CANR
WORK TITLE: You Like It Darker
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.stephenking.com/
CITY: Bangor
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC Feb 2021
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 21, 1947, in Portland, ME; son of Donald and Nellie Ruth King; married Tabitha Jane Spruce (a novelist), January 2, 1971; children: Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hill, Owen Phillip.
EDUCATION:University of Maine at Orono, B.Sc., 1970.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has worked as a janitor, a laborer in an industrial laundry, and in a knitting mill. Hampden Academy (high school), Hampden, ME, English teacher, 1971-73; University of Maine, Orono, writer-in-residence, 1978-79. Owner, Philtrum Press (publishing house), and WZON-AM (rock ‘n’ roll radio station), Bangor, ME. Has made cameo appearances in films, including Knightriders, 1981, Creepshow, 1982, Maximum Overdrive, 1986, Pet Sematary, 1989, and The Stand, 1994; has also appeared in American Express credit card television commercial. Served as judge for 1977 World Fantasy Awards in 1978. Participated in radio honor panel with George A. Romero, Peter Straub, and Ira Levin, moderated by Dick Cavett, WNET, 1980.
AVOCATIONS:Reading (mostly fiction), jigsaw puzzles, playing the guitar (“I’m terrible and so try to bore no one but myself”), movies, bowling.
MEMBER:Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Screen Artists Guild, Screen Writers of America, Writers Guild.
AWARDS:Carrie named to School Library Journal‘s Book List, 1975; World Fantasy Award nominations, 1976, for Salem’s Lot, 1979, for The Stand and Night Shift, 1980, for The Dead Zone, 1981, for “The Mist,” and 1983, for “The Breathing Method: A Winter’s Tale,” in Different Seasons; Hugo Award nomination, World Science Fiction Society, and Nebula Award nomination, Science Fiction Writers of America, both 1978, both for The Shining; Balrog Awards, second place in best novel category, for The Stand, and second place in best collection category for Night Shift, both 1979; named to the American Library Association’s list of best books for young adults, 1979, for The Long Walk, and 1981, for Firestarter; World Fantasy Award, 1980, for contributions to the field, and 1982, for story “Do the Dead Sing?”; Career Alumni Award, University of Maine at Orono, 1981; Nebula Award nomination, Science Fiction Writers of America, 1981, for story “The Way Station”; special British Fantasy Award for outstanding contribution to the genre, British Fantasy Society, 1982, for Cujo; Hugo Award, World Science Fiction Convention, 1982, for Stephen King’s Danse Macabre; named Best Fiction Writer of the Year, Us magazine, 1982; Locus Award for best collection, Locus Publications, 1986, for Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, Horror Writers Association, 1988, for Misery; Bram Stoker Award for Best Collection, 1991, for Four Past Midnight; World Fantasy award for short story, 1995, for The Man in the Black Suit; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novelette, Horror Writers Association, 1996, for Lunch at the Gotham Cafe; O. Henry Award, 1996, for “The Man in the Black Suit”; Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, 1997, for The Green Mile, and 1999, for Bag of Bones; Bram Stoker Award nomination (with Peter Straub), 2001, for Black House; Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, National Book Award, 2003; The Stand was voted one of the nation’s 100 best-loved novels by the British public as part of the BBC’s The Big Read, 2003; Bram Stoker Award nomination, 2004, for The Dark Tower VII; Lifetime Achievement Award, World Fantasy Awards, 2004; Quill Book Award in the sports category, for Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, 2005; named “Grand Master” by the Mystery Writers of America, 2006; Bram Stoker Awards, Horror Writers Association, 2008, for novel The Duma Key and for short-story collection Just after Sunset; Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a fiction collection, Horror Writers Association, 2010, British Fantasy Award for best collection, 2011, both for Full Dark, No Stars; Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in short fiction, 2011, for “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive”; Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, 2013, for Doctor Sleep; Audie Awards Fiction prize, 2014, for the audio version of Doctor Sleep, read by Will Patton; National Medal of Arts, 2014; Goodreads Choice Award in the mystery & thriller category, 2014, and Edgar Award for best novel, 2015, both for Mr. Mercedes; Best Short Story Prize, Edgar Allan Poe Awards, 2016, for “Obits”; Single-Author Collection Prize, Shirley Jackson Awards, 2016, for The Bazaar of Bad Dreams; Best Mystery & Thriller Prize, Goodreads Choice Awards, 2016, for End of Watch; PEN America Literary Service Award, 2018; Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, 2018, for Sleeping Beauties; named as a “notable book of 2022,” Chicago Tribune, 2022, for Fairy Tale; best horror book, Goodreads Choice Awards, 2023, for Holly.
POLITICS: Democrat.WRITINGS
Also author of early unpublished novels “Sword in the Darkness” (also referred to as “Babylon Here”) and “The Cannibals.”
Many of King’s novels have been adapted for the screen. Carrie was produced as a motion picture in 1976 by Paul Monash for United Artists, screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, directed by Brian De Palma, featuring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, and again in 2013 by Screen Gems, directed by Kimberley Peirce, and starring Julienne Moore; Carrie was also produced as a Broadway musical in 1988 by Cohen and Michael Gore, developed in England by the Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring Betty Buckley; Salem’s Lot was produced as a television miniseries in 1979 by Warner Brothers, teleplay by Paul Monash, featuring David Soul and James Mason, and was adapted for the cable channel TNT in 2004, with a teleplay by Peter Filardi and direction by Mikael Salomon; The Shining was filmed in 1980 by Warner Brothers/Hawks Films, screenplay by director Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, and it was filmed for television in 1997 by Warner Brothers, directed by Mick Garris, starring Rebecca De Mornay, Steven Weber, Courtland Mead, and Melvin Van Peebles; Cujo was filmed in 1983 by Warner Communications/Taft Entertainment, screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier, featuring Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro; The Dead Zone was filmed in 1983 by Paramount Pictures, screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, starring Christopher Walken; was adapted as a cable television series starring Anthony Michael Hall by USA Network, beginning 2002; Christine was filmed in 1983 by Columbia Pictures, screenplay by Bill Phillips; Firestarter was produced in 1984 by Frank Capra, Jr., for Universal Pictures in association with Dino de Laurentiis, screenplay by Stanley Mann, featuring David Keith and Drew Barrymore; Stand by Me (based on King’s novella The Body) was filmed in 1986 by Columbia Pictures, screenplay by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, directed by Rob Reiner; The Running Man was filmed in 1987 by Taft Entertainment/Barish Productions, screenplay by Steven E. de Souza, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Misery was produced in 1990 by Columbia, directed by Reiner, screenplay by William Goldman, starring James Caan and Kathy Bates; Graveyard Shift was filmed in 1990 by Paramount, directed by Ralph S. Singleton, adapted by John Esposito; It was adapted as Stephen King’s It, a television miniseries by ABC-TV, in 1990, and filmed as the motion picture It: Chapter One for New Line Cinema, directed by Andy Muschietti, in 2017; The Dark Half was filmed in 1993 by Orion, written and directed by George A. Romero, featuring Timothy Hutton and Amy Madigan; Needful Things was filmed in 1993 by Columbia/Castle Rock, adapted by W.D. Richter and Lawrence Cohen, directed by Fraser C. Heston, starring Max Von Sydow, Ed Harris, Bonnie Bedelia, and Amanda Plummer; The Tommyknockers was filmed as a television miniseries by ABC-TV in 1993; The Shawshank Redemption, based on King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal, was filmed in 1994 by Columbia, written and directed by Frank Darabont, featuring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman; Dolores Claiborne was filmed in 1995 by Columbia; Thinner was filmed by Paramount in 1996, directed by Dom Holland, starring Robert John Burke, Joe Mantegna, Lucinda Jenney, and Michael Constantine; Night Flier was filmed by New Amsterdam Entertainment/Stardust International/Medusa Film in 1997, directed by Mark Pavia, starring Miguel Ferrer, Julie Entwisle, Dan Monahan, and Michael H. Moss; Apt Pupil was filmed in 1998 by TriStar Pictures, directed by Bryan Singer, starring David Schwimmer, Ian McKellen, and Brad Renfro; The Green Mile was filmed in 1999 by Castle Rock, directed by Frank Darabont, who also wrote the screenplay, starring Tom Hanks; Hearts in Atlantis was filmed in 2001 by Castle Rock, directed by Scott Hicks, screenplay written by William Goldman, starring Anthony Hopkins; Dreamcatcher was released in 2003 by Warner Brothers and Castle Rock Entertainment and was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, written by William Goldman, starring Morgan Freeman; the novella Riding the Bullet was filmed by Innovation Film Group in 2004; the novella The Mist was filmed by Dimension Films in 2007; The Colorado Kid was adapted as the television miniseries Haven, 2010-11; Bag of Bones was filmed as a television miniseries in 2011 by Headline Pictures; Carrie was filmed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Screen Gems in 2013; A Good Marriage was filmed by Reno Productions in 2014; Cell was filmed by Benaroya Pictures and the International Film Trust in 2014; 11/22/63 was filmed as a television miniseries by Carpenter B., Bad Robot Productions, and Warner Bros. Television in 2015-16; Mr. Mercedes was filmed as a television series by Nomadicfilm, Temple Hill Productions, and Sonar Entertainment, 2017—; The Dark Towers was filmed by Columbia Pictures and Imagine Entertainment in 2017; It was filmed by Lin Pictures, New Line Cinema, and Vertigo Entertainment in 2017; Gerald’s Game was filmed by Intrepid Pictures in 2017; 1922 was filmed by Campfire Productions in 2017; Pet Cemetery was filmed by Di Di Bonaventura Pictures and Room 101, Inc. in 2019; In the Tall Grass was filmed by Copperheart Entertainment and Netflix in 2019; Doctor Sleep was filmed by Intrepid Pictures and Vertigo Entertainment in 2019.
Several of King’s short stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Boogeyman, filmed by Tantalus in 1982 and 1984 in association with the New York University School of Undergraduate Film, screenplay by producer-director Jeffrey C. Schiro, and it was produced again as a short film in 2010; The Woman in the Room, filmed in 1983 by Darkwoods, screenplay by director Frank Darabont, broadcast on public television in Los Angeles, 1985 (released with The Boogeyman on videocassette as Two Mini-Features from Stephen King’s Nightshift Collection by Granite Entertainment Group, 1985); Children of the Corn, produced in 1984 by Donald P. Borchers and Terrence Kirby for New World Pictures, screenplay by George Goldsmith, and produced again in 2009 as a television movie; The Word Processor (based on King’s “The Word Processor of the Gods”), produced by Romero and Richard Rubenstein for Laurel Productions, 1984, teleplay by Michael Dowell, broadcast November 19, 1985, on Tales from the Darkside series and released on videocassette by Laurel Entertainment, 1985; Gramma, filmed by CBS-TV in 1985, teleplay by Harlan Ellison, broadcast February 14, 1986, on The Twilight Zone series; Creepshow 2 (based on “The Raft” and two unpublished stories by King, “Old Chief Wood’nhead” and “The Hitchhiker”), was filmed in 1987 by New World Pictures, screenplay by Romero; Sometimes They Come Back, filmed by CBS-TV in 1987; “The Cat from Hell” is included in a three-segment anthology film titled Tales from the Darkside—The Movie, produced by Laurel Productions, 1990; The Lawnmower Man, written by director Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett for New Line Cinema, 1992; The Mangler, filmed by New Line Cinema, 1995; and The Langoliers, filmed as a television miniseries by ABC-TV in 1995; the short fiction “Secret Window, Secret Garden” was adapted into the film Secret Window, distributed by Columbia Pictures, written and directed by David Koepp, 2004; the short story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” from the collection Everything’s: 14 Dark Tales, has been adapted and made into a short film by James Renner; stories from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes have been adapted for a television miniseries, 2006; “1408” from the collection Everything’s Eventual has been filmed by Dimension Films in 2007; “Grey Matter” has been filmed by Artistic Analogies Film Co. in 2010; Under the Dome has been adapted into a television series from Amblin Entertainment, 2013—; “The Man in the Black Suit,” “The Road Virus Heads North,” “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” “Luckey Quarter,” “Home Delivery,” “Gotham Cafe,” “I Know What You Need,” “Umney’s Last Case,” “Suffer the Little Children,” “Tyger,” “Popsy,” “Harvey’s Dream,” “All That You Love,” “My Pretty Pony,” “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands,” “In the Deathroom,” “Dolan’s Cadillac,” “Here There Be Tigers,” “Hard Ride,” “The Man Who Loved Flowers,” “Survivor Type,” “Cain Rose Up,” “One for the Road,” “Mute,” “Rest Stop,” and “The Things They Left Behind” have been made into short films; the novel Salem’s Lot was adapted into a feature film by Gary Dauberman in 2024.
SIDELIGHTS
“With Stephen King,” wrote a contributor to Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, “you never have to ask ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’—You are. And he knows it.” Throughout a prolific array of novels, short stories, and screen work in which elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and humor meld, King deftly arouses fear from dormancy. The breadth and durability of his popularity alone evince his mastery as a compelling storyteller. Although the critical reception of his work has not necessarily matched its sweeping success with readers, literary colleagues and several critics discern within it a substantial and enduring literary legitimacy.
While popular with readers, the horror genre is frequently trivialized by reviewers who tend to regard it, when at all, less seriously than mainstream fiction. In an interview with Charles Platt in Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction, King suspected that “most of the critics who review popular fiction have no understanding of it as a whole.” Regarding the “propensity of a small but influential element of the literary establishment to ghettoize horror and fantasy and instantly relegate them beyond the pale of so-called serious literature,” King told Eric Norden in a Playboy interview: “I’m sure those critics’ nineteenth-century precursors would have contemptuously dismissed [Edgar Allan] Poe as the great American hack.” In a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, reprinted in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, he predicted that horror writers “might actually have a serious place in American literature in a hundred years or so.”
King’s ability to comprehend “the attraction of fantastic horror to the denizen of the late twentieth century,” according to Fear Itself contributor, partially accounts for his unrivaled popularity in the genre. However, what distinguishes him is the way in which he transforms the ordinary into the horrific. In Discovering Stephen King, Gary William Crawford observed that King is “a uniquely sensitive author” within the Gothic literary tradition, which he described as “essentially a literature of nightmare, a conflict between waking life and the darkness within the human mind.” Perpetuating the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and H.P. Lovecraft, “King is heir to the American Gothic tradition in that he has placed his horrors in contemporary settings and has depicted the struggle of an American culture to face the horrors within it,” explained Crawford, and because “he has shown the nightmare of our idealistic civilization.” Observing that children suspend their disbelief easily, King argued in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that, ironically, they are actually “better able to deal with fantasy and terror on its own terms than their elders are.” Adults are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, but in the process of growing up, commented King in the same volume, they develop “a good case of mental tunnel vision and a gradual ossification of the imaginative faculty”; thus, he perceives the task of the fantasy or horror writer as enabling one to become “for a little while, a child again.”
The empowerment of estranged young people is a recurring theme in King’s fiction. His first novel, Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power, is about a persecuted teenaged girl. “The novel examines female power,” remarked a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, “for Carrie gains her telekinetic abilities with her first menstruation.” “It is,” the essayist noted, “a compelling character study of a persecuted teenager who finally uses her powers to turn the table on her persecutors. The result is a violent explosion that destroys the mother who had taught her self-hatred and the high-school peers who had made her a scapegoat.” An alienated teenaged boy is the main character in King’s Christine, and Rage features Charlie Decker, a young man who tells the story of his descent into madness and murder. In The Shining and Firestarter, Danny Torrance and Charlie McGee are alienated not from their families—they have loving, if sometimes weak, parents—but through the powers they possess and by those who want to manipulate them: evil supernatural forces in The Shining, the U.S. Government in Firestarter. Children also figure prominently, although not always as victims, in Salem’s Lot, The Tommyknockers, Pet Sematary, The Eyes of the Dragon, and The Talisman.
