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WEBSITE: http://www.stephenking.com/
CITY: Bangor
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2016
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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.
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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; 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.
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.
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 Web site: “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 Web site 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. Meanwhile, 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.”
King once again turns his attention to a band of young kids joining forces to fight evil. In The Institute, 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.”
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 Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 12, 1980, Volume 26, 1983, Volume 37, 1985, Volume 61, 1990.
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.
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.
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 Keu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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 Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (May 28, 2013), “Stephen King on Growing Up, Believing in God and Getting Scared,” excerpts from Fresh Air 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 Web site, 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.
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, http://www.stephenking.com (November 17, 2019).
Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/ (June 3, 2009), Colin Harvey, review of Just after Sunset; Adam Roberts, review of Duma Key.
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.
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
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 novelCarriefor 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 Zonewas 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.
Originally written by Tabitha King, updated by Marsha DeFilippo.
Photo Credit: Shane Leonard
FAQ: https://www.stephenking.com/faq.html
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.
King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
Stephen King’s Victorian-style Mansion to Become an Archive and Writer’s Retreat
The legendary horror author is opening up his spooky home in Bangor, Maine
By Mary Elizabeth Andriotis
October 18, 2019
Stephen King's home in Bangor, Maine, features a creepy front gate.Photo: Glenn Nagel / Alamy Stock Photo
Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, recently received approval to turn their home in Bangor, Maine, into a writer's retreat and an archive of the famous horror author's work. The couple submitted the request to have their home rezoned as a nonprofit organization to the Bangor City Council earlier this month, and have now received unanimous approval.
“They did not want the house to become a Dollywood or some kind of tourist attraction,” David Gould, a city of Bangor planning officer, previously told New England Cable News. “That would bring all sorts of people to the neighborhood, and they have other neighbors that live there.” The King's retreat will host no more than five writers at one time.
In true Stephen King fashion, the eye-catching red Victorian-style mansion features bats, spiders, and a web on its front gates. The Shining author has said that upon moving to Bangor, he already had a plan to write “a very long book” set in “a small American city," and that the fictional town of Derry, Maine, in his hit 1986 novel It was inspired by Bangor.
“The King Family has been wonderful to the city of Bangor over time and have donated literally millions of dollars to various causes in the community. Preserving his legacy here in Bangor is important for this community," Bangor city councilor Ben Sprague informed Rolling Stone.
Currently, restricted tours of the home are available to visitors by appointment, as part of the Stephen King–inspired tours of Maine, appropriately called SK Tours. These tours also include locations depicted in It and the actual cemetery used for the 1989 adaptation of Pet Sematary. The Kings no longer live in the Bangor home. They spend most of their time at their other residences in Maine and Florida instead.
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Stephen King has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror
It’s a big year for King adaptations, but the movies only tell part of the story.
By Aja Romano@ajaromano Updated Oct 10, 2018, 2:01pm EDT
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It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. 1 best-sellers. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one — even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card.
In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary, the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend.
That means if you’re a King fan — or looking to become one — there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.
After all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things, whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It. Without The Shining, and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material.
Without Carrie, we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history — Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison — nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery.
This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century.
King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White
High school is hell.
Born in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha.
By 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him.
Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right, as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.
Carrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run. The story of a troubled girl who develops powers of telekinesis, Carrie is the ultimate “high school is hell” morality tale. Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates, and the book introduces us to two of King’s most prominent themes: small Maine towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy despite being deeply flawed and morally gray — in this case Carrie, her mother, and her bully Sue. The complicated bond between protagonist and antagonist is also a recurring motif in King’s writing.
Two years after Carrie’s publication, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation grossed $33 million on a $1.8 million budget, largely on the strength of advance critical praise and word-of-mouth reviews. Buoyed by the subsequent success of Carrie’s paperback sales, King would go on to churn out six novels (Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Rage, The Stand, The Long Walk, and The Dead Zone) over the next six years, establishing a prolificacy that would continue through much of his career.
“The movie made the book and the book made me,” King told the New York Times in 1979.
By 1980, King was the world’s best-selling author.
It’s taken decades for King’s work to be critically appreciated — in particular for its literary qualities
Tim Robbins celebrates the most hard-won jailbreak ever.
King’s work has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Harper’s to Playboy. The author has influenced literary writers like Haruki Murakami and Sherman Alexie along with genre creators like the producers of Lost. And he’s won virtually every major horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy award there is. But King also spent decades being written off by both the horror writing community and the literary mainstream.
King once referred to critics perceiving him to be “a rich hack,” a perception that bears out in horror writer David Schow’s offhand 1997 description of him as “comparable to McDonald’s” — intended to characterize King as horror’s pedestrian mainstream. When a 1994 King short story, his first to be published in the New Yorker, won the prestigious O. Henry Award, Publishers Weekly declared it to be “one of the weaker stories in this year’s [O. Henry Award] collection.”
“The price he pays for being Stephen King is not being taken seriously,” one of King’s collaborators told the LA Times in 1995.
The critical disparagement of King often went hand in hand with genre shaming. In a 1997 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl questioned King’s literary tastes, getting him to admit that he’d never read Jane Austen and had only read one Tolstoy novel. In response, King grinned that he had, instead, read every novel Dean Koontz had ever written — Dean Koontz being a notoriously lowbrow writer of thrillers. (That same year, the New York Times would compliment the breadth of King’s literary knowledge even while panning his epic best-seller The Stand.)
“Here you are, one of the best- selling authors in all of history,” Stahl continued, “and the critics cannot find much that they like in your work.”
To this, King replied, “All I can say is — and this is in response to the critics who've often said that my work is awkward and sometimes a little bit painful — I know it. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got.”
While King’s self-deprecation may have been a mark of respect for his critics, those critics were on the cusp of being proven wrong. This was in large part thanks to the sleeping giant that became The Shawshank Redemption, which drew popular attention to the fact that King could do more than “just” write horror, and helped kick-start critical reassessment of him and his work.
The film, written by longtime Stephen King adapter Frank Darabont, is based on one of King’s most literary works, a 1982 novella about an agonizingly slow prison break. Shawshank flopped when it opened in theaters in 1994, but it was nominated for seven Academy Awards — more than any other King adaptation. As indicated by its long reign as the highest-ranked film on IMDB, it has gone on to become one of the most popular and beloved films ever made.
By 1998, under the oversight of a new publisher, King’s books were actively being marketed as literary fiction for the first time. From the mid-’90s through today, King’s critical and cultural reputation has advanced as thoroughly as it stagnated before.
In a 2013 CBS interview, we see the marked difference with which contemporary media has come to view King’s work: “You used to always get slotted in the Horror genre,” interviewer Anthony Mason commented to King. “And I think it was sort of a way of some people, I think, not treating you all that seriously as a writer.”
“I don't know if I want to be treated seriously per se, because in the end posterity decides whether it's good work or whether it's lasting work,” King replied, secure in his position as one of the best-loved authors of the 20th century.
But evolving cultural views on genre fiction aside, King’s writing has always displayed significant literary qualities, particularly ongoing literary themes that have shaped how we understand horror as well as ourselves.
The horror of Stephen King doesn’t lie with the external but with the internal
Kathy Bates in Misery.
