Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

11 THE GOLDEN YEARS

Nineteen ninety-five was characterized by the fast and furious release of movies based on King’s novels and stories. Both The Mangler and Dolores Claiborne came out on the big screen in March, while The Langoliers appeared as a made-for-TV movie two months later. Rose Madder, Steve’s only novel to be published that year, followed in July. It’s the story of an abused woman who escapes her violent husband to look for a new life and, through a mysterious painting she got by pawning her engagement ring, discovers her power. Obviously, a critic at Entertainment Weekly did not go along with King’s new direction and panned the book, grading it C-minus, asking, “When did Stephen King stop being scary?”

The year unfolded with reprints of previously published novels, audio-books, and short fiction and nonfiction appearing in a variety of magazines and journals. Perhaps the biggest surprise was when Steve’s New Yorker story “The Man in the Black Suit” won first prize in the O. Henry Awards. It would be published in the accompanying anthology, Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards. Yes, it was that Stephen King. He hypothesized that the only reason he won was because the stories were submitted without the authors’ names. “There’s an immediate attitude that anyone who’s reaching a large, popular audience, what they’re doing is crap,” he said. “You’ve got these two places: high literature and popular fiction. In between is this great big river of misunderstanding. There are a lot of people who are dedicated to keeping the clubhouse white.”

While he was pleasantly surprised and gracious at his win, even he doubted the award. “It made me feel like an impostor, like someone made a mistake.”

In the meantime, Steve and Tabby’s kids were beginning to make inroads into their own writing lives. In the academic year 1994–95, Joe was a senior at Vassar College when Owen entered as a freshman. Joe spent most of his free time writing short stories and novels and had already started to submit work to literary magazines and fellowships. His first published story, “The Lady Rests,” would appear in an obscure publication called Palace Corbie 7 two years after he graduated under the byline of Joe Hill, and he would go on to win awards and accolades including a Bradbury Fellowship and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

For Joe, the influence from his early days growing up as the son of an internationally famous novelist ran deep. “When we were growing up, what we talked about around the dinner table was books and writers,” he said. “It seemed perfectly natural to me to spend your days going into an office and making stuff up. It was as normal as if I came from a family that had a pizza shack and mom and dad went in to throw the pizza dough every day.”

His brother, Owen, was also developing his writing chops. Though he dreamed of a career playing pro baseball, his real talents lay elsewhere, and he first set his sights on a writing career while in high school. “I never had much ability besides manual labor and writing, so I figured I’d give writing a shot first,” he said. “This is the family business, what I grew up around, so I don’t think they were all that surprised.”

While Owen readily admits that he comes from a privileged background, he said that his upbringing has kept him grounded: “I love Bangor, it will always be my home. Growing up there and going to public school is something I treasure. I was not sheltered from real people. I grew up with parents that are celebrities and very wealthy, and yet they were treated as part of the community.”

As for Naomi, after attending a few colleges, from the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she opened a restaurant in July 1994 at 94 Free Street in Portland, Maine. Her partner in the twenty-two-table bistro was Patty Wood, and they christened the restaurant Tabitha Jean’s, a combination of their mothers’ first names. Wood, an experienced chef, was in charge of the kitchen while Naomi ran the dining room. They described the menu as eclectic American cuisine, specializing in grilled entrées, seafood, and vegetarian dishes with an extensive wine list of 150 different vintages. Their primary market was the gay and lesbian community, though Naomi was quick to say the restaurant also attracted a significant number of straight patrons as well.

Naomi’s upbringing was evident in that she guaranteed that celebrities could dine in total anonymity at her establishment. In this, she shared her mother’s disdain for the unwanted attention their father attracted wherever he went. The official policy was that staff would plead total ignorance when queried by the media about the famous people who frequented the restaurant.

“The different celebrities I’ve known want to go to places where they can be anonymous, and where the waitstaff will shield them from autograph seekers,” she asserted, citing her own experience in instituting the guidelines, though Portland has never been known as a hotbed of celebrity activity. “I have no ability to be a private citizen just like everybody else,” she said, adding if she’d had her choice, she would have opted for a nonfamous father. “I think that if anybody went through it, they’d prefer to have their privacy.”

