Haunted Heart

9 THE LONG WALK

Though Steve had already resolved that he would no longer write about kids, he decided to write for kids, specifically, for his daughter.

While Joe eagerly read The Stand and Salem’s Lot when he was eleven years old, Naomi had no desire to read her father’s work. “My daughter is a more gentle soul,” he said. “She has very little interest in my vampires, ghoulies, and slushy crawling things.” Naomi instead preferred fantasy novels by Piers Anthony and works by John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and Shakespeare.

“She never read anything that I had written, and in a way that hurt. So I thought, all right, if she won’t come to me, I’ll go to her.” He sat down to write a story of sibling rivalry set in a faraway mythical kingdom, originally calling it The Napkins, in 1983 and gave it to Naomi to read. She liked it, and he was so pleased with it that he decided to send out the story for his annual Christmas missive in 1984. He renamed it The Eyes of the Dragon and published it himself through his own small press, Philtrum. He had started Philtrum, in 1982, to publish the first installment of The Plant. One edition of 1,000 signed copies numbered in black pen had been sold via lottery to fans, and a second edition of 250 signed copies were numbered in red, which he sent to his Christmas-card list. Philtrum later expanded to publish limited editions of stories and novellas that Steve deemed to be either too short or too far away from his typical style for his New York publishers.

Though he never intended The Eyes of the Dragon to be published for the general public, in 1987 Steve decided that the story deserved to be read by a wider audience, and so he granted permission to Viking to publish a trade edition of the book for distribution to bookstores. Deborah Brodie, a freelance book editor who had worked with noted children’s authors Jane Yolen and Patricia Reilly Giff, was brought on to edit the book, and she was impressed at how well King took her editorial direction.

She asked him to introduce Peter’s best friend, Ben, earlier in the story; in the original, Ben showed up at the halfway point. “Steve wove several references into various scenes early in the book, and then he created a whole new scene with a three-legged sack race to explain the genesis of their friendship,” she said. “That’s a very exciting moment for an editor, to ask the right questions and have the author do more than just answer it.”

She was initially concerned that she’d feel intimidated working with King, but her fears were dissipated when he told her, “The book is the boss.”

In March 1987, Stephanie Leonard—Tabby’s sister and the editor of Castle Rock—dropped a bomb on Stephen King fans. Though he’d previously hinted at retiring from writing, it now looked as if he would finally do it.

In her editor’s column, Leonard announced that Steve would be taking some time off from writing. “We’ve heard him say he’ll take five years,” she wrote.

The reaction was fast and furious. Fans flooded the office with phone calls and letters to protest and beg him to reconsider, and the story made headlines around the world. To pacify the fans, Steve backtracked a bit.

“I think it would be a good idea,” he said, laughing, “but I don’t know if I can. Tabby says that I can’t. She says that I couldn’t stop writing any more than I could stop breathing.”

The backlash and outrage forced Stephanie Leonard to amend her editor’s letter a few issues later: “Stephen is not really retiring, he is hoping to cut back on work so he can spend more time with his family. There will not be any more five-book years anytime soon. He plans to continue writing but publish less.”

His fans were somewhat mollified a few months later when Misery was published . . . at least those readers who didn’t take his novel about a nightmare fan personally.

As usual, King had ripped the headlines from his own life to create a novel. He’d been thinking about branching out from his usual oeuvre of horror—Eyes of the Dragon was the first real step in this direction—and he realized that some of his fans would fight him tooth and nail, which was particularly evident in the wake of his most recent retirement announcement. Misery is the story of a romance novelist who wants to work in a genre totally different from the one he has long been pigeonholed in, and one obsessed fan who kidnaps him and demands that he write another novel in the old genre.

Some fans reacted with anger as they interpreted the message of the novel—originally written as a Bachman book—to be King thumbing his nose at them. Because the character of Annie Wilkes was written as an over-the-top caricature, some of Steve’s fans believed that he held nothing but contempt for them.