King’s most explicit examination of alienation in childhood, however, comes in the novel It. The eponymous IT is a creature that feeds on children—on their bodies and on their emotions, especially fear. IT lives in the sewers of Derry, Maine, having arrived there ages ago from outer space, and emerges about every twenty-seven years in search of victims. King organizes the tale as two parallel stories, one tracing the activities of seven unprepossessing fifth-graders—‘The Losers’ Club’—who discovered and fought the horror in 1958, the other describing their return to Derry in 1985 when the cycle resumes. The surviving members of the Losers’ Club return to Derry to confront IT and defeat IT once and for all. The only things that appear to hurt IT are faith, humor, and childlike courage. “ It involves the guilt and innocence of childhood and the difficulty for adults of recapturing them,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt related in the New York Times. “ It questions the difference between necessity and free will. It also concerns the evil that has haunted America from time to time in the forms of crime, racial and religious bigotry, economic hardship, labor strife and industrial pollution.” The evil takes shape among Derry’s adults and older children, especially the bullies who terrorize the members of the Losers’ Club.
Not surprisingly, throughout most of King’s adolescence, the written word afforded a powerful diversion. “Writing has always been it for me,” King commented in a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa, reprinted in Bare Bones. His first literary efforts were science fiction and adventure stories. Having written his first story at the age of seven, King began submitting short fiction to magazines at twelve, and published his first story at eighteen. In high school, he authored a small, satiric newspaper titled “The Village Vomit,” and in college he penned a popular and eclectic series of columns called “King’s Garbage Truck.” He also started writing the novels he eventually published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman—novels that focus more on human alienation and brutality than supernatural horror. After graduation, King supplemented his teaching salary through various odd jobs and by submitting stories to men’s magazines. Searching for a form of his own, King responded to a friend’s challenge to break out of the machismo mold of his short fiction. Because King completed the first draft of Carrie at the time William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Thomas Tryon’s The Other were being published, the novel was marketed as horror fiction, and the genre had found its juggernaut. Or, as a contributor to Fear Itself noted: “Like a mountain, King is there.”
“King has made a dent in the national consciousness in a way no other horror writer has, at least during his own lifetime,” noted an essayist Discovering Stephen King. “He is a genuine phenomenon.” A newsletter—“Castle Rock”—has been published since 1985 to keep his ever-increasing number of fans well informed; and Book-of-the-Month Club has been reissuing all of his best sellers as the Stephen King Library collection. Resorting to a pseudonym to get even more work into print accelerated the process for King; but according to a Kingdom of Fear contributor, although the ploy was not entirely “a vehicle for King to move his earliest work out of the trunk,” it certainly triggered myriad speculations about, as well as hunts for, other possible pseudonyms he may also have used. In his essay “Why I Was Bachman” in The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels, King recalled that he simply considered it a good idea at the time, especially since he wanted to try to publish something without the attendant commotion that a Stephen King title would have unavoidably generated. Also, his publisher believed that he had already saturated the market. King’s prodigious literary output and multimillion-dollar contracts, though, have generated critical challenges to the inherent worth of his fiction. Thinking he has been somehow compromised by commercial success, some critics imply that he writes simply to fulfill contractual obligations. King, however, told Playboy interviewer Norden: “Money really has nothing to do with it one way or the other. I love writing the things I write, and I wouldn’t and ‘couldn’t’ do anything else.”
King writes daily, exempting only Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday. He likes to work on two things simultaneously, beginning his day early with a two- or three-mile walk: “What I’m working on in the morning is what I’m working on,” he said in a panel discussion at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, reprinted in Bare Bones. He devotes the afternoon to rewriting. According to his Playboy interview, while he is not particular about working conditions, he is about his output. Despite chronic headaches, occasional insomnia, and even a fear of writer’s block, he produces six pages daily.
Regarding what he considers an essential reassurance that underlies and impels the genre itself, King remarked in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre that “beneath its fangs and fright wig” horror fiction is really quite conservative. Comparing horror fiction with the morality plays of the late middle ages, for instance, he believes its primary function is “to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands.” Also, there is the solace in knowing “when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure.” King admitted to Norden, though, that despite all the discussion by writers generally about “horror’s providing a socially and psychologically useful catharsis for people’s fears and aggressions, the brutal fact of the matter is that we’re still in the business of public executions.” Regarding possible influence on readers, King told Norden that “evil is basically stupid and unimaginative and doesn’t need creative inspiration from me or anybody else,” but “despite knowing all that rationally, I have to admit that it is unsettling to feel that I could be linked in any way, however tenuous, to somebody else’s murder.”
“Death is a significant element in nearly all horror fiction,” wrote Michael A. Morrison in a critique of Pet Sematary for Fantasy Review, “and it permeates King’s novels and short stories.” In the opinion of some critics, however, King has been able to keep the subject fresh. An example of King’s ability to “pour new wine from old bottles” is his experimentation with narrative structure. In It, Carrie, and The Stand, declared Tony Magistrale in the study Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic, King explores story forms—“stream of consciousness, interior monologues, multiple narrators, and a juggling of time sequences—in order to draw the reader into a direct and thorough involvement with the characters and events of the tale.”
In Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, King uses different techniques to deal with similar characters. In the former, Jessie Burlingame has lost her husband to heart failure. He “has died after handcuffing her to the bed at their summer home,” explained a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, “and Jessie must face her life, including the memory that her father had sexually abused her, and her fears alone.” In Dolores Claiborne the title character is suspected of murdering her employer, a crusty old miser named Vera Donovan. Dolores maintains her innocence, but she freely confesses that she murdered her husband thirty years earlier when she caught him molesting their daughter.
“There are a series of dovetailing, but unobtrusive, connections,” observed a Locus contributor, “linking the two novels and both Jessie and Dolores.” Like It, both Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne are set in the town of Derry, Maine. They are also both psychological portraits of older women who have suffered sexual abuse. Dolores Claiborne differs from Gerald’s Game, however, because it uses fewer of the traditional trappings of horror fiction, and it is related entirely from Dolores’s viewpoint.
Dolores Claiborne “is, essentially, a dramatic monologue,” related Kit Reed in the Washington Post Book World, “in which the speaker addresses other people in the room, answers questions and completes a narrative in actual time.” “King has taken horror literature out of the closet and has injected new life into familiar genres,” a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor wrote. “He is not afraid to mix those genres in fresh ways to produce novels that examine contemporary American culture.”
Insomnia, continues the example set by Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne. It is also set in Derry, and its protagonist is Ralph Roberts, an elderly retired salesman, newly widowed and suffering severely from insomnia. Ralph begins to see people in a new way: their auras become visible to him. “Ralph finds himself a man in a classic situation, a mortal in conflict with the fates—literally,” observed a Locus reviewer. “How much self-determination does he really possess? And how much is he acted upon?” Ralph also comes into conflict with his neighbor Ed Deepeneau, a conservative Christian and antiabortion activist who beats his wife and has taken up a crusade against a visiting feminist speaker.
“There are some truly haunting scenes in the book about wife abuse and fanaticism, as well as touching observations about growing old, but they’re quickly consumed by more predictable sensationalism,” remarked Chris Bohjalian in the New York Times Book Review.
King delighted his readers and astounded his critics by issuing three new major novels in 1996: Desperation, The Regulators —under the pseudonym Richard Bachman—and The Green Mile, the last a Depression-era prison novel serialized in six installments. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: “If the publishing industry named a Person of the Year, this year’s winner would be Stephen King.” The same reviewer noted that with Desperation “King again proves himself the premier literary barometer of our cultural clime.” Released on the same day from two different publishers, Desperation and The Regulators have interlocking characters and plots; each works as a kind of distorted mirror image of the other. In Desperation, which some reviewers consider the better book, a group of strangers drive into Desperation, Nevada, where they encounter a malign spirit (Tak) in the body of police officer Collie Entragian. The survivors of this apocalyptic novel are few, but they include David Carver, an eleven-year-old boy who talks to God, and John Edward Marinville, an alcoholic novelist. Mark Harris, writing in Entertainment Weekly, remarked that King “hasn’t been this intent on scaring readers—or been this successful at it—since The Stand, ” adding that “King has always been pop fiction’s most compassionate sadist.”
Although The Regulators received little critical praise, King’s experiment in serialization with The Green Mile appealed to both readers and critics. An Entertainment Weekly reviewer called it a novel “that’s as hauntingly touching as it is just plain haunted,” and a New York Times contributor maintained that despite “the striking circumstances of its serial publication,” the novel “manages to sustain the notes of visceral wonder and indelible horror that keep eluding the Tak books.” Set in the Deep South in 1932, The Green Mile —a prison expression for death row—begins with the death of twin girls and the conviction of John Coffey for their murder. Block superintendent Paul Edgecombe, who narrates the story years later from his nursing home in Georgia, slowly unfolds the story of the mysterious Coffey, a man with no past and with a gift for healing.
King’s next major novel, 1998’s Bag of Bones, about a writer struggling with writer’s block and grief for his dead wife while living in a haunted cabin, was well received. Also acclaimed was the following year’s Hearts in Atlantis, which Tom De Haven described in Entertainment Weekly as “a novel in five stories, with players sometimes migrating from one story to the next.” De Haven went on to note that “there’s more heartbreak than horror in these pages, and a doomy aura that’s more generational than occult.” He also reported that the “last two stories are drenched in sadness, mortality, regret, and finally absolution,” concluding that Hearts in Atlantis “is wonderful fiction.” In Booklist, Ray Olson praised the volume as “a rich, engaging, deeply moving generational epic.”
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, also published in 1999, centers on a nine-year-old girl from a broken home who gets lost in a forest for two weeks. She has her radio with her and survives her ordeal by listening to Boston Red Sox games and imagining conversations with her hero, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon.
While these books were making their way to readers, King suffered a serious health challenge. On June 19, 1999, he was struck by a van while walking alongside a road near his home. He sustained injuries to his spine, hip, ribs, and right leg. One of his broken ribs punctured a lung, and he nearly died. He began a slow progress toward recovery, cheered on by countless cards and letters from his fans. During his recovery, he began experimenting with publishing his fiction electronically.
In August 2000, King self-published the first two installments of his e-book The Plant on his home page. Pricing the installments at one dollar each, King promised to publish additional chapters if at least seventy-five percent of those who download the first two installments paid for them. King also published a short story, “Riding the Bullet,” in March, and it was distributed as an e-book publication in several formats. This tale was eventually reprinted in the 2002 collection Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales.
King had begun work on a writer’s manual before his accident, and the result, 2000’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, sold more copies in its first printing than any previous book about writing. In addition to King’s advice on crafting fiction, the book includes a great deal of autobiographical material. The author chronicles his childhood, his rise to fame, his struggles with addiction, and the horrific accident that almost ended his life.
“King’s writing about his own alcoholism and cocaine abuse,” noted John Mark Eberhart in the Kansas City Star, “is among the best and most honest prose of his career.” Similarly, Jack Harville reported in the Charlotte Observer that “the closing piece describes King’s accident and rehabilitation. The description is harrowing, and the rehab involves both physical and emotional recovery. It is beautifully told in a narrative style that would have gained Strunk and White’s approval.”
Some of the novels King has published since the beginning of the twenty-first century, including Dreamcatcher and From a Buick 8, have brought strong comparisons with his earlier novels—in particular, It and Christine, respectively. Dreamcatcher and From a Buick 8 garnered praise from reviewers as well. “ Dreamcatcher marks [King’s] bracing return to all-out horror, complete with trademark grisly gross-outs, a panoramic cast of deftly drawn characters and a climactic race against time, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance,” commented Rene Rodriguez in the Miami Herald.
In the Charlotte Observer, Salem Macknee noted surface similarities between From a Buick 8 and Christine, but assured readers that “this strange counterfeit of a Buick Roadmaster is no rerun. Stephen King has once again created an original, a monster never seen before, with its own frightful fingerprint.”
King also received positive reviews for Everything’s Eventual. Among other stories, the collection includes a few that he previously published in the New Yorker. Notable among these is “The Man in the Black Suit,” which won the 1996 O. Henry Award for best short story and brought King comparisons with great nineteenth-century American fiction writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“As a whole,” concluded Rodriguez in another Miami Herald review, “ Everything’s Eventual makes a perfect showcase for all of King’s strengths: His uncanny talent for creating vivid, fully realized characters in a few strokes, his ability to mine horror out of the mundane, … and his knack for leavening even the most preposterous contraptions with genuine, universal emotions.”
Although he does not feel that he has always been treated unfairly by critics, King has described what it is like to witness his writing turned into filmed images that are less than generously received by reviewers. In his essay “Why I Was Bachman,” he admitted that he really has little to complain about: “I’m still married to the same woman, my kids are healthy and bright, and I’m being well paid for doing something I love.” Despite the financial security and recognition, or perhaps because of its intrinsic responsibility, King strives to improve at his craft. “It’s getting later and I want to get better, because you only get so many chances to do good work,” he stated in a panel discussion at the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa. “There’s no justification not to at least try to do good work when you make the money.”
According to Alan Warren in Discovering Stephen King, there is nothing to suggest that success has been detrimental to King: “As a novelist, King has been remarkably consistent.” Noting, for instance, that “for generations it was given that brevity was the soul of horror, that the ideal format for the tale of terror was the short story,” Warren pointed out that “King was among the first to challenge that concept, writing not just successful novels of horror, but long novels.” Moreover, wrote Warren, “his novels have gotten longer.”
Influenced by the naturalistic novels of writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, King once confessed that he had a bleak vision of the world’s future. On the other hand, one of the things he finds most comforting in his own work is an element of optimism. “In almost all cases, I’ve begun with a premise that was really black,” he said in a panel discussion at the 1980 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, reprinted in Bare Bones. “And a more pleasant resolution has forced itself upon that structure.” As a contributor to Kingdom of Fear maintained, however, “unlike some other horror writers who lack his talents and sensitivity, Stephen King never ends his stories with any cheap or easy hope. People are badly hurt, they suffer and some of them die, but others survive the struggle and manage to grow. The powers of evil have not yet done them in.” A Fear Itself essayist thought the reassurance King brings to readers derives from a basic esteem for humanity: “For whether he is writing about vampires, about the death of ninety-nine percent of the population, or about innocent little girls with the power to break the earth in half, King never stops emphasizing his essential liking for people.”
Douglas E. Winter assessed King’s contribution to the horror genre in his study Stephen King: The Art of Darkness this way: “Death, destruction, and destiny await us all at the end of the journey—in life as in horror fiction. And the writer of horror stories serves as the boatman who ferries people across that Reach known as the River Styx. … In the horror fiction of Stephen King, we can embark upon the night journey, make the descent down the dark hole, cross that narrowing Reach, and return again in safety to the surface—to the near shore of the river of death. For our boatman has a master’s hand.”
While King has played with giving up publishing his writings, the idea has not yet become a reality. In 2004, under the pseudonym Eleanor Druse, King published The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident. He has also continued with his “Dark Tower” series (the illustrated novels featuring Roland the gunslinger) with the publication of The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla in 2003. The book was published more than five years after the previous installment in the series, The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass.
The final two installments of the series came in 2004, with The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah and The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. In a surprise for fans, King introduced himself as a character in the sixth installment, which a Publishers Weekly reviewer called a “gutsy move” and also commented: “There’s no denying the ingenuity with which King paints a candid picture of himself.”
In 2004, King varied a bit from his usual formula to write, in collaboration with Stewart O’Nan, a nonfiction book about one of his great loves, the Boston Red Sox. When the two authors began keeping diaries of the baseball team’s games that year, they expected the result to be the story of yet another disappointing season for fans of the seemingly cursed team. Instead, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years. They book was titled Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season.
In Cell, a 2006 novel that Booklist critic Ray Olson considered “the most suspenseful, fastest-paced book King has ever written,” the author uses cell phone signals as a source for inducing zombie-like violence in the majority of the population. A Publishers Weekly contributor found “King’s imagining … rich,” and the dialogue “jaunty and witty” in this novel, which borrows technique from Richard Matheson and George A. Romero, the horror legends to whom the book is dedicated. Olson noted that with the publication of Cell, “King blasts any notion that he’s exhausted or dissipated his enormous talent.”
King presents a good old-fashioned yarn in his book The Colorado Kid. As told by two veteran newspaper reporters to a cub reporter named Stephanie McCann, the story revolves around the discovery of a body by two high school sweethearts twenty years earlier on Moosie’s beach in Moose-Lookit Island, Maine. The story reveals how the two reporters eventually discovered that the man was from Colorado. Several reviewers noted that The Colorado Kid is difficult to classify, as it contains elements of horror, mystery, and pulp fiction. Keir Graff, writing in Booklist, commented that the author “appears to be fumbling in his tackle box when, in fact, he’s already slipped the hook into our cheeks.” In a review in the Library Journal, Nancy McNicol commented that “this slim (by King standards) volume will speak to those who appreciate good storytelling.”
