of all the ramifications … food sources, energy, medical issues. He’d send me 50 pages at a time as he wrote, I’d give notes, then he’d send the rewrites to me. And he’d have questions on the fly: How do you build a nuclear warhead? What’s the most corrosive acid?
With 11/22/63, he had this idea about going back in time, so I started doing research six months before he started writing. I had a huge three-ring binder that was as big as the book. Since it was historical fiction, I had time lines for [Lee Harvey] Oswald’s locations and so on. It was a lot of work but also a lot of fun.
Library Journal: What research methods do you use?
Russell Door: A bunch of sources. I use reference books at the library. The Internet is very good, but like in All the President’s Men, I make sure I have three independent sources. Not everything is true out there.
And I have people I can contact. In Under the Dome, there’s a scene where a cruise missile [is] aimed at the Dome. It’s going to be released from a B-52. So I called a retired air force colonel who had flown B-52s to find out where they keep the planes, how long it would take to get one, that sort of thing.
Library Journal: What is the most difficult research question King has asked you?
He wanted to know where this fellow General Walker had lived in the Dallas area. He was the first person Oswald had tried to assassinate. I spent three or four days researching. I couldn’t sleep at night. I just could not find him. It wasn’t essential to the story. If I couldn’t find the address, it would be okay, but I really wanted to get it.
Luckily, my partner, who’s in real estate, has access to websites with old tax records. I finally found the address on a tax receipt from 1963.
Library Journal: What’s the most disgusting thing he’s ever asked you to research?
The most disgusting thing was how to make [methamphetamine]. It’s a side story in Under the Dome. There’s a character who was cooking crystal meth. I told him I had a problem with it, but he said we weren’t going to make it a cookbook, he just wanted to make sure we got the ingredients right, that kind of thing. I’m just not into drugs. That really turned me off.
Also, I thought Pet Sematary was just a horrible story about child death. I told him he shouldn’t publish it. He laughed when I said it, but that was a really tough story.
Library Journal: What can you tell us about Doctor Sleep? [note: his answer contains spoilers]
Russell Dorr: His books are sort of like a seven-layer dip. There’s plenty there for the fanatic who likes his scary stuff and gore. But you also have a story about a struggling recovering alcoholic. The main character [Danny Torrance, who was a little boy in The Shining] works in a hospice. There are these creatures, the Tribe, who kill children who have “shining” powers. They capture the dying breath and store it in a sort of steam. They live for centuries by breathing the steam. One of the children they kill is sick with the measles, and it’s the measles that ends up killing the Tribe.
It’s pretty well known how the measles virus affects the body, but we had to figure out how it would affect these creature-people and morph inside their bodies and how to make it plausible. He weaves this stuff into a tapestry that people will believe and care about.
Library Journal: You have such an intimate look at his upcoming releases. Do you have to sign nondisclosure agreements for the books you work on?
Russell Dorr: No, of course not! This is Maine, not New York City.
Library Journal: Is there anything you’d like people to know about Stephen King?
He’s a very regular guy. We’ve been buddies for years. His wife called the day after his accident [in 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and suffered extensive injuries to his legs and hips] and we spent three weeks together. He was a huge help to me when my wife was dying of cancer. He’s a
very nice guy.
1 When commuting to high school in nearby Lisbon Falls, Maine, King and the other kids in Durham were ferried by a converted hearse, and not a school bus. In his case, it seems apropo.
105
THE DARK MAN
2013
The Dark Man portfolio
Randall Flagg came to me when I wrote a poem called “The Dark Man” when I was a junior or senior in college. It came to me out of nowhere, this guy in cowboy boots who moved around on the roads, mostly hitchhiking at night, always wore jeans and a denim jacket. I wrote the poem in the college restaurant on the back of a placemat, but that guy never left my mind.