In his award-winning 1981 collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre, King names three emotions that belong to the realm of the horror genre: terror, horror, and revulsion. He argues that while all three emotions are of equal value to the creation of horror, the “finest” and most worthy is terror because it rests on the creator’s ability to command audiences’ imaginations. Drawing on numerous writers before him, he posits that never fully revealing the source of the horror is the best way to effect terror upon the mind.
King argues that the art of making us terrified about what lies around the corner is all about getting us to identify with the characters who are experiencing the terror. If we don’t care about the characters, then it won’t matter how many jump scares you fling at the audience — we have to be at least a little invested in their fate.
As such, King spends a great deal of time on characters’ interior lives, often jumping between different point-of-view characters throughout his novels. (For example, Salem’s Lot, It, and The Stand are all stories with large ensemble casts and multiple shifting points of view.) But every characterization, even a minor one, is rich with detail; even if you just met a new character, you can bet that by the time he or she meets a grisly ending a few pages later, you’ll have a deep understanding of who that character is.
King’s novels often contain deeply flawed yet sympathetic central characters surrounded by large ensemble casts full of equally flawed people, each struggling to interact and grapple with larger forces. By framing his stories within an interwoven web of narrative perspectives and juxtaposed character experiences, King is able to generate a feeling of interconnectivity, as well as explore the various literary themes that stretch throughout his multidimensional universe, including but not limited to:
1) Nerdboys to men
King credits his absentee father for bequeathing him a love of horror via a stash of pulp novels King discovered as a boy. But another lasting legacy of this truncated relationship was King’s ongoing preoccupation with relationships between men and boys, the process of attaining manhood, and the bridge between boyhood and adulthood.
We see these bonds take a variety of shapes and meaning throughout his work, ranging from comforting (Salem’s Lot) to destructive (Apt Pupil) to ambiguous (The Shining). King explores male intimacy through these relationships, frequently challenging typical masculine forms of expression. He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms. The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature.
To King, the social markers that make kids outcasts in school — from being nerdy to being overweight to enduring acne — also make them uniquely outfitted to be conduits for readers’ social anxieties and fears. Because deep down, we’re all reliving the social terrors of school every day of our lives.
2) Creative struggles and struggles with addiction
King frequently writes about the process of creation, often by exploring an artist who’s been prevented from creating in some way. The main characters of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, 1408, and numerous short stories are all writers who’ve been in some way prevented from writing or thwarted in their creative efforts. Many of these and other artistic characters mirror King’s own real-life experiences; for example, the artist at the center of 2008’s Duma Key reflects his physical struggle to write following a highly publicized 1999 injury that made writing difficult for several years.
King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival, or indirectly: The villain of Misery, Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.
3) World building through geography and repeated characters
Most people associate Stephen King with Maine and Maine with Stephen King. This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. Numerous fictional King towns, like Derry, Haven (the location of a 2010 TV series based on King’s mystery novel The Colorado Kid), and Castle Rock, exist in his works alongside real towns.
StephenKing.com
King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe. In stories like It, he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. And while Derry is the most famous of King’s fictional towns, Castle Rock is his most frequent destination, showing up over and over in his works.
King doesn’t only reuse places in his stories, however — he also reuses people. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises. In The Dark Tower he’s “the Man in Black”; to the lost souls in The Stand, he’s a leader named Randall Flagg. In other stories, he’s a nebulous cast of characters with the initials “R.F.”
Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing. King characters also are frequently able to travel between narrative landscapes, with or without their awareness (The Shining, Gerald’s Game, Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story). This interconnectivity becomes the central conceit of the Dark Tower, which explicitly links most of King’s stories together in one vast multiverse and explains that there are metaphysical doors between the worlds that allow all this to happen.
King’s work endures not because of its inherent darkness but because of its inherent hope
Part of the reason it may have taken critics so long to reassess King’s work is that “horror” implies the lower rungs of emotion King speaks of in Danse Macabre — the gross-outs and the physical gags that play into our understanding of the genre. But the key to his popularity as a horror novelist, and as a novelist in general, resides not in the darkest moments of his writing, but in his basic belief in humanity’s innate goodness.
He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a 1989 interview:
There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. ... If there weren’t this huge store of good will we would have blown ourselves to hell ten years after World War II was over.
... It’s such a common thing, those feelings of love toward your fellow man, that we hardly ever talk about it; we concentrate on the other things. It’s just there; it’s all around us, so I guess we take it for granted ...
I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I see a lot of the so-called “romantic ideal” at work in the world around us.
It’s this core optimism, more than his ability to scare us, that makes King so beloved by readers. Even in his bleakest works, he retains his ability to empathize deeply with his characters, and to see even his monsters as fundamentally human.
Stephen King
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other people with the same name, see Stephen King (disambiguation).
Stephen King
King at the New York Comic Con in February 2007
Born
Stephen Edwin King
September 21, 1947 (age 72)
Portland, Maine, U.S.
Pen name
Richard BachmanJohn SwithenBeryl Evans
Occupation
Author
Nationality
American
Alma mater
University of Maine
Period
1967–present[1]
Genre
Horrorfantasysupernatural fictiondramagothicgenre fictiondark fantasypost-apocalyptic fictioncrime fictionsuspensethriller
Notable awards
Bram Stoker AwardWorld Fantasy AwardNational Book Award
Spouse
Tabitha Spruce (m. 1971)
Children
Naomi King
Joe Hill
Owen King
Signature
Website
stephenking.com
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy novels. His books have sold more than 350 million copies,[2] many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. King has published 61 novels (including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman) and six non-fiction books.[3] He has written approximately 200 short stories,[4][5] most of which have been published in book collections.
King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, and British Fantasy Society Awards. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.[6] He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).[7] In 2015, King was awarded with a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature.[8] He has been described as the "King of Horror".[9]
Contents
1
Early life
2
Career
2.1
Beginnings
2.2
Carrie and aftermath
2.3
The Dark Tower books
2.4
Pseudonyms
2.5
Digital era
3
Collaborations
3.1
Writings
3.2
Music
4
Analysis
4.1
Writing style and approach
4.2
Influences
4.3
Critical response
5
Appearances and adaptations in other media
6
Political views and activism
6.1
Maine politics
7
Philanthropy
8
Personal life
8.1
Car accident and aftermath
9
Awards
10
Bibliography
10.1
Audiobooks
11
See also
12
References
13
Further reading
14
External links
Early life
Stephen King was born September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father, Donald Edwin King, was a merchant seaman. Donald was born under the surname Pollock, but as an adult, used the surname King.[10][11][12] Stephen's mother was Nellie Ruth (née Pillsbury).[12]
When King was two years old, his father left the family. King's mother raised Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to De Pere, Wisconsin; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, his family returned to Durham, Maine, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths. She then became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged.[1] King was raised Methodist[13] but lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, King chooses to believe in the existence of God.[14]
As a child, King apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and seemingly in shock. Only later did the family learn of the friend's death. Some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works,[15] but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing (2000).