In Lisey’s Story, King tells the tale of Lisey Landon beginning two years after her famous novelist husband, Scott Landon, has died. Besieged by researchers and others wanting Scott’s papers, Lisey decides to prepare his work for donation when she begins to receive threatening phone calls and notes, as well as a dead cat in her mailbox. Meanwhile, Lisey has been hearing Scott’s voice, and it leads her to a netherworld called Boo’Ya Moon where Scott and his brother used to go to escape their brutal father. Although Lisey escapes to this world to learn about Scott’s past and her own strength, she does not elude the psychopath who has threatened her. “The book is also, perhaps, a parable about love and imagination that affirms love as the more salvific of the two,” wrote Ray Olson in Booklist.
Reviewers welcomed the novel. Noting that King “is surprisingly introspective and mature here,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor called Lisey’s Story “one of King’s finest works.” In the Seattle Times, Mark Rahner remarked: “King is especially good at describing the monumental sadness of sifting through the remnants of a dead loved one’s life, and depicting the secret and sometimes even nauseatingly cute code-talk of long relationships.” Charles de Lint, writing in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, commented: “Sometimes even established writers can surprise us by stretching in a new direction, or telling a new kind of story while still using the favorite tools in their toolbox. That’s the case here, and it’s worth talking about.” Jim Windolf wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the novel “has an abundance of solid descriptions … and indelible images.” Windolf also commented on the magical world that King creates, saying: “It’s as real as J.M. Barrie’s Never-Never Land, L. Frank Baum’s Oz or the Grimms’ forest.”
In the aftermath of his horrific 1999 accident, King made a decision to relocate—on at least a part-time basis—from his Maine home to Florida. “A few years [after the accident], after developing a severe case of pneumonia, the king of chills decided to embrace warmth,” explained Time contributor Gilbert Cruz. “‘It’s the law,’ he jokes from his part-time home on the Gulf Coast. ‘You get a little bit older, and you have to move to Florida.’ So, in one of the rare cliché moments of his life, King … and his wife Tabitha flew south for the winter.”
While his previous novels had all been set in his native Maine, Duma Key draws on King’s new Florida surroundings. It tells the story of Edgar Freemantle, a construction chief and self-made millionaire who undergoes a catastrophic, life-changing accident. A construction crane collapses on the truck he is in, crushing his hip, shattering his skull, and damaging his right arm so badly that it has to be amputated. “Anyone who has ever screamed in post-traumatic pain or cursed his physical therapist during an agonizing session of stretching limbs in directions they don’t want to go,” wrote Mark Graham in the Rocky Mountain News, “will find it hard to read the first fifty pages of Duma Key, as Edgar describes the feeling of ‘ground glass’ in his leg and hip during his rehabilitation.” Many reviewers speculated that King used his own long and painful recuperation for inspiration. “When King writes in Freemantle’s voice that ‘everything hurt all the time. I had a constant ringing headache; behind my forehead it was always midnight in the world’s biggest clock-shop,’” observed Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today, “he’s not just imagining it.”
The accident’s effects go well beyond the purely physical: the combination of pain, medication, and brain damage changes Edgar’s personality. “He becomes prone to fits of rage. His wife leaves him,” Minzesheimer continued. “A psychiatrist advises him to find a new life elsewhere, so he moves to an isolated island in Florida.” He sets up shop on the small, privately owned island of Duma Key. “There,” reported Emily Lambert in Media Wales, “he discovers a talent for painting and becomes obsessed with the horizon. And an imaginary boat called Perse.” Freemantle “wrestles with a talent he doesn’t comprehend and familiarizes himself with his new neighbors, elderly heiress Elizabeth Eastlake and her caretaker, Jerome Wireman,” explained San Francisco Chronicle contributor Michael Berry. “All three harbor secrets, and as they size each other up, they all sense that occult forces have been set in motion around them. Edgar’s freaky paintings seem to contain portents of future tragedies, while Eastlake’s descent into Alzheimer’s masks the origin of the evil that lurks on the key’s deserted shore.” “You could say that Duma Key is about how Edgar gets his life back,” wrote Charles Taylor on Bloomberg.com. “The skeleton-grin irony is that what he gets back is not quite his life.”
Slowly the realization dawns on Freemantle that his presence on the island is not accidental, and that his paintings reveal truths that some, including Eastlake, have kept hidden. “As King expertly peels back layers of suspense and back story, Edgar realizes he has been drawn to Duma Key, which seems to want desperately wounded people for its own occult purposes,” declared Houston Chronicle reviewer Chauncey Mabe. “The island, no surprise, is haunted—by ghosts, memories, and an elemental evil of immense power and malice.” “The paintings hold significance, though Edgar does not initially understand them,” Ali Karim explained on the January website: “This changes when his youngest daughter comes to visit.” Ilse (most often called Illy) cheers her father up, but at the same time sensitizes him to the fact that Duma Key is not the peaceful, idyllic spot it appears outwardly to be. “When Illy gets sick after they explore the Island,” Karim continued, “Edgar starts to realize that there are things within Duma Key that might hold danger to him and his daughter and when Illy recovers, he sends her away.” “ Duma Key is a terrifying book about friendship and the random events that make life what it is,” Karim concluded. “It chases down the idea that even though we might sometimes hear the balls in the lottery machine ahead of time, the ability to do so comes with consequences and is perhaps linked to a greater evil and to things we don’t—can’t?—understand.”
“‘Trying to re-invent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream,’ is how Edgar comes to define his art, and this is King’s quest also,” explained Chicago Tribune critic Richard Rayner. “He writes as always with energy and drive and a wit and grace for which critics often fail to give him credit.” In addition, Rayner continued, “there’s the thrilling sense of a master determined not only to flex his muscles but develop them too.” “King may be meditating on the diverse powers of the creative soul,” wrote Washington Post Book World contributor Brigitte Weeks, “but he has in no way lost his unmatched gift for ensnaring and chilling his readers with ‘terrible fishbelly fingers.’” “When it comes to spine-tingling stories capable of melding the mundane with monstrous fears, both real and imagined,” concluded Erik Spanberg in the Christian Science Monitor, “nobody does it better.”
The novel Blaze, released in 2007, was published under the Bachman pseudonym and is as King’s first book published under the pen name since 1996’s The Regulators. Blaze tells the story of Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell who has fallen into a life of delinquency ever since his father’s brutal abuse left him feebleminded. King alternates chapters recounting Blaze’s past mistreatment with his current plans to execute a kidnapping scheme plotted by his recently murdered partner in crime, George Rackley. “Despite its predictability, this diverting soft-boiled crime novel reflects influences ranging from John Steinbeck to James M. Cain,” remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
King returns to short fiction with his 2008 collection of thirteen short stories, Just after Sunset. In the collection’s introduction, King cites his stint as a guest editor for the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories as the impetus for returning to writing short stories, and most of the stories in the collection were written after that experience. “Some are tales of the supernatural. Others are about people who one minute are innocent bystanders in a seemingly placid world and the next are unwitting participants in life-threatening scenarios,” as USA Today contributor Carol Memmott put it. “In Just after Sunset there are only flashes of the kind of recognition that King the novelist provides, and the short-story form does not allow him the space to turn his plot devices into metaphors. For me, that was most apparent in ‘N,’” noted New York Times Book Review contributor Charles Taylor, who was unimpressed with most of the stories in the collection. “Other stories range from the delirious bad taste of ‘The Cat from Hell’ to the just plain bad taste of ‘A Very Tight Place,’ from the gloppily inspirational ‘Ayana’ to the botched brilliance of ‘The Things They Left Behind,’” added Taylor. A Kirkus Reviews commentator remarked: “Though much of this lacks the literary ambition of King’s recent novels, [the story] ‘Stationary Bike’ provides a compelling portrait of creative psychosis.”
In the 2009 novel Under the Dome King returns to supernatural horror with his story of a small Maine town that is enclosed one October morning by an impermeable force field of unknown origin, forcing the people inside to exert themselves to survive. Booklist reviewer Ray Olson was not impressed with the characters in the novel: “King keeps a huge cast very busy in his third-biggest novel ever, but most of its members are flimsily realized.”
On the other hand, Library Journal contributor Karl G. Siewert praised the novel’s characters and the story, noting that “the characters are well rounded and interesting” and “a fast pace and compelling narrative make the reader’s time fly.” A Publishers Weekly critic called Under the Dome “a nonstop thrill ride as well as a disturbing, moving meditation on our capacity for good and evil,” and a Kirkus Reviews commentator deemed the book “vintage King: wonderfully written, good, creepy, old-school fun.”
Published in 2010, Full Dark, No Stars is a novella collection containing four stories about the darker side of human nature: 1922, Big Driver, Fair Extension, and A Good Marriage. Told in first person, 1922 is set in the dust-bowl American plains just before the Great Depression and tells the story of a hardworking farmer who enlists the help of his teenage son to kill his wife in order to retain the family land she hopes to sell. “King’s rambunctious fiction doesn’t often attempt a tragic tone, but 1922 does, and nearly achieves it,” mused New York Times Book Review contributor Terrence Rafferty. “Although he has toyed with the idea of doubles and split personalities before (notably in The Shining and The Dark Half ), there’s a particularly intimate sense of horror in 1922 because the sad story is told in the voice of one of the afflicted.” Big Driver is about a woman seeking vengeance against the man who raped her and left her for dead, while Fair Extension follows the relationship between a man and the best friend on whom he uses supernatural powers to shift all his bad luck and misfortune.
The heroine of A Good Marriage is Darcy Anderson, who in the twenty-eighth year of her marriage happens upon clues to the dark secret life of her husband, Bob. She discovers that he commits terrible crimes, for which he blames the presence of another person inside himself. “King works the double motifs deftly and guides the narrative to a satisfyingly cathartic climax—after which he supplies a nifty denouement in the form of a dialogue between poor shattered Darcy and a sly old retired cop,” noted Rafferty, who added that “ A Good Marriage is a characteristic King performance, speedy and craftsmanlike and solidly unnerving.” “These tales show how a skilled storyteller with a good tale to tell can make unsettling fiction compulsively readable,” commented a Publishers Weekly contributor.
Also published in 2010, the novella Blockade Billy takes King away from the horror genre to tell the story of baseball player Blockade Billy, whose brief big-league career with the New Jersey Titans was banished from the record books. Reviewing Blockade Billy in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Charles De Lint commented: “What I liked most was the voice of the narrator, an old man in a nursing home who, when he was a young man, was involved with the sport at a professional level.” In Booklist, Bill Ott noted: “For fans of fifties baseball and of baseball fiction and film, this deft pastiche makes a great way to celebrate a new season.”
In the novel 11/22/63, published in 2011, English teacher Jake Epping travels back in time and takes on the new identity of George T. Amberson to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President John F. Kennedy. “King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than thirty years,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Errol Morris. “One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer’s choice (and King chooses). But he pays his debts to history in other ways—by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George, Jack and Jackie, … It all adds up to one of the best time-travel stories since H.G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.” In Library Journal, David Rapp added: “King remains an excellent storyteller, and his evocation of mid-20th-century America is deft.”
King also returns to an earlier era in Joyland, albeit not via time travel. In this novel Devin Jones recalls the summer of 1973, when as a college student he worked at the titular amusement park, believed to be haunted by a young woman murdered there a few years earlier, one of several unsolved killings that have taken place in the vicinity. Devin finds the seedy park and the mysteries attached to it fascinating. Over the summer, he befriends veteran carnival workers, has his first sexual experience, and becomes an amateur detective.
Several critics found the novel an engaging blend of thriller and coming-of-age story. “Until the ghoulish climax, this reads like a heartfelt memoir,” related Daniel Kraus in Booklist, noting that the book has “an undeniable offhand charm.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor deemed Joyland “a satisfyingly warped yarn,” adding: “As ever, King writes a lean sentence and a textured story, joining mystery to horror.” Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, termed the novel “fairly light stuff” but “good fun.” Kirn explained: “King’s ambition this time around isn’t to snatch us and hold us in his grasp but to loft us up high, then briskly set us down the way a Ferris wheel does.” London Observer critic Alison Flood offered less qualified praise, calling Joyland “a far gentler, deeper, more thoughtful book than the one it masquerades as” and “more a coming-of-age mystery than a horror-filled thriller.” In Library Journal, Nancy McNicol concluded: “This one’s a must for King fans.”
The same year as Joyland, King published Doctor Sleep, a sequel to the work some consider his masterpiece, The Shining. Danny Torrance, the psychic young boy of the earlier book, is grown up yet still tortured by the horrors he endured at the haunted Overlook Hotel, which turned his father into a violent maniac. He has struggled with a drinking problem but has achieved sobriety with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He works at a hospice facility in New Hampshire; with his telepathic gift, “the shining,” he helps the patients find peace at life’s end, and his efforts have earned him the nickname Doctor Sleep. His psychic ability also leads him to a twelve-year-old girl, Abra, who has even stronger powers than his. She tells him people with the shining are under attack by a vampire-like race called the True Knot, and she enlists his aid in fighting them.
Some critics considered Doctor Sleep a worthy successor to The Shining. “King’s inventiveness and skill show no signs of slacking: Doctor Sleep has all the virtues of his best work,” reported novelist Margaret Atwood in the New York Times Book Review. A Kirkus Reviews commentator remarked that King “shows all his old gifts” in the novel, which is “satisfying at every level,” and Library Journal contributor Amy Hoseth described the work as “vintage King, a classic good-vs.-evil tale.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer found it “less terrifying than its famous predecessor” but “still a gripping, taut read.” In a similar vein, Ian Thomson observed in Spectator: “While Doctor Sleep is a very serviceable sequel to The Shining, it does lack the vertiginous attack and ability to frighten of early King.” To London Guardian contributor Steven Poole, however, this was not necessarily a problem. “What the novel lacks in brute fright … it makes up for with more subtle pleasures,” he noted. “The scenes where Dan accompanies elderly hospice residents in their final moments are tonally very well judged: here King finds a mode of the supernatural that has a melancholic beauty while avoiding spiritualist blather.” Poole added that “King’s tenderly sympathetic but no-bullshit approach” to alcoholism “is in a way more authentically disturbing than any pseudo-vampire.” In London’s Observer, Sam Leith predicted that readers will “inhale this novel like a great glorious draught of steam.” He concluded: “Is it the equal of The Shining ? Probably not. Does King need to lose sleep over it? Hell, no.”
Further novels that King has released in the wake of Doctor Sleep include Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. The three novels comprise the “Bill Hodges” trilogy, and all feature the eponymous hero, an aging detective who is suffering from pancreatic cancer. End of Watch takes place three days before Bill is set to begin cancer treatment, and the story is centered on a terrifying killer named Brady. Said killer has been in a coma for the last six years, but a new drug called Cerebellin is meant to revive him. Instead, it gives Brady telekinetic powers, so he escapes his bedridden body and takes over his doctor’s body via mind control. Brady is thus reborn as Dr. Z, and he installs psychic malware into a popular video game. This malware forces infected users to take their own lives.
Discussing his work in a PBS website interview with Jeffrey Brown, King explained: “I thought that the first book in the trilogy, Mr. Mercedes, would be the only book. And I kind of didn’t want to let the characters go, the main characters. So I had an idea for another book, and realized when I was working on that that I had unfinished business from the first book. So I had a nice rounded quality, the three of them.” King added: “I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can. And I want to engage the reader. I’m an emotional writer … I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.”
Praising End of Watch in the Christian Science Monitor, Erik Spanberg remarked: “Credit King for rolling out a chilling, and plausible, recipe for Internet-fueled hysteria.” He added: “Combined with a whiteout winter storm, a tick-tock race to stop mass detonation, and nail-biting near-misses, End of Watch roars to a satisfying conclusion. Which leads to another intriguing mystery: What’s next for the King of Horror?” Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, was also impressed, and she stated: “A word about Mr. King’s staying power: This is his best book since the vastly ambitious Under the Dome … and it’s part of a newly incisive, reality-based part of his career. At some point, the phantasmagorical became less central to him than the frightening prospects to be found in the real world. And he uses his ever-powerful intimacy with readers to convey the damage life can wreak.” Maslin went on to comment that “Mr. King’s recent novels appeal to older readers more than his early ones did, but they’ve gotten tougher, not tamer. And even though a couple of this book’s principals wind up smiling by the time they get to the last page, you won’t be. That’s a promise.”
