The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror
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The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror
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Overview
The Stephen King Companion is an authoritative look at horror author King's personal life and professional career, from Carrie to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
King expert George Beahm, who has published extensively about Maine's main author, is your seasoned guide to the imaginative world of Stephen King, covering his varied and prodigious output: juvenalia, short fiction, limited edition books, bestselling novels, and film adaptations. The book is also profusely illustrated with nearly 200 photos, color illustrations by celebrated "Dark Tower" artist Michael Whelan, and black-and-white drawings by Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne.
Supplemented with interviews with friends, colleagues, and mentors who knew King well, this book looks at his formative years in Durham, when he began writing fiction as a young teen, his college years in the turbulent sixties, his struggles with early poverty, working full-time as an English teacher while writing part-time, the long road to the publication of his first novel, Carrie, and the dozens of bestselling books and major screen adaptations that followed.
For fans old and new, The Stephen King Companion is a comprehensive look at America's best-loved bogeyman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466856684 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1004 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Stephen King Companion
Forty Years of Fear from the Master of Horror
By George Beahm, Michael Whelan, Glenn Chadbourne
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 George BeahmAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5668-4
CHAPTER 1
Family Roots
Donald Edwin Pollock
At his winter home in Florida, Stephen King sat down with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for an appearance on the PBS television show Finding Your Roots. Combing genealogical and military records, Gates's research team turned up a wealth of information about King's father, Donald.
The compiled information, assembled scrapbook-style for King's perusal, was an eye-opener for King, who understandably wanted to know more about the father who abandoned his family in 1949, when Stephen was two years old. According to what he remembers his mom said, his dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned.
Leafing through the leather-bound scrapbook, Stephen King turned the page and saw a black-and-white photograph of a six- foot-tall man with glasses.
Gates asks, "Now you know who that is."
Stephen King replies, "Not right offhand." He pauses. "Is that my dad?" In a shock of late recognition, Stephen exclaims, "He looks like me! ... a little bit." He shakes his head, and has a wistful expression on his face.
"No kidding," says Gates.
It was Stephen King's father. But his birth name isn't Donald Edwin King. As Gates pointed out, a record of birth and military records show that his name was Donald Edwin Pollock.
Twenty-five at the time of his marriage to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, Donald listed his occupation as "seaman" in the merchant marine. On David King's birth record, his father's occupation is listed as "master mariner." And on Stephen King's birth certificate, he's listed as "captain, merchant marine."
From there, Gates takes Stephen King on a genealogical trip into the past, showing that his roots go all the way back to Ireland on his father's side.
Despite the considerable passage of time, there are still unresolved issues and anger that fester in Stephen King, who is upset at the circumstances and consequences of his dad's unexplained departure.
Stephen King tells Gates, "I can remember as a kid, thinking of myself, well, if I ever meet my dad, I'm going to sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother. And as I got older, I would think, well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I'll sock him."
King and Gates have a good laugh over that, but the question that's haunted Stephen King for all those years will forever remain unanswered: Who was Donald E. Pollock?
Stephen King's father died at age sixty-six in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, but as to which cemetery, I couldn't determine. The largest, though, is Fairview Cemetery, near a town called ... Bangor.
As to his public records, they show that he remarried, and genealogical records online indicate five children by that marriage.
As to what he left behind in the wreckage of his first marriage: What we do know is that Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King picked up the shattered pieces of her family's lives and heroically moved on. Scrambling to make ends meet in her new, and unexpected, role as the family's breadwinner, survival became an extended family affair, with her four sisters helping out.
David King recalls moving all over the map, until they finally dropped anchor and settled in for the long haul in Durham. Aided financially by her siblings, Nellie Ruth was a single mother who not only raised two young boys but also her aging parents in a small, two-story house in Durham, Maine, that lacked a shower. It'd be difficult enough to be a caregiver even with a spouse to share the burden, but to do it essentially alone was an act of quiet courage and iron resolve: She was not going to abandon her family as her husband did.
A Child's Worst Nightmare
The emotions of fear and horror are inextricable in King's fiction, and justifiably so. There was, as Chesley pointed out, no respite for Stephen King's powerful imagination, which conjured up awful possibilities.
But the fear began early on in King's life when he was abandoned by his father — a small child's worst nightmare. Parents, after all, are supposed to be a bedrock, a solid platform on which children build their lives. But when one parent leaves for whatever reasons, children often blame themselves ("Was it something I did?"); they endlessly torture themselves asking a question that can't be answered: "Why?"