Like her daughter, Tabby felt the need to expand her horizons beyond Bangor. She was working on Survivor, her seventh novel, and for the first time in sixteen years that she had written about a place other than Nodd’s Ridge, a Maine college town by the name of Peltry. “I’ve thought that I needed to take a vacation from Nodd’s Ridge for a long time,” she said. “There are some unsettled matters that need to be dealt with there, but for the moment, Peltry is where I have to get some urgent work done.”

The idea for the novel came when she was visiting Owen and Joe at Vassar College. She was driving on campus, and out of the blue a student walked in front of her car. She stopped in time, but after the shock wore off, her mind hung on to the image, and before she knew it she was hard at work on a new book. Her views about marriage emerge loud and clear in the story, about a woman named Kissy Mellors who avoids hitting two female college students with her car only to witness a drunk driver behind her plow over them instead, killing one. The novel explores the aftermath in Kissy’s life and in those of others who knew the girls.

Like her husband, she tends to overwrite first drafts. “I rarely write a manuscript under a thousand pages, and then we cut and cut and cut. I like big fat novels. I think readers do too. It’s only publishers who sort of groan and start worrying about production costs. I think it’s too bad that there’s such an emphasis on stripped-down stories, because people’s lives aren’t.”

Also like Steve, she writes for three or four hours a day, though her work style is different. “Steve will rewrite the entire book, but I do it a page at a time as I go along, and subsequently my rewrites after the completion of my first draft are usually pretty minor tweaks.”

When her editor asked her to change the ending of Survivor, she disagreed, saying that her ending was more in keeping with what would happen in real life. Stephen got involved and sided with the editor—of course he would, he prefers happy endings—and Tabby changed the ending.

Survivor would be published in March of 1997.

In 1996, Steve began work on his first nonfiction book in eighteen years, since Danse Macabre. He thought that the proposed book, On Writing, would mean he would no longer have to answer the same old questions his fans still asked more than twenty years after Carrie was published. The number one offender, “Where do you get your ideas?” still elicited a groan. Partway into the project, however, he became distracted by an idea for a novel and put On Writing aside. When he returned to it a few years later, it would turn out to be a very different book from the one he had originally envisioned.

The midnineties were a golden time for King and his family. His kids were forging lives of their own, Steve had been sober for almost a decade, and his writing was hitting the sweet spot, pleasing his fans and surprisingly winning over critics who had previously regarded his work with undisguised contempt. He decided now to experiment with the literary roots of his youth: serial fiction. Between March and August of 1996, his six-part series, The Green Mile, was published, one installment each month, all in paperback by Signet. Predictably, each book hit the bestseller charts.

In a way, it was a deliberate response to fans who flipped ahead in his books to see how they ended, as well as an homage to his mother. As a boy, Steve had watched as Ruth would occasionally turn to the last page of a book to discover how the story ended. With a serialized novel, the ending wouldn’t be published for another six months. At the same time, the project was also a direct challenge to himself.

“I wrote like a madman, trying to keep up with the crazy publishing schedule and at the same time trying to craft the book so that each part would have its own mini-climax, hoping that everything would fit, and knowing I would be hung if it didn’t,” he said. “There was less margin for screwing up, it had to be right the first time. I want to stay dangerous, and that means taking risks.”

What made the situation even more tenuous was that he had no idea how the story would end, as he was still writing the last volume even when the first two books in the series had been published. He added another aspect to his high-wire act when the 1997 publication of the fourth Dark Tower book was announced in the back of the third book of The Green Mile. His fans were on alert.

When the final Green Mile book was published in August of 1996, all six of the books in the series appeared on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time, creating an outcry at the newspaper. From then on a book would only appear in one slot on the list regardless of how many different volumes were in the series.