Another positive assessment was proffered by Elizabeth Hand in the Washington Post, and she explained that “not long ago, the events described here would seem as improbable as a haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine. Today, however, quantum advances in neuroscience, computers and social media make End of Watch seem creepily plausible.” Thus, “throughout his tale, King nimbly pulls together numerous plot threads and characters, adding a few from Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, and for good measure throws in a final, nail-biting chase through a blizzard.” Offering further applause in the Guardian Online, Allison Flood declared: “ End of Watch may be a return to more classic King fare, but it’s still Bill and Holly’s decidedly down-to-earth detecting that makes the novel shine. I’d back these two anywhere, and can only hope that, as King recently hinted, he might return to these characters.”
In his novel Sleeping Beauties, King and coauthor Owen King present a world in which the women are overtaken by a sleeping sickness as they are covered by a kind of white moss. Trying to wake the women results in them becoming deranged killers. Although the sleeping sickness affects women worldwide, the novel focuses on the Appalachian town of Dooling and the appearance of a woman named Evie who is unaffected by the strange disease. Evie is seen as someone who can help while other men view her as evil. “The themes and characters of Sleeping Beauties become powerful fictional case studies, holding the mirror up to our own powder keg of a society in unforgettable and often unnerving ways,” wrote BookPage contributor Matthew Jackson. Rebecca Vnuk, writing for Booklist, remarked: “This allegorical fantasy has a rich premise.”
The Outsider focuses on a horrific evil that invades the Midwestern town of Flint City. When an 11-year-old boy is brutally murdered, including having his throat ripped out, a police detective named Ralph Anderson arrests a well-liked teacher named Terry Maitland for the crime. Maitland claims innocence, which proves to be true when Maitland dies and the horrible murders continue. As a result, Anderson realizes he is facing some kind of evil entity. The author “serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural,” commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Calling the first half of The Outsider a “riveting” police procedural, Booklist contributor Daniel Kraus went on to note: “The impossibility of the mystery is intoxicating, and readers will get dizzy from their shifting sympathies.”
The novella Elevation takes place in the town of Castle Rock, Maine, and is a fable featuring a big man named Scott who is losing weight but appears to be the same size. Meanwhile, a lesbian couple have opened a restaurant in town but are plagued by hostilities because they are not only lesbians but also married. Meanwhile, Scott must deal with his new lesbian neighbors, who seem to be hostile to him. Scott begins to become buoyant, providing him with a new perspective on things. Noting that “the impact of the strange or the unknown upon a person’s life is where King always shines,” Charles De Lint, writing for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, added: “In this case it allows him to explore issues we all face, such as the aging process or the different results that happen when we meet each other with either kindness or hostility.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel “a touching fable with a couple of deft political jabs on the way to showing that it might just be possible for us all to get along.”
In The Institute, King once again turns his attention to a band of young kids joining forces to fight evil. Luke Ellison is a child prodigy whose parents want him to attend a prestigious school for other extraordinarily talented children with unprecedented intellects. Luke ends up getting kidnapped one night only to wake up in what seems to be a replica of his own room at home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The world beyond that room, however, proves to be a facility in Maine where other gifted children are also being held against their will. “The concept of family separation takes on an eerie weight here, with unsettling parallels between the events of the novel and the real-life images we see on the news of kids … in cramped cages at the U.S.-Mexico border,” noted Robert G. Frazier in BookPage. It turns out that Luke and the others are at a secret government facility where the children are being researched for the psychic abilities while suffering abuse at the hands of their captors. King “plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “Not a word is wasted in this meticulously crafted novel.”
King’s 2020 compilation of four novellas, If It Bleeds, is set in the world of some of his previous work, such as those featuring Bill Hodges. In the title story, “If It Bleeds,” Holly Gibney, who works in the Finders Keepers Agency, is investigating a middle-school bombing. “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” features eight-year-old Craig, who is hired to read to the octogenarian, Mr. Harrigan. The two form a tight bond, and when Mr. Harrigan dies, Craig continues to talk to him as if he were still living and wonders what would happen if Mr. Harrigan responded. In “The Life of Chuck,” Marty Anderson is a teacher in a middle school who is having a hard day, made even worse by the fact the likeness of a person named Chuck is turning up everywhere and the world appears to be ending. “Rat” features a writer named Drew who has a brilliant idea for a novel and needs to actually get it written. He’s had no luck finishing the last three novels he has tried and wonders what the cost to him would be if he actually finishes this one.
“Longtime readers and new King fans alike will love the fresh tales in this wonderful collection,” commented Library Journal contributor Elizabeth Masterson of If It Bleeds. Similarly, Booklist reviewer Craig Clark commented; “This set of novellas is thought provoking, terrifying, and, at times, outright charming, showcasing King’s breadth as a master storyteller.” Likewise, Inyeong Kim, writing in the online Boston University News Service, observed: “In this new book, King shows that he is genuinely a master of his craft. He breathes new life into commonly used tropes and old patterns from his previous works.” USA Today website writer Brian Truitt was also impressed with If It Bleeds, remarking: “Sure, King still owns the fright business like none other, but the iconic author will keep you up late at night engrossed in four tales about our dreams and our frailties.”
King offers a crime story featuring a little kid with supernatural powers in his 2021 title, Later. Jamie Conklin has the power to see dead people and talk with them, making them answer questions truthfully. But with each dead person, such an encounter fades away after about a week. This skill comes in handy for Jamie’s literary agent mother, Tia, and her NYPD detective lover, Liz Dutton. Tia’s prime client, Regis Thomas, dies just before beginning work on the new installment of his popular series. Tia and Liz have Jamie contact Regis, who dictates that novel so that Tia does not lose her commission. Seeing this power, Liz decides to put Jamie to work on a dead serial bomber to discover where he hid his final explosive device. But such encounters with the dead come with a heavy price for the young boy, making him feel more haunted than ever. A Kirkus Reviews critic concluded of Later: “Crave chills and thrills but don’t have time for a King epic? This will do the job before bedtime. Not that you’ll sleep.”
(open new)In Fairy Tale, released in 2022, King tells the story of Charlie Reade, who makes a deal with God to do good works if his alcoholic father recovers. When the recovery happens, Charlie makes one of his good deeds caring for an elderly man named Mr. Bowditch, who lives with his dog, Radar, in a crumbling Victorian house. After Bowditch dies, Charlie discovers a portal in the garden well and enters another world, Empis. There, he endeavors to overthrow an evil prince. Reviewing the volume in TLS, Philip Womack suggested: “Stephen King’s latest novel, Fairy Tale, has no sheen of fairy dust, but it does inspire both wonder and fear. … It is also a deeply literary novel, with a keen awareness both of itself and of its predecessors.” Matt Bell, critic in the International New York Times, commented: “Fairy Tale is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it’s also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action.” Writing in USA Today, Brian Truitt remarked: “Fairy Tale is an escape that feels needed, especially for modern eyes, a profound story of good vs. evil that’s timeless and timely. The life-affirming saga of young Charlie Reade sticks with you more than most. After turning that last page, you’ll feel a little stronger in spirit, yearn for another story and, dare we say, maybe even live happily ever after.” “If you’re a fan of King, then you’ll be delighted to disappear into this charming coming-of-age tale and cheer for Charlie as he frees an oppressed people from a tyrannical ruler. It’s a tale as old as time,” noted Samantha Laine in Christian Science Monitor.
Holly, a 2023 novel by King, stars the titular character, who appeared in the “Bill Hodges” series, If It Bleeds, and The Outsider. Here, Holly’s overbearing mother, Charlotte, has just died of Covid-19, and Holly must learn how to live on her own. She also comes up against an older couple, Roddy and Emily Harris, two unassuming professors who lure in troubled people and eat them. In a lengthy review of Holly in the International New York Times, Flynn Berry suggested: “From vaccinations to the Capitol riot, Holly charges into the thorniest contemporary debates with gleeful recklessness. With the same abandon, King bends the rules of a procedural, not least by revealing the perpetrators’ identities in the opening chapter.” Berry added: “What makes King’s work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn’t his cruelty to his characters: It’s his kindness. King describes his characters’ interior landscapes, their worries and plans, with a focus like a giant benevolent beam.” Zack Budryk, contributor to the Washington Post, remarked: “It demonstrates that one of the last true rock stars of fiction can continue to grow as a writer, and doesn’t define success solely as a continuation of what’s worked for him before.” “Mystery and horror readers will find much to love,” predicted Jane Jorgensen in Library Journal.
You Like It Darker: Stories is a 2024 collection by King. It includes the story, “The Answer Man,” about a lawyer in the 1930s, who encounters a mystical entity that helps him make decisions, which King first started writing five decades earlier. The story was placed in a drawer with other abandoned tales and later discovered by his nephew, John Leonard. Leonard suggested that King finish it, and he became inspired to do so. King told Mary Louise Kelly, contributor to the National Public Radio website: “When I was a young man, I had a young man’s ideas about ‘The Answer Man’. But now, as a man who has reached, let us say, a certain age, I’m forced to write from experience and just an idea of what it might be like to be an old man. So yeah, it felt to me like yelling and then waiting for the echo to come back all these years later.” “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” finds a man falsely accused of murder, while “Two Talented Bastids” tells of a son uncovering a secret about his author father. Referring to King, Truitt, the USA Today reviewer commented: “With You Like It Darker, he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys.” “King’s conversational prose, relatable characters, and knack for knowing precisely what you are afraid of will draw you in … and hold you fast,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews writer. David Pitt, contributor to Booklist, suggested: “You Like It Darker proves that he is still at the height of his powers. A triumph.” “Some of the stories are darker and more poisonous than others, but they all have that King touch,” noted Jennie Mills in Library Journal.(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Beahm, George W., editor, The Stephen King Companion, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1989, revised and updated edition, 1992.
Blue, Tyson, Observations from the Terminator: Thoughts on Stephen King and Other Modern Masters of Horror Fiction, Borgo Press (San Bernardino, CA), 1995.
Collings, Michael R., Stephen King As Richard Bachman, Starmont House (Mercer Island, WA), 1985.
Collings, Michael R., Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture, 2nd edition, Borgo Press (San Bernardino, CA), 1995.
Collings, Michael R., The Works of Stephen King: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide, edited by Boden Clarke, Borgo Press (San Bernardino, CA), 1993.
Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 63, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2005.
Davis, Jonathan P., Stephen King’s America, Bowling Green State University Popular Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1994.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 143: American Novelists since World War II, Third Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.
Docherty, Brian, editor, American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1990.
Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, editors, The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, Bowling Green State University Popular Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1987.
Keyishian, Amy, and Marjorie Keyishian, Stephen King, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.
Magistrale, Tony, editor, Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic, Bowling Green State University Popular Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1988.
Magistrale, Tony, editor, A Casebook on “The Stand,” Starmont House (Mercer Island, WA), 1992.
Magistrale, Tony, Stephen King: The Second Decade—“Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half,” Twayne (New York, NY), 1992.
Platt, Charles, Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction, Berkley (New York, NY), 1983.
Saidman, Anne, Stephen King, Master of Horror, Lerner Publications (Minneapolis, MN), 1992.
Schweitzer, Darrell, editor, Discovering Stephen King, Starmont House (Mercer Island, WA), 1985.
Short Story Criticism, Volume 17, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, Underwood-Miller (San Francisco, CA), 1982.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, Underwood-Miller (San Francisco, CA), 1986.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1988.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 1992.
Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, editors, Fear Itself: The Early Works of Stephen King, foreword by King, introduction by Peter Straub, afterword by George A. Romero, Underwood-Miller (San Francisco, CA), 1993.
Winter, Douglas E., Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, New American Library (New York, NY), 1984.
PERIODICALS
Associated Content, October 1, 2008, Lori Titus, review of Duma Key.
Atlantic Monthly, September, 1986, review of It, p. 102; November, 2006, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 125.
Book, November-December, Chris Barsanti, review of The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla, p. 75; September 1, 2001, Stephanie Foote, review of Black House, p. 80.
Booklist, January 1, 1976, review of Salem’s Lot, p. 613; December 1, 1978, review of The Stand, p. 601; September 1, 1979, review of The Dead Zone, p. 24; September 1, 1998, Ray Olson, review of Bag of Bones, p. 6; February 15, 1999, Bonnie Smothers, review of Storm of the Century, p. 1003; July, 1999, Ray Olson, review of Hearts in Atlantis, p. 1893; September 1, 2001, Ray Olson, review of Black House, p. 4; September 1, 2003, Ray Olson, review of The Dark Tower V; May 1, 2004, Ray Olson, review of The Dark Tower VI: The Songs of Susannah, p. 1483; September 1, 2004, Ray Olson, review of The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, p. 6; September 1, 2005, Keir Graff, review of The Colorado Kid, p. 6; January 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of Cell, p. 24; June 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 6; May 15, 2007, Ray Olson, review of Blaze, p. 5; December 1, 2007, Ray Olson, review of Duma Key, p. 4; September 15, 2008, Ray Olson, review of Just after Sunset, p. 5; August 1, 2009, Ray Olson, review of Under the Dome; May 1, 2010, Bill Ott, review of Blockade Billy; September 15, 2010, Daniel Kraus, review of Full Dark, No Stars; November 15, 2010, Ian Chipman, review of American Vampire; September 15, 2011, Daniel Kraus, review of 11/22/63; May 1, 2013, Daniel Kraus, review of Joyland, p. 31; August 1, 2013, Daniel Kraus, review of Doctor Sleep, p. 50; April 15, 2016, Daniel Kraus, review of End of Watch; September 1, 2017, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Sleeping Beauties, p. 59; March 15, 2019; Daniel Kraus, review of The Outsider, p. 29; October 1, 2018, Donna Seaman, review of Elevation, p. 22; March 15, 2020, Craig Clark, review of If It Bleeds, p. 43; March 1, 2024, David Pitt, review of You Like It Darker: Stories, p. 24.
BookPage, October, 2017, Matthew Jackson, review of Sleeping Beauties, p. 21; Robert G. Frazier,”Kids Versus Evil: Stephen King Returns with a Chilling Escape Tale,” review of The Institute, p. 14.
Books, November 19, 2006, “Stephen King Fuses Serious Writing and Horror: A Widow’s Tale of Loss, Mourning and Terror,” p. 8.
Bookseller, December 9, 2005, review of The Dark Tower VI.
Boston Globe, January 19, 2008, Erica Noonan, “In Long or Short Form, He’s King of Horror”; November 15, 2008, Erica Noonan, review of Duma Key.
California Bookwatch, January, 2009, review of Just after Sunset; January, 2012, review of 11/22/63.
Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1990, review of Four Past Midnight, p. 3; November 7, 1993, review of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, p. 9; February 9, 2008, Richard Rayner, review of Duma Key.
Christian Science Monitor, January 22, 1990, Thomas D’Evelyn, review of The Dark Half, p. 13; January 25, 2008, Erik Spanberg, review of Duma Key; December 4, 2015, Erik Spanberg, review of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams; June 30, 2016, Erik Spanberg, review of End of Watch; September 6, 2022, Samantha Laine, “In Fairy Tale, Stephen King Riffs on the Classic Hero’s Quest,” review of Fairy Tale.
Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, OH), November 11, 2009, Nick Chordas, review of Just after Sunset.
Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT), November 16, 2008, Valerie Parsons, review of Just after Sunset.
English Journal, January, 1979, review of The Shining, p. 58; January, 1983, review of Cujo, p. 79; December, 1983, review of Different Seasons, p. 69; December, 1984, review of Pet Sematary, p. 66.
