Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

10 IT GROWS ON YOU

Gerald’s Game came out in May of 1992, and to call the novel a departure for Steve was the understatement of the year. Faithful readers who had no qualms about devouring King’s usual stories of murder, mayhem, supernatural creatures, and occasionally blood and gore threw down the book with horror when they learned it was about a couple who played sexual-bondage games in bed.

The idea for Gerald’s Game began when Steve thought he’d like to revisit the primary theme of Cujo, where one or two characters are essentially trapped within a small space. What would happen if a woman was trapped in a room by herself and couldn’t get out? And why was she there?

“She’s handcuffed to a bed,” participating in a bondage game, was the first thought that popped into his brain. “I started to consider what causes people to do this sort of thing, so I read a little bit about it and the whole thing struck me as a bit Victorian. There was something very Snidely Whiplash about the whole thing.”

Reading about sex games wasn’t the only research King had to do, unusual in itself for a man who professed to hate doing research. “I remember thinking that Jessie would have been a gymnast at school and she could simply put her feet back over her head, over the headboard, and stand up.” But he had his doubts. So after writing about forty pages of the book, he wanted to test the theory and he asked his son Joe to play guinea pig.

“I took him into our bedroom and tied him with scarves to the bedposts. At one point, Tabby came in and asked what I was doing, and I told her I was doing an experiment,” Steve said. After trying a few different positions, Joe couldn’t do it. Though he considered making Jessie double-jointed, King thought that was the easy way out, so it was back to the drawing board.

All the loyal fans who refused to buy the book because of the perceived subject matter would be surprised to hear King’s take on it: “Gerald’s Game is a book about child abuse. It’s an ordinary, grim story about a little girl who is abused by her father and grows up to be a certain kind of woman. She is chained to the bed because she has been chained in a certain kind of life.” Reviews were mixed: Entertainment Weekly called the main character Jessie Burlingame’s struggle 150 of the most excruciating, exhilarating pages in recent thriller fiction, yet a few sentences later lambasted King for his “stick-on feminism.” As predicted, many readers were offended by the sexual overtones of the book, pretty much a first in King’s oeuvre.

Like the publication of “Head Down” in the New Yorker two years earlier, Gerald’s Game was another departure for Steve. But the story made sense to him as a metaphor for his own struggles of the last few years. Not only was the novel set inside one room, but also within one woman’s brain. While a day didn’t go by when he didn’t want to drink a case of beer or snort up countless lines of coke, Jessie taught him the grace in the “one day at a time” motto of AA. He used the experience of his own sometimes overly long days to drag out Jessie’s minutes and make her story as horrific as possible to the reader.

In addition to his broadening horizons in his writing career, another surprising thing happened: once he had more than a tenuous hold on his sobriety, his marriage changed for the better. Steve and Tabby almost felt they were on a second honeymoon.

“People think that the kid stuff of love—you know, the romance, moon-June-spoon, and all the rest of it—ends with marriage, or shortly after,” he said. “When romance comes again, it comes as a complete surprise. And it’s much more uplifting ’cause you feel so grateful to have it return.”

Tabby agreed: “Sometimes creative people get creative about their marriage and find ways to revitalize it. Change happens, and you have to let it. Ultimately, it’s about contentment, partnership, and friendship. The other thing about marriage, if you get out early, you’ll miss the surprises, and some of them are wonderful.”

They also continued their charitable giving, primarily to Maine organizations. In 1992, they donated $750,000 for a new pediatric unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Steve was still intimately involved with baseball, following the Red Sox and coaching Owen’s Little League team. When Owen turned thirteen and moved on to Senior League, the difference in the quality of the fields was night and day: the field was pockmarked and uneven, and the equipment looked as if it came from a yard sale.

“I thought it was shame that kids have to adjust to substandard fields with shoddy equipment,” King said. “It’s not on a par with world peace or ending hunger here in Bangor, but I was taught that charity begins at home.”

So with a $1.5 million contribution from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, he decided to build a regulation AA baseball field for teenagers in and around Bangor. The Shawn T. Mansfield Stadium is named in memory of fellow coach Dave Mansfield’s son, who died of cerebral palsy.

The stadium, which Mansfield has dubbed “Stephen King’s Field of Screams,” can seat fifteen hundred, is fully lit for night games, and has a state-of-the-art public address system. The infield is made of Georgia clay, and sod was painstakingly placed by hand in the outfield and around the pitcher’s mound. A full-size electronic scoreboard complete with a six-foot-high, six-hundred-pound, lit analog clock sits beyond the right-field fence.