During media interviews for the book, he was careful to say that he still loved his fans, and that he wouldn’t be where he was if it not for them. However, he had experienced firsthand a dark side to some fans that he spoke about publicly for the first time:

“Fans still buy the food I put on my table. On one level it still knocks me out that people get off on what I’m doing that I can’t help but love them. But if you buy the book and spend two or three days reading it and really get off on it, then that’s all you deserve. That’s all your $17.95 should buy. It isn’t like a ticket into my house or my life or my bedroom or anything else.

“I’ve been a lightning rod for a certain number of crazy people. We keep files on them. The people who are the most devoted fans have a churning need to identify emotionally with the object of their worship.” Where it got really scary, he said, was when the adulation spilled over into actual resentment. “They feel that what I have achieved was really meant for them.”

As usual, Tabby didn’t mince words when she gave a pointed warning to his fans in the pages of Castle Rock two months after Misery was published: “In some very real way, you, the readers, know this man very well. I would like to suggest that you do not know him at all. In seventeen years of marriage, I am still discovering things I did not know about Steve, and I hope he’s still discovering the unknown in me.”

Steve said the same thing about Tabby: “I think of my wife as holding a deck of fifty-two cards. If you ask me how many she is showing me, I wouldn’t know. We are as close to each other as two people can be, but one can never be sure how much you do and do not know about another person.”

His original idea for Misery was a lot more graphic: Annie Wilkes had planned to kill Paul Sheldon, feed him to Annie’s pig—named Misery after the heroine in Paul’s books—and take his skin to bind the book he’d written for her. The original title? The Annie Wilkes First Edition.

Even though Annie was based on an amalgam of King’s scariest fans, he did grow quite fond of her while writing the book. “Of the characters I’ve created that readers know about, Annie Wilkes is my favorite. She always surprised me, she never did exactly what I thought she would do, and that’s why I liked her,” he explained. “She had a lot more depth and she actually generated a lot more sympathy in my heart than I expected.”

In truth, however, Annie Wilkes was a stand-in for Steve’s addictions. “I was writing about my alcoholism and didn’t have a clue.”

King’s next book was The Tommyknockers, published in November of 1987, the story of a female writer who discovers an alien spaceship buried in her yard, and how the inherent evil in the spaceship affects the people in her town. Even his loyal fans said it wasn’t among his best—and critics lambasted it.

The response to The Tommyknockers underscored a criticism of his writing that he’d been getting for some time. King’s books had become bloated from his typical overwriting, and his work badly needed an editor. Steve once joked that he suffered from a permanent case of literary elephantiasis. “I have a real problem with bloat. I write like fat ladies diet.”

“The guy is a machine,” said Stephen Spignesi, the author of numerous books about King, including The Essential Stephen King. “He is a very prolific creator, and he sometimes tends to overwrite. He doesn’t look at his work and say this could be shorter and he would be more effective. For instance, he’ll go on for two pages describing a room or something when the reader just wants some action.” But Spignesi admits some buried treasures are in the bloated pages: “Very often the excess description is often where King excels in literary imagery.”

“Nobody can make me change anything,” Steve once said in regard to his writing style. “Where does a ten-thousand-pound gorilla sit? The answer is, any place he wants. It’s too easy to hang myself. I have all this freedom, and it can lead to self-indulgence.” He was well aware of the criticism. “I think that I’m a little more sloppy than I was. I’m forty-four, my editor’s thirty-five, and I think, ‘What the fuck does he know? Don’t tell me how to make this hat, boy, I’ve been making these hats since from when you were in your mother’s womb.’

“But the fucking hat doesn’t have any brim or the thing’s inside out, and in fact he knows quite a lot. I try to listen and figure, if you’re the biggest ape in the jungle, you better be pretty careful.”

Even Steve was unhappy with the way The Tommyknockers turned out. “It just went on and on. It was a hard one to write, to keep track of all those people in the story. When I finished the first draft, it looked like the Bataan Death March, with lots of cross-outs and stuff. I locked myself in the bathroom and I laughed hysterically and cried and then laughed again. I never did that with a book.”

Of course, the trouble could have come because Steve had hit bottom in his drug addiction and alcoholism. After dealing with his drinking and blackouts for years, Tabby was starting to hint at an ultimatum. Steve recognized he was on thin ice, admitting that he didn’t trust himself, and that was why he continued to push himself, crank out the books, push people past the gross-out point they’d become accustomed to in his previous novels.

