A Brief Guide to Stephen King (2 page)

King’s original screenplays, comic books and musical works are then examined, and the guide concludes with a look at the highlights of King’s non-fiction writing, as well as a list of King’s output in chronological order of public appearance.

Stephen King once pointed out that even if he stopped submitting books for publication, he wouldn’t stop writing, and the word ‘prolific’ might have been invented for him. The scope of this book doesn’t allow space to discuss all of King’s myriad factual articles over the years, and readers particularly interested in those are steered towards Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’ excellent overview,
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction
(Cemetery Dance Publications, 2011) as well as the archive of King’s columns for
Entertainment Weekly
at that magazine’s website.

Forty years ago, the publication of a New England schoolteacher’s debut novel marked the start of a literary journey that has had many peaks and troughs – this guide is a small thanks to a writer who has formed an essential part of my reading life and that of many, many others.

Paul Simpson
September 2013

The descriptions and discussions in this guide cover the complete plotlines of all stories that are available as mass market publications as at March 2014. Those that aren’t available in that format – i.e.
Doctor Sleep, Joyland
, the uncollected magazine short stories,
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County
and
The Plant
– are considerably less spoiler-filled, but readers are cautioned that there may be details they don’t want to know before reading the story. However, major twists are not spoiled!

For clarity, references to the ‘Dark Tower’ relate to the entire saga;
The Dark Tower
when italicized refers to the seventh published volume of the series.

In the afterword to his most recent collection of novellas,
Full Dark, No Stars
, first published in 2010, Stephen King addresses his audience in the familiar way that he has been using ever since his first collection,
Night Shift
. He sounds like the guy you might sit next to in a bar who’s going to tell you about his life or loves. But the Steve King who comes across in those introductions isn’t necessarily the same as the Stephen King who’s been married to Tabitha Spruce for over forty years, the man who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, the multi-millionaire whose life was nearly cut short by a drunk driver just before the turn of the millennium. ‘Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself,’ King warns in that afterword. ‘It’s a form of deflection.’

Listen to any of the many interviews with King carried out over the years – there are plenty to choose from on YouTube, or available as CDs/downloads – and you can quickly come to spot when an interviewer is pursuing a
topic with which the author is uncomfortable. Certain incidents in King’s life have become magnified in importance, as people try to understand what makes a man write stories that are so affecting – whether as gross-out horror, or tugging the heart strings. The titles of the various biographies hint at the approach their authors have taken to King’s life:
America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman
;
Haunted Heart
.

What some fail to appreciate, perhaps, is that Stephen King loves to write. True, there have been times in his life when outside agencies have messed with that process; times when, by his own admission, the words haven’t flowed as freely. But writing is what he does, creating fiction that is, in his own terms, ‘both propulsive and assaultive’. His non-fiction is just as compelling:
On Writing
ranks as one of the best books about the craft, and his short Kindle essay ‘Guns’ should be required reading in the ongoing gun debate following the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

However, to put his books in context, the broad strokes of King’s life – his personal and professional ups and downs – do make an intriguing background . . .

Stephen Edwin King was born on 21 September 1947 to Donald Edwin and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, the younger brother of David Victor, who was adopted. His father was in the merchant marine, and when Stephen was just two years old, Donald announced that he was going for a packet of cigarettes. He was not seen or heard from again. (King quipped that it must have been an obscure brand.)

Growing up, the subject of Donald King was clearly a sore point for their mother, so Stephen and David learned not to ask about him. They did discover some souvenirs that he had sent home from the South Seas in the attic of their house, as well as a couple of reels of home movies, showing what they believed was their father standing at the bow of a ship in heavy North Atlantic seas. They also learned their father had sent stories to men’s magazines,
with their mother commenting that he was very talented but had no persistence.

Ruth, as she was known, devoted her life to her sons, ensuring that they never went to bed hungry, or lacked for love, even if she had to work at multiple jobs in order to do so. The Kings had to move around the country for a time, staying with relatives, during which period Stephen was apparently playing with a friend, but came home alone. The friend had been hit by a freight train, and they’d had to collect the pieces that remained in a basket. It’s an incident about which much has been made by those seeking to analyse why King writes horror fiction, although he dismisses such Freudian ideas, noting that he had no memory of it.

What did stick in his mind were a couple of stories that his mother told him – one about biting into a piece of chewing gum that had been placed on the bedpost overnight and discovering that a moth had fluttered down and got stuck in the gum. When she started chewing, she chomped the moth in half and felt the two halves flying inside her mouth before she spat it out. (King believed this prompted him to want to tell stories that would replicate the feeling he had the first time he heard that tale.)

The other was about a sailor who committed suicide in Portland, Maine. King asked his mother if she had seen the man strike the pavement, and he never forgot her answer: ‘Green goo in a sailor suit’. King felt that the episode said more about his temperament – asking the question of his mother – than proving that he was somehow warped by his childhood.

Stephen King always loved stories: his mother read him H.G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds
when he was young, and he started writing his own tales, earning a quarter for each from his mother, who was so impressed with his apparent natural talent. He read the E.C. Comics such as
Tales from the Crypt
and
The Vault of Horror
, and watched movies as much as he could, either on television when they
were staying with relatives who had a set, or at the cinema, lapping up the B-movie horror and science-fiction films of the mid-1950s. His clear love of these is expressed not just in the autobiographical sections of
Danse Macabre
. Occasionally they would provoke nightmares and produce images in his mind which would continue to haunt him – one such, of his own corpse rotting away on a scaffold on a hill, became the impetus for the Marsten House in
’Salem’s Lot
. Another incident from his childhood stuck in his mind: sitting in a movie theatre one Saturday afternoon in October 1957 and learning that the Russians had launched Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite.