In addition to his philanthropic efforts, Steve continued to be generous to small presses and publishers. Occasionally, he’d send a story over the transom to an editor who had no clue it was coming. In the spring of 1992, King sent the story “Chattery Teeth” to Richard Chizmar, founder of the magazine Cemetery Dance. Founded in 1988, Cemetery Dance is a horror magazine that pays homage to the old Twilight Zone TV show and publishes short stories, book reviews, and author interviews. King was a regular reader of the magazine, and when the story was published in the fall issue, his byline helped raise the profile of the magazine.

Not two years after Tabby’s encounter with Erik Keene, another fan began haranguing King. In the summer of 1992, Stephen Lightfoot showed up in Bangor, camping out in a van covered with messages that blamed King for John Lennon’s murder.

The police generally left him alone, but told him he’d be arrested if he strayed anywhere near Steve or his family. Not long after receiving the warning, Lightfoot showed up at a political rally in Portland for Representative Tom Andrews, and Steve and Tabby were in the audience.

A few of the volunteers on Andrews’s campaign saw Lightfoot’s van and watched as he approached some of the people in the audience. The volunteers called police, who said their hands were tied because Lightfoot hadn’t broken any laws. However, Steve was not the first famous person to appear in Light-foot’s crosshairs; he was also warned to stay away from the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, earlier that summer.

Sandy Phippen has firsthand experience with the sheer determination of King’s fans. When Phippen lived in Orono, one Sunday morning he went to pick up a newspaper at a local store and ran into a couple who’d driven all the way from Oklahoma just to take a photo of Steve’s house. “This happens all the time to anyone who lives near Bangor,” Phippen said. Usually he just gives directions, but this time he actually drove them to Steve’s house.

Based on his expertise as a book reviewer for Down East magazine, Phippen started to lead literary tours of Bangor for tourists. “Of course, all anyone wanted to see was Stephen King’s house,” he sighed. Once he had a busload of tourists from Youngstown, Ohio, who were librarians. “There have been lots of other writers from the Bangor area through the years, and poor ones too,” he said. “But everyone just wanted to go to Stephen King’s house, and to see the Paul Bunyan statue. Finally, because it was getting dark and they wouldn’t be able to take pictures outside Steve’s house, I gave in.”

Shortly after Gerald’s Game was published, Steve appeared at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) in Anaheim, California, the largest publishing trade show in the United States. This year, however, in addition to talking with booksellers and reporters, he’d be doing something a bit different: he’d be playing his old electric guitar in a band made up solely of other bestselling authors at a charity gig.

He took the stage as rhythm guitarist in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, where his bandmates included Amy Tan, Dave Barry, and Barbara Kingsolver, among others. They planned two performances during the convention—one on the convention floor, another in a local club. Their motto didn’t mince any words: “They play music as well as Metallica writes novels.”

The band was the brainchild of Kathi Kamen Goldmark, a San Francisco–based media escort who ferried authors from one interview to another when they came to town to plug their books. The conversations during the long days would often wander, and Goldmark would mention that she also sang in several small country bands.

She said the reaction from authors was universal: they all wished they could play in a band; perhaps they’d played in high school but had let their musical aspirations lapse over the years.

“I just kept hearing the same story, and we were all around the age of forty and thinking about the things we didn’t get to do,” she said, before the epiphany hit. Why not? Somehow she talked about a dozen authors into starting a band. In addition to Tan, Barry, and Kingsolver, other members included Ridley Pearson and Robert Fulghum. A friend who knew that King played guitar told Goldmark and suggested she invite him to be in the band. He accepted immediately.

She asked the members to fax lists of songs they’d like to play, keeping in mind that none of the authors knew anyone else, and what they all had in common was that they were amateurs. “Easy three-chord rock and roll was the only thing I had in mind,” she said.

Once word got out that Steve was playing in the band, everything changed. Tickets to the two scheduled concerts began to sell briskly, and booksellers called to see if Goldmark could arrange a private dinner with King, among other requests.

The first order of business was to find out just how bad they were. Gold-mark and musical director Al Kooper, a songwriter and producer who helped to form the band Blood, Sweat, and Tears and also played the organ on Bob Dylan’s classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” booked a few days in a practice studio near the convention hall.