His writing life started to look especially bleak after he handed in the manuscript for The Tommyknockers early in 1987, when he came down with a severe case of writer’s block. “It was terrible,” he said. “Everything I wrote for the next year fell apart like tissue paper.”

In the fall of 1987, Stephen King should have been on top of the world. Despite the negative reaction to The Tommyknockers, Misery had met with wider acclaim than his books usually did. The New York Times, a newspaper not previously known to look favorably on Steve’s novels, called it “an intriguing work,” while USA Today crowned it “King’s best.” The Running Man, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the starring role, pulled in just over $8 million on opening weekend in mid-November. But perhaps the thrill of Steve’s entire year came in October at a Johnny Cash concert at the Bangor Auditorium, when he was invited onstage by the Man in Black to join him on “Johnny B. Goode.”

He was tickled by the chance to play with Cash, but Stephen King was not in a good place. While he was thinking about what new horrors to inflict upon the lives of the characters in his work-in-progress, he was trying to forget about the horrors in his own life, specifically his overwhelming addictions. When he took the stage with Cash, no one in the audience or in the band could have imagined that the internationally famous horror writer who stood at the mike belting it out was only sober for about three hours a day, and he spent most of that time thinking of blowing his brains out.

“I love my life and my wife and kids, but I’ve always been somewhat quasi-suicidal most of the time, constantly wanting to push things past the edge,” he said.

His blackouts from cocaine and alcohol had become more frequent in the last few years, as he drank and drugged more not only to keep up the pace but also to keep the demons at bay: “You think the world loves you? We really know what’s going on, and we’re not going to let you forget we’re here.”

He said, “My kind of success does not lead you humbly to say, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’m an asshole.’ Rather, it leads you to say, ‘Who the fuck are you to tell me to settle down? Don’t you know I’m the king of the fucking universe?’ ”

He tells a story his mother had told him during his childhood. When Ruth was pregnant with him, she’d pull up a piece of tar from the road in front of the house and chew it. She didn’t know why she was compelled to do it, but she absolutely craved something in that tar, and if she couldn’t have it, she’d do nothing but think about it until she gave up and ran out into the middle of the road, where she fell on her hands and knees and clawed a hunk of asphalt out with her fingernails. She waited until she was heading back to the house before she popped it into her mouth and began mindlessly chewing as if it were a piece of taffy. She instantly felt better. Her husband, Donald, Steve’s father, was thoroughly disgusted and ordered her to stop, but she couldn’t. “There was something in that tar that she, that I, needed,” Steve would say years later.

Her son would later joke that something in that tar spawned his craving for drugs and alcohol, or else he had inherited the addiction gene from Ruth and it got rewired somewhere along the way. Or maybe it was responsible for the gene that compelled him to write, which he was thoroughly convinced was an addiction as well.

Tabby had cut Steve an awful lot of slack through the years. She saw how he was able to continue writing through the alcohol- and coke-induced fogs, and she’d seen him when he wasn’t writing: it wasn’t pretty. She too worried that if he stopped drinking and drugging, he would not be able to write a word, and that he would be much more difficult to live with than now.

Like many writers with an inclination toward booze and drugs, Steve believed if he stopped snorting cocaine and drinking, his output would slow to a crawl. He felt the same way about psychotherapy: talking about his deep-seated demons would automatically dilute the ideas and terrors that seemed to fuel his stories and novels.

But even he realized that things were getting out of hand. The blackouts were becoming more frequent. Tabby had long ago gotten used to sleeping alone night after night, padding down the magnificent mahogany staircase in their twenty-four-room restored Victorian mansion each morning only to find her husband passed out in a puddle of vomit in his office. The creature lying in the middle of the floor, her husband, was starting to resemble Jordy Verrill from the movie Creepshow, the character Steve had played, where, little by little, a nasty green fungus enveloped his entire body, finally asphyxiating him.

Now, the same thing was happening with Steve’s alcoholism—yes, Tabby could finally use the word to describe one of her husband’s addictions—he was suffocating.

