Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (10 page)

King began
The House on Value Street
,
a novel inspired by Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, while living in Boulder in the late summer of 1974. It did not work and he abandoned it after six weeks. What happened to the manuscript is unknown. King gives some detail of the work in
Danse Macabre
:
¹⁹
 

It was going to be a
roman à clef
about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, her brainwashing … her participation in the bank robbery, the shootout at the SLA hideout in Los Angeles – in my book, the hideout was on Value Street, natch – the fugitive run across the country, the whole ball of wax. It seemed to me to be a highly potent subject, and while I was aware that lots of non-fiction books were sure to be written on the subject, it seemed to me that only a novel might really succeed in explaining all the contradictions… I gathered my research materials … and then I attacked the novel. I attacked it from one side and nothing happened. I tried it from another side and felt it was going pretty well until I discovered all my characters sounded as if they had just stepped whole and sweaty from the dance marathon in Horace McCoy’s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
I tried it
in media res
. I tried to imagine it as a stage play, a trick that sometimes works for me when I’m badly stuck. It didn’t work this time. 

Kingdom Hospital
was a milestone in King’s career. His second attempt at series television, it ran over 15 hours in 2004. According to the ABC website,
Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital
was:  

…the haunting new drama series created directly for television by the award-winning, bestselling master of horror. Using Lars Von Trier’s Danish mini-series
Riget
(a.k.a.
The Kingdom
) as a point of inspiration, King tells the terrifying story of The Kingdom, a hospital with a bizarre population that includes a nearly blind security guard, a nurse who regularly faints at the sight of blood and a paraplegic artist whose recovery is a step beyond miraculous. When patients and staff hear the tortured voice of a little girl crying through the halls, they are dismissive of any suggestion of mysticism or unseen powers … but at their own peril.  

The Sony TV website told us, “Kingdom Hospital stands as a supposed shimmering example of modern medicine, but its doctors and patients have begun to collide with lurking supernatural forces which reveal its troubled history. Built upon the site of a great fire, which killed many children over 100 years ago, the hospital still hosts remnant spirits of the unsettled dead.” King used his own near death experience as the inspiration for the character of Peter Rickman. In the last episode, he gave cameo appearances as Johnny B. Good and a lawyer on TV in addition to the audio cameo as the AA sponsor on the telephone in episode six. 

To date, copies of the telescript for all nine episodes King wrote or co-wrote have yet to surface.  

The first two-hour episode was shown 3 March 2004 and garnered over 14 million viewers, the best new series launch on ABC-TV for over 2 ½ years, although ratings rapidly declined for later episodes. The network unforgivably split the series, with a two-month gap between the ninth and tenth episodes. Ironically, perhaps the finest episode in the series was King’s sad, compelling and redemptive take on events following an alternate reality 1987 World Series,
Butterfingers
, the last shown before the enforced break. 

King and Richard Dooling wrote the teleplays. One episode, in the first known collaboration with her husband, was based on a storyline by Tabitha King. The overall story was original to King, using characters by Lars van Trier. Craig R Baxley directed, as he had
Rose Red
,
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
and
Storm of the Century
. Ed Begley Jr. played Dr. Jesse James; Andrew McCarthy appeared as Dr. Hook; Jack Coleman as Peter Rickman; Diane Ladd as Mrs. Druse; and Bruce Davison played Dr. Stegman. The DVD was released in late 2004. 

In a column titled
A Kingdom That Didn’t Come
in
Entertainment Weekly
for 9 July 2004 King explains why he thinks the series flopped in the ratings. Importantly, he states, “As late as March, Rick [
Dooling
] and I delivered a season 2 ‘bible’ which the Alphabet net bought, paid for and eagerly received.” Unfortunately there are no plans to produce that second series. 

The episodes and writers were:
Thy Kingdom Come
(Stephen King);
Death’s Kingdom
(King);
Goodbye Kiss
(King);
The West Side of Midnight
(King);
Hook’s Kingdom
(King and Richard Dooling);
The Young and the Headless
(Dooling);
Black Noise
(Dooling);
Heartless
(Dooling);
Butterfingers
(King);
The Passion of Jimmy Criss
(Stephen King, based on a storyline by Tabitha King);
Seizure Day
(Dooling);
Shoulda Stood in Bed
(King);
Finale
(King).
The Passion of Jimmy Criss
was retitled
On the Third Day
for the DVD release, perhaps as a result of the runaway success of Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
. 

There were many subtle, and none too subtle links, from
Kingdom Hospital
to King’s other fiction and the series itself is mentioned in
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
. 

Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago
was advertised in
Dave’s Rag
as “…the new King story!!!!” It is assumed this was written, or was to be written, by young Stephen (only eleven at the time). The advertisement read, “‘Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago.’ Exciting story of 21 people prisoners on an island that should have been extinct 1,000,000 years ago. Order through this newspaper.” The same edition of the newspaper (Summer 1959) advertises a “New Book by Steve King!,”
Thirty-One of the Classics
. The text of that advertisement, “Read ‘Kidnapped,’ ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and
many
others!!! If you order in three weeks, only 30c. Contact Steve King %Dave’s Rag’ (
sic
).”
Dave’s Rag
itself was a newspaper self-published by Steve King’s brother, Dave. King relates much of its history in
On Writing
and two King stories from the newspaper,
Jumper
and
Rush Call
are reviewed in a separate chapter of this book. 

According to a 1986 article in
Time
magazine King was working on ‘
Livre Noir
, a detective story in French, “the language that turns dirt into romance.” The quote is presumably from what the article called “the indisputable King of horror” himself. The story also revealed King, promoting
It
at the time, had “plans to study French in order to finish” the story, indicating it had at least been started. 

Milkman
was an aborted novel, from which two segments,
Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)
and
Big Wheels (Milkman #2)
, were re-written and published as short stories.
Big Wheels
was first published in a 1980 anthology,
New Terrors 2
before King completely re-wrote it for an appearance in
Skeleton Crew
. 

Mr. Rabbit Trick
may be the first story King ever wrote. According to an article by Martyn Palmer in
The Times
magazine (re-published in
The Australian Women’s Weekly
magazine for January 2004) King, “…first started writing as a seven-year-old, when he presented his mother with a short story called
Mr. Rabbit Trick
, about magic animals.” As the article resulted from an interview King gave in Los Angeles to promote
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
we can presume King revealed this information. King also refers to what is almost certainly the same story in part 8 of the “C.V.” section of
On Writing
, in which he notes he wrote four or five “Mr. Rabbit Trick” stories. He sold four of them to his mother for a quarter a piece, “That was the first buck I made in this business.” 

In April 2005 it was revealed that King had co-written a script for a sequel to the movie,
The Night Flier
, based on his short story of the same name. Producer Richard P. Rubinstein told
Fangoria
magazine, “Mark Pavia, director of the original, came to me with a screenplay for the sequel,” the producer reports. “I don’t usually like sequels, but I thought the script was good and gave it to Stephen to see what he thought.” Not only did King enjoy the screenplay, he decided to get directly involved. “I thought the script would sit on his shelf for a while,” Rubinstein says, “but suddenly, Steve came to me with a corrected and rewritten screenplay by himself. When I told Mark, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. There were some things he would miss from his original version, but now he had an improved one co-written by Stephen King himself!” 

King’s office confirmed he had indeed written an updated draft while in Florida during the winter of 2004-5. The current title for the unproduced movie is
The Night Flier 2
. 

On the Island
is a novel King wrote in the period from 1985-90. In an interview with Tim Adams for
The Guardian
(UK) and published in September 2000, King said the following of the novel, “I started a book … about 15 years ago. It was called
On the Island
, and it was about rich people who talked these street kids into going to an island and being hunted, with paintballs. And they get there and they find these guys are actually shooting live rounds, and in my story there were two or three who escaped and waited for these rich guys to come back. I’ve got it on a shelf somewhere.” Rocky Wood observed a box containing this manuscript in King’s office in late 2002. It is as yet unclear whether King actually completed the novel (compare “I started…” with “I’ve got it on a shelf…”) 

Pinfall
is a screenplay segment written for the movie,
Creepshow 2
. However, there is much speculation as to exactly how much, if anything, of it King wrote. It seems certain the story idea was his – Spignesi states the segment was “based on an unpublished King short story”
²⁰
. Copies of the screenplay segment, which was cut from the film, circulate but it is far from certain that King did in fact write it.  

King wrote
The Pit and the Pendulum
, and he and Chris Chesley sold copies of it at Durham’s elementary school. It “novelized” the 1961 movie of the same name. All trace of the story has been lost. King tells its story (“…turned out to be my first best-seller”) in section 18 of the “C.V.” part of
On Writing
. King’s entertaining re-telling of the whole incident, in which he also reveals selling copies of another story,
The Invasion of the Star-Creatures
that summer, is highly recommended.
Concluding his retelling of the incident King says:  

Miss Hisler told me I would have to give everyone’s money back. I did so with no argument, even to those kids (and there were quite a few, I’m happy to say) who insisted on keeping their copies of V.I.B. #1. I ended up losing money on the deal after all, but when summer vacation came I printed four dozen copies of a new story, an original called
The Invasion of the Star-Creatures,
and sold all but four or five.