“I walked into a band rehearsal room in Anaheim, California, in 1992 and there were a bunch of people playing instruments loudly and badly,” said Dave Barry, prize-winning humorist and columnist at the Miami Herald. “In the middle, thrashing away on his guitar, was Stephen King. I picked up my guitar and started thrashing away, adding to the bad music set.”

During the phase when Goldmark had the musicians faxing song lists back and forth, Barry thought that maybe he was getting in over his head: “Some of these people sounded like they actually knew what they were doing, with chord charts and the like flying through the air.” Though he’d played in a band during college, he knew he wasn’t that good. Once the rehearsal began, however, Barry relaxed: “I was relieved when I got there and saw how bad we all were.”

Ridley Pearson, whose books included Blood of the Albatross and Undercurrents, also showed up that first day feeling a bit intimidated, not as much for his musical skills, but because Steve was in the band. “I was a big fan of his,” he said. “I read his books early on.”

When they finally met, Pearson was disarmed by King’s demeanor. “He turned out to be this teenagery, goofy tall guy who is not entirely comfortable with himself, but incredibly smart and very funny,” said Pearson. “Somehow I expected this guy dressed all in black. But he’s this blue jeans and T-shirt dude who has never grown past the age of fifteen, which is true of all the Remainders, which is why we all get along.”

Once they got past the first couple of awkward rehearsals and started to hang out, Goldmark noticed the breadth of Steve’s knowledge of popular culture. “He knows about everything,” she said. “You can’t mention a song or artist or a book that he’s not familiar with. Name a song and he’ll quote the lyrics. It doesn’t matter if it was a recent hit or something from thirty years ago, he’ll know it.”

Tabby also came on board for the rehearsals and performances. To Gold-mark’s relief, she fit right in. “She’s very unpretentious and no-nonsense and very funny,” said Goldmark, who booked a tour bus to take the band the ten blocks from the hotel to the gig and back. “She went out and bought a bunch of extralarge boxer shorts and got a bunch of people to throw them at the stage during the performance. As fun as the gig was, I think the bus was more fun.”

During the performances, Goldmark thought that Steve looked like a little kid at Christmas, and he acted like one too. Though King focused mostly on playing along on rhythm guitar, he did sing a few songs, including “Last Kiss” and “Teen Angel.”

“Steve would get going and kind of spontaneously mutate the lyrics,” said Dave Barry. “One night, on ‘Last Kiss,’ he sang, ‘When I awoke, she was lying there and I brushed her liver from my hair.’ ” The other band members cracked up and had to stop playing for several minutes.

No one—Kathi Goldmark or the authors in the band—expected the reaction to the Remainders to be so big, or to continue beyond the two shows. But it turned into a huge story not only with the national media, with the morning television stations frantically jockeying to get first dibs on the story, but also with the publishing industry all abuzz. After the final encore for the second performance, the band filed offstage, their heads still ringing with the thrill of playing for hundreds of screaming fans.

As Ridley walked behind Steve, suddenly Steve looked at him over his shoulder and said, “Ridley, we’re not done here.”

Within days, plans were being solidified for future performances as well as a road tour in 1993, which needed to be financed, so Steve proposed the idea of a book to his publisher, Viking, which they instantly agreed to. The working title was Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude. Everyone in the band would contribute, Tabby would take photos, and Dave Marsh, a music critic who had written biographies of Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, and the Who, would edit the book.

The Rock Bottom Remainders would play again.

After Gerald’s Game caught many Stephen King fans off guard, he continued to surprise them when Dolores Claiborne was published, the story of a woman who has led a long, hardscrabble life. When the story opens, she has been accused of murder, and not for the first time. Steve said he patterned Dolores’s life after his own mother’s, and that many of the stories in the book were those he had heard from Ruth when he was growing up.

To longtime fans who asked what happened to the horror, he assured them it would return, and soon. “Don’t say that I’m stretching my range or that I’ve left horror behind,” he said. “I’m just trying to find things I haven’t done to stay alive creatively.”

For a while, he actually considered combining Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game into one novel, since both involved the abuse of a woman. But after working on a few different angles, he decided to keep them separate. Since he was already working on Gerald’s Game when the idea for Dolores Claiborne came along, he opted to finish Gerald’s Game first.

In addition to branching out with the kinds of stories he told, he was also changing in at least one other way with his writing.

