A Brief Guide to Stephen King (12 page)

Originally released in a limited oversized edition by the Philtrum Press (King’s own publishing company) in 1984,
The Eyes of the Dragon
was often overlooked by King’s fans before its links to the ‘Dark Tower’ series were made explicit in the short story ‘The Little Sisters of Eluria’, which appeared in 1998. King had written the story (then known simply as ‘Napkins’) for his daughter Naomi Rachel King, the inspiration for the character Naomi Reechul in the book, and it was thought therefore that this was a children’s tale. This perception probably wasn’t helped by the major
Time
interview with King in late 1986, in which the book is described as ‘an Arthurian sword-and-sorcery epic written for Naomi, who read
Carrie
and has since refused to venture into any of her father’s other books’.

In fact, it’s not really a children’s book at all: ‘I respected my daughter enough then – and now – to try and give her my best,’ King explained, ‘and that includes a refusal to “talk down”. Or put another way, I did her the courtesy of writing for myself as well as for her.’ The levels of violence and gore may be toned down – particularly from contemporary King works such as
Pet Sematary
or
IT
– and there is a lot more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ involved. The omniscient narrator is able to get away with glossing over details in such a way that those with active imaginations can envision the various beheadings and tortures, but it could be innocuous enough for younger readers.

In some ways this can be seen as an ‘origin story’ for King’s greatest villain, Randall Flagg – as the final volume of the ‘Dark Tower’ saga makes clear, Delain is where he comes
from, and the gunslinger Roland is aware of Thomas and Dennis’s pursuit of Flagg following the events of this book.

The 1987 version of the story differs in a number of ways from the limited edition. Peter’s companion Ben appears much earlier in the story now, and King wrote the scene with the three-legged sack race which seals the two boys’ friendship specifically to address the concerns of Deborah Brodie, the freelance editor Viking brought on board for the new edition. The concerns of the fans who felt King should stick to writing horror, and not try to break into other fields, became a key note in the book King was working on at the time –
Misery
.

Speaking in 1989, Stephen King believed that
The Eyes of the Dragon
would make ‘such a great cartoon’, and eleven years later, it was optioned by WAMC Entertainment, intended as a $45 million animated feature. ‘The storyline and characters provide all the ingredients for a classic fantasy, sword-and-sorcerer animated tale, but are also blended with Stephen King’s own brand of suspense and dark humour,’ WAMC’s Sidonie Herman told
Screen Daily
in 2000. Their rights had lapsed by 2005, but a new version, this time for the US Syfy Channel, was announced in April 2012. If this gets the green light, this will be a four-hour miniseries, from a script by Michael Taylor and Jeff Vintar. The channel regularly takes a long time in preproduction on its projects, so its realization may still occur in time to mark King’s forty-year anniversary.

Misery
(Viking Press, June 1987)

Annie Wilkes is a fan. In fact, she’s author Paul Sheldon’s ‘number one fan’. So when she gets the chance to meet her hero, she’s over the moon – until she finds out that Paul has killed off his long-running heroine Misery Chastain in the most recent novel, and is branching out into other types of literature. He’s going to have to change his mind and
resurrect her, whether he likes it or not. And Annie has plenty of ways of ensuring that Paul will do what he’s told.

Paul isn’t allowed to cheat either – his first version of
Misery’s Return
doesn’t satisfy his keenest audience, and he has to rework it to make it credible and acceptable. By this time he has become addicted to painkillers, and has been forcibly prevented from being able to escape after Annie cuts his foot off. As Annie becomes increasingly more insane, killing a state trooper, and removing Paul’s thumb, Paul realizes that when he completes the manuscript to Annie’s satisfaction, he will die at her hands. When it is finished, he sets fire to it in front of Annie, and stuffs the burning pages in her mouth. After a fight in which Annie cracks her skull, Paul manages to attract attention from some more state troopers, and is rescued. But that’s not the end of his problems with Annie Wilkes . . .

