STEPHEN KING: I am going to write a book.
PUBLISHER: Hooray!
STEPHEN KING: It will be a sequel to The Shining, and Carrie will be in it.
PUBLISHER: But HawtRoland1208 already did that on KingFanFictionForum.net.
STEPHEN KING: It will have vampires.
PUBLISHER: Vampires are sexy.
STEPHEN KING: My vampires will be old and drive R/Vs and torture children to death.
PUBLISHER: You look tired. Are you tired? Maybe you should skip the book and take a beach vacation instead.
In the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s massive success the world was so overrun by lady detectives, French detectives, Canadian lumberjack detectives, sexy gypsy detectives, priest detectives, and doctor detectives that there was a shortage of things to detect. Why not ghosts?
And thus was spawned the occult detective who detected ghost pigs, ghost monkeys, ghost ponies, ghost dogs, ghost cats and, for some strange reason, mummies. Lots and lots of mummies. Besides sporting ostentatiously grown-up names that sound like they were randomly generated by small boys wearing thick glasses (Dr. Silence, Mr. Perseus, Moris Klaw, Simon Iff, Xavier Wycherly) these occult detectives all had one thing in common: they were completely terrible at detecting.
There’s a particular kind of nostalgia that smells like burning autumn leaves on an overcast day. It sounds like a static-filled radio station playing Brylcreem advertisements in the other room. It feels like a scratchy wool blanket. It looks like a wood-paneled library stuffed with leather-bound books.
This is the flavor of occult nostalgia conjured up by author John Bellairs and his illustrator, Edward Gorey, in their middle grade gothic New Zebedee books featuring low-key poker-playing wizards, portents of the apocalypse, gloomy weather, and some of the most complicated names this side of the list of ingredients on a packet of Twinkies.
Satan sure is a popular fellow! People are constantly praising him, praying to him, worrying about him, gossiping about him, cursing him, and sacrificing virgins to him. God’s pretty powerful, but Satan’s got cults, horror movies, the Smurfs, most children’s toys, and heavy metal music in his corner.
But how does Satan work? Where does he go? What does he do? Can he be washed with water or do you need a fast-evaporating alcohol-based spray to get the grime out from between his wings? All the following books have something to say about Satan and so I’m going to run through them quickly to make sure you get as much useful info as possible in the smallest amount of space.
What scares Stephen King? That question has been asked in hundreds of interviews and articles about the author, but the answer is easy. What scares Stephen King? Tom Clancy.
In early 1997, publishers Penguin and Putnam merged and suddenly Tom Clancy and Stephen King were under the same roof. Viking, a subsidiary of Penguin, had been King’s publisher since The Dead Zone, their relationship running to over 30 books, but King’s star had been slipping.
In the 1990s, heavy metal band Dürt Würk was poised for breakout success—but then lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom as Koffin, leaving his fellow bandmates to rot in obscurity.
Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western—she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when a shocking act of violence turns her life upside down, and she begins to suspect that Terry sabotaged more than just the band.
Kris hits the road, hoping to reunite with the rest of her bandmates and confront the man who ruined her life. It’s a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a celebrity rehab center to a music festival from hell. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, Grady Hendrix’s We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, pill-popping, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul… where only a lone girl with a guitar can save us all. Available September 18th from Quirk Books.
A lot of people make a lot of assumptions about Stephen King: he writes about writers too much; he sets all his stories in Maine; he writes horror. Now I’m giving you the tools you need to argue with anyone about any of these propositions. I read every single book published by Stephen King under his own name, so I leave out three of the Bachman books, books that are collaborations (no Talisman, no Sleeping Beauties, no Black House, no Gwendy’s Button Box), and I leave out the Dark Tower books (all eight of them). Also, I didn’t read Eyes of the Dragon because I forgot. So that means I didn’t read sixteen of his books.
Nevertheless, all told, I read 38 novels, 15 novellas, 111 short stories, and 5 poems by Stephen King. And here’s how they break down by the numbers.
This is it, the last book in The Great Stephen King Reread. I started back on October 18, 2012 planning to only read from the first decade of King’s output, but I picked back up again in October 2013 and read the next ten books, then stopped until 2015 when I read the next ten, and finally restarted in 2017 to finish off the whole body of King’s work, which brings us to now, exactly five years later.