“The worst advice I’ve ever received is ‘Don’t listen to the critics.’ I think that you should, because sometimes they’re telling you something is broken that you can fix,” he said. “If you stick your head in the sand, you won’t have to hear any bad news and you won’t have to change what you’re doing. But if you listen, sometimes you can get rid of a bad habit. Hey, none of us like critics, but if they’re all saying something’s a piece of shit, they’re right.”

For most of his novels, and quite a few of his short stories, movie studios and production companies snapped up the film rights even before the books saw print. Dolores Claiborne was no exception, but he was starting to lose patience with film projects that were not true to the original story.

The simple reason why films such as Children of the Corn II got made in the first place was because of a contract loophole where, in addition to buying the rights to the story, the producers also obtained the rights to the title. So while the first movie out of the gate was typically faithful to King’s stories and novels, subsequent movies weren’t. But Steve had no way of stopping them.

“They suck!” he said. “Carrie 2? What’s the point? There are thousands of good scripts and screenwriters out there, but their work is going begging because these people are so intellectually bankrupt that they have to do Carrie 2 or Children of the Corn VI.”

Sometimes They Come Back spawned Sometimes They Come Back . . . Again, followed by Sometimes They Come Back . . . for More. Steve predicted that the fourth and fifth in the series could be called Sometimes They Come Back . . . for Dinner and Sometimes They Come Back . . . for Low, Low Prices.

“They’re like walking around with a piece of toilet paper on your shoe,” he said. “People tell me they thought it was really a kind of a piece of junk. And I didn’t even know it got made.”

In most cases there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He did prevail in one instance, when New Line Cinema released Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man, which starred Pierce Brosnan. The producers also had a script titled Cyber God, and they killed two birds with one stone by incorporating a few elements from King’s story into Cyber God, but ran it under the title Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man.

Steve was so incensed at how they’d abused his name and his story that he sued New Line to have his name and the title of the story removed from the film and promotional materials. Two separate courts found in his favor, but New Line refused to change the film’s title, and the first editions of the video still had Stephen King’s name in the title. Only after the company was ordered to pay him $10,000 a day and full profits did they remove his name from the movie.

While Lawnmower Man was an extreme example, he was sanguine about why so many of the movies based on his books or short stories turned out to be bombs: he referred to it as the Hotel Towel Problem. “You steal all the towels in the hotel room and try to get them into a single suitcase,” he said. “You sit on it and move the towels around, and it still won’t shut because there’s too much material.” A parallel issue involved film producers. “They’re like the sharks you see in horror movies. They’re nothing but eating machines that buy and option books, and then the projects just sit on their desks while they wonder what the fuck to do with them.”

While some might suggest that he could perhaps help reduce the number of bad movies produced by not selling any more film rights, he refused: “I can’t get frozen on either side by saying that I can’t take on one more project, or what if I say these people can’t do this and they would have made a fantastic film?” For example, several people told him he was making a huge mistake to give Frank Darabont the option for his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, let alone sell it for only a thousand bucks. Darabont had previously written several episodes for the TV series Tales from the Crypt and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and his directorial debut was The Woman in the Room, a Dollar Baby short film that he’d made from one of King’s short stories. “I think that you have to take some risks, and you can’t do everything yourself because there’s just not enough life or enough time.”

One reason Steve decided he could throw the dice was because he had worked out a sweet deal with the production company Castle Rock Entertainment, a company that actor Rob Reiner and several Hollywood executives had founded in 1987 that dates back to Stand by Me. “They can have my work for a buck, and what I want in exchange is script approval, director approval, cast approval, and I want to have the authority to push the stop button at any point regardless of how much money has been invested,” Steve said.

“What I get on the back end is five percent from dollar one, every dollar spent at the box office, I get five cents. Needful Things grossed twenty million domestically and I made half a million. With The Green Mile, I made twenty-five million.”

Steve had also learned to put his foot down when it came to another visual medium as well: photographs of him. “If I see the red gels and the underlighting come out when someone is photographing me, I walk out,” he said. “All that shit to make me look spooky. I ask them when they’re photographing a black writer if they bring a watermelon and a barrel for him to sit on.”

He wasn’t soured on all moviemakers; there was still one director he wanted to work with, though it looked as if the planets would have to align first.

“Steven Spielberg and I have tried to work together three times, first on The Talisman, then on Poltergeist, and then on an original idea,” King said, but things never worked out. “It’s a case of two strong creative personalities, and Spielberg is fiercely creative, and unless you’re very, very quick, he’s always two steps ahead of you.” Steve admitted that in terms of his own creativity, he’s become accustomed to getting his own way. He cited a plaque that hangs in his garage that reads, If you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes. “That was basically the problem with us, who was going to be the lead dog.”

