Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

13 SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK

The new century brought King many new challenges and events, some of them strange, some of them expected. Recovery continued slowly, but he persevered. Though he could only write up to an hour and a half at a time, his productivity obviously did not suffer. He completed the draft of On Writing, wrote the e-novella Riding the Bullet, penned the screenplay for Kingdom Hospital, a thirteen-episode TV series, and cranked out Dreamcatcher, which weighed in at a mere 624 pages. He also resumed his collaboration with Peter Straub on Black House.

He had finished writing From a Buick 8 a couple of months before his accident, and it was scheduled for publication in 2000, but his publisher, Susan Moldow, thought it would be in bad taste to publish the book so shortly afterward since a horrific car accident is prominently featured in the novel.

After the accident, Steve and Tabby decided to stick to the routine they’d started a couple of years earlier and spend the winter in Florida. They would be away from the doctors who had been treating and closely monitoring him, but they were fearful of what a harsh Maine winter could do to Steve’s legs and hips, which were still held together by a convoluted network of pins and rods. Not only would the cold aggravate his pain and stiffen his joints, but if Steve slipped on the ice, he’d be almost back to square one.

A few benefits came from smashing up his body. When he visited the Red Sox camp during spring training in Fort Myers in the spring of 2000, the moment he showed up, he was mobbed by the players. “Nomar [Garciaparra] comes over, Bret Saberhagen comes over, Tim Wakefield comes over, and Tim goes, ‘Come on, get it up, get it up!’ They all wanted to see my leg,” Steve said.

Peter Straub visited Steve and Tabby for a week in February so they could resume working on Black House, the sequel to The Talisman. They collaborated on a forty-page bible that spelled out the bones of the story along with an outline and other details. Their working method was different this time around: When they worked on The Talisman, they spent a lot of time together at Steve’s home in Maine and Peter’s in Connecticut and taking long drives to nowhere to hash out the details. For Black House, they corresponded via e-mail and gabbed on the phone, then began to write. Steve would crank out the novel in a chunk of approximately fifty pages before forwarding it to Peter, who’d read it over and write his own fifty-page segment before sending it back.

Straub said they had more fun writing Black House than The Talisman and the work proceeded more quickly as well, though their writing styles and methods of working are quite different. “Steve is more straightforward than I am, far less given to complexity of both plot and characterization,” said Straub. “We both love the sweep of narrative and are both attracted to grandeur, and we are intensely interested in the various manifestations of evil. And our senses of humor coincide at many points, because we can reduce each other to helpless laughter.”

Steve thought of Peter like a big brother. As they worked on the second novel, they wrote with an eye toward a third. “There was never any question that there would be another book,” said King. “It’s just a question of trying to find the time.”

Stanley Wiater characterized their relationship as yin and yang: “Peter is a man who gets up in the morning, puts on a suit, and walks around looking like a million bucks. Stephen King gets up, puts on blue jeans and his shit-kicker boots, and he looks like he’s going to go out and drive a garbage truck. Peter Straub is very refined. He’ll look at the wine list and immediately know the best one. In his drinking days, Steve would always pick the Miller or Budweiser.”

In the first few months of 2000, electronic books were starting to gain some traction in the world of publishing, though there were no hard figures yet and many people both in and outside of the industry viewed reading a book on a computer screen as a novelty. Ralph Vincinanza, Steve’s foreign-rights agent, suggested that he think about trying out this new medium. “It would be nice to get an idea of what this market is like now,” said Vincinanza.

Steve pondered it and told his agent he had a novella that would work as an e-book. When Vincinanza read Riding the Bullet, he thought it would work well in the new format. “I thought it was a really good story in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of length,” he said.

“It was a way of saying to the publishers that I don’t necessarily need to go through them,” said King. “I wanted to break some trail for some other people, and it was a way of keeping things fresh.” He was also curious to see what the response would be.

Within twenty-four hours after it first appeared as a downloadable PDF file in e-book and Windows formats on several Web sites—Amazon and Barnes & Noble initially offered the book at no charge, while netLibrary and a few other sites charged $2.50 per download—Riding the Bullet had been downloaded four hundred thousand times.