I’d be lying if I said this reread hasn’t been a big deal to me. When I started, I was just about to sign a contract to write my first solo novel, Horrorstör. Five years later, I’ve got two novels on the shelves, a book of non-fiction, a finished movie (Mohawk), and another novel on the way. There have been ups, and a whole lot of downs, but Stephen King’s books have been with me every step of the way. This reread has been something I’ve hung onto during some dark days, but now that I’ve read everything King’s published on his own, under his own name (minus the Dark Tower books), it’s over. So let’s buckle down and do it one last time, digging into his latest short story collection, published on November 3, 2015, a collection not a lot of people liked.
According to the press release, Stephen King’s Revival features “the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written.” The Independent says it “practically screams ‘return to form’.” Critics say it’s a riff on Frankenstein, it’s King’s mad scientist book, it’s a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft. Stephen King books arrive in a cloud of advance hype with everyone, from his marketing department to his critics, telling us what each book is really about. But the joy of Revival lies in going in cold. So if you haven’t yet, just go read it for yourself. You won’t be sorry. But for a longer discussion of where it fits into King’s Canon, let’s continue.
By the time Revival came out in 2014, Stephen King™ was one of pop culture’s biggest brand names, for better and for worse. Everyone had an opinion about his books, which existed in the shadow of The General Consensus. For all time, Cujo will be the one King doesn’t remember writing. It will have a major lapse of good taste at the end. The Tommyknockers will be a mess. The verdict has been rendered. The verdict is also wrong. Cujo is one of King’s most ambitious and literary novels. The “lapse” in It is actually the heart of the book. The Tommyknockers is a mess, but the kind of raving, rabies-infected mess that’s the closest King has ever come to channeling William S. Burroughs.
Stephen King loves crime fiction. His first completed novel, Rage, was about a kid holding his high school class at gunpoint, and the novel he wrote right before Carrie was Blaze, the story of a kidnapping gone wrong. Several of his early short stories were crime stories (“Stud City,” 1969; “The Fifth Quarter,” 1972) and when he gave his speech accepting the National Book Award in 2003, he singled out for praise a handful of authors he believed were deserving of more attention, most of them crime and thriller novelists like Elmore Leonard, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, and Michael Connelly.
Richard Branson wants to be an astronaut and so he built a spaceport in New Mexico. Stephen King wants to be a crime novelist, and so he published his Bill Hodges Trilogy: Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and End of Watch (2016). If there’s one thing that we, as Americans, will die to defend, it’s the inalienable right of every rich person to live their dreams, and the first book in the trilogy, Mr. Mercedes, even won the coveted Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. So now Stephen King is a crime writer, and god bless America. The only problem is, he’s not a very good one.
STEPHEN KING: I am going to write a book.
PUBLISHER: Hooray!
STEPHEN KING: It will be a sequel to The Shining, and Carrie will be in it.
PUBLISHER: But HawtRoland1208 already did that on KingFanFictionForum.net.
STEPHEN KING: It will have vampires.
PUBLISHER: Vampires are sexy.
STEPHEN KING: My vampires will be old and drive R/Vs and torture children to death.
PUBLISHER: You look tired. Are you tired? Maybe you should skip the book and take a beach vacation instead.
Around 2012, Stephen King had an idea for a book. It was a small book, grafting an image he’d had 20 years ago (a kid in a wheelchair on a beach flying a kite) to his urge to write about carnivals. Set in 1973, it was kind of a mystery, but mostly a coming-of-age story about a college kid “finding his feet after a heartbreak.” It wasn’t the kind of book his publisher, Simon & Schuster, wanted. They liked big fat books, like Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining coming out later in 2013. So King returned to the scene of the (Hard Case) Crime and published it with the folks who’d previously handled his other slim, not-really-a-horror-or-a-mystery novel, The Colorado Kid. Also returning was Glen Orbik handling cover duties, best known for reproducing the lush, fully-painted style of pulp paperbacks for everything from movie posters, to comic books, to the California Bar Association.