For Steve and Tabby, exactly twenty years after they’d first received word that their lives had changed with the sale of Carrie, life was running smoothly and the family was calm.

Tabby’s fifth novel, One on One, was published in the spring of 1993. The book was the fourth in her Nodd’s Ridge series and was billed as a modern-day Catcher in the Rye. As she saw her husband switch gears and begin to experiment with different genres, Tabby became inspired in her own work.

“The biggest influence he’s had on my writing is that he taught me not to set limits on myself, that I was the only one who could decide what the limits were,” she said. “He’s also taught me the legitimacy of ordinary things in fiction.”

She had returned to a regular schedule of writing, though it in no way resembled her husband’s output: “I live with somebody who writes a lot faster than me, so I tend to think I’m a very slow writer.” Steve carried on as usual: Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a collection of mostly previously published short stories, including “Head Down” and “Dolan’s Cadillac,” was published in October 1993. The story “The Fifth Quarter” also appears in the book, which is the only published story King wrote under the pseudonym John Swithen, when the piece originally appeared in the April 1972 issue of Cavalier.

In the spring of 1993, Steve and the other members of the Rock Bottom Remainders went on a ten-day tour of eight East Coast cities from Providence to Miami. Tabby came along as photographer for the book that they’d collaboratively write about the experience: Mid-Life Confidential. After a few days of rehearsal in Boston, the band set out on the road in Aretha Franklin’s old tour bus with a playlist that included Dave Barry singing “Gloria,” Amy Tan doing lead vocals on “Leader of the Pack” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and Steve singing “Teen Angel” and “Stand by Me.”

Though they had gotten a taste of it the previous year during the two-night Remainders stand in Anaheim, one of the first things the other author/musicians noticed was how much different Steve’s life was from their own.

“No matter where you are, no matter what time of day, we were stopped, mauled, and interfered with because Stephen King just happened to be traveling with us,” said Pearson. “The guy does not have a private moment in his existence, but he does a beautiful job of dealing with it.”

Barry concurred: “He’s amazingly polite considering that there are times when people can be very intrusive. I’ve heard him explain to people that he can’t give them an autograph because he wasn’t working that day, and if he signs one, he’ll end up signing four hundred. Some people get it and some people don’t. Sometimes you see them get mad like he owes them.”

Sometimes the fans employed the other Remainders to get King’s autograph. After performing at a Philadelphia club called Katmandu, everyone hustled onto the bus for the long ride to Atlanta for the next concert. Barry was the last one on the bus, getting there just in time to see a huge crowd of people hanging around the bus all clutching Stephen King books. Steve was already on the bus, and people immediately corralled Barry and begged him to bring Steve out to sign their books.

“So I gave a little speech, telling them that they just got to see him play for two hours, he’s exhausted, we’re all exhausted, and we had a long bus ride ahead, so thanks for coming, but just let him be now,” Barry said. “They were all watching me and nodding at everything I was saying, and as soon as I finished, they started up again, asking me to drag him out of the bus. They didn’t hear a single word I said. And nobody asked for my autograph, either. Al Kooper said if the bus crashed, the headlines would read, ‘Stephen King and 23 Others Dead.’ ”

Later that night, a few hours out of Philadelphia, the bus stopped at a rest area. “We all pile out to go take a pee at this truck stop at four in the morning, and when we came out maybe fifteen minutes later, there were four people standing out in front of our bus holding copies of The Stand,” said Pearson. “Which meant that the gas jockeys had called their friends, woke them up, they got dressed, grabbed their copies of The Stand, drove to the truck stop, and were standing there in ten minutes to get Stephen’s autograph at four in the morning.”

The behavior of some fans inside the clubs and concert venues was no less bizarre. At one performance, a man who thought he was going to hear an actual band lit a cigarette just before he stomped out in disgust. “Somebody next to him was just drunk enough to think, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and lit his lighter next, and pretty soon we had that old Bob Dylan moment going,” said Pearson. “A thousand people swung back and forth with their lighters for our ridiculous band.”

Five minutes later, Pearson glanced into the audience. “There in front of Steve is this perfectly attractive forty-five-year-old woman, her mouth open in total adoration, holding both hands up just like as if welcoming him to hug her,” said Pearson. “And all ten of her obviously plastic fingernails were on fire.