Conjecture is no replacement for knowledge, and understandably the fear of abandonment prefigures largely in King's early fiction: Carietta White (Carrie), whose mother is a fundamentalist Christian, raising her alone; Danny Torrance (The Shining), whose dysfunctional father is slowly spiraling out of control; Charlene "Charlie" McGee (Firestarter), whose mother dies at the hands of the nefarious federal agents at "The Shop"; and others. The repercussions of parental abandonment reverberate in King's fiction, as they clearly do for Stephen King himself, who was never able to take out his long-simmering anger on his dad and punch him out. He can only live with the knowledge that, as Dick Hallorann tells Danny Torrance in the epilogue to The Shining,
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. ... But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
With his mother as his shining example, Stephen King went on to do just that: He went on.
Flotsam and Jetsam
The expression around the King family was that "Daddy done gone," and what he left behind, the physical artifacts from his past, had been boxed and stored at a relative's house down the street. Aunt Ethelyn and her husband, Oren, kept the flotsam and jetsam of Donald King's life in their attic, where one day Stephen went to see what he could find, the only physical remains of what once was presumed to be a good marriage.
In Spignesi's The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, David King was asked, "What do you remember about your father?"
David King replied:
Nothing. I don't remember the man personally at all. I do remember that at one point — I guess when we got back to Durham, Maine — Stevie and I found a trunk up in Aunt Ethelyn's garage that contained a lot of books on seamanship and that sort of thing, and in fact, there was even one of his Merchant Marine uniforms in it.
We also had several still pictures of him and one sixteen- millimeter film that he had taken. One scene from that film that I can remember was of the ship he was on going through a storm. There were waves crashing over the bow and everything. And surprisingly (since this was the mid-1940s), there were also some shots on that reel in color — footage of both Stevie and I as little kids running around.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote that he found in their attic boxes of his father's past, now gathering dust and long abandoned: merchant marine manuals and scrapbooks of his travels worldwide, including an 8mm movie reel, sans sound, which he shared with David; they saw, for the first time, their father waving to them in absentia. From Danse Macabre:
He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now.
Their dad, as it turned out, left Maine permanently and headed to Pennsylvania, where he would settle down permanently. But the boys had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that their father had left.
One thing Donald did leave behind, a blessing in disguise, was a box of cheap paperbacks, science fiction and horror, which Ruth said were his main interests, the kind of fiction he enjoyed reading. An aspiring writer, Donald King had tried his hand at writing fiction, even submitting items for publications, collecting a few rejection slips.
In time, if Donald King had applied himself to the craft of writing fiction, he might have produced a salable manuscript. But that never happened, possibly because, as Stephen, in Danse Macabre, recalls Ruth explaining, "Your father didn't have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature."
That afternoon in the dusty attic was a defining moment for a young Stephen King, who in Danse Macabre recalls what happened afterward: "The compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north" when he found a "treasure trove" of horror novels published by Avon. It was his first fictional encounter with the bogeyman of Providence, Rhode Island, a tall, saturnine-looking man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, better known as H. P. Lovecraft.
A Lovecraft collection was, recalled King, "the pick of the litter." Lovecraft, "courtesy of my father ... opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them."
Had Stephen King not found the box of horror books, would he have eventually turned to horror fiction? Or would he had turned in another direction, perhaps the books he'd eventually write under the Richard Bachman pen name?
It's a moot point because King found himself comfortably at home with the horror writers, the fantasists, the dark dreamers. Stephen, as a fledgling writer, would ironically follow in his father's footsteps, but where his father ultimately failed, Stephen would eventually succeed, and brilliantly so, because unlike his father, Stephen had, as his mother termed it, a "stick-to-it" nature, which must have come from his mother.
CHAPTER 2Durham, Maine
Stand by Me
The King family, particularly David and Stephen, bounced around like pinballs among relatives on both sides of the family all over the map. As David King recalled in an interview with Spignesi in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia:
When we were very small, I heard that we lived in Scarborough for a while, and then we lived in a place called Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That part is just hearsay, of course, because I really don't remember that. And then there was a period of time when Stevie stayed with Ethelyn, my mother's sister, and Oren Flaws, in Durham, and I stayed with Molly, another of her sisters, down in Malden, Massachusetts. Mother was working. I don't remember too much of that. I do remember one thing, though. Mom came to visit me at Molly's once, and I remember at breakfast time Molly always used to put wheat germ on our cereal, and I told my mother that my aunt was feeding us germs.