The success of Bullet got Steve thinking of other stories to experiment with in electronic format. He and Tabby frequently joked that after his brush with death, they were living in the Bonus Round, and so he felt freer to experiment on his own. The Internet was still the equivalent of the Wild West, and he loved gunslinger stories.

In 1982, Steve and Tabby had grown weary of sending out the same old Christmas cards every year, so he decided to start a serial novel that he would bind and send to friends. The Plant was the story of a houseplant named Zenith the Common Ivy that is anything but common; in fact the story bore an eerie resemblance to Little Shop of Horrors, an off-Broadway musical from 1982 about a giant man-eater of a plant as well as a classic 1960 horror movie by Roger Corman and starring Jack Nicholson. The Plant was King’s first self-publishing effort through his Philtrum Press. He printed 226 copies of the handsome green chapbook.

In 1983, he sent out the second chapter of The Plant. In 1984 he gave The Plant a year off, publishing in its stead the limited edition of The Eyes of the Dragon, the book he wrote for Naomi. In 1985 he published and sent out a third installment of The Plant.

Little Shop of Horrors was made into a movie for the second time in 1986 and was the major reason why there would be no fourth installment. He felt that the stories were just too similar and didn’t want to be accused of copying someone else’s idea.

After the success of Riding the Bullet, he thought about experimenting further with electronic publishing by offering The Plant for download. But first he wanted some feedback from readers. He posted a query on his Web site asking (a) if he should publish The Plant in serial format, and (b) if people thought readers would pay for it on the honor system, like an unattended roadside farm-stand where people take what they want and leave the money in a coffee can.

His fans, as expected, eagerly responded and encouraged him to proceed with his experiment.

The first serial appeared on the Web site in July, with a new edition appearing each month until December. After the sixth installment had appeared, Steve announced that he was stopping his experiment, at least temporarily. About 75 percent of the people had paid up, though he admitted that while some were freeloaders, others had failed to fork over the dollar for each installment because they were stymied by the technology.

But also, Steve had lost interest in the story. He’d decided to publish the story for public consumption because he wanted to motivate himself to work on it again, but that didn’t work. Essentially, the six parts of the electronic version of The Plant were the three versions published back in the eighties, and he wrote little new material for the e-book.

But he couldn’t entirely be faulted; understandably, he still wasn’t back to full steam ahead since his accident. And three other projects were consuming his attention: Black House, Dreamcatcher, and the fifth Dark Tower book. He departed from his usual strategy—write first, research later—on Dream-catcher, the story of four childhood friends who reunite in adulthood to fight both psychological and supernatural demons. He compared his new novel to a Tom Clancy book, where the story line required more details about the military—particularly helicopters and Humvees—than he knew, so he approached the National Guard base in Bangor for help.

He asked for a ride in a Humvee, and a couple of soldiers took him, with a brace still on his leg, out into a marshy area near the barracks. Steve was thrilled. As a result of his research, he offered to appear in a thirty-second public service announcement to promote the Maine National Guard’s college tuition-assistance program.

In a scene reminiscent of his old American Express commercials from the early eighties—“Do you know me?”—King started his spiel in the TV spots by saying, “You know, one of the few things scarier than my books and movies is trying to pay for college.”

The PSAs were so successful that the “commercial” was pulled from the airwaves two months early, with fifty-five new recruits enlisting in the Army Guard and twenty more signing up with the Air Guard. The original $300,000 in the program earmarked for troops pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees was boosted to $500,000 with the help of additional federal funds.

In June 2000, Steve and Tabby flew to Nashville to witness a “ceremony of union” between Naomi, thirty, and her fifty-four-year-old professor at Mead-ville Lombard Theological School, who goes by the name of Thandeka. Naomi had enrolled at the seminary in 2000.

Thandeka is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and received her doctorate in the philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate School. She and Naomi met at Meadville, and like Naomi she had undergone a change of heart in midlife and decided to go to seminary after spending sixteen years as a TV producer.

In 1984, the Bishop Desmond Tutu blessed her with her Xhosa name, which means “one who is loved by God.”