Entertainment Weekly, October 14, 1994, review of Insomnia, p. 52; June 16, 1995, review of Rose Madder, p. 54; March 22, 1996, review of The Two Dead Girls, p. 63; April 26, 1996, review of “The Mouse on the Mile,” p. 49; May 31, 1996, review of “Coffey’s Hands,” p. 53; June 28, 1996, review of “The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix,” p. 98; August 2, 1996, review of “Night Journey,” p. 53; September 6, 1996, review of “Coffey on the Mile,” p. 67; October 4, 1996, Mark Harris, review of Desperation, p. 54; December 27, 1996, review of The Green Mile, p. 142; September 25, 1998, “King of the Weird,” p. 95; September 17, 1999, Tom De Haven, review of Hearts in Atlantis, p. 72; September 21, 2001, Bruce Fretts, “Back in ‘Black’: Stephen King and Peter Straub Return to the Shadows with the Delightfully Creepy Black House,” p. 76; September 27, 2002, Chris Nashawaty, “Stephen King Quits,” p. 20; June 25, 2004, Gregory Kirschling, review of The Dark Tower VI, p. 172; October 7, 2005, Gilbert Cruz, “The New King of Pulp,” p. 83; June 15, 2007, Tanner Stransky, review of Blaze, p. 83.
Esquire, November, 1984, review of The Talisman, p. 231; February 21, 2008, Benjamin Percy, review of Duma Key; September, 2013, Chris Jones, “Stephen King Loses His Blood: Who’d Have Thought the Sequel to the Shining Would Be So Tender?,” p. 90.
Fantasy Review, January, 1984, Michael A. Morrison, review of Pet Sematary, p. 49.
Guardian (London, England), September 20, 2013, Emma Brockes, “Stephen King: On Alcoholism and Returning to The Shining”; September 25, 2013, Steven Poole, review of Doctor Sleep.
Houston Chronicle, September 20, 1998, Bruce Westbrook, “Stephen King Finds Love among ‘Bones’,” p. 17; February 8, 2008, Chauncey Mabe, review of Duma Key.
Independent (London, England), August 15, 1998, Kim Newman, review of Bag of Bones; November 10, 1999, David Usborne, “Stephen King’s Misery”; October 12, 2001, Charles Shar Murray, review of Black House; January 20, 2008, Matt Thorne, review of Duma Key; November 9, 2008, Matt Thorne, review of Just after Sunset.
International New York Times, September 7, 2022, Matt Bell, “Stephen King’s Fairy Tale: A Portal to a Fantasy Kingdom,” review of Fairy Tale; September 7, 2023, Flynn Berry, “In Stephen King’s Latest, Beware the Kindly Old Professors,” review of Holly.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1974, review of Carrie, p. 257; December 1, 1977, review of Night Shift, p. 1285; June 15, 2006, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 594; December 15, 2007, review of Duma Key; September 1, 2008, review of Just after Sunset; September 1, 2009, review of Under the Dome; September 15, 2010, review of Full Dark, No Stars; October 15, 2011, review of 11/22/63; September 1, 2013, review of Doctor Sleep; November 15, 2013, review of Joyland; March 15, 2018, review of The Outsider; October 15, 2018, review of Elevation; August 15, 2019, review of The Institute; January 15, 2021, review of Later; August 1, 2023, review of Holly; May 1, 2024, review of You Like It Darker.
Library Journal, March 1, 2004, Kristen L. Smith, review of The Dark Tower V, p. 126; May 15, 2004, Nancy McNicol, review of The Dark Tower VI, p. 115; September 15, 2004, Nancy McNicol, review of The Dark Tower VII, p. 49; September 15, 2005, Nancy McNicol, review of The Colorado Kid, p. 60; July 1, 2006, Nancy McNicol, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 66; July 1, 1998, Mark Annichiarico, review of Bag of Bones, p. 137; November 1, 2003, Michael Rogers, review of The Gunslinger, p. 129; January 1, 2008, Carolann Curry, review of Duma Key, p. 84; September 15, 2008, Nancy McNicol, review of Just after Sunset, p. 51; September 1, 2009, Karl G. Siewert, review of Under the Dome; October 1, 2010, Carolann Curry, review of Full Dark, No Stars; September 15, 2011, David Rapp, review of 11/22/63; May 1, 2013, Nancy McNicol, review of Joyland, p. 74; September 15, 2013, Amy Hoseth, review of Doctor Sleep, p. 65; May 5, 2020, Elizabeth Masterson, review of If It Bleeds, p. 98; August, 2023, Jane Jorgensen, review of Holly, p. 64; April, 2024, Jennie Mills, review of You Like It Darker, p. 92.
Locus, September, 1992, review of Gerald’s Game, p. 21; November, 1992, review of Dolores Claiborne, p. 19; February, 1994, review of Insomnia, p. 58; October, 1994, review of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, p. 54.
Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1983, review of Christine, p. 3; November 20, 1983, review of Pet Sematary, p. 17; November 18, 1984, review of The Talisman, p. 13; August 25, 1985, review of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, p. 4.
Maclean’s, December 5, 2011, Brian Bethune, review of 11/22/63.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January, 2007, Charles De Lint, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 38; May, 1999, Elizabeth Hand, review of Bag of Bones, p. 41; December, 2007, review of Blaze, p. 28; July, 2008, Charles De Lint, review of Duma Key, p. 26; September-October, 2010, Charles De Lint, review of Blockade Billy; May-June, 2011, Charles De Lint, review of Full Dark, No Stars; March-April, 2019, Charles De Lint, review of Elevation, p. 71.
Metro, January 24, 2009, Robert Murphy, review of Duma Key.
Miami Herald, March 21, 2001, Rene Rodriguez, review of Dreamcatcher; March 27, 2002, Rene Rodriguez, review of Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales.
Midwest Quarterly, spring, 2004, Tom Hansen, “Diabolical Dreaming in Stephen King’s ‘The Man in the Black Suit,’” p. 290.
National Review, September 1, 1998, James Bowman, review of Bag of Bones, p. 46.
New Republic, February 21, 1981, Michele Slung, review of Firestarter, p. 38.
New Statesman, September 15, 1995, Kevin Harley, review of Rose Madder, p. 33.
Newsweek, August 31, 1981, Jean Strouse, review of Cujo, p. 64; May 2, 1983, review of Christine, p. 76.
New York Daily News, February 2, 2008, David Hinckley, review of Duma Key.
New Yorker, January 15, 1979, review of The Stand, p. 109; September 30, 1996, review of Desperation, p. 78.
New York Review of Books, October 19, 1995, review of Dolores Claiborne, p. 54.
New York Times, March 1, 1977, review of The Shining, p. 35; November 28, 1977, review of Night Shift, p. 46; March 26, 1978, review of The Stand, p. 13; August 17, 1979, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Dead Zone, p. C23; August 14, 1981, review of Cujo, p. 19; August 11, 1982, review of Different Seasons, p. 25; April 12, 1983, review of Christine, p. 27; October 21, 1983, review of Pet Sematary, p. 21; November 8, 1984, review of The Talisman, p. 25; August 21, 1986, Christopher Lehmann Haupt, review of It, p. 17; June 29, 1992, review of Gerald’s Game, p. B2; November 16, 1992, review of Dolores Claiborne, p. B1; June 26, 1995, review of Rose Madder, p. B2; October 26, 1996, review of “Coffey on the Mile,” p. 16; November 14, 2014, Janet Maslin, review of Revival; June 8, 2016, Janet Maslin, review of End of Watch.
New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1974, review of Carrie, p. 17; February 20, 1977, Jack Sullivan, review of The Shining, p. 8; September 11, 1977, review of Carrie, p. 3; March 26, 1978, review of Night Shift, p. 13; February 4, 1979, review of The Stand, p. 15; May 10, 1981, review of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, p. 15; August 29, 1982, review of Different Seasons, p. 10; April 3, 1983, review of Christine, p. 12; November 6, 1983, review of Pet Sematary, p. 15; November 4, 1984, review of The Talisman, p. 24; June 9, 1985, review of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, p. 11; February 22, 1987, review of The Eyes of the Dragon; p. 12; May 13, 1990, review of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, p. 3; September 2, 1990, review of Four Past Midnight, p. 21; September 29, 1991, review of The Waste Lands, p. 14; August 16, 1992, review of Gerald’s Game, p. 3; December 27, 1992, review of Dolores Claiborne, p. 15; October 24, 1993, review of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, p. 22; October 30, 1994, Chris Bohjalian, review of Insomnia, p. 24; July 2, 1995, review of Rose Madder p. 11; October 20, 1996, review of The Green Mile, p. 16; September 21, 1998, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Bag of Bones; March 20, 2000, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Click If You Dare: It’s the Cybercrypt,” p. 7; November 4, 2001, Mary Elizabeth Williams, review of Black House; January 25, 2002, Ron Wertheimer, “‘Rose Red,’ Victims Blue in a Stephen King Thriller,” p. 36; November 12, 2006, Jim Windolf, “Scare Tactician,” review of Lisey’s Story, p. 1; January 21, 2008, Janet Maslin, review of Duma Key; March 2, 2008, James Campbell, “Dark Art,” p. 9; November 5, 2008, Janet Maslin, review of Just after Sunset; November 23, 2008, Charles Taylor, “Little Bites of Horror,” review of Just after Sunset; November 8, 2009, James Parker, review of Under the Dome; November 28, 2010, Terrence Rafferty, review of Full Dark, No Stars; November 13, 2011, Errol Morris, review of 11/22/63; p. 12; June 23, 2013, Walter Kirn, “Thrilled to Death,” p. 10; September 22, 2013, Margaret Atwood, “Shine On,” review of Doctor Sleep, p. 1.
Observer (Charlotte, NC), October 4, 2000, Jack Harville, review of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft; September 25, 2002, Salem Macknee, review of From a Buick 8; June 22, 2013, Alison Flood, review of Joyland; September 29, 2013, Sam Leith, review of Doctor Sleep.
Off Our Backs, December, 2001, Mary E. Atkins, review of Rose Madder.
Oregonian (Portland, OR), February 29, 2008, Vernon Peterson, review of Duma Key.
Penthouse, April, 1982, Bob Spitz, interview with author.
People, April 16, 1984, Mark Donovan, review of Cycle of the Werewolf, p. 16; August 24, 1987, Mark Donovan, review of Misery, p. 13; November 7, 1988, Mark Donovan, review of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, p. 38; September 28, 1998, Alex Tresniowski, review of Bag of Bones, p. 51.
Playboy, June, 1983, Eric Norden, review of Christine and interview with King, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, February 25, 1974, review of Carrie, p. 102; June 7, 1976, review of Salem’s Lot, p. 73; November 14, 1977, review of The Shining, p. 64; September 25, 1978, review of The Stand, p. 127; November 12, 1979, review of The Stand, p. 56; April 1, 1996, review of The Two Dead Girls, p. 38; June 24, 1996, review of Desperation, p. 43; July 14, 1997, review of The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, p. 65; June 22, 1998, review of Bag of Bones, p. 81; January 25, 1999, review of Storm of the Century, p. 75; August 4, 2003, review of The Dark Tower V; April 19, 2004, review of The Dark Tower VI, p. 37; August 15, 2005, Orson Scott Card, review of The Colorado Kid, p. 40; January 2, 2006, review of Cell, p. 37; August 28, 2006, review of Lisey’s Story, p. 27; May 21, 2007, review of Blaze, p. 34; November 19, 2007, Paul Pope, review of The Gunslinger Born, p. 45; October 2, 2007, Laura Hudson, “Marvel’s Dark Tower Team Talks to Stephen King”; December 10, 2007, review of Duma Key, p. 37; September 14, 2009, review of Under the Dome; September 27, 2010, review of Full Dark, No Stars; October 4, 2010, review of American Vampire; September 19, 2011, Peter Cannon, review of 11/22/ 63; January 2, 2012, review of 11/22/63; April 8, 2013, review of Joyland, p. 40; August 12, 2013, review of Doctor Sleep, p. 38; March 19, 2018, review of The Outsider, p. 52; July 8, 2019, review of The Institute, p. 67.
Rapport, annual, 1992, review of The Waste Lands, p. 21, and review of Gerald’s Game, p. 26.
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), January 18, 2008, Mark Graham, review of Duma Key.
St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), December 14, 2008, Colette Bancroft, review of Just after Sunset.
San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2008, Michael Berry, review of Duma Key.
Saturday Review, September, 1981, Michelle Green, review of Cujo, p. 59; November, 1984, review of The Talisman p. 85.
Scotland on Sunday (Edinburgh, Scotland), November 9, 2008, Janet Maslin, review of Just after Sunset.
Seattle Times, October 27, 2006, Mark Rahner, review of Lisey’s Story.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL), November 23, 2008, Carole Goldberg, review of Just after Sunset.
Spectator, October 13, 2001, Sam Phipps, review of Black House, p. 58; December 10, 2011, Ian Thomson, “Saving JFK,” review of 11/22/63; October 5, 2013, Ian Thomson, review of Doctor Sleep, p. 51.
Star (Kansas City, MO), October 4, 2000, John Mark Eberhart, review of On Writing.
Star (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 10, 2008, review of Duma Key.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), September 13, 1998, James Lileks, “In Stephen King’s Latest, Things … Happen; but Bag of Bones Is Not a Gorefest; This Novel Has Depth,” p. 19.
Sydney Morning Herald, June 21, 2005, “Woman Sues Stephen King over Misery Character.”
Telegraph (London, England), February 8, 2008, Justin Williams, “The Horror of Stephen King’s Decline”; February 8, 2008, Tim Martin, “Let the Bones Keep Rattling.”
Time, August 30, 1982, Paul Gray, review of Different Seasons, p. 87; July 1, 1985, review of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, p. 59; October 6, 1986, review of It; p. 74; June 8, 1987, review of Misery, p. 82; December 7, 1992, review of Dolores Claiborne; p. 81; September 2, 1996, review of The Green Mile, p. 60; October 12, 1998, Nadya Labi, review of Bag of Bones, p. 116; January 17, 2008, Gilbert Cruz, “King’s New Realm.”
Times (London, England), January 20, 2008, John Dugdale, review of Duma Key; January 24, 2008, Peter Millar, review of Duma Key.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, October 7, 2022, Philip Womack, “Tell a Story, Own a World: A Literary Fable of Good and Evil,” review of Fairy Tale, p. 17.
USA Today, January 22, 2008, Carol Memmott, review of Duma Key; January 23, 2008, Bob Minzesheimer, review of Duma Key; November 11, 2008, Carol Memmott, review of Just after Sunset, p. D6; June 7, 2016, Brian Truitt, review of Mr. Mercedes; September 7, 2020, Brian Truitt, “King Weaves a Fairy Tale Filled with Heart, Horror,” review of Fairy Tale, p. 1D; May 21, 2024, Brian Truitt, “Stephen King’s Darker Runs Gamut of Hues,” review of You Like It Darker, p. 2D.
Valdosta Daily Times (Valdosta, GA), March 28, 2008, review of Duma Key.
Village Voice, April 29, 1981, review of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, p. 45; October 23, 1984, review of The Talisman, p. 53; March 3, 1987, review of It, p. 46.
Voice Literary Supplement, September, 1982, review of Creepshow, p. 6; November, 1985, review of Salem’s Lot, p. 27.
Washington Post, May 19, 2016, Elizabeth Hand, review of End of Watch; September 23, 2023, Zack Budryk, “Stephen King’s Holly Is Admirably Nuanced about Autism,” review of Holly.
Washington Post Book World, May 26, 1974, review of Carrie, p. 17; April 12, 1981, review of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, p. 4; August 22, 1982, review of Different Seasons, p. 1; November 13, 1983, review of Pet Sematary, p. 1; June 16, 1985, review of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, p. 1; August 26, 1990, review of Four Past Midnight, p. 9; September 29, 1991, review of Needful Things, p. 9; July 19, 1992, review of Gerald’s Game, p. 7; December 13, 1992, Kit Reed, review of Dolores Claiborne, p. 5; October 10, 1993, review of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, p. 4; October 9, 1994, review of Insomnia, p. 4; October 29, 2006, “Admit It: You’ve Been a Horrible Snob about Stephen King,” p. 1; January 16, 2008, Brigitte Weeks, “Stephen King Wields an Artist’s Dark Palette,” review of Duma Key.
ONLINE
2 Walls Webzine, http: //www.2walls.com/ (June 3, 2009), Chris Orcutt, review of The Gunslinger.
Agony Column, http:// www.trashotron.com/ (June 3, 2009), Rick Kleffel, reviews of Bag of Bones and Black House.
American Chronicle, http://www.americanchronicle.com/ (June 3, 2009), Jamieson Villeneuve, review of Bag of Bones.
