A Brief Guide to Stephen King (9 page)

Links are there to King’s work. An incident where Dawes recalls shooting a blue jay, but failing to kill it, turned up again in King’s writing: both Audrey Wyler in
Desperation
, and Todd Boden in
Apt Pupil
have similar encounters. Andy McGee experienced similar difficulties as a child with a squirrel, according to
Firestarter
. The Blue Ribbon Laundry is where Carrie White’s mother lives, and the home of ‘The Mangler’ from that short story.

Roadwork
has yet to be adapted into any other medium.

Cujo
(Viking Press, September 1981)

Large St Bernard Cujo always wanted to be a good dog, and it wasn’t his fault that he became rabid when he did what dogs do and chased a rabbit, leading him to a nest of infected bats. Maybe the spirit of serial killer Frank Dodd possessed him when he terrorized Donna Trenton and her son Tad in their Ford Pinto on a hot summer’s day in Castle Rock, Maine. Donna has taken Tad with her to Joe Camber’s garage to try to get their car repaired; Donna’s affair with Steve Kemp has recently been discovered by her husband Vic, who has had to travel out of town to a business meeting in a desperate attempt to keep his advertising agency afloat. Camber can’t help Donna: Cujo has already killed him. Even Sheriff Bannerman is no longer in a position to assist: when he goes to visit the Cambers’ property, he too is killed by Cujo – and believes for a moment that he can see his former deputy, Dodd, looking at him from
Cujo’s eyes as the dog savages him. Eventually, desperate after two days besieged in the car by Cujo, Donna battles the dog, killing it – but it’s too late to save Tad. The four-year-old boy fails to survive the ordeal.

Stephen King barely remembers writing
Cujo
, thanks to his ever-growing addictions to alcohol and drugs, which, as he notes himself, is a loss, because it means he doesn’t remember ‘enjoying the good parts’ as he wrote them. It has been seen by some critics as a metaphor for King’s own struggles with addiction – like Cujo, the sufferer from addiction is ordinary and friendly on the outside, but when the alien substance is introduced, the nastier side, which was always there, comes to the surface. Whatever King’s state of mind, it enabled him to create a story that won the British Fantasy Society Award in 1982, and became part of modern pop culture – even those who haven’t read the book or seen the film know that the name Cujo belongs to a threatening canine.

Cujo
was criticised by reviewers and readers for its downbeat ending, ‘perhaps the cruellest, most disturbing tale of horror he’s written yet’, according to the
New York Times’
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. King defended the bleak finale noting that it was what the story demanded. There aren’t happy endings all the time in life: ‘it has to be put into the equation: the possibility that there is no God and nothing works for the best’, he commented a couple of years later.

It’s a story told on a much smaller scale than his more recent work, and in a far more realistic way. There aren’t any large government organizations trying to capture small children, just an infected canine on the loose. Bar the opening mention and Sheriff Bannerman’s hallucination as he dies, there are few suggestions of the supernatural. ‘I’d always wondered whether or not it would be possible to write a novel restricted to a very small space,’ King told
Starburst
magazine, explaining that he had considered an
elevator before choosing a car. ‘I began to think of it as a low-budget novel . . . because the setting is so restricted.’

It was inspired by a story he read during his time in England about a child in Portland, Maine who was killed by a St Bernard, and his own experiences facing another of the breed who took a dislike to King when he arrived in the driveway of a mechanic’s house. He considered setting up a situation where Donna had been bitten by Cujo, and had to battle to stop herself from harming her son, but when he learned that rabies doesn’t take hold that quickly, he diverted attention to the plot as we know it.

The unusual format – there are no delineated chapters, simply breaks between scenes – derived from King’s desire to make the book ‘a brick thrown through somebody’s window, like a really invasive piece of work. It feels anarchic, like a punk-rock record.’ It serves to ratchet up the tension, even if some of the juxtapositions of scenes – dealing with Joe Camber’s wife or Donna’s husband’s problems – can be frustrating on first read.

An ‘excerpt’ from the book appeared as ‘The Monster in the Closet’ in the
Ladies Home Journal
in October 1981, although it cherry-picks moments from the story, and includes a few details that did not make the final edition.