King continued his interest in serialized fiction the month after the last Green Mile book came out, albeit with a twist. Two more novels would follow in the fall: The Regulators, a Richard Bachman book, came in at just under 500 pages, while the 704-page Desperation was published under his own name. He billed the two as companion novels and insisted they both come out on the same day: October 1, 1996. With The Green Mile books still selling well, King had an astonishing eight different books on some bestseller lists at the same time, which would be a difficult record for him, or anyone else, to beat. On a few bestseller lists where the mass-market edition of Rose Madder hit the paperback list, he held nine separate slots.

King described his two new novels as the equivalent of fun-house reflections of the other: “The same characters populate each book, but they have been shaken up, turned inside out, and stood on their heads. Think of the same troupe of actors performing King Lear one night and Bus Stop the next.”

The idea for Desperation came on a cross-country trip when Steve was driving Naomi’s car from Oregon to Maine. In Ruth, Nevada, a small town that looked totally uninhabited, the only sign of life was a burly policeman walking toward his car parked on the street. Suddenly, a thought popped into King’s head: “Oh, I know where everybody is, that cop killed them all.” He then wrote a story set in a town named Desolation in the Nevada desert with a population of one: Sheriff Collie Entragian, who has a special purpose in rounding up motorists unlucky enough to pass through the town.

The Regulators had a longer gestation time. In the early eighties, Steve had been working on a screenplay called The Shotgunners. In 1984, Kirby McCauley set up a meeting between Steve and Sam Peckinpah, a movie director whose films included The Wild Bunch, The Getaway, and Convoy. Peckinpah was sniffing around for an idea for a new picture to direct, and Steve had The Shotgunners.

Peckinpah liked what he saw and gave Steve some ideas for revamping it, since it was still essentially a first-draft screenplay, but Sam died of a stroke in December 1984 before anything was hammered out. Steve put the screenplay away until he started work on Desperation, when he thought some of the ideas from both stories could work well in tandem in a companion book.

Some readers were offended by the outright mention of God in Desperation, particularly through the character of David Carver, a young boy whose fervent belief and faith helped him to lead the others.

“The idea of using God as a character in Desperation was the engine that made the book go,” Steve said. “While I don’t see myself as God’s stenographer, He’s always been in my books. It depends on the people I’m writing about.” In a way, Steve just decided to take a break from the evil that’s inherent in most of his books. “So I thought, what if I treat God and the accoutrements of God with as much belief, awe, and detail as I have treated evil. Some people say the God stuff really turns them off, but these guys have had no problems with vampires, demons, golems, and werewolves in the past.”

He still retained his basic religious beliefs from childhood: “I’ve always believed in God. I also think that the capacity to believe is the sort of thing that either comes as part of your equipment, or at some point in your life when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement to believe in God because it will make your life easier and richer to believe than not to believe. So I choose to believe.”

Due to the demands and challenges of publishing two books on the same day with a combined print run of over 3 million copies, Viking begged King to publish the two books separately, but Steve insisted they appear simultaneously. In the end, Viking published Desperation, while Dutton, another imprint under the Penguin umbrella, published The Regulators. To further complicate matters, Dutton was in charge of bringing out the limited edition of The Regulators while publisher Donald M. Grant would publish the limited edition of Desperation. Neither publisher felt it could handle bringing out two limited editions at the same time.

A problem arose in the middle of producing the limited edition for The Regulators. When the time came for Steve to sign the pages for the book, he balked, as production manager Peter Schneider recalled. “How can I sign these books?” Steve asked. “The Regulators was written by Richard Bachman, and as you know, Bachman’s dead. I said you could do a limited edition—I never said anything about signing them.”

Schneider contacted Joe Stefko, the freelance designer in charge of the limited edition, who recalled that another small press had run into the same problem with a limited edition by Philip K. Dick, who had died a few years earlier. “They purchased canceled checks from Dick’s widow, cut out the signature, and used them as the signature,” said Schneider. In the continuing story line of the fictional Richard Bachman, his widow had discovered a few unpublished manuscripts after her husband’s death. “What if she also found a number of canceled checks?” Schneider mused.