Steve was still on crutches when he and Tabby flew to Nashville, but by the time his birthday rolled around in September, he was walking unassisted. He still had some pain in his hip and needed to work on his range of motion, but his leg was as good as it was going to get, with no pain. “My body is fifty-two years old except for my hip, where it’s about eighty-five now,” he said. “I never think anymore, ‘I’m going to New York.’ It’s more like ‘I’m taking my leg to New York.’ ”

On September 21, Steve and Tabby were celebrating his birthday when word arrived that Bryan Smith, the man who had caused him so much pain and agony and lost work time over the past fifteen months, was dead of a drug overdose. King offered a brief statement:

“I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Bryan Smith. The death of a forty-three-year-old man can only be termed untimely.”

On Writing, King’s first nonfiction book in two decades, was published in October with a first printing of five hundred thousand copies. Though he had always shied away from writing his autobiography, this was as close as he would ever get, albeit in a selective way, by focusing on a few choice events from his childhood in a section he entitled “C.V.” In a separate section, he also described the details of his accident and subsequent recovery, assembling it as best he could from the bits and pieces he recalled, and from what others had told him.

Steve, who once said, “Facts don’t bother a novelist,” confided that writing the book, especially the second half when he was still recovering from the accident, was more difficult than he had expected. “It’s like sex in a way,” he said. “You’d rather do it than write about it.”

At 288 pages, the book was one-fourth the length of The Stand. He worried that after more than twenty-five years of publishing novels, it was only a paltry book and asked himself, “Is this all you really have to say about the art and craft of writing?” He was satisfied that it was, yet he realized that some folks would be put off by the idea of Stephen King writing a book on how to write: “It’s like the town whore trying to teach women how to behave.”

Just as happened when he turned in his scripts for miniseries to the networks, his editor came back with some objections to his manuscript for On Writing, particularly because one of the markets for the book would be high school students. When told to tone down the language a bit, Steve knew that he had accomplished what he’d set out to do as he viewed the book as a renegade primer, “an outlaw text.” He said, “If you give a book to a kid and tell him to take it home, put a book jacket on it, and give it back at the end of the year, they think it’s a dumb book. But if it’s something that they have to go and buy themselves, they take it more seriously.”

He also resumed working on the fifth Dark Tower book, though at the time he started it, he intended the last three books to be published as one. Though his fans breathed a great sigh of relief, his reasons for returning to Roland Des-chain were selfish: “I decided that I wanted be true to the twenty-two-year-old who wanted to write the longest popular novel of all time. I knew it was going to be like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub, and I thought I’m just going to keep on working, because if I stop, I’ll never start again.”

January 2, 2001, marked a milestone in Steve and Tabby’s lives: their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Their friends and colleagues were not surprised that they’d lasted this long.

“They have one of the best and healthiest marriages you can possibly imagine,” said Otto Penzler. “She knows him so well and he’s dependent on her. She’s his crutch. Tabby has gotten him through a lot of stuff.”

George MacLeod, Steve’s college buddy, agrees, adding that Steve would never think of straying: “Steve is very conservative in that regard. He’s a one-woman man, that is his nature.” In at least one regard, according to MacLeod, Tabby and Steve are complete opposites. “There’s a side of him that is still some nervous kid, while I’ve never seen that in Tabby at all. She’s very, very comfortable with herself and very up-front when she needs to be. My guess is that he probably still depends on that in her, and she runs interference for him.”

“Tabby keeps the monsters away,” said Steve.

“You never know what you’re going to get with Tabby, she’s very mercurial,” said Rick Hautala. “Sometimes when I see her, she’ll give me a big hug and a kiss and tell me that she’s happy to see me, and the next time she’ll hold back and just say hi.”

While Steve has been known to rattle off a list of his most common fears, adding more as the years go by, Tabby has struck many of their friends as completely fearless. “Tabby’s not afraid of him, or anything,” said Dave Barry.

“I think that people fear things they shouldn’t and don’t fear things they should,” she says. “Like anybody else, if the plane drops, I’m going to scream. But fear stops you from moving forward and keeps us from knowing things.”

Steve admits that without Tabby he wouldn’t have generated the sheer number of pages that he has. “When people ask me how I’ve managed to remain so prolific, I tell them that I haven’t died and I haven’t gotten divorced. I’ve had a fairly settled life, and that’s made it possible for me to contemplate some god-awful things in my fiction.”