There are plenty of connections to King’s other Castle Rock stories, notably
The Dead Zone
, and the events at the Camber garage resonate in the community for the next decade.

Like the book, the movie version of
Cujo
, released in August 1983, is well known even to those who wouldn’t normally bother with what on the surface – and certainly the way that it was marketed – was a horror film. Dee Wallace, best known at that point for playing Elliot’s mother in
E.T
., was Donna Trenton, with Danny Pintauro as Tad. King was initially invited to pen the screenplay, and deviated from his own plotline more than eventual writer
Barbara Turner (using the pen-name Lauren Currier) did. Turner’s screenplay contained King’s downbeat ending, but director Lewis Teague brought Don Carlos Dunaway on board to change it. Although originally against a happy ending, King eventually agreed: the film concludes with Tad surviving his ordeal. Five separate Saint Bernard dogs were used to play Cujo (as well as a German Shepherd in a Saint Bernard suit!).

Supposedly, a remake of
Cujo
was in preparation to mark the original’s thirtieth anniversary in 2013; despite an optimistic press release from Sunn Classic Pictures in January that year, nothing had materialized by the summer. The moderator at King’s own website noted that ‘Stephen isn’t involved’.

The Running Man
(Signet Books, May 1982)

The year 2025, and America is a totalitarian state. Needing money for medicine for his seriously ill daughter, Ben Richards signs up for
The Running Man
, one of the most dangerous and brutal games produced by the Games Network for the entertainment of the population. It’s a manhunt: the hunted is an enemy of the state who’s given a twelve-hour head start before armed hitmen, known as Hunters, get on his trail. He receives a sum for each hour he stays alive; the same if he kills a Hunter or law-enforcement officer; and a billion dollars if he survives for thirty days. (The record is eight days.) He has to send two video messages each day, or forfeit his fees. Richards sets off, travelling through New York and Boston, gaining help from a gang member – unusual, because the public are paid if they report his location. Richards learns that the shows on the Network are simply a means of pacifying the public, but when he tries to reveal the truth, his messages are altered. Eventually he manages to board a plane, claiming he has explosives, along with the lead Hunter and an innocent woman bystander whose car he hijacked. The Network producer,
Dan Killian, offers him a job as lead Hunter, but Richards is concerned of the effect on his family. When Killian tells him his wife and daughter are already dead, Richards takes control of the plane, allows the woman to parachute away, and then aims the plane at the Games Network skyscraper. The resulting explosion kills Killian and Richards.

Unfortunately far better known for the movie version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Richards, discussed below, than its literary form,
The Running Man
was the last of King’s pseudonymous novels to be published while he was able to maintain the secret of ‘Dicky’ Bachman’s identity. Like
The Long Walk
, it takes television’s fixation with game shows to a logical, if grim, conclusion, and was written ‘one feverish weekend’ in 1971 over the space of seventy-two hours ‘with virtually no changes’ – a considerably faster pace than King was used to. Neither Doubleday nor Ace Books expressed an interest in it and it therefore became part of the set of trunk novels that King offered to New American Library.

When
The Running Man
was published, King was adamant that he wasn’t responsible for the book. ‘I know who Dick Bachman is though,’ he told
Shayol
magazine. ‘I went to school with Dicky Bachman and that isn’t his real name . . . That boy is absolutely crazy.’ Twenty years later, he would note that
The Running Man
was ‘written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing’. When reviewing the first book in
The Hunger Games
trilogy, he pointed out that both this and
The Long Walk
predated Suzanne Collins’ books by some considerable time.

It’s a fast-paced adventure tale that is, as King noted in
The Bachman Books
introduction, ‘nothing but story and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side’. The tale counts down to some catastrophic event, a device used equally effectively by Michael Grant in his
‘Gone’ series of novels twenty-five years later, but unlike George Dawes in
Roadwork
, or Garrity in
The Long Walk
, it’s hard to feel too much for Ben Richards one way or other. He’s a man thrown into a dreadful situation who deals with it as best he can, and for the most part feels like a cipher. However, at least he does get what King called ‘the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending’!