Aside from hangovers that lingered into the afternoon, while he put on the horrormeister face for his public and his devil-may-care face for his family, he was starting to worry that booze and coke were affecting his work. The bashing The Tommyknockers received was a tiny wake-up call.

While his addictions were interfering with his output, they were also starting to trump plain old common sense: Steve was beginning to think he was immortal. The volume of his work had actually increased through the years along with his consumption, despite the blackouts.

Tabby had finally had enough. One day she combed through Steve’s office gathering up everything that wasn’t being used in moderation or for its original purpose. Some of it was in plain sight: empty beer cans, and empty bottles of NyQuil and Listerine. Some of it she had to dig for, because Steve still denied he was using cocaine.

“I didn’t just have a problem with beer and cocaine, I was an addictive personality, period,” he admitted later. “I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, I loved Listerine, I loved NyQuil, you name it. If it would change your consciousness, I was all for it.”

Tabby went through the bookcases and found tucked into file folders and underneath unopened office supplies the drug paraphernalia: plastic bags with the residue of white powder inside, coke spoons, everything. She loaded everything into a garbage can and, in a confrontational exercise straight out of the AA playbook, gathered up the kids and a few friends and upended the loaded can onto the floor in front of her husband.

She was no longer in denial. Tabby issued an ultimatum: he could either continue on his current path or get sober. If he chose to do himself in, his family sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to watch.

“The worst side effect of addiction is the inability to see what you’re doing to yourself and to others,” she said. “I made Stephen acknowledge that. Then he decided to save himself.”

Steve sat there stunned as he stared at the evidence. Scattered and hidden around the house, it didn’t seem like much. But now, as he stared at the detritus of twenty years’ abuse, it took up more space than he thought. A lot more. It was time to face the truth. He knew if he didn’t do something about his addiction, he’d be dead within five years, ten tops.

When Tabby told him he was basically hungover seven days a week until the middle of the afternoon for years on end, and that he started drinking for the day as soon as the clock chimed five o’clock and didn’t typically stop until seven hours later, he didn’t believe her. Toward the end, he was drinking and taking drugs around the clock. Over the winter and spring of 1986, he revised and edited IT while he was in a nonstop blackout.

So he started to think about cutting back. But that’s all he was doing, thinking about it. He did dabble a bit with moderation: maybe only one six-pack a night, or two instead of three, and cutting the coke down by half, snorting up only five lines instead of ten.

“I was looking for a détente, a way I could live with booze and drugs without giving them up altogether,” he said. “Needless to say I was not successful in this.”

He’d pull off moderation for a few days, then he’d be right back where he’d started. The alternative—no drugs, no booze, stone-cold sober twenty-four hours a day—scared him more. He’d been drinking almost as long as he’d been writing. He didn’t always write when he was drunk or stoned, but his primal belief was that alcohol made it possible for him to write, and without it he’d have to sweat out each word. If his brain was forced to stand on its own, without a crutch, he was deathly afraid that his writing ability would shrivel up and blow away.

It took a full two years of hits and misses, false starts, broken promises, and the quiet realization that he couldn’t simply do it himself before he got 100 percent sober—and stayed that way. He finally realized he had to go cold turkey in 1989.

It took two weeks of absolute torture. Once he’d checked each item off his list on his journey through withdrawal—the dry heaves, nausea, constant tremors, and insomnia—Steve knew he’d made it. He’d never pick up another beer or snort another line of coke again if it meant he had to repeat the previous two stinking, miserable weeks. He felt strange and unsettled as his body and brain adjusted to his new reality.

“My coke addiction was a blessing in disguise,” he said. “Without coke, I’d have gone on drinking until the age of fifty-five and I would have died of a stroke. Once you add the coke, you eventually tip over, that stuff eats you from the inside out.”

His body and mind were not accustomed to sobriety.

The calm was so loud it buzzed. For someone who wasn’t used to the sensation—after all, Steve had started drinking when he was barely a teenager—it was unnerving. Steve turned to the one thing that had saved him time and time again through the years, had distracted him from illness and poverty, and had ultimately made him wealthy and famous behind his wildest imagination:

He sat down to write.