—STEPHEN KING, THE DARK MAN BOOK JACKET
If there’s one dark figure whom King readers know well, it’s the Dark Man, who goes by several nicknames: the Walkin’ Dude, the Hard Case, the Ageless Stranger, the Man in Black. No matter what you call him, he’s the ultimate badass, who, as King noted, “came to me out of nowhere.” He made his first appearance in a 1969 poem published in the University of Maine at Orono’s literary magazine, Moth. He’s also shown up, significantly, in The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon (as the King’s trusted advisor), and the Dark Tower story cycle.
The poem, which appears in book form for the first time in the Cemetery Dance edition (2013), shows a side of King most people are unaware of: he studied and wrote poetry during college.
But the Dark Man’s omnipresence visually in this Cemetery Dance book is special because Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne parsed every line of King’s original poem to extract every possible image, resulting in a book in which the poem serves the art, with one illustration per page. (Glenn followed it up with a phone-book-sized portfolio crammed with even more art.)
The 88-page book is among my favorites of the ones Glenn has illustrated, because it’s obvious that he poured his heart and soul into it. The color art for the dust jacket features a moonlit night with a dark man in the foreground, walking to a ramshackle house.
So, who’s Glenn Chadbourne?
For starters, he’s a lifelong Mainer. “I live in Damariscotta, which is an hour north of Portland. It’s one of those little picture-postcard kind of towns, with lighthouses, the ocean, rocky coast, etc.”
He’s also a full-time artist, best known for his connection to Stephen King through numerous Cemetery Dance projects, including two anthologies (The Secretary of Dreams and Full Dark, No Stars, in two volumes). He also provided the logo for the Kings’ Haven Foundation and the PS Publishing edition of Carrie.
His favorite assignment, though, was illustrating The Dark Man, which he described as
an absolute dream gig. It’s probably my favorite Stephen King gig to date, because they gave me carte blanche to go wild on it. I had this short, creepy poem to go by and we figured eighty or so pages to play with, so I got to use every drop of imagination to build this eerie nasty atmosphere that creeps along to a climax. I loved every second of dreaming up a real desolate feel. I kept thinking of Rust Belt towns on the fringes of things … and a sort of sultry lonely southern gothic thing at the same time. Hopefully I pulled off a decent job; if I did, it was channeled from the Dark Man himself.
Glenn Chadbourne: An Interview by George Beahm
George Beahm: As someone who has lived in Maine his entire life (“not yet,” I can hear you say), do you feel a special affinity toward King’s work because he’s a Maine writer, and because he writes horror/suspense fiction?
Glenn Chadbourne: Well, I’d have to say yes to both reasons. Maine is a unique place with a unique atmosphere, especially once you get off the beaten picture-postcard-touristy track. Though if Steve had lived in Ohio and set his backdrops in Cleveland, I’d still love the stories equally as much. It’s fun to live around here and read books that take place in fictitious settings while being surrounded by real towns that exist. There’s a cool creepy factor to that for [those of us] who live a stone’s throw from ’Salem’s Lot! I often tell PFA (people from away) who ask about Stephen’s stories that he’s put us on the map as the Transylvania of America.
GB: What are some of your favorite King books or stories?
Glenn Chadbourne: They all speak to me on some level, because you’re inside the character’s heads and worlds and you can relate more often than not to situations in the books. You feel for the characters. It goes back to the “Maine” thing for me. My old gramma could have been cast in either Dolores Claiborne or the great short story “The Reach.”
Glenn Chadbourne
But I guess I’d have to say ’Salem’s Lot because it creeped the bejesus out of me and still holds up. I recently listened to it on my Kindle, not having read it in eons. I also just chewed through Revival, and that left me speechless with dread. It’s a bleak book that jolted me and shows Steve has plenty of dark mojo left for the gut-wrenching stuff. I could go on and on, but as far as favorites, I think of them more along the lines of a yummy buffet featuring any amount of tasty dishes to munch on, each with its own special flavor.
GB: What would be your dream Stephen King project? That is, what would you absolutely love to illustrate, if the opportunity came up?