Stephen King may have put aside the trappings of the horror novel after
IT
, but
Misery
is a horror story of a different sort. It’s a highly claustrophobic two-hander in which King deals with the plight and problems of the writer and his relationship with his fans, as well as – subconsciously – talking about the perils of addiction. ‘Even if
Misery
is less terrifying than his usual work – no demons, no witchcraft, no nether-world horrors – it creates strengths out of its realities,’ John Katzenbach wrote in the
New York Times
. ‘Its excitements are more subtle. And, as such, it is an intriguing work.’

With a basis in the tale of Scheherazade from
One Thousand and One Nights, Misery
was described as a ‘love letter’ from King to his fans in some of the attendant publicity; other critics have called it ‘more like a gigantic F*** You’. It certainly derives in part from King’s annoyance at his fans’ reactions to
The Eyes of the Dragon
, since he felt that they were trying to pigeonhole him into one specific genre of writing. King was clear in interviews promoting
Misery
that he still was grateful to the fans, but he had experienced the darker side of their adoration, and he had become very wary of it. Years earlier he believed he had encountered his own ‘number one fan’ – Mark Chapman, who would become the murderer of John Lennon in 1980. Ironically, one of the worst fan-related incidents happened four years after
Misery
was published: King was away at a baseball game, leaving his wife alone in the house in Maine when she heard a window break. ‘There was this guy there, and he claimed he had a bomb (in fact it was a bunch of pencils and erasers and stuff and paperclips),’ King recalled in 2000. ‘He was an escapee from a mental institution and he had this rant about how I’d stolen
Misery
from him. Tabby fled in her bathrobe and the police came . . .’

In the book, Annie Wilkes is a monster, and King was delighted with the way that she has no redeeming features: ‘This voice rose up inside me and said, “Why does she have to have a good side?” ’ he recalled in 1990. “If she’s crazy go ahead, make her a monster! She’s a human being but let her be a monster if that’s what she wants to be,” and it was such a relief!’

In
On Writing
, King was open about his drug addiction and alcohol problems in the early 1980s, and how they were rapidly escalating around the time he wrote
Misery
. It was a cry for help from an inner part of his own psyche that he could only recognize once he had come out the other side.

Had the author not succumbed to ‘cancer of the pseudonym’, chances are that
Misery
would have followed
Thinner
as a book by Richard Bachman. It has various connections to other King stories though – Annie talks about the ruins of the Overlook Hotel (
The Shining
), while Sheldon’s novels are mentioned in
The Library Policeman
novella in
Four Past Midnight
.

There are probably few people who nowadays read
Misery
without thinking of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, the part
she played in Rob Reiner’s 1990 movie – and for whom William Goldman penned the character in the screenplay. A certain amount of expansion was deemed necessary to translate the story to the big screen – we learn far more about the search for Paul as it goes on – with Reiner explaining that ‘we got rid of the most gory and horrific parts. I wanted to concentrate on the idea of this chess match between the artist and his fan’. The foot-lopping was also toned down for the screen. Bates’s performance won her both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

The claustrophobic nature of the story also lends itself to stage adaptation: Simon Moore wrote and directed a production for the UK stage, which opened in 1992 with
Burn Notice’s
Sharon Gless as Annie and Bill Paterson as Paul. Ken Stack directed a version of this in Maine in 2000. William Goldman has also adapted his screenplay for a new stage version that opened in Pennsylvania in November 2012, with Johanna Day as Annie and Daniel Gerroll as Paul. Director Will Frears promised that the production would be realistic: ‘There are these astonishing moments of violence and terror in the middle of it, we all felt we had to go there — you had to see those ankles crunch. If you didn’t really deliver that satisfyingly, in a sense you weren’t doing
Misery
. And that’s what the people came for.’

The Tommyknockers
(Putnam, November 1987)

Writer Bobbi Anderson is in the woods near her home in Haven, Maine, with her dog, when she comes across a piece of metal sticking out of the ground. Investigating it, she eventually discovers that it is part of an alien spaceship, which starts to release an odourless gas that affects everyone within a certain area of the woods. The gas enables the residents of the town to use parts of their brains they haven’t accessed before, and create incredible gadgets to help them with their everyday life – even if they don’t fully comprehend them, or realize that the gas is also affecting them physically.