After that we went to live with my grandmother on my father's side in Chicago for a period. I was in kindergarten at the time. I can remember at one time seeing a picture of me in my kindergarten class. All of us in the class had made Easter bonnets out of paper and whatnot. I don't know if that picture is still in existence or not.
I can vaguely remember that we had a dog, and that the dog was kept in the front yard, and so you had to be very careful where you walked.
After Wisconsin, we then went to live with my father's sister Betty, and a lady she stayed with named Rudy. We have a picture of that somewhere, too — Stevie and I sitting on a lawn in front of a house. That was in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area. Aunt Betty was a schoolteacher, as was Rudy, and I skipped second grade because she thought that I should.
After that we lived in an apartment of our own in Fort Wayne. I can remember some of that. We shared the apartment with a number of cockroaches. It was an apartment house, but I'm not sure if it was a single-family dwelling or if there were a couple of apartments in it.
They finally planted geographic roots in Durham, Maine, in 1958. For the next eight years, it would be the place they called home.
The Kings' small home was a stone's throw from Methodist's Corner (named after a local church). It housed Ruth, her two sons, and also her parents, then in their eighties, and in declining health.
Like most towns in Maine, Durham is rural. Chris Chesley, who was a young teenager living there in the late fifties, recalled that most people in town commuted to bigger, nearby towns to make a living. Chris's recollection was that they were all "poor." Or, at least, not well off.
In 1962, noted Stephen King in On Writing, Durham's population was approximately 900. Its population according to the 2000 census was only 1,496 households (3,381 people).
Unlike most writers who grew up in comfortable surroundings, whether in urban or suburban environments, Stephen King and his family had a hardscrabble life. There were no luxuries. Understandably, his early fiction reflected a desire to escape, and he did it through his rich imagination, which transported him away from the rural dreariness of Durham.
It was the only world he knew, though in later years he made more frequent trips to nearby Lisbon Falls, where he saw life unfold in small-town Maine. A working-class town, with the Worumbo Mill as its primary employer, it was surrounded by small-town stores, shops, and businesses. (The mill burned down in 1987.)
Durham is mostly open fields, farmland, inexpensive single-family homes strung out on remote roads, and churches that formed its social hub. Its principal landmark is a large lake called Runaround Pond.
In later years, Stephen King's references to himself as a "hick" can be seen as self-deprecation. Clearly, he was never a stereotyped Mainer, parodied in Creepshow, in which he played a hayseed farmer named Jordy Verrill.
Back then, in the late fifties and early sixties, Stephen King knew that financially his family wasn't well off, but he did not consider them poor. Grounded in the reality of living in rural Maine, King's early values — hard work, honoring the family, self-sustainment, and lack of pretense — would later be reflected in the naturalism of his fiction. King wasn't the literary equivalent of John Updike writing about the solidly middle-class folks who come "from away" (a Maine term for non-Mainers). King didn't write about the affluent tourists who come to Bar Harbor or other scenic destinations; instead, he wrote about the blue-collar working class because that was what he saw growing up in Durham.
Without the distractions of big-city life, or even small-city life on the scale of nearby Lisbon Falls, Durham was simple and unglamorous. His friends back then accepted him for who and what he was: a big, goofy kid who found self-worth in writing. He wore thick, black glasses and spent most of his time inside a cramped upstairs bedroom that he shared with his older brother David, who, along with an old, battered manual typewriter and his overactive imagination, were Stephen's constant companions.
King's life and times as a teenager were captured with fidelity in his story "The Body," set in rural Maine and fictionalized as Castle Rock (the film version was shot in Oregon). In "The Body," King wrote: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?"
Adapted by director Rob Reiner as Stand by Me, "The Body" perfectly encapsulates the life and times of a young Stephen King growing up in rural Maine: the first-person narrator, in fact, is King as Gordie LaChance, who finds validation in himself through his storytelling.
Gordie's great fear, even as a young teen, is that he, like many of the others, would be trapped in Castle Rock and never realize his dreams. At one point Gordie's best friend Chris asks him, "I'm never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?"
Gordie replies, "You can do anything you want, man."
