by George Beahm
No, King is not sufficiently elevated, not sufficiently elegant, not sufficiently a part of the teachers’ own university backgrounds—implying that they might actually have to read him and study him themselves in order to lecture to classes—that he is simply inappropriate as the subject for a research project. And to prove their point, they pound the final nail into the coffin of any would-be term paperist: There’s just not enough criticism written about him to make the effort worthwhile.
Again and again I have heard this comment and am stunned by the ignorance it betrays. Certainly for many science-fiction, fantasy, and horror writers, the claim is accurate. Even some of the finest writers in the genres have been ignored by traditional critics and scholars, to the point that accurate bibliographies are not even available for many, if not most. In spite of the valiant efforts of publishers like the late Ted Dikty of Starmont House and his series editor, Roger Schlobin, who between them saw the publication of several dozen introductory monographs, or Rob Reginald at Borgo Press, with his continuing series of definitive bibliographies—in spite of the work of dozens of scholars and critics approaching such monumental tasks as the lifeworks of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and others almost as prolific and as central to our reading heritage—in spite of all this effort, it is still too easy for teachers to issue lists of termpaper topics that ignore some of the most popular and influential writers of our times.
But to make that claim for Stephen King?
I glance at the bookshelf and see the three-inch-thick manuscript that represents my work on a Stephen King bibliography, and I wonder.1 Woefully out of date since its completion in 1991, the manuscript nevertheless includes over three thousand items, both primary and secondary, including titles of several dozen books exclusively about King (a number of them from prestigious university presses), more dozens of articles in scholarly and popular journals and magazines, and hundreds of reviews ranging from the New York Times Book Review to localized fan presses—but this is not enough to allow students sufficient exercise in the fine and ancient art of literary research.
Granted, not all of the criticism and scholarship available on King is first class. I think of one article that discovers Vietnam allegories in a King story, when King himself has stated publicly that he sees (or intended) no such sub-text himself. Or another critic who, after publishing three very expensive specialty editions of interviews and criticism, notes that he considers King little more than a literary hack (although presumably a source of no little income).
Nevertheless, it seems important to recognize that much of the criticism is solid and, more important yet, that horror writers are an intrinsic and essential part of understanding late-twentieth-century American culture. Writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Dan Simmons, and others have written works that transcend narrow genre classifications, that have grappled with the fundamental social problems we face today, and have explored them through the metaphor of the monstrous and the horrific—as if AIDS, molestation, homelessness, and -isms of various sorts were not already monstrous and horrific enough. These writers have described us in the clearest and broadest of terms—not pessimistically or nihilistically but often with an undercurrent of true hope. On the surface, their images may be frightening, but then so is our world. The “premillennial cotillion” that Koontz depicts graphically in Dragon Tears is not just a figment of his imagination. The worldwide plague that wipes out most of humanity in King’s The Stand is only a few degrees beyond the plagues—diseases, social unrest, political threats—that we presently face. The fictional disintegration of society in McCammon’s Swan Song or Mine or Stinger reflects the real disintegrations we see around us. Their unique visions of what it is to live here, to live now, is captured in these and other novels and stories in ways that no alternative form can legitimately duplicate.
And our children read those novels and stories.
Our children see the world in terms of the visions these novels and stories create.
Our children need to understand more completely what it is that these writers are struggling to achieve.
1 Published as Horror Plum’d: International Stephen King Bibliography and Guide, 1960–2000.
122
STEVE’S TAKE:
AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN KING
BY TONY MAGISTRALE
MAY 21, 2002
Tony Magistrale, who has written extensively about Stephen King’s works, teaches in the English department at the University of Vermont, in Burlington. He’s also a friend of King’s and was the university’s liaison when King came to lecture and refused to accept Magistrale’s proffered check, stating that the university should use the money to buy books instead.
Interviewed by the media extensively, King’s hundreds of profile pieces and interviews vary widely in terms of quality. To my mind, three interviews stand out, for various reasons: Eric Norden’s, in Playboy (June 1983), which covers his early years in detail, which I reprinted in The Stephen King Companion (Andrews and McMeel, 1989); Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Nathaniel Rich’s, in The Paris Review (fall 2006), which is readily available online; and this interview, conducted by Dr. Magistrale, which was originally published in his book, Hollywood’s Stephen King (Palgrave Macmillan).
Of the three, Magistrale’s is unique because the questions are not posed by a journalist but, instead, by an academic who has also read King’s large body of work and viewed the films adapted from that work. Consequently, he asks probing questions that elicit thoughtful responses from King, who typically answers the same questions from journalists who haven’t done their homework: Is horror all you write? Was there a childhood incident that scared you so badly you started writing horror fiction? What scares you?