Architectural Digest Online, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/ (October 18, 2019), Mary Elizabeth Andriotis, “Stephen King’s Victorian-Style Mansion to Become an Archive and Writer’s Retreat.”
Blog Critics, http:// blogcritics.org/ (June 3, 2009), Ronald C. McKito, review of The Gunslinger; Mel Odom and Amanda Banker, reviews of Duma Key.
Bloomberg.com, http:// www.bloomberg.com/ (June 3, 2009), Charles Taylor, “Stephen King Goes to Florida, Finds Twitching Limb.”
BookPage, http:// www.bookpage.com/ (June 3, 2009), James Neal Webb, review of Bag of Bones.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (June 3, 2009), Marlene Taylor, review of Bag of Bones.
BookStove, http:// www.bookstove.com/ (June 3, 2009), N.R. Richards, “Stephen King’s Misery.”
Boston Phoenix, http:/ /weeklywire.com/ (June 3, 2009), Charles Taylor, “Unlocking Stephen King’s Bag of Bones.”
Boston University News Service, https://bunewsservice.com/ (September 16, 2020), Inyeong Kim, review of If It Bleeds.
Comic Book Resources Reviews, http://www.comicbookresources.com/ (June 3, 2009), Timothy Callahan, review of The Long Road Home.
ComicCritique.com, http://www.comiccritique.com/ (June 3, 2009), review of The Long Road Home.
Entertainment Weekly Online, http://www.ew.com/ (June 3, 2009), Tom De Haven, review of Bag of Bones; Maitland McDonagh, “‘Misery’ Gets Company”; Kate Ward, review of Duma Key; Gregory Kirschling, review of Just after Sunset; Jeff Jensen, “When Stephen King Met the ‘Lost’ Boys.”
Examiner.com, http:// www.examiner.com/ (June 3, 2009), reviews of Duma Key and Just after Sunset; “Stephen King’s Bag of Bones Heads for the Silver Screen.”
Fairfield Weekly, http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/ (June 3, 2009), “‘Stephen King Goes to the Movies’ Is Pretty Lousy.”
Fandomania, http:// fandomania.com/ (June 3, 2009), Kelly Melcher, review of The Gunslinger.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.google.com/ (February 13, 2021), “Stephen King.”
First Post (London, England), http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/ (June 3, 2009), review of The Gunslinger Born.
Guardian Online https: //www.theguardian.com/ (May 1, 2017), Allison Flood, review of End of Watch.
GMA News, http:// www.gmanews.tv/ (June 3, 2009), “Latest King Stories about Twilight, not Darkness.”
Horror Fiction, http:/ /horror-fiction.suite101.com/ (June 3, 2009), Lisa Rufle, review of Duma Key.
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/ (February 8, 2012), author film and television credits.
January, http:// januarymagazine.com/ (June 3, 2009), Ali Karim, review of Duma Key.
List, http:// www.list.co.uk/ (June 3, 2009), Mark Edmundson, review of Duma Key.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (July 30, 2013), Max Winter, “High Pulp: Stephen King’s Joyland.”
Maine Campus (University of Maine), http://media.www.mainecampus.com/ (June 3, 2009), Zach Dionne, review of Just after Sunset.
Media Wales, http:// www.walesonline.co.uk/ (June 3, 2009), Emily Lambert, review of Duma Key.
National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ (May 28, 2013), “Stephen King on Growing Up, Believing in God and Getting Scared,” excerpts from Fresh Air interview; (May 22, 2024), Mary Louise Kelly, author interview.
Onyx Reviews, http:// www.bevvincent.com/ (June 3, 2009), review of Just after Sunset.
OpenZine, http:// www.openzine.com/ (June 3, 2009), reviews of Bag of Bones and Just after Sunset.
PBS, http:// www.pbs.org/ (May 1, 2017), Jeffrey Brown, author interview.
Portland Mercury Online http://www.portlandmercury.com/ (June 3, 2009), Erik Henriksen, review of Duma Key.
Salon.com, http:// www.salon.com/ (June 3, 2009), Andrew O’Hehir, review of Bag of Bones.
Science Fact & Science Fiction Concatenation, http://www.concatenation.org/ (June 3, 2009), Tony Chester, review of Duma Key.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction, http://scififantasyfiction.suite101.com/ (June 3, 2009), Derek Clendening, review of Just after Sunset.
Screen Rant, https:// screenrant.com/ (February 13, 2021), “Stephen King.”
SFFWorld.com, http:// www.sffworld.com/ (June 3, 2009), Victor J. Smith, review of Misery; Darren Burn and Harriet Klausner, reviews of The Drawing of the Three; reviews of Black House and Bag of Bones.
SF Site, http:// www.sfsite.com/ (June 3, 2009), Pat Caven, review of Bag of Bones; Matthew Peckham, reviews of The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three and The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger.
Slate.com, http:// www.slate.com/ (June 3, 2009), Michael Wood, review of Bag of Bones.
Speaking Volumes, http://www.speakingvolumesonline.org.uk/ (June 3, 2009), review of Bag of Bones.
Stephen King Book Reviews, http://www.king-stephen.com/ (June 3, 2009), reviews of Misery, Bag of Bones, Black House, The Gunslinger, The Drawing of Three, Roadwork, The Running Man, Thinner, and Cycle of the Werewolf.
Stephen King website, https://www.stephenking.com (November 8, 2024).
Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/ (June 3, 2009), Colin Harvey, review of Just after Sunset; Adam Roberts, review of Duma Key.
Syfy Wire, https:// www.syfy.com/ (August 3, 2020), Josh Weiss, “Stephen King Reveals New, Hardboiled Genre Detective Novel Later Coming in 2021.”
Tech (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://tech.mit.edu/ (June 3, 2009), Freddy Funes, review of Black House.
Time Out Sydney, http: //www.timeoutsydney.com.au/ (June 3, 2009), Will Gore, review of Duma Key.
USA Today, https:// www.usatoday.com/ (April 29, 2020), Brian Truitt, review of If It Bleeds.
Vox, https:// www.vox.com/ (August 10, 2018), Aja Romano, “Stephen King Has Spent Half a Century Scaring Us, but His Legacy Is So Much More than Horror.”
Vue Weekly, http:// www.vueweekly.com/ (June 3, 2009), Josef Braun, “Still King.”
The Author
About the Author
Press Biography
Photo Gallery
Film/TV Appearances
Awards
Stephen King HeadshotWritten by
Tabitha King, updated by Marsha DeFilippo
Photo Credit
Shane Leonard
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother's Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen's mother's failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem's Lot, before it became 'Salem's Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen's mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year-long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.
Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.
The Kings have three children: Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip, and four grandchildren.
Stephen is of Scots-Irish ancestry, stands 6'4" and weighs about 200 pounds. He is blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and has thick, black hair, with a frost of white most noticeable in his beard, which he sometimes wears between the end of the World Series and the opening of baseball spring training in Florida. Occasionally he wears a moustache in other seasons. He has worn glasses since he was a child.
He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story "Trucks") in 1985.
Stephen and Tabitha provide scholarships for local high school students and contribute to many other local and national charities.
Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.
Press Biography
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1971, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers. King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.
Stephen lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored locally for their philanthropic activities.
Photo Credit: Shane Leonard
FAQ: https://stephenking.com/faq/
QUOTED: "When I was a young man, I had a young man's ideas about The Answer Man. But now, as a man who has reached, let us say, a certain age, I'm forced to write from experience and just an idea of what it might be like to be an old man. So yeah, it felt to me like yelling and then waiting for the echo to come back all these years later."
Stephen King's new story took him 45 years to write
May 22, 20245:00 AM ET
By
Mary Louise Kelly
,
Erika Ryan
,
Courtney Dorning
8-Minute Listen
Download
Stephen King says finishing one of his stories decades after he started it felt like
Stephen King says finishing one of his stories decades after he started it felt like "calling into a canyon of time."
Francois Mori/AP
Stephen King is out with a new collection of short stories.
As you might expect from the reigning King of Horror, some are terrifying. Some are creepy. Others are laugh-out-loud funny. And one of them took him 45 years to write.
The book is a collection of 12 stories, called You Like it Darker.
Books
Stephen King's legacy of horror
Over the course of his decades-long career as a writer, King has learned there's no taking a story too far.
"I found out – to sort of my delight and sort of my horror – that you can't really gross out the American public," King told NPR.
He spoke with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly about the book, destiny and getting older.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Mary Louise Kelly: I want to start by asking you about the story, The Answer Man. You began it when you were 30. You finished it when you were 75. What the heck happened?
Sponsor Message
Stephen King: Well, I lost it. What happens with me is I will write stories and they don't always get done. And the ones that don't get done go in a drawer and I forget all about them. And about five years ago, these people started to collect all the stuff that was finished and all this stuff that was unfinished and put it in an archive. They were going through everything – desk drawers, wastebaskets underneath the desk, every place. I'm not exactly a very organized person. My nephew John Leonard found this particular story, which was written in the U.N. Plaza Hotel back in the '70s, I think. And he said, "You know, this is pretty good. You really ought to finish this." And I read it and I said, "You know, I think I know how to finish it now." So I did.
Kelly: Well give people a taste. The first six or so pages that you had written back in the hotel, it becomes a 50-page story. What was it that you decided was worth returning to?
King: Well, I like the concept: This young man is driving along, and he's trying to figure out whether or not he should join his parents' white shoe law firm in Boston, or whether he should strike out on his own. And he finds this man on the road who calls himself the Answer Man. And he says, "I will answer three of your questions for $25, and you have 5 minutes to ask these questions." So I thought to myself, I'm going to write this story in three acts. One while the questioner is young, and one when he's middle aged, and one when he's old. The question that I ask myself is: "Do you want to know what happens in the future or not?"
Sponsor Message
Kelly: This story, like many of your stories, is about destiny – whether some things are meant to happen no matter what we do, no matter what choices we make. Do you believe that's true?
King: The answer is I don't know. When I write stories, I write to find out what I really think. And I don't think there's any real answer to that question.
'Carrie' turns 50! Here are the best Stephen King novels — chosen by you
Books You Love
'Carrie' turns 50! Here are the best Stephen King novels — chosen by you
Kelly: You do describe in the afterword of the book that going back in your seventies to complete a story you had begun as a young man gave you, and I'll quote your words, "The oddest sense of calling into a canyon of time." Can you explain what that means?
King: Well, you listen for the echo to come back. When I was a young man, I had a young man's ideas about The Answer Man. But now, as a man who has reached, let us say, a certain age, I'm forced to write from experience and just an idea of what it might be like to be an old man. So yeah, it felt to me like yelling and then waiting for the echo to come back all these years later.
Kelly: Are there subjects you shy away from, where you think about it and think, "You know what, that might be one step too creepy, too weird?"
King: I had one novel called Pet Cemetery that I wrote and put in a drawer because I thought, "Nobody will want to read this. This is just too awful." I wanted to write it to see what would happen, but I didn't think I would publish it. And I got into a contractual bind, and I needed to do a book with my old company. And so I did. And I found out – sort of to my delight and sort of to my horror – that you can't really gross out the American public. You can't go too far.
Sponsor Message
Kelly: It was a huge bestseller, as I recall.
King: Yeah, it's a bestseller and it was a movie. And yeah, the same thing is true with It, about the killer clown who preys on children
Kelly: Who still haunts my nightmares, I have to tell you. You've written how many books at this point?
King: I don't know.
King: Really? In our recent coverage of you, we've said everything from 50 to 70.
King: I think it's probably around 70, but I don't keep any count. I remember thinking as a kid that it would be a really fine lifetime to be able to write 100 novels.
Kelly: Oh my gosh. Well you sound like you're still having a lot of fun, so I hope you have quite a few more novels for us to come.
King: That'd be good.
QUOTED: "Stephen King's latest novel, Fairy Tale, has no sheen of fairy dust, but it does inspire both wonder and fear. ... It is also a deeply literary novel, with a keen awareness both of itself and of its predecessors."
FAIRY TALE
STEPHEN KING
592pp. Hodder and Stoughton. 22 [pounds sterling].
FAIRY TALES DON'T necessarily involve fairies. They might more aptly be termed "wonder tales": narratives inspiring awe and fear. They tell us about darkness, both in the mind and outside it; and they describe the growth of children into socialized adults. Passed down in oral form, they are linked to oaths and enchantments. Repetitive structures and formulaic constituent parts render them spell-like: tell a story, lull a child, banish evil.
Stephen King's latest novel, Fairy Tale, has no sheen of fairy dust, but it does inspire both wonder and fear. It meshes the grammar of the fairy tale with that of small-town Americana and portal fantasies, adding in body horror and alien weirdness, under a monumental imaginative architecture. Like many fairy tales it critiques tyranny and homogeneity, and emphasizes the wit and intelligence of the weak against the strong. It is also a deeply literary novel, with a keen awareness both of itself and of its predecessors.
King's everyman hero, Charlie Reade (one letter away from "Reader") undergoes many extraordinary trials, testing his intelligence, integrity and strength. He makes a promise to God: if his father recovers from alcoholism (brought on by his wife's death), he will do good in the world. This happens and he thus finds himself looking after a grumpy old man, Mr Bowditch, and his dog, Radar (also two letters away from you, dear reader). This section, gradually crescendoing, hardly leaving Bowditch's creepy Victorian house, is enthralling. Something is awry: odd chittering sounds emanate from a shed and the appearance of nuggets of gold hints at the supernatural; yet the homely, growing tenderness between Charlie and Bowditch (and, crucially, Radar) both anchors us in the real and prepares us for being yanked into the irreal.
And yanked we are. The second half begins with Bowditch's death and Charlie's discovery of a great secret: there is another world, Empis, accessed down a well in the garden. Bowditch has been visiting Empis and collecting gold there while keeping himself alive thanks to a sundial that reverses the ageing process. Charlie, in keeping with the altruistic kindness of fairy-tale heroes, especially towards animals, decides to take the dying Radar there to make her young again.
Empis has been devastated by a power-crazy prince who has made a pact with a supernatural entity, Gogmagog--a reversal of Charlie's deal with his own God. This prince, known as "Flight Killer", has cursed Empis, causing everyone to turn "gray", their features blurring and distorting, their voices vanishing. Surviving members of the deposed royal family are dispersed and under disparate curses: one memorable moment involves a mouthless princess throwing her voice to a horse. When Charlie makes his way through a haunted city, the tension and creeping dread are brilliantly realized. The buildings seem alive, watching him as he loses himself in the maze.
Charlie takes on the role of a rescuing prince, and there is a sense of his being guided by a higher power (both divine and authorial). It is refreshing to find an element of sincere religious atonement in a contemporary novel, Charlie's contract with God keeping him from tipping over the edge. In the end, it is the magic of words that helps Charlie: an understanding that if you name something, you can control it. Plurality, decency and honour will win out.
We are reminded of the literariness of proceedings: a prince of Empis reads novels about our world, given to him by Bowditch on previous expeditions. King steeps his meticulous prose in allusion: to Carl Jung, to cinema (Psycho), to television shows (including, slyly, a nod to Stranger Things, the King-influenced Netflix series); to William Blake, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, L. Frank Baum's utopian The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the more recent and dystopian The Hunger Games. The whole paraphernalia of horror and fantasy is also present: gargoyles, animated skeletons, torture chambers, mermaids and goblins. References to fairy tales abound, from Charlie's doomed mother going to get fried chicken in her "Little Red Riding Hood raincoat" to his recurring comparisons of himself to Jack (of Beanstalk fame). Throughout, Stephen King's thesis is plainly made: stories are constructed, section by section, from other stories; and that renders them all the more powerful.
Philip Womack's latest novel is Wildlord, 2021
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Womack, Philip. "Tell a story, own a world: A literary fable of good and evil." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6236, 7 Oct. 2022, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A722460088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ca3b5fb. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Fairy Tale is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it's also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action."
In King's latest novel, a teenage boy discovers another world beneath a backyard shed.
FAIRY TALE, by Stephen King
Stephen King is no stranger to the portal fantasy genre, or to the kinds of young, unwitting protagonists who end up traveling to other worlds. In "The Gunslinger," the first volume of his epic Dark Tower series, King gave us 11-year-old Jake Chambers, who arrives in Roland of Gilead's world after dying in ours. In "The Talisman," co-written with Peter Straub, 12-year-old Jack Sawyer "flips" between America and the fantastical Territories on a quest to save his mother's life. Twenty years later, King and Straub sent Jack on another Territories adventure in "Black House," this time connecting his story to the Dark Tower books and King's larger multiverse.