Glenn Chadbourne: “The Mist.” I love to draw creepy crawlers!
GB: Have you ever met King?
Glenn Chadbourne: In all the years I’ve been lucky enough to illustrate different things for him, I’ve yet to meet him. I know and deal with his personal assistant, Marsha DeFilippo, with different gigs when they arise, and she’s a real sweetheart. I’ve received e-mail kudos from him over the years, and that’s always nice, and I go up to the office from time to time, but he’s never been around on any visits I’ve made.
GB: How much work have you done for Cemetery Dance?
Glenn Chadbourne: Oodles. The CD staff are among my favorite people on the planet, and I owe them a lot!
106
JOYLAND
2013
The major job is still to entertain people. Joyland really took off for me when the old guy who owns the place says, “Never forget, we sell fun.” That’s what we’re supposed to do—writers, filmmakers, all of us. That’s why they let us stay in the playground.
—STEPHEN KING, INTERVIEW, PARADE MAGAZINE, 2013
Sometimes the best thing about falling in love is falling out of love, because it means you can get on with your life, no matter how long it takes. Sometimes, though, even a lifetime isn’t enough.
In Joyland, a sixty-one-year-old man looks back at a time when he was twenty-one and reflects on life’s sweet and sour notes. The sweet: growing closer to a girl named Wendy Keegan, whom he loves. And the sour: growing apart from her, when she no longer loves him.
Joyland, as book reviewers have pointed out, is more a coming-of-age story than it is a crime/suspense novel, which no doubt surprised some readers who were expecting the latter. Published by Hard Case Crime, a line of hard-boiled crime fiction, Joyland’s ad copy suggests that its crime/suspense and supernatural elements overshadow the story’s personal and poignant aspects, but that’s not the case: If you can enjoy a simple story of a young man in love, you’ll find much to like in this short novel. But if you’re looking for spookier fare, you may be crestfallen: “The mystery,” wrote Darren Franich for Entertainment Weekly, “isn’t too mysterious. The ghost hardly appears. Not that much happens, really.”
Cover to Joyland
From the book: “That fall was the most beautiful of my life,” Devin Jones recalls. “And I was never so unhappy. I can say that, too.”
Devin’s situation recalls King’s relationship with a college girlfriend that also soured. As he told Winter in Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, “I had lost my girlfriend of four years, and [Sword in the Darkness] seemed to be constantly, ceaselessly pawing over that relationship and trying to make some sense of it. And that doesn’t make for good fiction.”
In Joyland, King perhaps went back for one last time to achieve closure. “I’m in my sixties now,” says Devin Jones,
“my hair is gray and I’m a prostate cancer survivor, but I still want to know why I wasn’t good enough for Wendy Keegan.”
Unlike Stephen King, who met Tabitha Spruce in his senior year of college and wound up marrying her—a relationship that has stood the test of time—Devin, a lost boy turned old man, is forever haunted by Wendy—a long-lost love. “I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles,” recalls Devin.
THE STORY’S ORIGIN
In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (May 28, 2013), Stephen King explained that the story’s origin began with an image of a wheelchair-bound boy flying a kite on a beach. “It wanted to be a story, but it wasn’t a story,” he told her.
But the story grew, as it often does with King, and centers on an amusement park called Joyland, based on a real park in New Hampshire. And on its fringes is a mother named Annie, whose son, Mike, suffers from muscular dystrophy. Wheelchair-bound, Mike’s simple wish is to fly a kite on the beach near Joyland.
THE PUBLISHER
King chose to go, once again, to Hard Case Crime because it brought back old memories of when he was a kid growing up in rural Maine. “We lived way out in the country,” he told Gross, “and my mother would go shopping once a week … to the Red and White or the A&P to pick up her groceries. And I would immediately beat feet to Robert’s Drugstore, where they had a couple of those wire [spinner] racks with the hard-boiled paperbacks that usually featured a girl with scanty clothing on the front.”