In the end, each of the numbered-and-lettered limited-edition copies of The Regulators had a canceled check signed by Richard Bachman—in Stephen King’s hand—included on the first page. The fun part was that each check not only had a different number, from 1 to 1,000, but that each was made out to a character or business mentioned in a past King novel, or a prominent establishment from King’s own past, with a pertinent note in the memo line. For instance, check number 306 was made out to Annie Wilkes for $12; the memo read “axe and blowtorch.” Number 377 was made out to Cavalier for eight bucks for a back issue of the magazine containing “The Cat from Hell.”

After having eight new books come out in one year, Steve understandably needed to take a bit of a breather. Indeed, 1997 and 1998 would be relatively quiet by comparison, with only one book to appear each year: the fourth Dark Tower book, Wizard and Glass, would be published in November of 1997, and Bag of Bones in September 1998. Also in November 1997, he’d win the Horror Writers’ Association Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for The Green Mile series.

In perhaps the biggest upheaval of that period, with his last contract to Viking fulfilled, King decided to shop around for a new publisher. Viking had earlier come under the publishing umbrella of Penguin when they’d bought NAL, which meant that he and Tom Clancy now shared a publisher. Clancy had been with Putnam since 1986 when they’d published his second novel, The Hunt for Red October, and Steve felt that the marketing the company had done on his previous titles was less aggressive than Putnam’s campaign for Clancy. In addition, they categorized Clancy as mainstream while King was still classified in the horror genre, despite his recent efforts to branch out.

But probably the more compelling reason for Steve to look elsewhere was that after a relationship of almost two decades, he and his publisher had grown complacent with each other. He felt stale. He didn’t even offer Viking a chance to propose a new strategy; he just wanted out.

But he made a serious gaffe in the search for a new publisher, mostly because the drama was played out in public. For years, Steve had maintained that the money didn’t matter, all he wanted to do was write his books, but given that, his next move didn’t look so good. He could have been bluffing, or maybe he just wanted to leave Viking so badly that he made such an outrageous demand for the advance on his next book that he knew Viking would never agree to it. He asked for a whopping $18 million for Bag of Bones, which actually wasn’t that outrageous when his previous price per book was $15 million. A commonly bandied-about figure in the publishing industry is that 90 percent of the books published with a traditional advance and royalty agreement never sell enough books or subsidiary rights to earn their advance back, and King was no exception. However, when the publisher turned thumbs-down, he took the opposite tack in the search for his next publisher.

After almost twenty-five wildly successful years in the bestseller realm, he didn’t need the money. So he tossed out another insane idea to the next round of publishers and suggested an up-front payment of a mere $2 million for each of three books. King would pay for half of the production costs, and the profits would be split the down the middle. Publisher Susan Moldow at Scribner, part of Simon & Schuster, agreed to his unorthodox proposal, and they got busy. Steve’s longtime editor, Chuck Verrill, followed him to his new publisher.

The financial arrangements weren’t the only unusual thing about his new deal. The first book, Bag of Bones, was a big departure as well, the story of a widower who was a bestselling author who’d suffered from writer’s block in the three years since his wife’s death. It was billed by King’s new publisher as alternately a love story and a literary read, a departure for him, even though he seemed to be in his typical form when he exclaimed with glee, “I just loved that, killing off a major character right at the start!”

When he began writing the book, he had in mind a gothic novel, both within the scope of his storytelling and how he traditionally defined the term: “It’s a novel about secrets, about things that have been buried and stay quiet for a while and then, like a buried body, they start to smell bad.”

He cited a traditional gothic classic as his inspiration for the book: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, the story of a woman who marries a man who is tormented by the memory of his previous wife, now deceased. One aspect of the novel represented a real departure for him, but he found it was the only way the story could work: “There’s a narrator, a first-person voice, which I haven’t used very much in my longer fiction.”

As usual when the main character was a writer, Steve gave a disclaimer in case some readers would think he was writing autobiographically: “Mike is probably as close as you could get to me, even though I’ve been careful to distance myself from him. He’s not as successful, he has no children, his wife is dead, and he has writer’s block. But our take on what the writing is about and how the writing works is very similar.”