Following in Jake and Jack's footsteps comes Charlie Reade, the 17-year-old hero of King's latest novel, "Fairy Tale." A talented athlete, Charlie saves the life of Howard Bowditch, an eccentric recluse who lives alone with his ancient German shepherd, Radar. Inserting himself into Bowditch's life as a make-do nurse and handyman, Charlie slowly discovers that his neighbor is addicted not just to solitude and secrets (and, eventually, pain pills), but to the treasures of a place called Empis, a kingdom he visits by descending "185 stone steps of varying heights" beneath Bowditch's locked backyard shed.
It takes many pages and foreshadowings for Charlie to get into that shed, but he finally arrives in Empis with Radar at his side and Bowditch's .45 revolver on his waist. There Charlie finds a kingdom in dire need, its royal family long ago overthrown by the usurper Flight Killer, who has inflicted a mysterious disfiguring illness called "the gray" upon the populace. Most notable among the sufferers whom Charlie meets on his quest is Leah, a deposed princess whose "storybook loveliness" is marred by her missing mouth, "a knotted white line" ending in "a dime-sized red blemish that looked like a tiny unopened rose." (How Leah manages a drink provides one of the novel's most arresting images, a pure jolt of classic King-style body horror.)
There's plenty of fresh invention in "Fairy Tale," but much of what Charlie encounters reminds him of something else he's seen or read. Before he meets Radar, the German shepherd is rumored to be a "monster dog," "like Cujo in that movie." Leah evokes for him a similarly named princess in need from a galaxy far, far away. Charlie, aware of the tropes he's inhabiting, isn't surprised: "Isn't 'Star Wars' just another fairy tale," he reasons, "albeit one with excellent special effects?"
King's portals - like his novels - have always been leaky apertures, prone to cultural exchange and playful cross-contamination. "There are other worlds than these," Jake Chambers once told Roland of Gilead (a line that appears verbatim in "Fairy Tale"), and in King's novels all possible worlds, his and those of others, are always playing a game of telephone. Some elements are lifted wholesale from traditional tales like "Rumpelstiltskin" and especially "Jack and the Beanstalk," which contributes not just the deadly child-eating giant who guards Empis's palace but the name of the Lovecraftian horror lurking beneath. Other allusions and homages abound, with King sometimes even playfully laying claim to the inventions he's riffing on, as when Bowditch speculates that Ray Bradbury must've visited a particular location in Empis's capital before writing "Something Wicked This Way Comes." (As far as I can tell, King always gives credit where it's due, sometimes subtly, sometimes not.)
So "Fairy Tale" is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it's also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action. The best (and longest) of the novel's set pieces depicts Charlie's forced participation in the Fair One, a gladiatorial contest organized to entertain Flight Killer and his sycophantic court. In the Fair One, it's kill or be killed, and surviving it takes all of Charlie's wits, charisma and athleticism - as well as a risky indulgence in his hot temper and his talent for violence. "There's a dark well in everyone, I think," Charlie realizes, "and it never goes dry. But you drink from it at your peril. That water is poison."
At 17, Charlie's seen the lingering effects of these dark wells on his father, a recovering alcoholic, and the isolated Mr. Bowditch and even on Flight Killer, the root of all Empis's problems; by the novel's end, Charlie will need to learn to live with what he's sipped from his own. After all, goodness isn't something you are, even if you're the chosen prince who has come to save a kingdom: Goodness is something you do, and Charlie Reade is always trying his best.
Despite the plot's twists and turns, the biggest surprise "Fairy Tale" has to offer King's so-called Constant Readers might be the book's promise of a happy ending. At one point, Charlie warns us these require "something unlikely," narrative tricks made "palatable to readers who wanted a happy ending even if the teller had to pull one out of his hat." But I'll bet many readers hungry for a genuinely feel-good adventure won't care what tactics King uses to deliver the goods: These days, some of us will take all the happy endings we can get, however unlikely they seem.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of "Appleseed" and "Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts."
FAIRY TALE | By Stephen King | 599 pp. | Scribner | $32.50
Matt Bell is the author most recently of "Appleseed" and "Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts."
JON MCCORMACK
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 International Herald Tribune
http://international.nytimes.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Bell, Matt. "Stephen King's 'Fairy Tale': A Portal to a Fantasy Kingdom." International New York Times, 7 Sept. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A716283640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4abacc46. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Fairy Tale is an escape that feels needed, especially for modern eyes, a profound story of good vs. evil that's timeless and timely. The life-affirming saga of young Charlie Reade sticks with you more than most. After turning that last page, you'll feel a little stronger in spirit, yearn for another story and, dare we say, maybe even live happily ever after."
Once upon a time, Stephen King dared to write a novel called "Fairy Tale," and totally lived up to that simple but lofty title, borrowing from tales we know - old standards as well as modern classics - to put his own signature on a fantastical genre.
Everything from Rumpelstiltskin and Three Little Pigs to "Star Wars" and "Hunger Games" finds its way into the iconic author's rousing coming-of-age book (Scribner, 608 pp., ***1/2 out of four), a narrative spanning two worlds with man-eating giants, electric zombies, duels to the death, a cruel ruler and a fair princess. It's a boy and his dog, though, who will win your heart as much as King's past efforts have unnerved your soul.
The author's annals have featured plenty of young protagonists - the Losers Club of "It" being top on that list - though 17-year-old Charlie Reade comes bearing a strong moral code and gravitas even before the crazy stuff happens.
A high school football hero, Charlie's had to grow up fast in his Illinois small town: His mom died tragically when he was 7, and his father's battle with booze also affected Charlie. At one point, he promised God he'd pay Him back if only his dad could get clean, though when he does, it's a vow that weighs on Charlie frequently.
One day, coming home from baseball practice, Charlie hears howls coming from an old Victorian known among children as the "Psycho House." He finds elderly Howard Bowditch on the ground with a broken leg, having fallen from a ladder, and his old German Shepherd, Radar. Charlie gets help but soon after becomes a caregiver for both the crotchety Bowditch and the aging canine, so he becomes curious about the guy's locked shed (and the strange noises coming from it).
King takes his time getting to the "real" fairy tale, though you won't mind. He crafts an enjoyable trio with Charlie and his two new best friends over the first third of the novel, gradually doling out Bowditch's mysterious backstory until the man dies. Thanks to a cassette confessional, Charlie finds out the shed contains steps leading down to a kingdom called Empis.
There begins the start of a quest - one born out of empathy rather than adventure - that will change his life and that of those he'll soon meet.
In recent years, King has successfully dabbled in detective noir ("Mr. Mercedes" trilogy, "The Outsider") and hard-boiled crime ("Billy Summers"). Here, he brings his own flair to the fairy tale, good enough to land this hefty tome right next to your Brothers Grimm collection.
King pays homage to his fellow writers as well. His "Fairy Tale" dedication reads "Thinking of REH, ERB, and, of course, HPL" - likely referring to pulp scribes Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft - and he also includes a sly Ray Bradbury Easter egg as well as a self-reference to lend some entertaining meta-ness.
The book bursts with creativity, and King weaves in bits of our world as Charlie ventures deeper into this new realm. Yet it's a narrative that remains down to earth rather than going off on flights of fancy. The threats Charlie and his allies face feel scarily real, the dangers visceral, and Charlie himself figures out something often forgotten by the cynical: "I think all worlds are magic. We just get used it."
"Fairy Tale" is an escape that feels needed, especially for modern eyes, a profound story of good vs. evil that's timeless and timely.
The life-affirming saga of young Charlie Reade sticks with you more than most. After turning that last page, you'll feel a little stronger in spirit, yearn for another story and, dare we say, maybe even live happily ever after.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Truitt, Brian. "King weaves a 'Fairy Tale' filled with heart, horror." USA Today, 7 Sept. 2022, p. 01D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A716398373/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=21f9e043. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "If you're a fan of King, then you'll be delighted to disappear into this charming coming-of-age tale and cheer for Charlie as he frees an oppressed people from a tyrannical ruler. It's a tale as old as time."
The master of horror, Stephen King, comes up with a not-so-scary riff on fantasy stories and the hero's quest in "Fairy Tale."
Stephen King's "Fairy Tale" is an epic quest novel with a golden-haired hero and his beloved pooch who save a cursed people from an even more cursed villain. Surprisingly unscary, the book offers a journey through an enchanted world. Charlie Reade, the main character, warns the reader right off the bat: "I'm sure I can tell this story. I'm also sure no one will believe it."
Like many people during the pandemic, King sought ways to occupy himself. He asked himself "What could you write that would make you happy?" This book was the answer.
Since it veers from the prolific writer's typical horror fare, "Fairy Tale" may be a good option for readers turned off by the blood, gore, and terror of some of his other books (although they'll find some of that here, too). In the book's jacket flap, King writes: "As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city - deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street.... Those images released the story I wanted to tell."
We meet Charlie, a charming 17-year-old living a pretty typical teenage life: school, sports, the occasional girlfriend. However, when he was 10 years old, his mother was killed in a hit and run incident, which turned his father to alcohol to numb the pain. Now in recovery, his father is an encouraging and loving parent, but Charlie often wonders if he'll return to drinking, since he believes the only reason his dad was able to stop was because Charlie asked God to make it happen. "If you do that for me, whoever you are, I'll do something for you.... I swear," he prayed. Shortly after, his dad quit drinking, leaving Charlie indebted and looking for whatever good deed would fulfill his end of the deal.
That good deed presents itself when Charlie runs to the aid of his spooky neighbor, Howard Bowditch, after Howard's German Shepherd, Radar, howls for help. The three develop a relationship as Howard pays Charlie $500 a week to care for him and the dog. Where the money comes from is a mystery, and even though he wasn't expecting to get paid, Charlie is pushed by grumpy Howard to take it.
Inside Howard's place (nicknamed "Psycho House" by the locals), Charlie sees a tidy home with a lot of old things. But there's also a secret safe. Weird noises from a locked shed. A bucket of gold pellets. A gun. Then he meets some shady characters. As the novel unfolds, Charlie learns the source of Howard's fortune, and it becomes his responsibility to protect what lies beyond the locked shed. The implications are deeper than what Charlie discovers in the shed, and could have far-reaching effects on the world.
Throughout the novel, King nods to fairy tales. Charlie observes, "I myself was a version of Jack the Beanstalk Boy," as he meets an exiled princess with a (sort of) talking horse. There are lots of fanciful touches: a sundial that can remove years from one's life, a character in a red velvet smoking jacket who offers tea and sugar to his captive. At other times, the events are downright morbid: a mermaid speared through the heart; an epic battle to the death akin to "The Hunger Games"; one character devoured by rats. It's in these moments the reader remembers they're reading a King novel.
It's a whopping read, just shy of 600 pages, and there are times the reader wonders if it really needed to be that long. There is some repetition: Charlie repeatedly mentions how much his adventure matches a stereotypical fairy tale (which it does), and a lot of signposting and foreshadowing that's anything but subtle. But if you're a fan of King, then you'll be delighted to disappear into this charming coming-of-age tale and cheer for Charlie as he frees an oppressed people from a tyrannical ruler.
It's a tale as old as time.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Laine, Samantha. "In 'Fairy Tale,' Stephen King riffs on the classic hero's quest." Christian Science Monitor, 6 Sept. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A716446057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8fa0576d. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "It demonstrates that one of the last true rock stars of fiction can continue to grow as a writer, and doesn't define success solely as a continuation of what's worked for him before."
Byline: Zack Budryk
By Stephen King
Scribner. 449 pp. $30
- - -
It seems like common sense that once a person has been doing something for upward of 50 years, they're as good at it as they're ever going to be. Figures like Meryl Streep or Bruce Springsteen no longer reinvent the wheel with their new art, and they don't need to - they're institutions now.
That's why it's a little surprising that Stephen King, who's been an icon of his medium for half a century, has progressed from offering what could generously be described as some questionable depictions of neurodivergent characters to creating one of the most nuanced, well-realized autistic characters in literature culminating in his latest, "Holly."
The title character, private investigator Holly Gibney, first appeared in King's "Mr. Mercedes" (2014). She's a supporting character in both that and its two follow-ups, "Finders Keepers" and "End of Watch," assisting retired cop Bill Hodges, and was the main protagonist in King's novella "If It Bleeds," from 2020. Holly is not explicitly identified as autistic in the initial volume, but is later described as having "Aspergers-like" tics, and the two actors to have played her on-screen - Justine Lupe in the "Mr. Mercedes" series and Cynthia Erivo in HBO's "The Outsider" - have both said they deliberately played her as autistic. Lupe's Holly also describes herself "stimming," the term for autistic self-soothing behaviors.
In her early appearances, Holly lives in circumstances that will be painfully familiar to many adult autistic people - she's a middle-aged woman who remains under the thumb of her mother, Charlotte, who has deliberately kept Holly dependent on her and convinced her she can't make it in the wider world. As this latest novel begins, Holly is mourning Charlotte's death from covid while grappling with the knowledge that her mother was abusive, particularly after discovering an inheritance that was concealed from Holly. Most human beings can understand complex feelings about someone they both love and understand hurt them, but it's particularly salient for autistic people, who naturally gravitate toward figures they believe they can trust. King depicts the experience poignantly and realistically, and it makes Holly feel like a real autistic person in ways that having her exhibit symptoms gleaned from a Google search wouldn't.
King has a checkered history with writing about disability, as is perhaps natural for someone who started his career in an era when we understood the subject far differently than we do today. Two of his earlier portrayals of developmental disability demonstrate the problems both he and genre fiction have historically had with writing such characters.
In King's epic "The Stand" (1978), Tom Cullen, one of a coalition of survivors of a global pandemic, is clearly written as developmentally disabled in some way, although both his small-town roots and the time in which the book was written limit the specifics offered about what was then called "slow."
Cullen is a gentle giant in the tradition of Lennie Small in "Of Mice and Men," and anticipates genre characters like Hodor in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" or John Coffey in King's own "The Green Mile." He has a catchphrase of sorts, habitually spelling out "moon" and declaring that the word relates to his current circumstances.
King's depiction of Cullen isn't malicious or deliberately insulting, but it's not particularly empathetic either. At one point, the character is hypnotized, revealing a buried "God's Tom" persona that is both intelligent and psychic. His disability only extends to the point when it's more convenient to the plot for him not to be.
This subtext is made even worse in King's "Dreamcatcher" (2001), a work of body horror written while King was recovering from a near-fatal car accident. The book and the movie adapted from it are probably most notorious for the central conceit - alien parasites that enter humans through their anal cavities - but one of its central characters, Doug "Duddits" Cavell, is a man with Down syndrome who is either psychic or an alien himself (it's a very confusing book).
I bring this up not to bash King's older writing but instead to illustrate how much his depiction of disability has evolved with Holly. Not only does her autism manifest itself in far more realistic ways, she's a fully realized human being in ways that neurodivergent fictional characters seldom are. The Holly of this new novel is one with several books' worth of character development behind her, and it feels genuinely cathartic to read the character at a stage in her life when she knows her own value and has a robust network of friends and partners.
Holly's antagonists in the novel are a particularly chilling pair of King creations, elderly married college professors Roddy and Emily Harris, who have spent years snatching unfortunates out of a local park and cannibalizing them, bound to crackpot theories that consuming other humans will stave off their physical and mental degeneration.
The two make excellent foils for Holly, a woman who has come to accept that she works differently than most people, even if that's not always to her advantage. In one of the novel's most satisfying exchanges, Holly informs a furious Roddy that any benefit he believes he's deriving from his ghastly fare is simply the placebo effect.
Holly was created around the time of a broader sea change in depictions of autism in fiction and, coincidentally, the removal of Asperger's syndrome as a separate diagnosis from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013.
The early 2010s saw characters like Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), the fourth-wall-breaking fan favorite on NBC's metatextual sitcom "Community," and Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), the detective protagonist of the crime series "The Bridge." Both of these characters are, like Holly, clearly written as autistic even though they aren't explicitly described that way. Perhaps as a result, neither of them feels like a socially-responsible PSA about autism in lieu of a three-dimensional character, and neither does Holly in any of her appearances.