Oh, please, give me a break.
Magistrale’s interview, which follows, is insightful. His questions, and King’s answers, reveal two keen minds, sometimes sparring but more often agreeing on major points. The discussion is organic; the conversation interactive and, for the reader, thought-provoking.
Though conducted in 2002, a time when King published From a Buick 8, Black House, and Everything’s Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales, Magistrale’s interview more than holds its own, and it offers much food for thought to King’s readers, who want (to use a metaphor from The Wizard of Oz) to see the man behind the curtain.
Kevin Quigley in front of the Kings’ main house in Bangor.
A “No Trepassing” sign on the King property.
Penney and Stuart Tinker of SK Tours of Maine.
A bat guards the front gate to the Kings’ main house.
Built in 1871–1873 and bought by the Kings in 2007, the Charles P. Brown house is next door to their main home in Bangor.
New England’s northern tier consists of scattered towns, rolling meadows, impenetrable woods and bogs. This is Stephen King’s country. Lancaster, New Hampshire, or Skowhegan, Maine, could seamlessly be transformed into the sets for movie remakes of ’Salem’s Lot, It, or Stand by Me.
Fewer cars pass me now, mostly trucks, many of them hauling loads of timber and heating oil. This is a land where winter never really loosens its hold on the imagination, even late in May. There are also fewer radio stations, especially as I ascend into the mountains. Long stretches of static are occasionally punctuated by country music and heavy metal. I have lost all contact with classical music.
The first road sign that points the way to Bangor, Maine, appears incongruously at the Vermont–New Hampshire state border. Immediately following it is another sign welcoming travelers to New Hampshire and the Great North Woods, and then, one more sign, as if as an afterthought, “Brake for Moose—It Could Save Your Life.” About this point it occurs to me that Dracula’s Jonathan Harker and I share some things in common: We are both traveling east through rugged mountains on a strange journey that may prove to be as terrifying as it is beautiful.
Bangor is a small town. Like most New England places, it is difficult to know; it
keeps its secrets to itself. On one hand, there is the Bangor of charming downtown boutiques and quaint canals cut through solid blocks of granite. The Bangor Opera House on Main Street is the epicenter of town. But there is also Bangor the blue-collar city. A downtown that—except for the teenagers assembled in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts—is completely deserted at ten o’clock on a Friday night. A place of abandoned factories and concrete oil storage tanks that appears to have more in common with Baltimore or Buffalo than with its upscale coastal cousins, Kennebunkport and Portland. At dinner my first night in town, the waiter, a Bangor native, informs me that the population of his city is 35,000 “and shrinking. We’re at the end of the line here.”
Stephen King lives on unequivocally the most elegant street in Bangor, composed of large, rambling houses that once belonged to nineteenth-century timber barons. King’s house is the largest and most rambling one on the block, a restored Victorian mansion that is ten times as long as it is wide. Yellow surveillance cameras hang from underneath the wide eaves of the structure’s first floor, like the suspended nests of giant bees. Lovely landscaping that is now in full bloom graces the front yard. A high black iron gate, similar to what might be found along the perimeters of a cemetery, demarcates King’s property lines. The message is clear: This is a well-tended, lovely place, but don’t bother ringing the doorbell unless you have an invite.
Stephen King’s business office is located on the other side of Bangor, behind an airport runway of the Bangor International Airport and next door to a towering blue General Electric power plant. In a one-floor nondescript, prefabricated concrete building—resembling more a barracks than an office—off to the right of a dead-end street overgrown with weeds pushing through cracked asphalt, America’s Storyteller conducts his daily affairs.
The contrast between King’s office and home is stunning, but also instructively symbolic. The Victorian mansion is heir to King’s own Horatio Alger–like achievement of the American dream. It is a monument to his enormous literary, cinematic, and financial success. His unassuming office, however, speaks to King’s working-class origins and ethics. It is a comfortable but unpretentious space where the humble heroes and heroines who populate his narratives—the Dolores Claibornes and Stu Redmans and Johnny Smiths—would likely feel very much at home.
Road signs outside Bangor, pointing to Bar Harbor, Brewer, and downtown Bangor.
The Thomas Hill Standpipe in Bangor.
Magistrale: I spent most of this morning in downtown Bangor, just walking around. There were a couple of moments down there when I could have sworn I saw a clown, but I might have imagined that. Can you tell me something about the role Bangor has played over the years in helping you to visualize settings for novels and screenplays?