The jacket copy played it to the hilt, highlighting his recent O. Henry Award. CNN called the book a “classic ghost story,” and like clockwork it hit the New York Times bestseller list the first week it was published and stayed there for a month.

As he made the promotional rounds for Bag of Bones, Steve was still talking about retiring, or at least taking a little bit of time off. But even as the words left his mouth, he realized the odds were not good: “You know how when you’re on the turnpike on a hot day, and you always seem to see water at the horizon? That’s my year off, right there! Whenever I get there, it’s always a little further along.”

Steve and Tabby’s kids were grown, out of the house, and forging paths of their own. Though Joe and Owen were pursuing writing careers full speed ahead, Naomi needed to have a serious operation in 1997. She was still running the restaurant, but business wasn’t as good as she and her partner had projected, and she was mulling over her path in life when she was hit by a drunk driver and forced off the road.

The other driver was never found. According to an eyewitness, the car bore no tags or registration. Naomi was seriously injured, her back refracturing along an old spinal injury. The accident shook her world.

“My first reaction was to pray really hard for survival,” she said. “My later reactions were anger, fear, and grief because there were significant losses and no way to recoup them.” She said for years afterward she was incredibly nervous whenever faced with a situation where she found herself in traffic merging to her right. “I had a choice to make: to reopen my heart that was scarred with anger, fear, and grief, or to live confined in an emotional spiritual cage.”

She was an active member of the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, near Portland, and before she entered the hospital, over one hundred parishioners gathered to pray for her. She later said that her most memorable spiritual experience was that healing service. “Words fail to describe it,” she said. “Your pulse merges with a sense of unity. You can feel the heartbeat of the world.”

A few days after her operation, those same church members said that they had visions of her going to seminary to become a minister. She dreamed about it too.

“I kept having a dream about a closet full of robes and vestments and clerical garb,” she said, “but everyone knew that no gay girl kid was going to be able to do that.”

In the aftermath of what turned into a lengthy recovery, Naomi decided to close Tabitha Jean’s, her Portland restaurant. Her priorities were changing. She was beginning to heed the call she’d heard to attend seminary and become a Unitarian/Universalist minister, though the fact the business was struggling helped strengthen her resolve. While the restaurant did well at lunch, a dinner crowd never materialized the way she had envisioned.

Following in her father’s philanthropic footsteps, Naomi donated all equipment from the restaurant to several local charities, including the Preble Street Mission, a Portland homeless shelter and soup kitchen; the East End Family Workshop, a local child-care center and resource service; and the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, her home church.

Health problems were starting to weigh Steve down as well. Though he had always worn Coke-bottle glasses for his severe myopia, his eyesight was getting worse. In 1997, he was diagnosed with macular degeneration, with total blindness the eventual outcome. The following year, he suffered a detached retina. His vision primarily deteriorated in his straight-ahead perspective, but not in the peripheral vision. He didn’t seem too disturbed by it.

“That’s the part I want to keep, as a man and as a writer, is what I see out of the corners,” he said.

Tabby had also experienced her fair share of health issues. Not only had she lost most of her sense of smell, but she was diabetic as well. And a few years earlier, she’d had an operation where, according to Rick Hautala, “the doctors came out with some or all of one kidney in a bucket.”

It was a poorly kept secret that Steve never liked Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, and he’d always wondered what a remake would look like. He finally got his chance in April 1997 when Mick Garris directed a three-part miniseries that aired on ABC-TV.

Through the years, Kubrick was unhappy with Steve’s continued criticism of his 1980 film. ABC was happy with The Stand, so they invited Steve to work on another miniseries for the network. He replied that he’d like to rework The Shining into a miniseries, and this time he’d like to write the screenplay. To remake the movie, a deal unusual for Hollywood was struck between three parties, Steve, Kubrick, and Warner Brothers, who had produced the original film: the miniseries would only get made if Steve kept his mouth shut about Kubrick’s version. He agreed, the standards and practices department gave his script a green light, and production began.