“I shouted over to Dave, ‘I never want to be that famous.’ ”

Goldmark would be the first to admit that the band would not have been the same without King, and not just because of the crazed pyromaniacs. “He made it bigger,” she said. “He made it different, and he gained the band a lot of notoriety and interested a lot of people.”

But despite his obvious visibility onstage, Steve saw the band as a kind of refuge. “His life is just really different from anybody else’s, but he makes a real effort to be a regular guy, to roll with it, to take the regular seat on the airplane instead of getting the upgrade,” said Goldmark. “I felt that was really important to him. He hung with the group and I was really impressed by that.”

The few times that Steve and Tabby had to leave the tour on other business, even for a few hours, they regretted it. Once they reached Miami for the ABA Convention, she and Steve stayed at a different hotel from where the band was based. “In retrospect, it was a mistake,” she said. “Once we were at the American Booksellers Convention, Steve wasn’t part of the band anymore, instead he was Stephen King Public Figure, bug in amber. From the silly bitch who threw herself into the limo to announce that she was in love with his mind to eating in a restaurant so full of publishers it might as well have been in New York, the tour felt like it never happened.”

As band photographer, Tabby found the tour to be a welcome respite from their public lives as well. “After the first day, we all forgot that she was taking pictures,” said Goldmark. “We already knew her from the first year, and it made much more sense to have her as the photographer than having some strange person with a camera come on board. The whole thing was just so much fun, like a weird, wonderful little summer camp.”

When the tour ended in Miami, everyone agreed that they would perform at least once a year at ABA.

Insomnia came out in April 1994. The story is about a widower who starts suffering from a severe lack of sleep. Soon, his sleep deprivation becomes so bad that he believes he’s hallucinating—at first, that is. The truth slowly sinks in, and soon the main character, Ralph Roberts, is in battle with a slew of supernatural demons intent on taking the town of Derry and its inhabitants by force. At 832 pages, compared with the comparatively anemic length of Gerald’s Game at 331 pages and Dolores Claiborne at 305, it appeared that King was back in his old stomping grounds.

Though Insomnia fell within the same category as Steve’s usual horror books, he was still reaching out into new areas. With the publication of Insomnia, some critics automatically categorized Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne as experimental works in King’s lifelong opus, and his latest book only proved that he was still entrenched in the horror niche and would remain there until his last book was published. King dismissed this theory out of hand: “I’m sure that I could make a very nice living just being Stephen King for the rest of my life. But if it came down to just doing that, I’d rather not write at all.”

King has suffered bouts of insomnia on and off through the years. His “What if?” moment for the book came during a particularly bad stretch of sleepless nights, and writing the book only exacerbated his condition: “While I was writing it, I hardly slept at all.”

But the book almost didn’t see the light of day. After he’d spent four months writing and had about 550 pages of the manuscript, he suddenly decided it wasn’t publishable.

Steve had long held the theory that in writing, all he’s doing is unearthing stories that already exist, extracting them from the earth as intact as possible. “I really think that the stories are found articles and the story basically tells itself,” he said. “When I’m working on something, I see a completed book. In some fashion, that thing is already there. I’m not really making it so much as I am digging it up, the way that you would an artifact, out of the sand. The trick is to get the whole thing out so it’s usable, without breaking it. You always break it somewhat—I mean, you never get a complete thing—but if you’re really careful and lucky, you can get most of it.”

He believes this so deeply that he bristles whenever someone suggests that he has created his stories and characters out of thin air. “Actually, when I feel that I’m creating, I feel that I’m doing bad work,” he said. “I don’t feel like a novelist or a creative writer as much as I feel like an archaeologist who is digging things up and being very careful and brushing them off and looking at the carvings on them.”

In that way, Insomnia felt as if he had created it. And he was not happy. “Taken piece by piece and chapter by chapter, it’s good,” he said. “But I didn’t get this one out of the ground. It broke. And I sometimes go back and think I can fix it, but then I remember that I can’t, because of something in the story.”

He put the manuscript away for a while, and one day about a year later he picked it up and finished it in a white-hot heat. When the book was published, he did a cross-country promotional book tour on his Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, stopping only in independent bookstores to do signings along the way. Insomnia spent fourteen weeks on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list and Booklist deemed it marvelous.