King related in detail his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse Macabre (1981), in a chapter titled "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause." King compares his uncle's dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection of short stories he remembers as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios during a 2009 interview, "I knew that I'd found home when I read that book."[16]
King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine in 1966.[17] He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt (he later paid tribute to the comics in his screenplay for Creepshow). He began writing for fun while still in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, and later began selling to his friends stories based on movies he had seen (though when discovered by his teachers, he was forced to return the profits). The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber"; it was serialized over four issues (three published and one unpublished) of a fanzine, Comics Review, in 1965. That story was published the following year in a revised form as "In a Half-World of Terror" in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman.[18] As a teen, King also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[19]
From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English.[20] That year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, and participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen.[21] King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump attendant, and worker at an industrial laundry. King met his future wife, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the University's Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops; they wed in 1971.[21]
Career
Beginnings
King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor", to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967.[1]
After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post immediately, initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier. Many of these early stories have been republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story "The Raft" was published in Adam, a men's magazine. After being arrested for driving over a traffic cone, he was fined $250 and had no money to pay the petty larceny fine. However, payment arrived for the short story "The Raft" (then entitled "The Float"), and King was able to pay the fine.[22] In 1971, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He continued to contribute short stories to magazines and worked on ideas for novels.[1]
Carrie and aftermath
In 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. Carrie was King's fourth novel,[23] but it was the first to be published. It was written on a portable typewriter that belonged to his wife. The novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages of his work in the garbage can.[24] Tabitha King fished the pages out of the garbage can and encouraged him to finish the story, saying that she would help him with the female perspective; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel.[25] King said, "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas… my considered opinion was that I had written the world's all-time loser."[26] According to The Guardian, Carrie "is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent—and then, as the novel progresses, developing—telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more."[27]
When Carrie was chosen for publication, King's phone was out of service. Doubleday editor William Thompson – who would eventually become King's close friend – sent a telegram to King's house in late March or early April 1973[28] which read: "Carrie Officially A Doubleday Book. $2,500 Advance Against Royalties. Congrats, Kid – The Future Lies Ahead, Bill."[29] According to King, he bought a new Ford Pinto with the money from the advance.[28] On May 13, 1973, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, which—in accordance with King's contract with Doubleday—was split between them.[30][31] Carrie set King's career in motion and became a significant novel in the horror genre. In 1976, it was made into a successful horror film.[32]
King's Salem's Lot was published in 1975. In a 1987 issue of The Highway Patrolman magazine, he stated, "The story seems sort of down home to me. I have a special cold spot in my heart for it!"[33] After his mother's death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where King wrote The Shining (published 1977). The family returned to western Maine in 1975, where King completed his fourth novel, The Stand (published 1978). In 1977, the family, with the addition of Owen Phillip (his third and last child), traveled briefly to England, returning to Maine that fall, where King began teaching creative writing at the University of Maine.[34]
In 1982, King published Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which King is famous.[35] The collection is notable for having had three of its four novellas turned into Hollywood films: Stand by Me (1986) was adapted from the novella The Body,[36] The Shawshank Redemption (1994) was adapted from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,[37] and Apt Pupil (1998) was adapted from the novella of the same name.[38][39]
In 1985, King wrote his first work for the comic book medium,[40] writing a few pages of the benefit X-Men comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men. The book, whose profits were donated to assist with famine relief in Africa, was written by a number of different authors in the comic book field, such as Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, and Alan Moore, as well as authors not primarily associated with that industry, such as Harlan Ellison.[41] The following year, King published It (1986), which was the best-selling hard-cover novel in the United States that year,[42] and wrote the introduction to Batman No. 400, an anniversary issue in which he expressed his preference for that character over Superman.[43][44]
The Dark Tower books
Main article: The Dark Tower (series)
In the late 1970s, King began what became a series of interconnected stories about a lone gunslinger, Roland, who pursues the "Man in Black" in an alternate-reality universe that is a cross between J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and the American Wild West as depicted by Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone in their spaghetti Westerns. The first of these stories, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, was initially published in five installments by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman, from 1977 to 1981. The Gunslinger was continued as an eight-book epic series called The Dark Tower, whose books King wrote and published infrequently over four decades.[citation needed]
Pseudonyms
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King published a handful of short novels—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The idea behind this was to test whether he could replicate his success again and to allay his fears that his popularity was an accident. An alternate explanation was that publishing standards at the time allowed only a single book a year.[45] He picked up the name from the hard rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, of which he is a fan.[46]
Richard Bachman was exposed as King's pseudonym by a persistent Washington, D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, who noticed similarities between the works and later located publisher's records at the Library of Congress that named King as the author of one of Bachman's novels.[47] This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death"—supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym".[48] King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half, about a pseudonym turning on a writer, to "the deceased Richard Bachman", and in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was released, the companion novel The Regulators carried the "Bachman" byline.
In 2006, during a press conference in London, King declared that he had discovered another Bachman novel, titled Blaze. It was published on June 12, 2007. In fact, the original manuscript had been held at King's alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono, for many years and had been covered by numerous King experts. King rewrote the original 1973 manuscript for its publication.[49]
King has used other pseudonyms. The short story "The Fifth Quarter" was published under the pseudonym John Swithen (the name of a character in the novel Carrie), by Cavalier in April 1972.[50] The story was reprinted in King's collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes in 1993 under his own name. In the introduction to the Bachman novel Blaze, King claims, with tongue-in-cheek, that "Bachman" was the person using the Swithen pseudonym.