This time, he wanted to see how much he could get away with, since the network was obviously pleased with his treatment of The Stand, despite a number of questionable scenes. “I wanted to push the envelope, and I’d worked enough with them that I felt confident enough that they would let me do just that,” he said. He sensed that the censors knew they were working within a pretty broad gray area, so Steve tried to stay away from scenes that he knew they’d want to cut.

“We had a number of problems with the network in terms of the violence between a man and his wife,” said King. “The last hour of the show is very harrowing. He’s chasing her, she’s trying to protect the kid, and he’s got a mallet which he’s hitting her with, and hitting her and hitting her. In the movie he was hit once but she wasn’t.”

Ironically, the horror sailed through with flying colors, but a stumbling block was Wendy Torrance’s telling her husband to stick his job up his ass. The censors refused to budge, so Steve changed the line to “Take this job and stick it!” Yet the issue of Danny’s life being endangered was overlooked by the censor’s red pencil. When the miniseries aired, ABC received a number of complaints about the harrowing scenes when Jack pursued his son, practically nonstop. After The Shining aired, censors at all three networks agreed that from now on, in programs airing before 9 p.m., they’d excise any scenes or situations where children would be placed in physical and emotional jeopardy.

On December 1, 1997, Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old freshman at Heath High School, in West Paducah, Kentucky, shot and killed three students at a school prayer meeting and wounded five others. Carneal had a copy of Rage, the first novel by Richard Bachman, in his locker.

Barry Loukaitis, just shy of his fifteenth birthday, killed two fellow students and his algebra teacher on February 2, 1996, at Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington. After he shot his teacher, fifty-one-year-old Leona Caires, Loukaitis was overheard quoting from Rage, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?”

In the wake of the shootings, and after the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, where thirteen people were killed and twenty-three wounded, King made an important decision. “I sympathize with the losers of the world and to some degree understand the blind hormonal rage and ratlike panic which sets in as one senses the corridor of choice growing ever narrower, until violence seems like the only possible response to the pain,” he said. “And although I pity the Columbine shooters, had I been in a position to do so, I like to think I would have killed them myself, the way one puts down any savage animal that cannot stop biting.”

The FBI asked King to help set up a computer profile to identify teenagers who have similar tendencies. He declined, but realized he’d had enough.

“I’ve written a lot of books about teenagers who are pushed to violent acts,” he said. “But with Rage, it’s almost a blueprint in terms of saying, ‘This is how it could be done.’ And when it started to happen, I said, ‘That’s it for me, that book’s off the market.’ ”

He told New American Library, the publisher of the early Bachman novels, to declare the book out of print.

During the New England ice storm of 1998, which toppled trees and knocked out power across the region for up to two weeks or more, Steve and Tabby’s opinion toward Maine winters began to change. He was walking one of their dogs in the driveway, taking baby steps down the icy surface to get the mail, when a chunk of ice fell off the mailbox, barely missing the dog. “That’s when we asked ourselves, ‘Why are we still here in the winter?’ ” The only answer they could find: “Because we always have.” So they decided to start spending the winter months near Sarasota, Florida. “The first thing I always do in the morning is turn on the TV and see what they’re getting hit with up North,” he said.

He and Tabby typically made their annual pilgrimage back and forth by car. Steve’s fear of flying was still as strong as ever, though he tended to joke about it. “There’s no breakdown lane up there. If it stops, it’s over, forget it,” he said, adding that he prefers to fly first-class not only for the advantages and service, but also, “If there’s going to be an accident, I want to be the first to the crash site. On the other hand, if you’re in the last row, at least you don’t have to linger in a burn ward.”

Once when he was flying on a small jet, he commented that he wouldn’t mind flying if he could just get knocked out for the entire flight, but without resorting to the drugs and booze that he had kicked in a hard-won fight a decade earlier. One of the pilots said they could do it by lowering the oxygen back in the passenger section. Steve brightened and told them to do it, but they refused.