The rights to
The Running Man
were sold before the world knew that Bachman was Stephen King, albeit at a higher price than would normally be charged for a book by an unknown writer. The eventual movie was actually the second attempt to film it: a 1985 version, directed by
Rambo’s
George Pan Cosmatos, starred
Superman’s
Christopher Reeve as Richards, but after the director was fired, production was shut down. Andrew Davis, later responsible for the remake of
The Fugitive
, was appointed to direct from Steven E. de Souza’s script, with Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as the lead. (King didn’t hold back on his opinion of the casting: his Richards ‘is about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get’, he wrote in 1996.) Two weeks into shooting, Davis was replaced by Paul Michael Glaser, the former
Starsky & Hutch
star. The film quickly lost anything beyond a superficial resemblance to King’s original, and the poster proclaimed the movie was based on a book by Richard Bachman.

When he was coming to the end of his term as Governor of California in spring 2011, Schwarzenegger claimed that he had been approached about remaking
The Running Man
. However, despite the film regularly appearing in lists of top ten science-fiction films that should be remade, nothing has yet appeared.

Christine
(Viking Press, April 1983)

Christine is a bitch who destroys friendships and takes lives. But she’s not just some girl – she is a 1958 Plymouth
Fury, whom teens Arnie Cunningham and Dennis Guilder spot in a dilapidated state outside the house of Roland D. LeBay. Arnie falls in love with Christine and, despite Dennis’ advice (after he has a worrying vision while sitting inside the car), he buys her. He hires space at a local garage run by small-time crook Will Darnell, and starts to repair the car. Dennis is concerned when he learns of the car’s bad history after LeBay’s death (LeBay’s wife and daughter died in the car), and becomes even more worried about his friend – as Christine’s appearance improves, so does Arnie’s. He becomes overconfident, rude and cocky, increasingly starting to resemble LeBay. He begins to date newcomer Leigh Cabot, but she doesn’t feel safe around Christine – and Christine doesn’t like her. When Christine is attacked by a gang of thugs, she starts to repair herself, and then wreaks vengeance on the gang. Arnie is suspected but always has an alibi. However, his relationship with Leigh suffers, and she begins to date Dennis. When Arnie learns of this, they realize they need to destroy the car before she kills them – and this might restore Arnie to normal. As they do so, LeBay’s spirit tries to prevent them, and arranges for Arnie and his mother to die in an accident. Four years later, Dennis reads of a strange car-related death, and wonders if Christine is now coming for him . . .

Readers were of course unaware of Stephen King’s double life as Richard Bachman, and most didn’t know of the small press edition of the first ‘Dark Tower’ book
The Gunslinger
, so the arrival of
Christine
marked the end of an eighteen-month wait for a new King novel (the four-novella collection
Different Seasons
appeared in 1982). Part of the delay was caused by the problems King had with writing
Christine
: structurally, the book is unusual, with two first-person narrated sections sandwiching a third-person portion. King couldn’t find a way to deal with Christine’s murderous spree except as an omniscient narrator,
and freely admitted that the odd format ‘nearly killed the book’. However, looking back in 2011, he claimed that he had the most fun writing
Christine
of all his novels to date.

King’s love affair with rock music comes to the fore here – the frontispiece of the book contains page after page of copyright notices for permission to quote from different lyrics, with an apposite quote from rock and roll at the top of each chapter. He had to pay for these permissions himself but he could afford to – for
Christine
, he worked out a new contract with his publishers where he received a $1 advance, but a much higher percentage of the royalties.

King was inspired in part by the 1977 movie
The Car
– in
Danse Macabre
, he discusses one of the key scenes from that film in which the title vehicle, which is of course demonically possessed, pursues a couple of cyclists through Zion State Park in Utah, blaring its horn and eventually running them down. Around the same time that film came out, King had been wondering what would happen if his car’s odometer began to run backwards – would the car get younger? Both ideas fed into
Christine
, although King upped the stakes by having his possessed car blazing with fire while on its hunt. The novel is very clear that Christine acts the way she does because of Roland LeBay’s influence the man’s rotting ghost is a key character. ‘I couldn’t seem to keep him out of the book,’ he later noted. ‘Even after he died he kept coming back for one more curtain call, getting uglier and uglier all the time.’