One man appears immune to the effects of the gas, Bobbi’s former lover Jim ‘Gard’ Gardener, who has a metal plate in his head. He’s virulently against nuclear power and is initially trying to alert people to the dangers of this, before understanding that what the spaceship is providing is considerably worse. The other residents of Haven are taken over by the aliens’ consciousness as they ‘become’ Tommyknockers, and want Bobbi to dispose of Jim, but she refuses. When the spaceship’s hatchway is uncovered, Bobbi and Jim enter to find the Tommyknocker crew in hibernation; soon after, Jim kills Bobbi accidentally. He then finds a way to control the ship telepathically, and, as he dies, it blasts off into space. Haven’s survivors are collected by agents of The Shop, although most of them die quickly.

A book that King admits he wrote at the height of his cocaine and alcohol addictions across the spring and summer of 1986,
The Tommyknockers
is also the writer at his least controlled. King stated in interviews regularly that he didn’t always take well to criticism, even from his editors: after all, what were they going to do? Fire one of America’s top-selling authors? There are whole swathes of
The Tommyknockers
that feel self-indulgent – notably the 200 pages dedicated to introducing us to the residents of Haven – which should have been carefully pruned. The multiple references to characters and situations from his other work don’t help, particularly when they contradict and undercut the previous stories, such as the reference to the presence of It in Derry in a book clearly set years after the events of that novel.

The Tommyknockers
was King’s homage to the schlock science-fiction tales of the 1940s, and was a conscious reworking of themes in H. P. Lovecraft’s tale ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (itself adapted for the big screen in the same year that
The Tommyknockers
was published). It also bears remarkable similarities to Nigel Kneale’s third
Quatermass
TV serial,
Quatermass and the Pit
, whose 1967 film version was released in America under the title
Five Million Years to Earth
, as well as the 1970 TV movie
Night Slaves
, which was based on a novel by Jerry Sohl.

Discussing the novel in 2009, King noted that he had the original idea for
The Tommyknockers
while still a senior in college, but he realized that ‘the canvas was just too big. And so I quit’. When he picked the novel back up a couple of decades later, he thought that it would become an examination of the corrupting nature of power. ‘If I have these two people and they’re able to get this flying saucer out of the ground and fly it, then they can decide they’re going to become sheriffs for world peace and discover they do a really terrible job at it, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ he told
Time
magazine. Instead the book became about the unstoppable power of addiction: Bobbi notes that her compulsion to dig the craft out of the ground had nothing to do with free will, and that once something is discovered, human nature dictates you have to dig it out, in case it’s treasure.

Portions of
The Tommyknockers
were published as ‘The Revelations of Becka Paulson’ in
Rolling Stone
magazine on 19 July and 2 August 1984. The short-story version was considerably changed for its inclusion in the book – for a start, it takes place in 1973 rather than contemporaneously.

The Tommyknockers
was not well received. The
New York Times
damned it with faint praise: ‘We already knew [Mr King] could grip us with good horror stories and so-so horror stories. Now he has shown that he can grip us with a lousy horror story as well.’
Publishers Weekly
said that the book was ‘consumed by the rambling prose of its author’ and that, like the characters in the story, King had ‘ “become” a writing machine’.

The early 1990s saw a number of King’s projects adapted for the small screen with
The Tommyknockers
appearing on
ABC in May 1993. Like
IT
– and the earlier movie of
Carrie
– this was penned by Lawrence D. Cohen, with
L.A. Law’s
Jimmy Smits and later
CSI
star Marg Helgenberger as Gard and Bobbi. Cohen tightened up the story, as well as making various changes (listed in considerable detail online) – notably the Tommyknockers themselves come to life at the end, and the effects of the ‘becoming’ are rather less visually obvious (a lack of teeth rather than the full-blown radiation poisoning symptoms of the novel). Filmed in New Zealand,
The Tommyknockers
didn’t have the pulling power of
IT
, and was severely edited for its US video release, although the whole miniseries is now available on DVD. ‘I thought they did a pretty decent job with a book that wasn’t top drawer to begin with,’ King told
Cinefantastique
.