The "children's book" Charlie the Choo-Choo: From the World of The Dark Tower was published in 2016 under the pseudonym Beryl Evans, who was portrayed by actress Allison Davies during a book signing at San Diego Comic-Con,[51] and illustrated by Ned Dameron. It is adapted from a fictional book central to the plot of King's previous novel The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.[52]
Digital era
Stephen King at the Harvard Book Store, June 6, 2005
In 2000, King published online a serialized horror novel, The Plant.[53] At first the public presumed that King had abandoned the project because sales were unsuccessful, but King later stated that he had simply run out of stories.[54] The unfinished epistolary novel is still available from King's official site, now free. Also in 2000, he wrote a digital novella, Riding the Bullet, and has said he sees e-books becoming 50% of the market "probably by 2013 and maybe by 2012". But he also warns: "Here's the thing—people tire of the new toys quickly."[55]
King wrote the first draft of the 2001 novel Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, which he called "the world's finest word processor".[56]
In August 2003, King began writing a column on pop culture appearing in Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week. The column was called The Pop of King (a play on the nickname "The King of Pop" commonly attributed to Michael Jackson).[57]
In 2006, King published an apocalyptic novel, Cell. The book features a sudden force in which every cell phone user turns into a mindless killer. King noted in the book's introduction that he does not use cell phones.[citation needed]
In 2008, King published both a novel, Duma Key, and a collection, Just After Sunset. The latter featured 13 short stories, including a previously unpublished novella, N. Starting July 28, 2008, N. was released as a serialized animated series to lead up to the release of Just After Sunset.[58]
In 2009, King published Ur, a novella written exclusively for the launch of the second-generation Amazon Kindle and available only on Amazon.com, and Throttle, a novella co-written with his son Joe Hill and released later as an audiobook titled Road Rage, which included Richard Matheson's short story "Duel". King's novel Under the Dome was published on November 10 of that year; it is a reworking of an unfinished novel he tried writing twice in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and at 1,074 pages, it is the largest novel he has written since It (1986). Under the Dome debuted at No. 1 in The New York Times Bestseller List.[59]
On February 16, 2010, King announced on his Web site that his next book would be a collection of four previously unpublished novellas called Full Dark, No Stars. In April of that year, King published Blockade Billy, an original novella issued first by independent small press Cemetery Dance Publications and later released in mass-market paperback by Simon & Schuster. The following month, DC Comics premiered American Vampire, a monthly comic book series written by King with short-story writer Scott Snyder, and illustrated by Rafael Albuquerque, which represents King's first original comics work.[60][61][62] King wrote the background history of the very first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, in the first five-issues story arc. Scott Snyder wrote the story of Pearl.[63]
King's next novel, 11/22/63, was published November 8, 2011,[64][65] and was nominated for the 2012 World Fantasy Award Best Novel.[66] The eighth Dark Tower volume, The Wind Through the Keyhole, was published in 2012.[67] King's next book was Joyland, a novel about "an amusement-park serial killer", according to an article in The Sunday Times, published on April 8, 2012.[68]
During his Chancellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King indicated that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer. With a working title Mr. Mercedes and inspired by a true event about a woman driving her car into a McDonald's restaurant, it was originally meant to be a short story just a few pages long.[69] In an interview with Parade, published May 26, 2013, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed[70] he published it in June 2013. Later, on June 20, 2013, while doing a video chat with fans as part of promoting the upcoming Under the Dome TV series, King mentioned he was halfway through writing his next novel, Revival,[71] which was released November 11, 2014.[72]
King announced in June 2014 that Mr. Mercedes is part of a trilogy; the second book, Finders Keepers, was released on June 2, 2015. On April 22, 2015, it was revealed that King was working on the third book of the trilogy, End of Watch, which was ultimately released on June 7, 2016.[73][74]
During a tour to promote End of Watch, King revealed that he had collaborated on a novel, set in a women's prison in West Virginia, with his son, Owen King to be titled Sleeping Beauties.[75]
Collaborations
Writings
King has written two novels with horror novelist Peter Straub: The Talisman (1984) and a sequel, Black House (2001). King has indicated that he and Straub will likely write the third and concluding book in this series, the tale of Jack Sawyer, but has set no deadline for its completion.[citation needed]
King produced an artist's book with designer Barbara Kruger, My Pretty Pony (1989), published in a limited edition of 250 by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Alfred A. Knopf released it in a general trade edition.[76]
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) was a paperback tie-in for the King-penned miniseries Rose Red (2002). Published under anonymous authorship, the book was written by Ridley Pearson. The novel is written in the form of a diary by Ellen Rimbauer, and annotated by the fictional professor of paranormal activity, Joyce Reardon. The novel also presents a fictional afterword by Ellen Rimbauer's grandson, Steven. Intended to be a promotional item rather than a stand-alone work, its popularity spawned a 2003 prequel television miniseries to Rose Red, titled The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. This spin-off is a rare occasion of another author being granted permission to write commercial work using characters and story elements invented by King. The novel tie-in idea was repeated on Stephen King's next project, the miniseries Kingdom Hospital. Richard Dooling, King's collaborator on Kingdom Hospital and writer of several episodes in the miniseries, published a fictional diary, The Journals of Eleanor Druse, in 2004. Eleanor Druse is a key character in Kingdom Hospital, much as Dr. Joyce Readon and Ellen Rimbauer are key characters in Rose Red.[citation needed]
Throttle (2009), a novella written in collaboration with his son Joe Hill, appears in the anthology He Is Legend: Celebrating Richard Matheson.[77] Their second novella collaboration, In the Tall Grass (2012), was published in two parts in Esquire.[78][79] It was later released in e-book and audiobook formats, the latter read by Stephen Lang.[80]
King and his son Owen King wrote the novel Sleeping Beauties, released in 2017, that is set in a women's prison.[81]
Music
In 1988, the band Blue Öyster Cult recorded an updated version of its 1974 song "Astronomy". The single released for radio play featured a narrative intro spoken by King.[82][83] The Blue Öyster Cult song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was also used in the King TV series The Stand.[84]
King collaborated with Michael Jackson to create Ghosts (1996), a 40-minute musical video.[85] King states he was motivated to collaborate as he is "always interested in trying something new, and for (him), writing a minimusical would be new".[86] In 2012 King collaborated with musician Shooter Jennings and his band Hierophant, providing the narration for their album, Black Ribbons.[87] King played guitar for the rock band Rock Bottom Remainders, several of whose members are authors. Other members include Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry, and Greg Iles. King and the other band members collaborated to release an e-book called Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (June 2013).[88][89] King wrote a musical entitled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County (2012) with musician John Mellencamp.[citation needed]
Analysis
Writing style and approach
Stephen King in 2011
King's formula for learning to write well is: "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer." He sets out each day with a quota of 2000 words and will not stop writing until it is met. He also has a simple definition for talent in writing: "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."[90]
When asked why he writes, King responds: "The answer to that is fairly simple—there was nothing else I was made to do. I was made to write stories and I love to write stories. That's why I do it. I really can't imagine doing anything else and I can't imagine not doing what I do."[91] He is also often asked why he writes such terrifying stories and he answers with another question: "Why do you assume I have a choice?"[92] King usually begins the story creation process by imagining a "what if" scenario, such as what would happen if a writer is kidnapped by a sadistic nurse in Colorado.[93]
King often uses authors as characters, or includes mention of fictional books in his stories, novellas and novels, such as Paul Sheldon who is the main character in Misery, adult Bill Denbrough in It, Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, and Jack Torrance in The Shining. He has extended this to breaking the fourth wall by including himself as a character in the Dark Tower series from Wolves of the Calla onwards. See also List of fictional books in the works of Stephen King for a complete list. In September 2009 it was announced he would serve as a writer for Fangoria.[94]
Influences
King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most as a writer."[95] In a current edition of Matheson's The Shrinking Man, King is quoted as saying, "A horror story if there ever was one...a great adventure story—it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading."[citation needed]
Other acknowledged influences include Ray Bradbury,[96] Joseph Payne Brennan,[97] Elmore Leonard,[98] John D. MacDonald, and Don Robertson.[99]
King's The Shining is immersed in gothic influences, including "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe (which was directly influenced by the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto).[100] The Overlook Hotel acts as a replacement for the traditional gothic castle, and Jack Torrance is a tragic villain seeking redemption.[100]
King's favorite books are (in order): The Golden Argosy; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Satanic Verses; McTeague; Lord of the Flies; Bleak House; Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Raj Quartet; Light in August; and Blood Meridian.[101]
Critical response
Science fiction editors John Clute and Peter Nichols[102] offer a largely favorable appraisal of King, noting his "pungent prose, sharp ear for dialogue, disarmingly laid-back, frank style, along with his passionately fierce denunciation of human stupidity and cruelty (especially to children) [all of which rank] him among the more distinguished 'popular' writers."