In a plot twist at once so horrifying and ironic it could have come straight out of one of his own books, his greatest fear of all came true.

He couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come, his sentences were complete gibberish, and each letter might as well have been a hieroglyph. For years, he had imagined that if he stopped drinking and drugging, his ability to write would simply shrivel up and blow away. And it finally had. Now what?

Steve seriously considered the pros and cons of a relapse, returning to his old ways. He knew he could live without the booze and the coke. What he couldn’t live without was his writing. He was prepared to sign a deal with the devil in blood, and he knew it would be worth every drop. So what if he died early? Look at the body of work he already had to leave behind.

He considered it very seriously.

During these early, fragile days, Tabby could read her husband’s mind, and she wasn’t buying any of it. She sat with him, cried with him, and kept him on a short leash until she felt the danger was past. She knew how easy it would be for him to slide back into his old ways.

They both knew if he did, she’d be out of there. That knowledge was enough to carry him through the rough spots. She helped him write one word at a time. He wrote a lot of crap trying to recapture the rhythm of writing without the input from either a high or a low. Little by little, his ability to tell a story came back.

In 1988 he started going to AA and NA meetings and found great irony—and truth—in the organization’s slogan. “Nobody lives one day at a time like a drug addict,” he said. “You don’t think yesterday or tomorrow, you just think now.”

About a year after Tabby’s ultimatum, Steve was driving on I-95 outside Bangor. At the time, he was still playing around with the idea of moderation, whipsawing between swearing off booze and coke forever, then partaking from his hoarded stash in secret, always with an eye on the closed door to make sure Tabby didn’t suddenly come barreling through it.

The section of the highway between Augusta and Bangor is a pretty tedious stretch of road, not much more than asphalt and pine trees as far as the eye can see. It was perhaps the perfect place for King to experience the epiphany that he would later credit with saving his life.

He was by himself. The day was cloudy. As was his norm most afternoons, he was thinking about getting high later in the day once he returned home. Then, out of the blue, came a voice that told him to reconsider.

You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to was the exact phrase he heard. “It’s like it wasn’t my voice,” he said later.

And that, as he’s said in his books, was that.

When he decided to give up drugs and alcohol, he thought it would be a good idea to see a therapist, primarily because he felt that he needed to learn how to deal with the substantial void that getting sober would leave in his life. Though it did help him, he decided to tread carefully, however, because he was afraid it would affect his writing. “I’d be afraid that it would put a hole in the bottom of my bucket, and then everything might go out the wrong way,” he said. “I don’t know if it would exactly destroy me as a writer, but I think it would take away a lot of the good stuff.”

Once he got sober, he looked at other parts of his life that needed some cleaning out. One of the victims was Kirby McCauley, King’s longtime literary agent. Steve ended his long relationship with McCauley and hired Arthur B. Greene, a personal manager who would handle agenting responsibilities along with financial matters. Greene’s first task was to negotiate a new contract with NAL, with Steve responsible for writing only one book a year for the next four years. Though he was writing again, King was still newly sober and didn’t know what to expect every day when he woke up in the morning.

Nineteen eighty-eight was a quiet year when it came to Steve’s publishing career. The first trade paperback edition of The Gunslinger was published in September. Then in November, Nightmares in the Sky, a book of gargoyle photographs by F-stop Fitzgerald, an independent photojournalist, was published, and Steve had written the commentary for the book.

His reduced output was a wise move as the hard truths about his addictions started to emerge in small doses. He finally realized what he had turned into, as well as the stress he’d put his friends and family through.

He had been addicted to cocaine for about eight years. “I was high for most of the eighties. It’s not a terribly long time to be an addict, but it lasted longer than World War Two,” he said. “And that’s how it felt a lot of the time. I didn’t hide my drinking, but I hid my drugs because right away I knew it was a problem.

“The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. I didn’t beat up on them or anything. Basically I don’t think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work.”

“He covered well,” Joe later said about his father’s drug and drinking problems.