Hard Case Crime specializes in publishing books that aren’t what they appear. Everything they release, from Stephen King to Max Allan Collins, gets a painted cover that makes it look like old school, disreputable pulp no matter what the contents. That made it a good fit for both The Colorado Kid and Joyland, since neither is what it appears, either. The Colorado Kid barely even had a story and was, instead, a philosophical logic problem that doubled as a rumination on the failures of storytelling and the power of mysteries. Joyland looks like a thriller and even reads a bit like a thriller with its haunted funhouses, carny talk, psychic children, and serial killers, but it’s mostly about an emo college kid getting dumped.
In 1971, eight years after the JFK assassination, Stephen King started writing a book called Split Track. Recently hired as an English teacher at Hampden Academy, he had just published a short story called “I Am the Doorway”, almost sold a novel called Getting It On to Bill Thompson at Doubleday, and he was constantly sucking up ideas. As he recalls, “It was 1971 and I was in the teachers’ room and people were talking about the Kennedy assassination. The 22nd would roll around and people would talk and write about the assassination and stuff. I guess somebody must have said, ‘What would it have been like if Kennedy had lived?’ And I thought to myself, ‘I’d love to write a story about that.’ ”
Newly married, with a one-and-a-half year old daughter at home, barely three months into his first teaching job, he was overwhelmed by the amount of research involved and gave up after writing 14 single-spaced pages. 36 years later, in the January, 27 issue of Marvel Spotlight, King wrote about a comic he was considering that told the story of a guy who travels through a time portal in the back of a diner to stop the Kennedy assassination, but changing history turns the present day into a radioactive wasteland and he has to go back again and stop himself from stopping Oswald. King thought this story might reach “an audience who’s not my ordinary audience. Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read The Help or People of the Book might like this book.” Six months later, King’s researcher, Russell Dorr, went to work on the Kennedy assassination in preparation for King’s next book. And, in January, 2009, 38 years after first getting the idea, King began typing the beginning of what would become 11/22/63. And he was right. It would turn out to be his biggest bestseller in over a decade.
Every day, Stephen King sits down and writes 2,000 words. More when he was younger. When he finishes a novel he doesn’t take a break. He either moves on to short stories or, if he has some juice left over, he’ll write a novella. Sometimes he’ll let a completed manuscript lie fallow for a while, moving on to another project, then coming back to it later. He may work on a new manuscript in the morning, and rewrite an older one at night. We always think of an author’s biography as being directly related to their work, matching publication dates to events in their lives, but writers live with a book when they’re writing it, not when it’s released. And because King is constantly composing, it’s hard to find any clear correlation between the life and the books because it’s almost impossible to figure out when he actually wrote them. Was he noodling on something for years before he came back to it? How long did a manuscript lie fallow? The best I can do is educated guesswork.
King has published three collections of novellas, and we have to assume that the stories they contain were written after he finished bigger novels. But which ones? I’ve been trying to figure out when King wrote the novellas in Full Dark, No Stars and it’s almost impossible. And it’s driving me crazy, because this collection, like each of the novella collections before, moved King in a new direction.
Stephen King likes his epics. The Stand was his version of Lord of the Rings and it was already plenty long in 1990 when he added 329 pages to make it his longest book ever, clocking in at 1,153 pages. It was his massive epic about childhood and adulthood coming in at 1,138 pages. And in 2009 he delivered Under the Dome, his third longest book at 1,072 pages. But an epic is about more than mere page count, it’s about an author’s ambitions, and King’s epics deliver as many characters as we can handle, overflowing a town-sized stage, battling The Forces of Absolute Evil in books like ‘Salem’s Lot, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things, Insomnia, Desperation, and The Regulators.
But an interesting thing’s been happening as King gets older: his books have been shrinking. Starting with 1987’s Misery, but especially with 1992’s Gerald’s Game, he’s limited himself more and more to one or two characters in a single location (Dolores Claiborne, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), and when he has given us that epic scale and scope in books like Cell, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, and 11/22/63 he’s seen the action through the point of view of one or two characters. It’s something he came to late (King didn’t even publish a first person novel until Dolores Claiborne in 1992) but since Insomnia in 1994 he’s approached his epics from a more intimate perspective. But Under the Dome is a throwback, a massive King-sized epic hoagie, dripping with fillings, the size of ‘Salem’s Lot and Needful Things, done the old fashioned way: cramming in absolutely everything he can lay his hands on, and letting it all hang out.