In his book The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Noël Carroll discusses King's work as an exemplar of modern horror fiction. Analyzing both the narrative structure of King's fiction and King's non-fiction ruminations on the art and craft of writing, Carroll writes that for King, "the horror story is always a contest between the normal and the abnormal such that the normal is reinstated and, therefore, affirmed."[103]
In his analysis of post–World War II horror fiction, The Modern Weird Tale (2001), critic S. T. Joshi[104] devotes a chapter to King's work. Joshi argues that King's best-known works (his supernatural novels) are his worst, describing them as mostly bloated, illogical, maudlin and prone to deus ex machina endings. Despite these criticisms, Joshi argues that since Gerald's Game (1993), King has been tempering the worst of his writing faults, producing books that are leaner, more believable and generally better written.[citation needed]
In 1996, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story "The Man in the Black Suit".[105]
In his short story collection A Century of Great Suspense Stories, editor Jeffery Deaver noted that King "singlehandedly made popular fiction grow up. While there were many good best-selling writers before him, King, more than anybody since John D. MacDonald, brought reality to genre novels. He has often remarked that 'Salem's Lot was "Peyton Place meets Dracula. And so it was. The rich characterization, the careful and caring social eye, the interplay of story line and character development announced that writers could take worn themes such as vampirism and make them fresh again. Before King, many popular writers found their efforts to make their books serious blue-penciled by their editors. 'Stuff like that gets in the way of the story,' they were told. Well, it's stuff like that that has made King so popular, and helped free the popular name from the shackles of simple genre writing. He is a master of masters."[106]
In 2003, King was honored by the National Book Awards with a lifetime achievement award, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Some in the literary community expressed disapproval of the award: Richard E. Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as "non-literature" and critic Harold Bloom denounced the choice:
The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.[107]
Orson Scott Card responded:
Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite.[108]
In 2008, King's book On Writing was ranked 21st on Entertainment Weekly list of "The New Classics: The 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008".[109]
Appearances and adaptations in other media
Main article: List of adaptations of works by Stephen King
King and his wife Tabitha own Zone Radio Corp, a radio station group consisting of WZON/620 AM,[110] WKIT-FM/100.3 & WZLO/103.1.
King tried his hand at directing with Maximum Overdrive, in which he also made a cameo appearance as a man using a malfunctioning ATM.[111]
King produced and acted in a television series, Kingdom Hospital, which is based on the Danish miniseries Riget by Lars von Trier.[112]
In 2010, King appeared in a cameo role as a cleaner named Bachman (a reference to his pen name Richard Bachman) on the FX series Sons of Anarchy.[113]
The Syfy TV series Haven is based on King's novella, The Colorado Kid.[114]
In 2019, King appeared in a cameo role as a thrift store owner in It Chapter Two.[115]
Political views and activism
In April 2008, King spoke out against HB 1423, a bill pending in the Massachusetts state legislature that would restrict or ban the sale of violent video games to anyone under the age of 18. King argued that such laws allow legislators to ignore the economic divide between the rich and poor and the easy availability of guns, which he believed were the actual causes of violence.[116]
A controversy emerged on May 5, 2008 when Noel Sheppard posted a clip of King at a Library of Congress reading event on the Web site NewsBusters. King, talking to high-school students, had said: "If you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that."[117] The comment was described by the blog as "another in a long line of liberal media members bashing the military," and likened to John Kerry's similar remark from 2006.[118] King responded later that day, saying, "That a right-wing-blog would impugn my patriotism because I said children should learn to read, and could get better jobs by doing so, is beneath contempt...I live in a national guard town, and I support our troops, but I don't support either the war or educational policies that limit the options of young men and women to any one career—military or otherwise." King later expressed regret for the remark, saying that he misspoke. King added that during the Vietnam War, serving in the military was a great career for some.[119]
During the 2008 presidential election, King voiced his support for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.[120] King was quoted as calling conservative commentator Glenn Beck "Satan's mentally challenged younger brother."[121]
On March 8, 2011, King spoke at a political rally in Sarasota aimed against Governor Rick Scott (R-FL), voicing his opposition to the Tea Party movement.[122]
On April 30, 2012, King published an article in The Daily Beast calling for rich Americans, including himself, to pay more taxes, citing it as "a practical necessity and moral imperative that those who have received much should be obligated to pay ... in the same proportion".[123]
On January 25, 2013, King published an essay titled "Guns" via Amazon.com's Kindle single feature, which discusses the gun debate in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. King called for gun owners to support a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, writing, "Autos and semi-autos are weapons of mass destruction...When lunatics want to make war on the unarmed and unprepared, these are the weapons they use."[124][125] The essay became the fifth-bestselling non-fiction title for the Kindle.[126]
King has criticized Donald Trump and Rep. Steve King, deeming them racists.[127][128][129]
In June 2018, King called for the release of the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov who is jailed in Russia.[130]
Maine politics
King endorsed Shenna Bellows in the 2014 U.S. Senate election for the seat held by Republican Susan Collins.[131]
King publicly criticized Paul LePage during LePage's tenure as Governor of Maine, referring to him as one of The Three Stooges (with then-Florida Governor Rick Scott and then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker being the other two).[122] He was critical of LePage for incorrectly suggesting in a 2015 radio address that King avoided paying Maine income taxes by living out of state for part of the year. The statement was later corrected by the Governor's office, but no apology was issued. King said LePage was "full of the stuff that makes the grass grow green"[132] and demanded that LePage "man up and apologize".[133] LePage declined to apologize to King, stating, "I never said Stephen King did not pay income taxes. What I said was, Stephen King's not in Maine right now. That's what I said."[134]
The attention garnered by the LePage criticism led to efforts to encourage King to run for Governor of Maine in 2018.[135] King stated he would not run or serve.[136] King sent a tweet on June 30, 2015 calling LePage "a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love. If he won't govern, he should resign." He later clarified that he was not calling on LePage to resign, but to "go to work or go back home."[137] On August 27, 2016, King called LePage "a bigot, a homophobe, and a racist".[138]
Philanthropy
King has stated that he donates approximately $4 million per year "to libraries, local fire departments that need updated lifesaving equipment (Jaws of Life tools are always a popular request), schools, and a scattering of organisations that underwrite the arts."[123][139]
The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, chaired by King and his wife, ranks sixth among Maine charities in terms of average annual giving with over $2.8 million in grants per year, according to The Grantsmanship Center.[140]
In November 2011, the STK Foundation donated $70,000 in matched funding via his radio station to help pay the heating bills for families in need in his home town of Bangor, Maine, during the winter.[141]
Personal life
King's home in Bangor
King married Tabitha Spruce on January 2, 1971.[142] She too is a novelist and philanthropic activist. The couple own and divide their time between three houses: one in Bangor, Maine (set to become a museum and writer's retreat[143]), one in Lovell, Maine, and for the winter a waterfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. The Kings have three children, a daughter and two sons, and four grandchildren.[1] Their daughter Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist Church minister in Plantation, Florida, with her lesbian partner, Rev. Dr. Thandeka.[144] Both of the Kings' sons are authors: Owen King published his first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories, in 2005. Joseph Hillstrom King, who writes as Joe Hill, published a collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, in 2005. His debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box (2007), was optioned by Warners Bros.[145]