As another way to do some housecleaning in his new life, King decided to make a change with WZON, the radio station he’d owned for five years. In October, he switched WZON to a noncommercial format, similar to how public radio stations operate. Instead of generating revenue from commercials and live remote broadcasts, the station would make money from listener contributions and corporate grants, and Steve would make up the difference if necessary.

The following year, Stephanie Leonard decided to shut down Castle Rock, the newspaper. The quality of the publication had seriously deteriorated over the past year, mostly because Steve had stopped contributing, and all that remained were short stories by his fans and fawning reviews of his latest books. Newly sober and fragile, he needed to spend his energy and time more carefully. But more than that, he decided not to do anything he didn’t want to do. His family came first, then his work.

Nineteen eighty-nine brought the publication of several limited editions that had been in the works for a while, including My Pretty Pony and Dolan’s Cadillac. King’s only full-length novel published that year was The Dark Half, which came out in November.

My Pretty Pony was published in a limited metal-bound edition of 250 copies by the Whitney Museum, which published one limited-edition book each year as a fund-raiser. When the museum contacted him, King sent along “My Pretty Pony,” an unpublished, hundred-page short story about an elderly man who teaches his grandson about the quick passage of time. The book’s cover was made from stainless steel and had a digital clock embedded on the front. Even at $2,200, the book sold out immediately. King then assigned the mass-market rights to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a printing of fifteen thousand copies with a cover price of $50.

The Dark Half was the last novel King would write before becoming totally sober, and perhaps not coincidentally, the plot revolved around the two personalities of one man. “I started to play with the idea of multiple personalities, and then I read that sometimes twins are imperfectly absorbed in the womb,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. What if this guy is the ghost of a twin that never existed?’ I wrapped the whole book around that spine.”

With every additional day Steve spent without alcohol or cocaine, more scales fell from his eyes. Despite agreeing to license the rights to “My Pretty Pony,” Steve was starting to sour on the idea of limited editions. “You just have a book I once had in my hand, and I signed my name to it. So what?” he said. “Just because I touched it with my pen? I don’t completely understand it, other than it’s not normal.”

Though Steve had always participated in benefits and fund-raisers for a variety of causes, he decided to expand his efforts and commitments to others, not only through his foundation but by tying his creative output to local community and economic-development projects. He agreed to sell the movie rights to Pet Sematary only to a production company that agreed to film the story in Maine. The movie, released in April 1989, was a commercial success and brought more film crews to the state in coming years.

In the meantime, King’s relative calm, and sobriety, continued. He signed up as assistant coach on his son Owen’s Little League team and helped the team win the state championship in the summer of 1989. His family had grown closer since Steve had kicked drugs and alcohol, and no one was happier than Tabby and the kids.

In 1990, Steve found himself reunited once again with his original publisher, Doubleday, for the publication of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. He was finally going to have one of his best-loved works published in the version he had originally intended. First, he restored the hundred thousand words that had been cut from the original edition. Then he updated it by adding a new beginning and end, along with a dozen illustrations by Bernie Wrightson, a well-known fantasy artist. Steve had admired his work for years and thought Wrightson’s art would enhance the expanded book.

Doubleday, of course, was still Steve’s last choice for a publisher, but because they had published the original novel, they still owned the rights. In the intervening years, however, Doubleday had been purchased by Bertelsmann and merged with Bantam and Dell into BDD, so Steve was dealing with an entirely new set of faces. Many people in the company were doubtful that they could be successful with what was essentially a previously published book with some new material. They did not consider the mythology and anticipation that had built up over the years about this uncut book. In its first week of sale in May 1990, at a then hefty cover price of $24.95 and at 1,153 pages, The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition rocketed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for many weeks.

By the time of its publication, Steve had celebrated a full year without drugs or alcohol. Some things were becoming clearer to him. For one, he felt his writing was more effective now that he was sober:

“I actually feel more creative. I went through a period where I felt a bit flat, like a cup of seltzer water where all the bubbles have departed. But now I feel like myself again, only with wrinkles.”