In 1958 the family moved to West Durham, Maine, so Ruth could be near her elderly parents. This provided some security for the young boys, and they began to become part of the community, although King’s height (he was six feet two by the age of twelve) set him apart to an extent. His reading tastes became more catholic, as he discovered the police stories of Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald (who later provided an introduction for King’s first collection of short stories,
Night Shift
).

When his brother obtained an old mimeograph machine, the boys started to produce
Dave’s Rag
, a newsletter for the neighbourhood that included reviews of films and TV shows, as well as occasional short stories. Selling for 5 cents each, they provided the nascent writer with his first outlet, and once his mother got hold of an ancient Underwood typewriter – whose letter ‘m’ broke off, meaning that, like Paul Sheldon in
Misery
, he had to fill in the letters by hand on the manuscript – he began to write stories which he submitted to the pulp magazines, none of which sold, although he did receive occasional pieces of good advice about how to present his copy.

After watching
The Pit and the Pendulum
, the 1961 horror film based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, starring Vincent Price, King wrote his own sixteen-page
novelization of the movie from memory, adding his own touches, and ran off copies for his friends at school. They were happy to pay him a quarter for the story – which King intended to use to swell his own coffers (or Steve’s College Fund, as he later put it) – but the authorities at school were not impressed. He was suspended and made to repay the money, since his teachers and the principal didn’t think he should be reading horror, let alone writing it.

Ruth worked in the kitchens at a local residential centre for the mentally challenged, while Steve attended first the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School. There he became editor of the school newspaper,
The Drum
, for which he wrote a couple of short stories, and also created a satirical version of it,
The Village Vomit
, which got him in as much trouble as his Edgar Allan Poe homage had done at his grammar school. It was also the catalyst for him joining the Lisbon newspaper, the
Weekly Enterprise
, as a sports reporter. The editor, John Gould, taught the young writer valuable lessons about economy of prose and clarity of purpose. In addition, King began working at Worumbo Mills and Weaving, taking an eight-hour shift in addition to his high-school hours, since he was determined to live up to his mother’s dream for him to follow his brother to the University of Maine. There was a further incentive for keeping his grades up: the Vietnam War was heating up, and those who weren’t in college were being shipped out to Southeast Asia, often, as King wryly observed later, returning home in coffins.

King’s writing before arriving at university included more than one complete novel: in 1963, aged sixteen, he penned a 50,000 word novella called ‘The Aftermath’, a science-fiction story about an alien invasion in the wake of a nuclear war. He also completed ‘Getting It On’, later published as
Rage
, as he was ‘coming out of the high school experience . . . Everyone has that rage, has that insecurity. Rage allows people to find some catharsis,’ he commented
later. He had kept a scrapbook about the killer Charles Starkweather, some of which fed into the character of the novel’s Charlie Decker.

King started at the University of Maine at Ororo after graduating from Lisbon Falls in 1966, and from his second (sophomore) year, became involved with the school newspaper,
The Maine Campus
, for which he provided a weekly column,
King’s Garbage Truck
, as well as a serial story, a Western entitled
Slade
. He also started to make professional sales of his short stories, beginning with ‘The Glass Floor’ to
Startling Mystery Stories
in the summer of 1967 for $35 – and he admitted that no subsequent cheque, no matter the sum, gave him more satisfaction. ‘Someone had finally paid me some real money for something I had found in my head,’ he wrote in an introduction to a rare reprinting of a story that was ‘clearly the product of an unformed story-teller’s mind’. He completed another full novel (‘Sword in the Darkness’, which he referred to as his ‘dirty little secret’ in
On Writing
) from which only Chapter 71 has ever been published.

At university, he became involved with student politics, serving as part of the Student Senate, and supporting the anti-war movement, since he believed the US action in Vietnam was unconstitutional. More importantly, he met a fellow English student, Tabitha Spruce; they fell in love, and married in January 1971. This was shortly after he graduated with a B.A. in English, and qualified to teach at high-school level. Jobs weren’t plentiful, and to begin with, he worked at the New Franklin industrial laundry, supplementing his income with the occasional short-story sale. He reworked ‘Getting It On’, and submitted it to Doubleday publishers in New York. Although editor Bill Thompson liked the story, and asked King for numerous rewrites, which the author gladly supplied, he was unable to persuade the editorial board to accept it. He did, however, encourage King to continue writing.

The Kings’ first two children, Naomi and Joe, were born in quick succession, and Stephen eventually got a job teaching English at Hampden Academy in the autumn of 1971. Even with that full-time income, and Tabitha working at Dunkin’ Donuts, money was very tight, and the Kings were part of what he later called ‘the working poor’: the cheque for the sale of the short story ‘Sometimes They Come Back’ paid for vitally needed amoxicillin to treat Naomi’s ear infection (a few years earlier, another cheque had arrived just in time to pay a court fine). King was also drinking more heavily than he should, believing for a time that all he would ever amount to was a high school teacher who sold half a dozen stories a year. He had written a couple more novels –
The Running Man
and
The Long Walk
– but publishers were interested in short stories not novels from him.

Tabitha continued to support his writing as they moved to a double-wide trailer in Herman, Maine, for which they couldn’t even afford a phone line. To ensure they didn’t spend more than they could afford, Tabitha decided to cut up their credit cards.

Encouraged by a friend to try to write a story from a female perspective, King had begun work on a tale about an outcast girl who developed powers that allowed her to strike back at her tormentors. After getting a certain way into the story, he hit a mental roadblock, and threw the pages away in disgust; however Tabitha was interested in what he was writing, retrieved them, and read it through. She told him that there was something there worth pursuing, and offered to help him with the details of female high school life that King was unaware of.