In the early 1970s, King developed a drinking problem which would plague him for more than a decade.[146] Soon after Carrie's release in 1974, King's mother died of uterine cancer; King has written of his severe drinking problem at this time, stating that he was drunk while delivering the eulogy at his mother's funeral.[147]:69 King's addictions to alcohol and other drugs were so serious during the 1980s that, as he acknowledged in On Writing in 2000, he can barely remember writing Cujo.[147]:73 Shortly after the novel's publication, King's family and friends staged an intervention, dumping on the rug in front of him evidence of his addictions taken from his office including beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil, dextromethorphan (cough medicine) and marijuana. As King related in his memoir, he then sought help, quit all drugs (including alcohol) in the late 1980s, and has remained sober since.[147]:72 The first novel he wrote after becoming sober was Needful Things.[148]
Car accident and aftermath
On June 19, 1999, at about 4:30 p.m., King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5, in Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Edwin Smith, distracted by an unrestrained dog moving in the back of his minivan, struck King, who landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet (four meters) from the pavement of Route 5.[147]:206 According to Oxford County Sheriff deputy Matt Baker, King was hit from behind and some witnesses said the driver was not speeding, reckless, or drinking.[149] In his book On Writing, King states he was heading north, walking against the traffic. Shortly before the accident took place, a woman in a car, also northbound, passed King first and then the light-blue Dodge van. The van was looping from one side of the road to the other, and the woman told her passenger she hoped "that guy in the van doesn't hit him."[147]:206
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family, but was in considerable pain. He was transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton and then flown by air ambulance to Central Maine Medical Center (CMMC) in Lewiston. His injuries—a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp laceration and a broken hip—kept him at CMMC until July 9. His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg, but stabilized the bones in the leg with an external fixator.[150] After five operations in 10 days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could sit for only about 40 minutes before the pain became unbearable.[147]:216
King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to prevent it from appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard, to King's disappointment, as he had fantasized about smashing it.[151][152]
Awards
Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Stephen King
Alex Awards 2009: Just After Sunset[153]
American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults
1978: 'Salem's Lot
1981: Firestarter
Balrog Awards 1980: Night Shift
Black Quill Awards 2009: Duma Key
Bram Stoker Award
1987: Misery[154]
1990: Four Past Midnight[154]
1995: "Lunch at the Gotham Café"[154]
1996: The Green Mile[154]
1998: Bag of Bones[154]
2000: On Writing[154]
2000: "Riding the Bullet"[154]
2002: Lifetime Achievement Award[154]
2003: The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla[154]
2006: Lisey's Story[154]
2008: Duma Key[154]
2008: Just After Sunset[154]
2010: Full Dark, No Stars[154]
2011: "Herman Wouk is Still Alive"[155]
2013: Doctor Sleep[156]
British Fantasy Award
1981: Special Award[157]
1982: Cujo[157]
1983: "The Breathing Method"[157]
1987: It[157]
1999: Bag of Bones[157]
2005: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower[157]
Deutscher Phantastik Preis
2000: Hearts in Atlantis
2001: The Green Mile
2003: Black House
2004: International Author of the Year
2005: The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
Edgar Award for Best Novel
2015: Mr. Mercedes
Horror Guild
1997: Desperation
2001: Riding the Bullet
2001: On Writing
2002: Black House
2003: From a Buick 8
2003: Everything's Eventual
Hugo Award 1982: Danse Macabre[158]
International Horror Guild Awards
1999: Storm of the Century[159]
2003: Living Legend[159]
Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! (The Best Translated Mystery Fiction of the Year in Japan)
2014: 11/22/63[160]
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
2011: 11/22/63[161]
Locus Awards
1982: Danse Macabre[162]
1986: Skeleton Crew[162]
1997: Desperation[162]
1999: Bag of Bones[162]
2001: On Writing[162]
Mystery Writers of America 2007: Grand Master Award[163]
National Book Award 2003: Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[6]
National Magazine Awards
2004: "Rest Stop"
2013: "Batman and Robin Have an Altercation"[164]
New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age 1982: Firestarter
O. Henry Award 1996: "The Man in the Black Suit"
Quill Award 2005: Faithful
Shirley Jackson Award 2009: "Morality"[165]
Spokane Public Library Golden Pen Award 1986: Golden Pen Award
University of Maine 1980: Alumni Career Award
Us Magazine 1982: Best Fiction Writer of the Year
World Fantasy Award
1980: Convention Award[166]
1982: "Do the Dead Sing?"[166]
1995: "The Man in the Black Suit"[166]
2004: Lifetime Achievement[166]
World Horror Convention 1992: World Horror Grandmaster[167]
Bibliography
Main articles: Stephen King bibliography, Stephen King short fiction bibliography, and Unpublished and uncollected works by Stephen King
Audiobooks
2000: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 978-0-7435-0665-6
2004: Salem's Lot (introduction), Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 978-0-7435-3696-7
2005 (Audible: 2000): Bag of Bones (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 978-0743551755
2016: Desperation (read by Stephen king), Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 978-1508218661
2018: Elevation (read by Stephen King), Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 978-1508260479
Stephen King's The Institute (Scribner, $30, 9781982110567, audio/eBook available) is already drawing comparisons to a couple of his older works, Firestarter and It, as well as to the Netflix sensation "Stranger Things." And with good reason--The Institute includes a ragtag collection of adolescents banding together against a common enemy, a shady organization exploiting children for their unique "gifts." But whether King is chasing "Stranger Things" or "Stranger Things" is chasing King, the result is the same: shocking suspense and hallmark thrills.
In an unexpected move, King opens The Institute with a Jack Reacher-like drifter named Tim Jamieson, who takes a job as a "night knocker" with the sheriff's department in rural Dupray, South Carolina. It's more than 50 pages later before we meet the novel's true protagonist, young prodigy Luke Ellis, whose parents are trying to get him into a prestigious school where his unique intellect will be challenged.
But Luke's world is shattered when he is kidnapped from his Minneapolis home in the middle of the night by a team of highly skilled special operatives. He awakens in a room made to look like his own, though the illusion stops at the door. Once outside his room, Luke finds himself in a strange facility somewhere in Maine. He soon learns he's not alone, as other kids, ranging in age from 10 to 16, are also being held prisoner. King conveys Luke's confusion, shock, hopelessness and grief in convincing and heart-wrenching fashion.
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 huddled under silver mylar blankets in cramped cages at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a thinly veiled comparison to callous border patrol agents, Luke's adult captors lack compassion and are often downright cruel.
But King ramps up the cruelty even further, subjecting Luke to physical and mental abuse that, at times, readers may find hard to sit through. Luke and the other kids get slapped around, are forced to receive mysterious injections that cause convulsions and are nearly drowned in a sensory deprivation tank, all to awaken the kids' latent telepathic or telekinetic powers. The kids are promised that, if they do as they are told, they'll have their memories wiped and be returned home to their parents as if nothing ever happened. Good behavior is rewarded with tokens to purchase snacks or even alcohol and cigarettes. Kids can even buy time on a computer, though internet access is restricted.
After gaining the trust and help of one of the Institute's support staff, Luke makes a break for freedom. His escape brings him to South Carolina, where Tim Jamieson finally reenters the story just in time to aid Luke in a final confrontation with the Institute's baddies.