Once he had a real scare when he was flying on a Learjet and the plane hit clear-air turbulence. “It was like hitting a rock wall in the sky,” he said. “The oxygen mask came out and I thought that we were dead. You never want to see an oxygen mask, except in the film at the beginning.” The turbulence was so bad that his seat was ripped from the floor and he landed lying on his side still strapped into the seat.

It took a while for him to get on a plane again.

Older and wiser, Steve was starting to become more sanguine about not only his place in the canon of popular fiction, but also about the reality of the publishing marketplace. He recognized that his decision to not focus strictly on writing horror had driven away some readers. “Over the years, I’ve lost readers,” he said. “After all, I’m not exactly providing the same level of escape that Salem’s Lot or The Shining did. People tell me I never wrote a book as good as The Stand, and I tell them how depressing it is to hear that something you wrote twenty-eight years ago was your best book.”

Regardless of the topic or approach he took in a new novel, the process was always the same. “Once the actual act of creation starts, writing is like this high-speed version of the You Can Make Thousands of Faces! flip books I had when I was a kid, where you mix and match,” he said. “You can put maybe six or seven different eyes with different noses, except in writing a novel there aren’t just thousands of faces, there are literally billions of different events, personalities, and things that you can flip together.”

Even though some of the readers who had been with him from the beginning were falling away with his new brand of books, he was about to embark on a project that would bring millions of new fans into the fold, all saying—just as had happened when Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption were released—“I didn’t know Stephen King wrote that!”

Production began for The Green Mile, with Frank Darabont directing and serving as screenwriter. Steve visited the set a few times and said that Tom Hanks stayed in character the whole time Steve was there. “He strapped me into the chair, tightened the straps, and put the hood on my head and screwed it down. I said, ‘Okay, I’ve got the idea, now let me out of here,’ ” Steve said. Then he asked Hanks to trade places. Hanks refused, telling King that since he was in charge of the block, he could never sit in the chair.

Steve continued to branch out even on TV. Instead of adapting his novels and stories for miniseries, he was invited to write an episode for the fifth season of The X-Files, which aired on February 8, 1998. He had appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy! with David Duchovny and Lynn Redgrave in November 1995, and Steve won, donating his proceeds of $11,400 to the Bangor Public Library. After the show Duchovny, who played the role of Fox Mulder on The X-Files, suggested that Steve write an episode for the series. He returned to Bangor, watched a few shows, and started talking with Chris Carter, who created the series.

The episode, named “Bunghoney,” was classic Stephen King. Gillian Anderson, in the role of Dana Scully, takes a rare weekend break to a town in Maine, where she meets a number of residents who have clawed out their eyes. She volunteers her services to the police in town and discovers the cause to be a single mother with a supposedly autistic daughter whose favorite doll, named Chinga, appears to be possessed and the cause of the discontent in town. According to King, Carter radically edited his original script, which revolved around the theme of the government pursuing the little girl.

But Carter wanted King to focus on Chinga, so Steve rewrote the script. Carter still wasn’t happy with the revisions, so instead of giving it back to Steve for another try, he instead rewrote it himself. The episode that finally aired bore little resemblance to Steve’s initial idea.

Though Steve had dreamed for years about finding his father—or at least, what happened to him—he’d never actively pursued it, perhaps afraid of what he’d discover.

One day in the late nineties, someone did the digging for him.

A crew at the CBS television network was working on a documentary on Steve, and they interviewed David King, his brother. The issue of their father came up, and though both brothers typically dismissed the question, this time David gave the producers Donald King’s Social Security number. After a bit of research, the crew found a trail that had long gone cold. Steve’s premonitions from the eighties were right on track. In November 1980, Donald King had died in the small town of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, known as the Gateway to the Poconos, and ironically five miles west of Bangor, Pennsylvania.

Though Steve and David had mixed feelings about the news, the producers presented them with photos of the new family their father had started, which included three boys and a girl, their half brothers and half sister.

King believes that his father’s widow, Brazilian by birth, had no clue of her late husband’s past. “Bigamy is a very severe offense, which would have serious consequences for those children,” Steve said. “I couldn’t do that to them, bring that knowledge. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say.”