Rogue 5 - Stephen King

50 years as the lord of the underworld

Yes, this is Stephen King

Today marks the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Carrie, the book that Stephen King made. The book that made Stephen King.

There are countless Greek myths of abandoned children left to die of exposure only to be rescued and later gain fame: Oedipus, Perseus, Atalanta. So too with Carrie. As he recounts in On Writing, King wrote the first three pages of the tale only to ball up the sheets in disgust and toss them:

“The next night, when I came home from school, my wife Tabby had the pages. She'd spied them while emptying my waste-basket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she’d help me with that part.”

Would there be the King of Horror without his wife, Tabitha? Unlikely. But what’s certain is that once the paperback of Carrie came out, it was pedal to the metal for Stephen King. Here’s a Maine Campus article that came out after the paperback rights for Carrie were purchased (yes, that extra zero in the advance figure is a typo):

Neither the CAMPUS writer of that piece nor the “ex-CAMPUS writer” had any idea just how big the big time would be. Over the next half century, dozens of movies would be adapted from King’s works, including, to name just a few: The Shining, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Christine, Children of the Corn, Firestarter, Stand by Me, The Running Man, Misery, The Lawnmower Man, Needful Things, The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, The Mist, It, Gerald’s Game, and Pet Sematary.

Big time big time.

With King’s skyrocketing popularity came the inevitable backlash within the literati that he was a mediocre writer, a hack, a scribbler of penny dreadfuls. That he was, as Harold Bloom put it after King was awarded the prestigious National Book Award, “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Harold Bloom, R.I.P., had exquisite taste,¹ but when it came to Stephen King, he was immensely (to use his adverb) wrong. And I say this as no reader of popular fiction. The books that most awe and inspire me are whoppers like Ulysses or Paradise Lost. In politics and character, I may be anti-establishment, but in books, I’ve always been a canonical snob. At the same time, I consider Stephen King a hell of a writer. Sure, King is no stylist like Nabokov, where each sentence is a rarefied polished gem. But neither is Charles Dickens, and Dickens is hardly an immensely inadequate writer.

I didn’t always appreciate him. As a smug Ivy League teenager, I used to pooh-pooh Stephen King out of sheer ignorance (which, as a born-and-bred-Mainer, also makes me shamefully unpatriotic). I’d never read him. I just formed my views based on the slander of detracting critics. It’s how most people form their political views now: sheeplike and secondhand.

You’d think I’d have read him just out of team spirit. I grew up ten minutes from his home in Bangor, Maine. My father was a sociology professor at U Maine, where King got his B.A. (at a small faculty party in the late 70s, my dad asked him how the academic world was receiving his books and King responded with a joke about the green-eyed monster, or something to that effect).

My mother has a meatier Stephen King story: in late 1998 she went to one of his Bangor bookstore signings and handed him a letter inviting him to become a patron of the International Peace Village in Cyprus, which she was trying to create. He told her to instead send the letter to the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation. True to character, my mother pushed back: were she to do that, she told him, it would “only get lost in the Foundation’s black hole.” So he took her letter and tucked it into the front pocket of his shirt. A few months later, the following letter arrived in Cyprus accompanied by a check for $20,000:

One year later, he published his autobiographical and instructional “On Writing.” It was the first book of his I read. I was surprised to find that the writing was, well, good. Very good. Compact, no-bullshit, solid advice. Very Strunk-&-Whitish. You also got fun bio tidbits about King, like how as a kid he once wiped his ass in the woods with poison ivy or that he was so drunk writing Cujo that he couldn’t remember composing most of it. Who can write a book like Cujo while blitzed? Not a hack.

The man is also a workhorse, as his output attests. Upon reading On Writing, I was inspired to establish a writing schedule: six a.m. to noon every day. I’d work for money only in the afternoons. This was, of course, tricky on an island ten miles off the coast of Maine, which is where I was living at the time. The main line of work on Monhegan—lobstering—begins at dawn. Fortunately, the lobstermen saw that my unavailability in the mornings was for a legit (or semi-legit) cause so a few made exceptions for me, steaming in to the dock at midday so I could stern with them for a half day. If there’s one thing Mainers, especially islanders, respect, it’s a work ethic, dubious as that work may be.

Me baiting a lobster trap on Matt Weber’s F/V Griffin as a part-time sternman

So enthusiastic was I over On Writing that I even wrote King a letter offering up the studio apartment I was renting if he ever wanted to come visit Monhegan (truly beyond ridiculous, as if it were 1973 and he were still living in a doublewide trailer, writing his novels in the laundry room on his wife’s typewriter). Monhegan is stark and beautiful in the winter, I opined in my letter, like a tourism pamphlet, you will love it. I also enclosed a short story I’d written called “The One-Man Tent.”

A few weeks letter I got a letter back from his agent or assistant, I can’t remember, thanking me for the offer but saying that King was in Florida. As for my story, she regretted to inform me that he had a policy of not reading other writers’ manuscripts as they may influence his writing, which might result in legal and copyright imbroglios. It was a smooth excuse.

Since then, I’ve read six or seven of his novels—not that many considering his total, but enough to see that there’s nothing mechanical or formulaic in his prose. He doesn’t employ a studio of scribes like James Patterson. He doesn’t outline his stories and then outsource the production. No, King writes from deep in the guts and psyche. Consider what he said of his U Maine English professor Burton Hatlen:

“It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called ‘the language pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.’ […] I can think of no better place to spend one's days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim.”

King fishes those fantastic waters. There’s improvisation, there’s magic. He’s a mythmaker. And his tales have less to do with horror than with all too human fears and struggles—alcoholism (Misery), infidelity (Cujo), or bullying (Carrie)—and the tearing of the social fabric that ensues.

The only thing of his that I try not to read is his X-formerly-known-as-Twitter feed, with what I see to be an anachronistic, early 2000s conception of blue and red America. It makes me wince. But to each his views. The man doesn’t hold back. He never has.

I read myself to sleep each night, a habit that works like melatonin on me. It’s no fault of my reading. It’s physiology. It’s having toddlers. But with Stephen King, not only do I stay up reading longer than normal, but I then find myself mysteriously waking up at, oh, say 3:45 am, unable to sleep, reaching for the Kindle, thinking, I’ll just read a few more pages—I’m sure that’ll help me get back to sleep.

That’s what’s happened the last few mornings. It’s now 4:57 am as I write this. I’ve been up for over an hour, re-reading On Writing in preparation for this Rogues Gallery post but also in hopes it might help settle me back to sleep. But even his damn non-fiction keeps me up. The last few nights I started and finished Carrie (never read it before) during similar time frames: between the hours of 11pm and midnight and then, accursedly, between 4 and 6 am. That’s not a sustainable sleep schedule, especially when a two-year-old kamikazes your bed at 6:15.

The moral of this tale: go read some Stephen King, and if you value your precious sleep (as you should because modern sleep research has permanently put to bed the sarcasm around the preciousness of sleep) read him during the day.

Stephen King. (b.1947) Kingfisher of the Underworld. Twitter Troll. Mainer.

1. Academically unfashionable as Harold Bloom may be now in his stalwart defense of the canon and unabashed literary standards, I’ve always cherished that curmudgeonly dinosaur and supported his dying crusade against turning the spine-tingling love of literature into a tallying of ethnic quotas. Bloom’s death in 2019 felt like the end of an era, a loss to readers who, while recognizing the historic realities of racism, injustice, and empire, nevertheless don’t think that tearing down the literary monuments of dead white men is the right move.

Rogue 4 - Franz Kafka