King makes no effort to hide his distaste for Trump, as he takes a direct jab at him in the book's waning pages. Political leanings aside, The Institute offers a thrilling reading experience and rousing tribute to the resilience of children and the unending fight against evil.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Frazier, G. Robert. "Kids versus evil: Stephen King returns with a chilling escape tale." BookPage, Sept. 2019, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596849499/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=81ab5662. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A596849499
King, Stephen THE INSTITUTE Scribner (Adult Fiction) $30.00 9, 10 ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King's (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he's bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of "pray"? Or "depraved"?). Turns out he's a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others ("You ought to go see Doc Roper," he tells a local. "There are pills that will brighten your attitude"). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine--this is King, so it's got to be Maine--and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy ("You're in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It's not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won't be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"King, Stephen: THE INSTITUTE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596269883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=51ef3e01. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A596269883
Stephen King. Scribner, $30 (576p) ISBN 978-1-982110-56-7
King wows with the most gut-wrenching tale of kids triumphing over evil since It. In a quiet Minnesota neighborhood, intruders kidnap 12-year-old prodigy Luke Ellis and murder his parents. When Luke wakes up, he finds himself in a room identical to his own bedroom, except that he is now a resident of the Institute--a facility that tests telekinetic and telepathic abilities of children. Luke finds comfort in the company of the children in the Front Half: Kalisha, Nick, George, and Avery. Others have graduated ro the Back Half, where "kids check in, but they don't check out." The Front Half are promised that they'll be returned to their parents after testing and a visit to Back Half, but Luke becomes suspicious and desperate to get out and get help for the others. However, no child has ever escaped the Institute. Tapping into the minds of the young characters, King creates a sense of menace and intimacy that will have readers spellbound. The mystery of the Institute's purpose is drawn out naturally until it becomes far scarier than the physical abuse visited upon the children. Not a word is wasted in this meticulously crafted novel, which once again proves why King is the king of horror. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"* The Institute." Publishers Weekly, 8 July 2019, p. 67. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593351698/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d7073c55. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A593351698
Elevation, by Stephen King, Scribner, 2018, $19.95, he.
I WASN'T planning to review this new Stephen King book. I've covered enough of his books in this column, and the idea that anyone would need me to point out that he has a new one at this point in his career is patently ridiculous. No, I was just reading it because he's an author I like to follow for the sheer pleasure of good storytelling. But as I was reading it--and once I'd turned the last page-I found myself thinking about some things that made me feel it was worth a few paragraphs here.
King writes books I love and also ones that don't appeal to me. The latter are as well written as the former; the difference is that either the premise or characters in them don't interest me. I usually can't tell which a book will be until I try it, but one thing I know for sure: There's a certain sweet spot in King's work, and that's the story told at novella length.
Novellas are curious creatures. Longer than a short story, sometimes quite a bit longer, shorter than a novel (and in King's case a lot shorter than most of his novels). I can't tell you why he writes them, but I know why I'm drawn to them.
I'm hardly the first person to make this observation, but one of King's biggest strengths--one might even say gifts, since it's a rarity among even the biggest and most popular writers--is his ability to bring a character to life in only a sentence or two. That character might only have a walk-on role, showing up for a page or so in the story and never returning, but the reader is left with an indelible understanding of who they are. And they're almost always individuals, not stock characters.
I call this a gift because it's not something that can be taught or learned. I believe that anyone can learn to be a writer if they put in the time and practice, just as anyone can learn to play, say, the piano. But it's only a chosen few who have that extra something that an Art Tatum or Thelonious Monk brings to their music or as a Stephen King does to his writing. The rest of us do the best we can.
A novella gives its author the opportunity to focus on a character's story and motivation with a little more room than in a short story and without the broad sweep that a novel requires wherein that one character can be overshadowed by the rest of the cast and various subplots.
(I'm generalizing here, of course. There are fat novels that zero in on one character with breathtaking intensity and you only have to read Andrew Vachss to see how an author can successfully distill the scope of a novel into three or four pages. Something that narrative songwriters do all the time in a handful of stanzas, but I digress.)
(Oh, and allow me one more digression. I'm not talking here about the current crop of "novellas" I see with too much regularity that are only vignette bridges that fit in between installments of a series.)
King has proved many times over that some of his most moving stories clock in at novella length. Just consider "The Body," "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," or "The Long Walk."
Which brings me to something else I found myself considering. We all make assumptions about books and movies and TV shows, deciding what something's like without actually experiencing it firsthand. I'm as guilty of this as the next person. So if you ask most people to describe King they'll tell you he's a horror writer--this is especially true if they've never read him.
A better description might be that he's a Brand Name in that while he writes every sort of book you can imagine (I'd guess perhaps only half of his large body of work could be considered horror), what his dedicated readers expect and find in his books are great characters and their compelling stories, regardless of genre definitions.
Elevation is a good example. This is a book that anyone would enjoy, though a fair number of people will never give it a try because of the by-line (which in King's case usually takes up half the cover). Ostensibly it's about a man named Scott Carey who, if I may quote the cover copy, is "losing weight, without getting any thinner, and the scales register the same whether he is in his clothes or out of them, no matter how heavy they are."
It's a bit of a gimmicky premise, the kind we often run across in a King story, and King certainly delivers on its narrative pull. You do want to keep reading to see how it all turns out. But I don't feel it's really the point of the book. It's not the curiosity itself so much as how it affects the characters that seems important, and the impact of the strange or the unknown upon a person's life is where King always shines.
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.
Or how we deal with homophobia.
Reading is a way for us to experience other people's lives by living inside their skin through the course of the story. These characters can be different genders, have different religious beliefs, different colored skin, or different sexual orientations. We might have strong opinions about these people who are Other from us in real life but through fiction from their points of view-when we see the world through their eyes, with their hopes and fears revealed--we come to understand that these Others aren't really strangers. They're just us in a different package.
That's the gift of fiction. Not to lecture--save that for an op-ed piece. But to allow us inside another's skin and understand them just through following their journey in the story on the pages we read. And then hopefully we'll be a little more empathetic when we meet similar people outside the context of fiction.
King does a beautiful job of that in this book. And if Elevation changes just a few minds, then the writing of the book was well worth the while.
Highly recommended.
Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2. EBooks may be sent as an attachment to cdelint@gmail.com.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
De Lint, Charles. "Elevation." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mar.-Apr. 2019, p. 71+. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A578582627/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23fc4141. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A578582627
King, Stephen ELEVATION Scribner (Adult Fiction) $19.95 10, 30 ISBN: 978-1-9821-0231-9
King (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) revisits a couple of familiar themes while paying heed to new realities in this elegant whisper of a story.
Scott Carey has a problem. He's a big guy, clocking in north of 240 pounds, but lately the bathroom scale has been telling him something different: He looks the same, but he's losing weight, pound after pound. "Twenty-eight pounds," he tells a doctor friend. "So far." There's more weight loss to come, recalling horrormeister King's Thinner (as Richard Bachman), though without the curse. But what is it that's remaking Scott--diabetes, cancer, a change of metabolism? It's not for want of eating: As King writes, "One of the benefits of his peculiar condition, aside from all the extra energy, was how he could eat as much as he wanted without turning into a podge." An adventurous palate, curiosity, and a brace of pooping pups who leave bits of themselves on his lawn put him into the orbit of a married couple, two newcomer women, who have opened a vegetarian Mexican restaurant in a quiet town in--where else?--Maine. The locals don't favor the couple with their business until--well, it would give too much away to talk about precipitating events, except to say that Scott has a way of being just where he's needed in the midst of inclement weather, to say nothing of a gift for setting a good example of neighborliness. As befits the premise, King delivers an uncharacteristically slim novel, just a hair longer than a novella, and one wishes there were just a little more backstory to give depth to Scott's good-guyness. Why is his reaching out to beleaguered neighbors important in "Trumpian" times? "It just is," Scott tells us, before he finds a memorable--and quite beautiful, really--way to depart a Podunk town made all the better for his presence.