Despite his success of almost twenty years and publishing dozens of books, Steve still faced blocks of his own making: “For me, a lot of times the real barrier to get to work—to get to the typewriter or the word processor—comes before I get there.” He often has days when he is unsure whether he can write that day, this coming from a man who is obsessive about his writing and who has spoken of retiring countless times. “I have a lot of days like that. I think it’s kind of funny really, that people think that just because I’m Stephen King, it doesn’t happen to me.” Usually his hesitation comes when he knows he has to write a difficult scene, but like many other writers, once he sits down at the desk and puts his fingers on the keyboard, he falls right back into the story.

On May 8, 1994, The Stand debuted as a four-part miniseries on ABC.

“The Stand is the most important project, in terms of film, that I’ve ever done,” he said. “It was a huge effort and more work than any two or three novels I’ve ever done in my life.”

When Steve set out to write the screenplay for the book, he had originally intended it to be a movie for theatrical release. Try as he might, he couldn’t condense the story enough, and he and director George Romero thought about turning it into two separate films before farming it out to another writer, but then ABC approached Steve about turning it into a miniseries.

Once the script was finalized—the length of the miniseries was pegged at over six hours—Steve broke with his usual hands-off approach when selling movie rights to his books and was on the set of The Stand for most of the 125 days of shooting, serving as coexecutive producer. There was no way he’d miss it; after all, it was his baby.

“I was mostly making sure that they were doing what they were supposed to do,” he said, but he occasionally caught a mistake that few other people would have picked up on. When Ray Walston, Gary Sinise, and Corin Nemec were on Walston’s porch, Nemec, who played Harold, wanted to go to Stovington, but Sinise, in the role of Stu Redman, said there was no need, since the people there were all dead.

Nemec’s line in the script was “Let’s just say I’m Missouri.” After three takes, King interrupted the actors to ask Nemec to repeat the line. Nemec pointed to the script where it read, “I’m Missouri,” which turned out to be a printing error.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Let’s just say I’m from Missouri,’ meaning ‘Show me,’ ” King said. “This was not a case of an actor being stupid, this was the case of an actor with so much reverence for the script, apparently, he didn’t want to change a word.”

Little noticed on the set was Steve’s son Joe, who joined the crew as a production assistant during a semester off from college. And Steve decided to take a cameo role in the miniseries to play the part of Teddy Weizak, who gives Nadine a ride and also serves as a border guard.

“I actually have a part this time that isn’t a total country asshole,” he said. “Starting with Creepshow, I got sort of typecast. I’ve played a lot of hick morons in my career.”

The Shawshank Redemption followed in theaters that fall, and the movie received raves from critics, even those who had previously automatically panned a movie or book simply because King’s name was attached.

In fact, Shawshank stood out simply because many moviegoers had no clue that Steve wrote the story that the film was based on. It was no secret that many of his previous movies had turned out to be clunkers. But people who couldn’t be bribed to walk into a movie theater to watch a Stephen King movie—or to read one of his books—loved the film and dragged their friends along to see it.

Case in point: One day Steve was in a grocery store in Sarasota when a woman approached him to tell him she was happy to meet him, but that she didn’t read his books or watch his movies because she didn’t like horror. He asked her what she did like, and she rattled off a list of movies including Shawshank Redemption.

“I wrote that,” he said.

“No, you didn’t,” she said.

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Steve excused himself to pay for his groceries.

Somewhat less publicized in the mass media, but much discussed among New York literary insiders, was the appearance of a short story with a Stephen King byline in the New Yorker. “The Man in the Black Suit,” published in the October 31, 1994, issue, was King’s second appearance in the magazine. Was a new, more literary game afoot for King? Or were the definitions of high and low literature being blurred?

Steve had shown Chuck Verrill, his longtime editor, his stories from time to time for consideration for future short-story collections. Verrill thought that a couple of his nonsupernatural stories might be a good fit for the New Yorker. Verrill sent them along to Chip McGrath, then the fiction editor at the magazine, who said he’d rather have one of King’s typical stories. Verrill sent along “The Man in the Black Suit,” and the magazine published it in the Halloween issue. Steve’s reaction was mixed: “I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, and I’m grateful for the exposure, but it’s still a little bit like being a prostitute and being put at the head of a float on National Whore’s Day.”

Yet, the stories he wrote that strayed outside his well-worn horror path were much harder for him to write. “It’s like having to learn to think all over again,” he said. “At this point, writing on a nonsupernatural level is like learning to talk after you’ve had a stroke.”