Stephen King: We moved here in 1979. At that time, when we decided the kids would be needing more contact with other kids rather than just the woods—we had been living down in Lovell—we had two choices: There was Portland and there was Bangor. Tabby wanted to go to Portland, and I wanted to go to Bangor because I thought that Bangor was a hard-ass, working-class town—there’s no such thing as nouvelle cuisine once you are north of Freeport—and I thought that the story, the big story that I wanted to write, was here. I had something fixed in my mind about bringing together all my thoughts on monsters and the children’s tale, “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” and I didn’t want it to be in Portland because Portland is a kind of yuppie town. There had been a story in the newspaper about the time we decided to move up here about a young man who came out of the Jaguar Tavern during the Bangor Fair. He was gay and some guys got to joking with him. Then the joking got out of hand, and they threw him over the bridge and killed him. And I thought, that’s what I want to write about. Tabby did not really want to come here, but eventually we did.
Before I started writing It, I did just what you did today: I walked all over town, I asked everybody for stories about places that caught my attention. I knew that a lot of the stories weren’t true, but I didn’t care. The ones that really sparked my imagination were the myths. Somebody told me something that I still don’t know if it is true or not. Apparently, you can put a canoe down into the sewers just over across from here at the Westgate Mall and you can come out by the Mount Hope cemetery at the other end of town. It’s one of the stories that you say to yourself, if it isn’t true, it ought to be. I like very much the idea of a Plutonian canoe race. This same guy told me that the Bangor sewer system was built during the WPA and they lost track of what they were building under there. They had money from the federal government for sewers, so they built like crazy. A lot of the blueprints have now been lost, and it’s easy to get lost down there. I decided I wanted to put all that into a book and eventually I did. But there was one image that remained with me through all this. Whenever I would walk through the two beautifully kept cemeteries that are on this side of town, where the ground slopes down into the woods I would notice these four-foot-deep drifts of dead flowers. This is stuff that came off the individual graves and washed down into the gully, and I thought to myself, This is the truth of the dead, this is where the dead end up. This is what we don’t see aboveground.
Eventually, at least in the geography of my mind, Bangor became Derry. There is a Bangor in Ireland, located in the county of Derry, so I changed the name of the fictional town to Derry. There is a one-to-one correlation between Bangor and Derry. It’s a place that I keep coming back to, even as recently as the novel Insomnia. And the same is true of Castle Rock. There was a piece that appeared last week in the Sunday Telegram called “Stephen King’s Maine.” The writers said that Castle Rock was really Lisbon Falls, which is where I went to high school, but it’s not. Castle Rock is a lot more fictionalized than Derry. Derry is Bangor.
Magistrale: There are also the civic landmarks that you have appropriated, such as the Paul Bunyan statue and the Standpipe water tower.
Stephen King: And don’t forget the Bangor Auditorium, which is called the Derry Auditorium in the books. It figures very large in Insomnia, where a guy turns a plane into a missile and tries to kill everybody inside.
Magistrale: Before we get much further into this interview, I’d like to tell you something about the scope of the book I am writing.1 It’s divided into chapters that contain close readings of three to five films that share much in common thematically. But I’m not trying to cover all the films that have been made from your work. Ultimately, perhaps about half.
Stephen King: I hope that in the course of your study you intend to pay some attention to the films that haven’t been “done to death.” You might find some worthwhile things in these movies that will encourage others to have another look [at these films].
Magistrale: To be honest, with the notable exception of Kubrick’s The Shining, which carries with it a critical bibliography as large as all the other interpretative work done on your films combined—and I think this is primarily because Kubrick directed it—I can’t think of any other King movie that has been analyzed sufficiently, much less “done to death.”
Michael Collings wrote an excellent introduction to Hollywood’s earliest films adapted from your novels, up to and including Silver Bullet, but his book was published back in 1986 and is long out of print. After that, you can find the occasional critical essay on a single film in an academic journal, a chapter in a scholarly book dealing with the particular King adaptation that belongs to the canon of a specific director (e.g., David Cronenberg or Stanley Kubrick) or is associated with a topical issue. Then there are the oversized “fanzine” magazine-books that try to say something about everything that has appeared on celluloid associated with your name. Unfortunately, these magazine-books are big on glossy stills and production history, which are interesting and sometimes helpful to know, but short on serious film analysis. In addition to the seven-paragraph reviews published in newspapers and popular periodicals shortly after a film is released, that’s what is out there in the libraries right now.
>
Stephen King: I wonder why this is. Why haven’t these movies received more extensive and serious critical attention? Do you know why? I hope you will address this issue somewhere in your book because, quite frankly, I don’t have a clue to answering this question and I would be very curious to understand it.
Magistrale: From the eighteenth century to our own era, the horror genre has always maintained a wide popular interest. Do you feel that the reasons for the genre’s popularity changed over time, or has horror sustained a consistently constructed audience?