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.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"King, Stephen: ELEVATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A557887299/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7442418e. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A557887299
Elevation. By Stephen King. Oct. 2018.160p. Scribner, $19.95 (9781982102319).
Scott, lonely after a divorce he didn't want, could stand to lose a little weight, but, even though the scale shows a steady decrease, he looks exactly the same. He confides in the retired Doctor Bob, who is just as mystified, but at least provides good company. Now if only Scott could resolve his troubles with Deirdre and Missy, new neighbors who have opened a Mexican restaurant. He's puzzled by Deirdre's hostility until he discovers that the good folks of Castle Rock, Maine, have pilloried the women not only because they're "lesbeans," as one indoctrinated boy puts it, but because they had the nerve to get married. How Scott--bedazzled by his gradual elevation and the new perspective it brings--makes use of his gravity-defying condition to bring the town together during the holiday season (even as he faces a dire fate) makes for a sharply imaginative, sweetly funny, tenderly uplifting fable. Divisive times call for unifying tales. Written in masterly King's signature translucent style and set in one of his trademark locales, this uncharacteristically glimmering fairy tale calls unabashedly for us to rise above our differences. --Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKST0RY: This succinct, magical, timely, and eminently discussable novel will bring in droves of King fans, along with all who enjoy charming yet edgy stories.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Elevation." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2018, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A557837977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a3332fe. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A557837977
The Outsider
Stephen King. Scribner, $30 (576p) ISBN 978-1-5011-8098-9
MWA Grand Master King wraps a wild weird tale inside a police procedural in this nicely executed extension of his Bill Hodges detective trilogy (begun with 2014's Mr. Mercedes). Det. Ralph Anderson of the Flint City, Okla., police force appears to have beloved youth baseball league coach Terry Maitland dead to rights when he publicly arrests him for the grisly murder of an 11-year-old boy, since the crime scene is covered with Terry's fingerprints and DNA. Only one problem: at the time of the murder Terry was attending a teachers' conference in a distant city, where he was caught clearly on videotape. The case's contradictory evidence compels Anderson and officials associated with it to team up with Holly Gibney (the deceased Hodges's former assistant) to solve it. What begins as a manhunt for an unlikely doppelganger takes an uncanny turn into the supernatural. King's skillful use of criminal forensics helps to ground his tale in a believable clinical reality where the horrors stand out in sharp relief. Agent: Chuck Verrill. Darhansoff & Verrill. (May)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Outsider." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A531977327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aaa99180. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977327
The Outsider.
By Stephen King.
May 2018. 576p. Scribner, $30 (9781501193453).
Two quick years after concluding his Bill Hodges trilogy of mystery novels with End of Watch (2016), King returns to the genre (and even brings back a character) with a book that showcases his best and worst instincts. The first half, a police procedural, is absolutely riveting. Oklahoma detective Ralph Anderson relishes arresting local little-league coach Terry Maitland for the brutal murder of an 11 -year-old boy. Multiple witnesses saw him, his DNA is all over the scene--it's open and shut. But is it? King makes you feel Ralph's drowning panic as evidence, just as irrefutable, places Terry in another town. The impossibility of the mystery is intoxicating, and readers will get dizzy from their shifting sympathies. And then ... well, King loyalists will see this coming. Seemingly written into a corner, the story goes supernatural, with a Salem's Lot-style gang of reluctant heroes taking up arms against a foe who has something to do with a Mexican monster legend and women-wrestler films. Still, the amazingly strong start should be enough to fuel most readers through the end.--Daniel Kraus
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Along with Revival (2014), Mr. Mercedes (2014), and Full Dark, No Stars (2010), this is another shockingly dark book-perfect for longtime fans, of whom there are, well, zillions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kraus, Daniel. "The Outsider." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A533094473/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0d846709. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094473
King, Stephen THE OUTSIDER Scribner (Adult Fiction) $30.00 5, 22 ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) 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.
If you're a little squeamish about worms, you're really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: "His throat was just gone," says the man who found the body. "Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something...." Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage--and it doesn't help Anderson's world-weariness when the evil doesn't stop once Terry's in the ground. Natch, there's a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King's early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King's concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he's at his best, as always, when he's painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: "June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack." Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity's head caves in "as if it had been made of papier-mache rather than bone." And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King's boundless legion of fans.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"King, Stephen: THE OUTSIDER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530650874/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e97ee3c9. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650874
Collaborative novels can be tricky propositions, even for writers as accomplished as the father-son duo of Stephen and Owen King. Each author's stylistic and thematic concerns can stick out in jarring ways, creating a mashup far less seamless than either author perhaps would like. Sleeping Beauties is not one of those novels. In the grand tradition of team-ups like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens and Stephen King's own The Talisman (with Peter Straub), it is a triumph of two voices blending wonderfully to take us into a dark and all-too-real dream.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
All the women in the Appalachian town of Dooling (and around the world) are falling asleep and refusing to wake up. Once sleep takes them, their bodies are covered by a mysterious, fluffy coating, and if they are disturbed, they awaken as homicidal maniacs. This development naturally sows chaos, inciting riots across the nation and sending men into a frenzy. In Dooling, though, there's something different: Evie, an enigmatic woman with strange abilities, seems unaffected by the sleeping sickness. Some men think she's a monster, others a savior, but whatever side they take in a world without women, Dooling is transformed into a powder keg.
Sleeping Beauties traffics in some very potent themes, from the obvious question of what an all-male society would devolve into to less obvious concerns like the politics of a women's prison and the evolution of sexuality during the aging process. None of these issues, though, are dealt with cheaply or crudely. The book wields the best attributes of each author--Stephen's ability to ratchet up tension, Owen's wit and their joint gifts for character detail--with a deftness that makes it feel like the work of a single hybrid imagination. In the authors' hands, 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.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jackson, Matthew. "Sleeping Beauties." BookPage, Oct. 2017, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A507825808/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3d54b65d. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507825808
Sleeping Beauties. By Stephen King and Owen King. Sept. 2017. 720p. Scribner, $32.50 (9781501163401).
A sleeping sickness quickly takes over the world, affecting only females. As they drift off (and enter a different dimension, the reader soon learns), a white, mossy substance covers them, leaving them in a sort of cocoon. No one knows why or how this is happening, but it soon becomes clear that trying to wake any of these sleeping beauties results in deadly, horrifying acts. Evie appears in town out of nowhere and seems to be the only female unaffected by this event--but she's got supernatural powers, natch. The Kings set their tale in a small Appalachian town, home to a women's prison. Dr. Clinton Norcross, the staff psychiatrist, finds himself in charge as all of the female leadership falls asleep. It might not seem so hard to run a prison of sleeping women, right? Well, it's not so easy when Evie is there, still awake and doing strange things, and Norcross' wife, Lila--the town sheriff--succumbs despite her best efforts. This allegorical fantasy has a rich premise but is overly long, which may put off readers who aren't already King fans.--Rebecca Vnuk
HD HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Two Kings in one, father and son, are bound to attract readers.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vnuk, Rebecca. "Sleeping Beauties." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A509161629/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4e2785e0. Accessed 12 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161629