"Holly" isn't a perfect book - Holly doesn't care for profanity, and there's a limit to how many times one can read the word "poopy" in third-person-limited narration. But it demonstrates that one of the last true rock stars of fiction can continue to grow as a writer, and doesn't define success solely as a continuation of what's worked for him before. That, his protagonist herself would say, gives me "Holly hope."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Budryk, Zack. "Stephen King's 'Holly' is admirably nuanced about autism." Washington Post, 23 Sept. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766317067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=26f93545. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "From vaccinations to the Capitol riot, "Holly" charges into the thorniest contemporary debates with gleeful recklessness. With the same abandon, King bends the rules of a procedural, not least by revealing the perpetrators' identities in the opening chapter."
"What makes King's work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn't his cruelty to his characters: It's his kindness. King describes his characters' interior landscapes, their worries and plans, with a focus like a giant benevolent beam."
Byline: Flynn Berry
His new novel, "Holly," charges into thorny contemporary debates with a pair of unassuming fiends.
HOLLY, by Stephen King
A friend of mine has become a scaredy-cat since having a baby. She has been forcing herself to watch horror movies through parted fingers, hoping they will steel her nerves for the frights of everyday life. I thought of my friend's experiment while reading "Holly," the new mystery from Stephen King: Here is a thriller scary enough to test its readers' mettle - and toughen them up.
Holly Gibney, a private investigator, is attending her mother's funeral when a woman calls asking for help finding her missing daughter. From a classic hard-boiled premise, the investigation unspools in rich, generous storytelling, its tone more color-saturated than noir. Like Kate Atkinson in her Jackson Brodie series, King writes a procedural with Dickensian scope: In "Holly," we encounter reversals of fortune, a surprise inheritance, and a wide cast of friends and adversaries.
Holly once wanted to be a poet. She is partial to a mai tai "because it makes her think of palm trees, turquoise water and white sand beaches." She likes movies, and has a habit of quoting scraps of dialogue to herself. She was raised by a difficult, overbearing mother whose remembered maxims continue to scold her, and she's still wary around teenage boys after being bullied in school. Holly is loyal, resourceful and unstintingly conscientious: She carries around an empty cough drop tin as a personal ashtray. Other people might toss their cigarettes on the ground, "but that doesn't mean she has to add her own filth to the general litter."
When Holly appears on the page, you never have the sense of an author pulling her strings. Her decisions feel genuine, like Holly herself is running the show. She first appeared in "Mr. Mercedes," the start of King's Detective Bill Hodges trilogy, and continued to evolve in "Finders Keepers" and "End of Watch." King has said that Holly "was supposed to be a walk-on character in 'Mr. Mercedes' and she just kind of stole the book and stole my heart." Her presence balances the new novel's darkness. And there is quite a lot of darkness.
The missing young woman vanished from Red Bank Avenue, a derelict strip of self-storage units, warehouses and empty lots. Up the hill from the avenue, the retired professors Emily and Rodney Harris live in a row of expensive Victorian houses "with impeccable paint jobs, bow windows and lots of gingerbread trim." With their bon mots and cocktail parties, the Harrises are respected members of the college community. No one would suspect that their home has a cage in its basement.
The professors are cultivated gourmands, monsters who wear their education and affluence like a mask. An emerita professor of English, Emily will discuss literature with a young Black poet, while privately muttering racial slurs to herself. She "thinks Donald Trump is a boor, but he's also a sorcerer; with some abracadabra magic she doesn't understand (but in her deepest heart envies) he has turned America's podgy, apathetic middle class into revolutionaries." What the professors do to their victims is a stark expression of a society tearing itself apart. Their crimes are queasily believable against the lurid, cartoonish strains of fear and division that surround them.
This is a book with a high body count, though most of the deaths in its pages aren't caused by its villains - they're from Covid. Holly's investigation begins in July 2021, as hospitals are piling up with patients and temporary morgues have opened to handle the overflow of bodies. "When this is over," Holly thinks, "no one will believe it really happened. Or if they do, they won't understand how it happened."
Her own mother, Charlotte, "attended an anti-mask rally in the state capital, waving a sign reading MY BODY MY CHOICE (a sentiment that did not keep her from being adamantly anti-abortion)." Within weeks, she was dead from the virus. In contrast, Holly is fastidious, carrying around masks and nitrile gloves, inviting mockery from those who don't share her scruples.
From vaccinations to the Capitol riot, "Holly" charges into the thorniest contemporary debates with gleeful recklessness. With the same abandon, King bends the rules of a procedural, not least by revealing the perpetrators' identities in the opening chapter. One character quotes the Spanish poet Juan RamoÌn JimeÌnez, whose advice seems to be King's own guiding principle: "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." King's gambles pay off: Knowing the professors' culpability only gives the narrative more urgency, especially as the gruesome nature of their crimes becomes horrifyingly clear.
During my time reading "Holly," I woke screaming from a night terror, which was unexpected, and which everyone who reads the book will understand. What makes King's work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn't his cruelty to his characters: It's his kindness. King describes his characters' interior landscapes, their worries and plans, with a focus like a giant benevolent beam. You can sense the goodness running through them, and that current of goodness is what makes the acts of violence so disturbing.
King is having fun in "Holly," absolutely - the story zings along - but his work also raises questions that cut keenly. Holly "likes to think (but doesn't quite believe) there's a kind of providence at work in matters of right and wrong, blind but powerful, like that statue of Lady Justice holding out her scales. That there's a force in the affairs of men and women standing on the side of the weak and unsuspecting, and against evil."
But her work takes its toll. When Holly reflects on her job as a private investigator, she imagines another life for herself, one in which murderers "would only be cable news fodder, which could be muted or turned off in favor of a romcom." She knows an appalling truth: "There's no end to evil."
So why face such matters head on, whether as a reader or a detective? After staring directly at the worst sorts of evil a human can commit, do we come away stronger? Or just more sad? The answer seems to be both. Maybe, like Holly, we can't help but take the call.
Flynn Berry is the author of the novels "Northern Spy," "A Double Life," "Under the Harrow" and the forthcoming "Trust Her."
HOLLY | By Stephen King | 449 pp. | Scribner | $30
Flynn Berry is the author of the novels "Northern Spy," "A Double Life," "Under the Harrow" and the forthcoming "Trust Her."
CARLO GIAMBARRESI
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 International Herald Tribune
http://international.nytimes.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Berry, Flynn. "In Stephen King's Latest, Beware the Kindly Old Professors." International New York Times, 7 Sept. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A763553830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c441b79c. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
King, Stephen HOLLY Scribner (Fiction None) $30.00 9, 5 ISBN: 9781668016138
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character "stole his heart." Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn't exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it's possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn't understand how this phrase is currently used--and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"King, Stephen: HOLLY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758849204/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=191829b6. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Mystery and horror readers will find much to love."
King, Stephen. Holly. Scribner. (Holly Glbney, Bk. 3). Sept. 2023.464p. ISBN 9781668016138. $30. THRILLER
King gives former supporting player Holly Gibney (introduced in Mr. Mercedes) her own full-length novel to solve the case of a missing person. Private investigator Holly is supposed to be on bereavement leave after the death of her mother, but she can't dismiss the persistent Penny Dahl. Penny's daughter Bonnie disappeared while biking home from work a month earlier, and the police didn't have time for more than a cursory investigation into what seemed to be a case of an adult walking away from her own life. Holly investigates, with help from friends. She soon realizes that Bonnie's is not an isolated case; others have gone missing in the last few years. The only similarity among the disappeared people is that they were last seen in the same area. The deeper Holly goes, the more convinced she becomes that something very sinister is going on. VERDICT King's choice to set the novel in the middle of COVID works, both to develop his characters and to keep Holly off base, emotionally and professionally. He eschews the supernatural here but finds all the horror possible in the evil that "normal" people may do. Mystery and horror readers will find much to love. -- Jane Jorgenson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Jorgenson, Jane. "Holly." Library Journal, vol. 148, no. 8, Aug. 2023, p. 64. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A759873627/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7cab76a9. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "With You Like It Darker, he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys."
After 50 years, Stephen King knows his Constant Readers all too well. In fact, it's right there in the title of the legendary master of horror's latest collection of stories: "You Like It Darker."
Heck yeah, Uncle Stevie, we do like it darker. Obviously so does King, who's crafted an iconic career of keeping folks up at night either turning pages and/or trying to hide from their own creeped-out imagination. The 12 tales of "Darker" (Scribner, 512 pp., ***1/2) are an assortment of tried-and-true King staples, with stories that revisit the author's old haunts - one being a clever continuation of an old novel - and a mix of genres from survival frights to crime drama (a favorite of King's in recent years). It's like a big bag of Skittles: Each one goes down different but they're all pretty tasty.
And thoughtful as well. King writes in "You Like It Darker" - a play on a Leonard Cohen song - that with the supernatural and paranormal yarns he spins, "I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is." With the opener "Two Talented Bastids," King takes on an intriguing, grounded tale of celebrity: A son of a famous writer finally digs into the real reason behind how his father and his dad's best friend suddenly went from landfill owners to renowned artists overnight.
That story's bookended by "The Answer Man," which weaves together Americana and the otherwordly. Over the course of several decades, a lawyer finds himself at major turning points, and the same strange guy shows up to answer his big questions (needing payment, of course), in a surprisingly emotional telling full of small-town retro charm and palpable dread.
With some stories, King mines sinister aspects in life's more mundane corners. "The Fifth Step" centers on a sanitation engineer who has a random and fateful meeting on a park bench with an addict working his way through sobriety, with one heck of a slowburn reveal. A family dinner is the seemingly quaint setting for twisty "Willie the Weirdo," about a 10-year-old misfit who confides only in his dying grandpa. And in the playfully quirky mistaken-identity piece "Finn," a truly unlucky teenager is simply walking home alone when wrong place and wrong time lead to a harrowing journey.
A couple entries lean more sci-fi: "Red Screen" features a cop investigating a wife's murder, with her husband claiming she was possessed; while in "The Turbulence Expert," a man named Craig Dixon gets called into work, his office is an airplane and his job is far from easy. There also is some good old-fashioned cosmic terror with "The Dreamers," starring a Vietnam vet and his scientist boss' experiments that go terrifyingly awry. The 76-year-old King notably offers up some spry elderly heroes, too. One finds himself in harm's way during a family road trip in "On Slide Inn Road," where a signed Ted Williams bat takes center stage, and "Laurie" chronicles an aging widower and his new canine companion running afoul of a ticked-off alligator.
King epics like "It" and "The Stand" are so huge that the books double as doorstops, yet the author has a long history of exceptional short fiction, including the likes of "The Body," "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" and "The Life of Chuck" (from the stellar 2020 collection "If It Bleeds"). And with "Darker," the two lengthier entries are the greatest hits.
"Rattlesnakes" is a sequel of sorts to King's 1981 novel "Cujo," where reptiles are more central to what happens than an unhinged dog. Decades after his son's death and a divorce results from an incident involving a rabid Saint Bernard, Vic Trenton is retired and living at a friend's mansion in the Florida Keys when a meeting with a neighbor leads to unwanted visits from youthful specters. It both brings a little healing catharsis to a traumatizing read and opens up a new wound with unnerving bite.
Then there's the 152-page "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream," which leans more into King's recent noir detective/procedural era. School janitor Danny has a psychic vision of a girl who has been murdered and he tries to do the right thing by informing the police. But that's when the nightmare really begins, as he becomes a prime suspect and has his life torn asunder by the most obsessed cop this side of Javert. Danny's all too ready to be his Valjean, a compelling sturdy personality who fights back hard - and the best King character since fan-favorite private eye Holly Gibney.
"Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic," King writes in his afterword. And with "You Like It Darker," he proves once more that his smaller-sized tales pack as powerful a wallop as the big boys.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Truitt, Brian. "Stephen King's 'Darker' runs gamut of hues." USA Today, 21 May 2024, p. 02D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A794626391/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0af9cbb7. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "King's conversational prose, relatable characters, and knack for knowing precisely what you are afraid of will draw you in ... and hold you fast."
King, Stephen YOU LIKE IT DARKER Scribner (Fiction None) $30.00 5, 21 ISBN: 9781668037713
A dozen tales from the master of creepiness.
Do you like your short stories on the dark side? Enjoy having eerie images and unsettling plot points turn your dreams into nightmares? Take pleasure in jumping at shadows and feeling your heart beat faster after nightfall? If so, this beefy new collection is for you. In a dozen stories--some considerably longer than others--spanning about 500 pages, King gives the reader a host of things to fear: deadly snakes, ghoulish ghosts of long-dead children, man-eating alligators, stealthy serial killers, plummeting airplanes, mad scientists, mistaken identity. Along the way, he also offers insights about, among other things, the fickleness of talent, the power and pathos of unrealized dreams, the pain and pleasure of relationships, and the meaning and meaninglessness of life and, of course, death. In "Two Talented Bastids," the son of a famous writer seeks out the source of his father's success as well as that of his father's best friend, an artist--and confronts his own limitations. In "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream," a man's dream about a dead body turns into a living nightmare of suspicion and disbelief. "The Answer Man" explores the value of knowing your future; "Rattlesnakes," a sequel to King's bestseller Cujo (1981), the importance of reckoning with the past. And while the book is not without an occasional misstep ("Red Screen," about a cop with a nitpicking perimenopausal wife, say), King's conversational prose, relatable characters, and knack for knowing precisely what you are afraid of will draw you in--page by page, horror by horror--and hold you fast.
The disturbing stories in King's latest collection will seep into your psyche and haunt you.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"King, Stephen: YOU LIKE IT DARKER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A791876873/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=120bcc76. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "You Like It Darker proves that he is still at the height of his powers. A triumph."
You Like It Darker. By Stephen King. May 2024. 512p. Scribner, $30 (9781668037713); e-book (9781668037737).
Tucked away in King's new collection of a dozen stories, many published here for the first time, is a previously unpublished novella that is, quite simply, a small masterpiece. "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" features some of the author's most compelling characters: Danny, whose frighteningly real dream upends his life; Jalbert, a detective whose obsession with Danny borders on the delusional; Davis, Jalbert's partner, who struggles to believe the unbelievable. This absolutely spellbinding tale, all by itself, is worth the price of admission. But there's so much more, stories about love, loss, tragedy, resilience, and--this is Stephen King, after all--unearthly creatures and the strange, unpredictable overlap between this world and another. A character from a classic early King novel makes a welcome return, too, in a beautifully imagined tale that will move readers to tears. This book features some of the author's most engaging writing ("There's plenty of get-along between them, but love ain't in it). King's first book, Carrie, was published 50 years ago. He's had a remarkable career, and You Like It Darker proves that he is still at the height of his powers. A triumph.--David Pitt
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With so many new and exceptional stories, this collection will have King's legions of fans clamoring.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pitt, David. "You Like It Darker." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2024, pp. 24+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786417385/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4995306c. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.
QUOTED: "Some of the stories are darker and more poisonous than others, but they all have that King touch."
King, Stephen. You Like It Darker: Stories. Scribner. May 2024.512p. ISBN 9781668037713. $30. F
In King's (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams) new collection of short stories, a rogue scientist tries to peer past the boundaries of the world by hypnotizing "The Dreamers"; "Danny Coughlin's Bad Dream" becomes a nightmare when a police officer mistakes Danny for the murderer of a young woman; and the son of a famous author discovers how his father's writing talent blossomed in midlife in "Two Talented Bastids." There's also a young lawyer in the 1930s who is trying to determine whether he should work at his family's white-shoe law firm or open his own small practice; he's lucky enough to fall into a fold of space and time to find "The Answer Man." In fact, the lawyer will come to find the Answer Man three times in his life; will he like the answers he hears? Meanwhile, in "Rattlesnake," the Constant Readers bump into a character from Cujo long after the events of that book, who is trying to outrun his own ghosts and the ghosts of others. VERDICT King explains in an afterword to the collection that short stories are hard for him to write, but readers will be thrilled by these tales. Some of the stories are darker and more poisonous than others, but they all have that King touch.--Jennie Mills
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Mills, Jennie. "You Like It Darker: Stories." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 4, Apr. 2024, p. 92. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788954071/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6e02164. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.