IT was first broadcast as a four-hour miniseries on ABC-TV on November 18, 1990, and King was thrilled that what he considered his magnum opus was dramatized the same year that the full-length version of The Stand was published. But much as he struggled with reducing the length of his books, he frequently felt constrained by not only network censorship but also by the length of time available for a broadcast. Perhaps that’s why, in recent years, he had pulled back from writing the teleplays for miniseries based on his books. “If I’d written the script for IT, it would have been a thirty-two-hour miniseries,” he joked.

Four Past Midnight, published in September 1990, was a collection of four novellas: “The Langoliers,” “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” “The Library Policeman,” and “The Sun Dog.”

As usual, the idea for one of them came out of the blue, when Steve was doing his usual mundane tasks. One morning Steve was having breakfast with Owen, when the twelve-year-old asked to borrow his father’s library card to take out a few books for a school project. When King asked why he couldn’t use his own card, Owen said he was afraid.

Of course, that got Steve’s attention. “What are you afraid of?” he asked. When he was six years old, one of Owen’s aunts had told him that he always had to return his library books on time or else the library police would show up at the house and punish him. When Steve heard his son’s story, it brought him back to his own childhood.

“When I was young, I’d always check the due date on library books, because I worried about what would happen if I brought the books back a year late,” he said, adding that on several occasions he’d lost a book and gone into a total panic.

Many scholars and fans who are intimately familiar with every word that Stephen King has ever written would point at April 16, 1990, as the turning point in his metamorphosis from horror writer to one who could actually tell a pretty good story without once drawing on horror, blood and guts, or the supernatural.

That was the issue date when “Head Down,” a story about his son’s Little League team and Steve’s experience as an assistant coach, appeared with his byline in the New Yorker, the elite literary weekly magazine. One can only imagine the outrage when his byline appeared.

“I think a lot of people in the literary community look at horror as a gutter genre,” said Chuck Verrill, King’s longtime editor. “You don’t think of Philip Roth and Stephen King in the same sentence, but I think the door has been finally opened for him.”

King donated the payment from the New Yorker to the Bangor Little League. “It was the hardest work I’d done in ten years,” he said. “My method of working when I am out of my depth is brutally simple: I lower my own head and run as fast as I can, as long as I can. That is what I did here, gathering documentation like a mad pack rat and simply trying to keep up with the team. Hard or not, ‘Head Down’ was the opportunity of a lifetime, and before I was done, Chip McGrath of the New Yorker had coaxed the best nonfiction writing of my life out of me.”

Jonathan Jenkins grew up in Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School in 1990. The first couple of summers after graduation, he worked for the Growing Concern, an Orono-based landscaping company contracted to mow the lawn and maintain the gardens at Stephen King’s Bangor house. Jenkins compared the job to painting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Despite that he rode a self-propelled commercial mower that cuts a swath about five feet wide, the Kings’ lawn was “so big that as soon as we finished, we went back and started again,” said Jenkins.

Though Jenkins had grown up in Bangor and knew what the Kings’ house looked like, he wasn’t initially familiar with the elaborate gardens that Tabby had designed and planted because they were mostly in the back of the house. When Jenkins heard he’d be working at the house, at first he expected to be maintaining grounds that looked as if they were straight out of The Shining. “I kept picturing the kid running through the maze at the end of the movie,” he said.

But the grounds were more humble, with no topiary and no six-foot-high hedges. Instead, a good chunk of the area behind the house consisted of elaborate flower beds. Tabby was beginning to lose her sense of smell, so perhaps she kept adding more annuals and perennials to compensate.

Jenkins’s most vivid memory of mowing Stephen King’s lawn was the tourists, an endless stream of people. Some would camp out in front of the house, tightly gripping the bars of the wrought-iron fence, straining for a glimpse of Steve in one of the mansion windows. Others would drive by the house slowly, leaning out a car window with a video camera trained on the towers. “They’d head down the street, turn around, and drive by the house again,” said Jenkins. “It was a constant procession all day long. Every so often a guy would stick his head out the window and yell, ‘Hey, Lawnmower Man!’ ” Other times, people would come up to the gate with Polaroid pictures of the house and ask Jenkins if he could get Steve to sign them.