In the end, it is not Gordie who becomes a permanent resident of Castle Rock: that would be John "Ace" Merrill, who bullied him when they were younger and has become a fixture in the small town. As an adult, Gordon sees Ace leaving work from his job at the local mill and heading into a bar called the Mellow Tiger; Ace is now a thirty-two-year-old man, no longer lean and mean as he was in his teens, but overweight and resigned to his mundane life. Gordie looks on and thinks, "So that's what Ace is now."
Their world has moved on, and when life's cards have been dealt, it's Ace who holds the losing hand: He's the joker. The winning hand is held by Gordie, who grew up, matured, and finally escaped the confines of rural Maine:
I'm a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right ... but it still freaks me out to put ... those words, "Freelance Writer," down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors' offices.
But time is a river, and like the rushing waters of the Androscoggin River that runs through Lisbon Falls, past the abandoned Worumbo Mill where Stephen King once worked, life, too, moves on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Stephen King Companion by George Beahm, Michael Whelan, Glenn Chadbourne. Copyright © 2015 George Beahm. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
A Note to the Reader
Foreword: The Learn’d Astronomer by Stephen J. Spignesi
Introduction: The Golden Years by George Beahm
Part One: Maine Roots
1. Family Roots
2. Durham, Maine
3. EC Comics
4. “Three Durham Lads Publishing Bright Hometown Newspaper” by Don Hansen
5. A Special Occasion: Chris Chesley’s Friendship with Stephen King
6. Stephen King at the University of Maine: A Writer in the Making by Sanford Phippen King Graduates: A Blessed Event?
7. Rick Hautala: Maine’s Other Horror Writer Rick Hautala: An Interview
8. Burton Hatlen: An Interview
9. Crossing the Kittery Bridge into Maine’s Heart of Darkness
10. From Student to Teacher: Stephen King and Carroll Terrell
Part Two: Pre-Carrie: A Hardscrabble Life
11. A Writer’s Nightmare, a Writer’s Dream
12. A Good Angel”: Cavalier editor Nye Willden
13. The Bones of the Family Business: Writing
Part Three: Doubleday Boo ks: Magic Time—The Making of the Master of Horror
14. King’s Classic Books: An Overview
15. William G. Thompson: Another Good Ange
16. Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King: The Future Queen of Durham Ruth P. King Obituary
17. Carrie
18. “Campus Columnist Publishes Novel” by Burton Hatlen Stephen King: American Gothic
19. Salem’s Lot On ’Salem’s Lot as the Great American Novel
Stephen King and Frank Darabont on Limited Edition Books
20. The Shining
The Stanley Hotel Shines On
21. Night Shift — Keep on Trucking: Maximum Overdrive
22. The Stand: Taking a Stand Against Doubleday
23. Cemetery Dance’s Deluxe Special Editions of the Doubleday Books
24. The Early Bachman Books” Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man(1982)
Part Four: “The Bestsellasaurus Rex” Stomps Over to New American Library
25. Turning the Page: King Goes to New American Library
26. The Dead Zone
27. The Kings’ Maine Haunt in Bangor Terry Steel on the King’s Fence “Bats and Spiders”
28. Firestarter
29. Dark Forces: “The Mist”
30. Frank Darabont on “The Mist”: An Interview Conducted by Hans-Åke Lilja
31. Cujo Coming Clean: King’s Addiction
32. Danse Macabre
33. Stephen King’s Creepshow
34. Drawn to Darkness: Bernie Wrightson, an Artist Inspired by Stephen King
35. Stephen King: A Chautaqua in Pasadena, California
36. Different Seasons
37. The Road to the Dark Tower: Roland’s Quest
38. Michael Whelan: Illustrating the Dark Tower
39. Christine
The King’s and Queen’s Cars
40. Rock and Roll Haven: Stephen King’s Station, WKIT 100.3 FM
41. Pet Sematary
42. Thinner
43. The Talisman
Anthologist Peter Straub
44. Douglas E. Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness
45. The Eyes of the Dragon
Illustrator Kenny Ray Linkous
46. Castle Rock: “All the News That’s Fit to Print”
47. Cycle of the Werewolf
Bernie Wrightson and Cycle of the Werewolf
48. Skeleton Crew
49. J. K. Potter: Illustrating the Limited Edition of Skeleton Crew
50. Off the Beaten Path: Stephen King’s Office
51. Marsha DeFelippo: An Interview by Hans-Åke Lilja Fan Mail
52. It
“Stephen King, the Master of Pop Dread”
Michael Collings on Stephen King as Storyteller
53. SK Tours of Maine: Stephen King’s Maine Haunts
54. Misery
“Happiness is a Warm Gun”
55. Making Whoopee: Stephen King’s “Gift of Gotta” Harry, Carrie, and Garp: Stephen Kingat the Press Conference
56. Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
57. The Tommyknockers
Stephen King on The Tommyknockers
58. Bag of Nerves: Meeting Stephen King by Kevin Quigley
59. The Dark Half
60. The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition
61. Stephen King Draws on Bernie Wrightson to Illustrate The Stand “I nearly jumped out of my skin”
62. A Dark Treasure: The Limited Edition of The Stand
63. Michael Collings on Four Past Midnight
64. Rock Bottom Remainders
65. Quotes by and About the Rock Bottom Remainders
66. Needful Things
67. Gerald’s Game
68. Philtrum Press
69. Nightmares and Dreamscapes
70. Dolores Claiborne
71. Michael Collings on Insomnia
72. Rose Madder
73. Clive Barker: Demon Fabulist: Clive Barker on Stephen King
74. Desperation and The Regulators: A Bulleted Book
75. The Green Mile
Part Five: Scribner: Building Bridges
76. The Winter of King’s Discontent
77. Michael Collings in Bag of Bones
78. Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay on Storm of the Century
79. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
80. The Day That Changed King’s Life: The Accident—June 19, 1999: “The Bonus Round” and Gallows Humor
81. Hearts in Atlantis
Coda: “Squad D”
82. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing
83. Dreamcatcher
84. Black House, with Peter Straub
85. The Ultimate Stephen King Horror Story: Retirement?
86. From a Buick 8
87. Stephen King Receives the National Book Award
88. Take Stephen King. Seriously.
89. Everything’s Eventual
90. Faithful
“Not in my lifetime. Not in yours, either.”
91. Stewart O’Nan: An Interview by Hans-Åke Lilja
92. The Colorado Kid
93. How to Speak Like a “Mainah” : A Mainer on Actors’ Maine Accents by David Lowell
94. Cell
95. Lisey’s Story
96. Blaze
97. The Haven Foundation: A Place for Freelance
98. Duma Key
99. The Kings’ Main Home in Florida: Touring “Duma Key”
100. Just After Sunset: the Story Behind “The Cat from Hell”
101. Under the Dome
The TV Adaptation of Under The Dome
102. Blockade Billy
The Skeleton Crew at Cemetery Dance
103. Full Dark, No Stars
104. 11/22/63 “Q&A: Russell Dorr, Stephen King’s Researcher”: Interviewed by Stephanie Klose
105. The Dark Man — Glenn Chadbourne: An Interview by George Beahm
106. Joyland
107. Doctor Sleep: Oscar the Cat
108. Mr. Mercedes
109. World Fantasy and World Horror Conventions: November 2014
110. Revival
111. Stephen King’s Revival Book Tour: Stephen King on Death
112. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Stevie
113. “I Hear Time’s Winged Chariot Drawing Near”
114. Finders Keepers
115. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
Part Six: Movies: Screamplays
116. Stephen: A Box Office King
117. Ten Notable Films in Chronological Order — Unearthed and Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary
118. Frank Darabont: An Interview by Hans-Åke Lilja
119. The Real Thing: Drew Struzan: A Profile by George Beahm
Part Seven: The Critics’ Corner
120. Stephen Spignesi: An Interview Conducted in 2015 by George Beahm
121. Stephen King and the Critics: A Personal Perspective by Michael Collings
122. Steve’s Take: An Interview with Stephen King by Tony Magistrale
123. The King and I: Further Adventures with Stephen King by Sanford Phippen
Part Eight: Steph en King in Cyberspace
124. Top Web Sites for King Fans Glass Onion Graphics: Michael Whelan’s Dark Tower Prints
125. Lilja’s Library: An Interview with Hans-Åke Lilja by George Beahm
126. An Interview with David A. Williamson of Betts Books by George Beahm
127. Making the Grade: Assessing Book Condition
A Chronology of Stephen King’s Life:
Personal and Professional, 1947–2015
Acknowledgments
About the writers
About the artists
About the author