Steve occasionally wandered out into the yard with the dogs when the landscapers were working and would exchange a few words with Jenkins and the other workers, but Tabby was clearly in charge of the gardening effort. She set most of the flower beds in back of the house so she wouldn’t be on display to the gawkers. “I don’t ever recall her going out front,” said Jenkins. “Usually if she had an issue or wanted to talk to us, it would be out back or on the side of the house.”

One day Jenkins was out front mowing while a car full of teenagers was parked in the street. They kept asking him if Mr. King was home, then all of a sudden Steve pulled up in front of the automatic gate in his Suburban. Jonathan threw a glance toward him as a warning, but they followed his gaze and saw Steve just as he was driving through the gate. “They ran towards the Suburban and had just about reached it when he floored it and closed the gate behind him as fast as he could,” said Jenkins.

In addition to remembering the persistent tourists camped out in front of the house, Jenkins was impressed by Steve and Tabby’s generosity. One of his high school friends from Bangor was an aspiring actor who desperately wanted to go to college and earn a degree in theater, but his parents wanted him to go to medical school. “He got into a huge fight with his parents, and when word got out, Tabby told his parents she and Steve would pick up the tab for him to go to college,” said Jenkins.

It was too early in the season for Jenkins to be mowing the lawn when a man named Erik Keene broke into the Kings’ house on April 20, 1991, at six in the morning. Tabby was the only one home at the time, and after hearing the sound of glass breaking, she encountered Keene in the kitchen. He waved a box wrapped in brown paper at her and told her he had a bomb and was going to blow up the house because he claimed that King stole the plot for Misery from Keene’s aunt. Tabby ran out of the house in her nightgown and headed for a neighbor’s house to call the police.

With a bomb-sniffing dog in tow, the police searched the house and found Keene holed away in the attic. When they opened the box he had threatened Tabby with, they found about two dozen pencils with paper clips wound around them. Keene was arrested and prosecuted and served just over eighteen months in jail before he was extradited to Texas for a parole violation.

After the break-in, the Kings increased security at the house by extending the wrought-iron fence all the way around the yard, adding gates with access codes, and installing closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Spooked by the incident, the family lay low for most of the year.

In August 1991, The Wastelands, the third book of the Dark Tower series, was published. Eager fans got their hopes up that Steve would get back up to speed and bring the projected next four books of the series out in quick succession. Unfortunately, after The Wastelands appeared, readers who wanted to find out about the exploits of Roland Deschain would have to wait more than six long years until the next installment.

Steve’s next novel, Needful Things, the first book he wrote while completely sober, was published in October 1991. “I was in a sensitive place, because it was the first thing that I’d written since I was sixteen without drinking or drugging,” he said.

He intended the book to be a comedy about the Reagan years, but neither readers nor the critics seemed to get the joke. “I thought I’d written a satire of Reaganomics in America in the eighties,” he said. “The idea being that this man came to a small town, opened it like a junk shop and you could buy anything that you wanted, but you ended up paying with your soul.”

With its huge cast of characters, King viewed Needful Things in the same vein as Salem’s Lot and The Stand, but in retrospect, his opinion of the book has changed: “Over the years I’ve come to think that maybe it just wasn’t a very good book.”

Needful Things was billed as the last novel King would set in Castle Rock. He knew he would still write stories about Maine, but in the wake of his drawing attention to the Pine Tree State, a new group of writers had recently written novels about Maine. Except for a few—such as The Beans of Egypt, Maine, written by fellow native Mainer Carolyn Chute—Steve didn’t hesitate to lash out at those writers who wrote about his beloved Maine and got it all wrong. He was provincial and protective about his native state, and he believed that the Johnny-come-latelies shouldn’t even be writing about Maine.

“You can write about Maine if you are from away, as long as you write a story about somebody who’s from away who comes to Maine,” said Steve. “But if you want to write a story about Maine and Maine people, I think you have to grow up here.”

As 1991 ended, Tabby finally felt she could breathe easier. Steve was faithfully attending AA and NA meetings, the house was as secure as they could make it, even though King had made it clear he didn’t “want to live like Michael Jackson or Elvis at Graceland,” and he would continue to attend his beloved Red Sox games and appear at book signings.