Despite his output, however, King doesn’t think he writes a lot. “I just write every day and keep it rolling along. I think a lot of writers have a tendency to stand back awhile and sort of sniff around a project if it’s not going well. That never works for me; I find that once I get out of the driver’s seat, I don’t want to go back in. The story gets old for me very quickly, and I begin to lose whatever feelings I had for the characters. So when I run into tough sledding, my impulse is to push straight ahead and the material piles up. If it’s bad, I can always rip it out later.”

Have any famous actresses caught his eye? “There are always temptations when you’re off on tour and doing the conventions, and plenty of groupies,” he said. “But no wife wants to be traded in for a trophy wife. What helped was that my father deserted my mother and I saw what my mother’s life was like after that, what the consequences were when the man leaves.”

Both maintain that they’ve been faithful through their decades of marriage. Says Tabby on the prospect that Steve would fool around, “I would cut something off and then I would shoot him.”

“They really love each other, number one,” said Sandy Phippen. “They’re wonderful together, and I love the way she takes over. And they also play off each other all the time. They make fun of each other, and I think he lets her handle everything.”

But all that togetherness only goes so far. Neither Steve nor Tabby think they could write a book together. “Sounds like a quick ticket to divorce court,” he joked. “I don’t think we could do it, though the thought has crossed my mind.”

“I’ve never sought out collaboration,” said Tabby. “I’ve seen other people do it, and I think it takes a lot of generosity and a willingness to let go of control to some degree. I’ve seen my husband do it, but I don’t think he lets go of control. I think he just bullies his way into what he wants like a freight train.”

But another problem was at hand. “We did once talk about doing a project together, but the minute the businesspeople got involved, it turned into Steve’s project,” she said. “It was like I wasn’t even in the room. I ended my involvement immediately.”

She has also ruled out writing a book with either of her sons. “We read each other’s shit and offer suggestions that may or may not be taken, and that’s the end of it,” she noted.

In February 2001, King filed a lawsuit against his insurance company, Commercial Union York Insurance, stemming from his accident two years earlier. The insurance company had paid him $450,000—Commercial Union stated that amount was the limit of his policy—while Steve sued for the full value of his $10 million umbrella policy to cover his medical bills and lost income. The lawsuit estimated his total losses to be $75 million.

The media had a field day and his loyal fans questioned why, when Steve had more money than God and had always claimed that money mattered little to him, he’d suddenly got greedy.

To those who knew him, however, it wasn’t a surprise. “The money was irrelevant, it was the principle of the thing,” said Stephen Spignesi. “If he had not gotten what he believed the policy entitled him to, he would have felt that he was wasting the money, and growing up dirt-poor in rural Maine, it was a sin to waste money. And if he has a contract in place with an insurance company and they’re screwing him so that the money would come out of his pocket, it would be a waste. That’s why he sued.”

In the end, the two sides settled the lawsuit when Steve suggested that the insurance company donate $750,000 to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, where he’d spent three weeks recovering after the accident, and the company agreed.

Dreamcatcher, the novel he began writing a few months after the accident, was published in March 2001.

“It’s a book about guys,” he said. “I wanted a truer version of Iron John. I wanted to write a book about how guys act with other guys and what it means to be a man among other men.”

The book seemed a way to overcompensate for the spate of novels he’d written over the years featuring strong female characters, though other messages clearly wormed their way into the story line. “There is a terrifying fear of the government that runs throughout the book, that they would rather kill all of us than tell us the truth,” he said.

He couldn’t help but use his recent pain and recovery in the novel. “The character in the tree stand had been hit by a car and was recuperating, and I obviously knew how that felt. When I wrote about it, I didn’t think about the pain as much. It was like being hypnotized. But there are things in the book that are extremely gruesome, and I found myself pulling back a bit.”

His original title for the book was Cancer, but Tabby talked him out of it, since she thought it would be bad karma.

The month after Dreamcatcher was published, one of Steve’s stories appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Editor Otto Penzler selected “Quitters, Inc.,” a story about a man who wants to quit smoking and hires an agency that promises to help him no matter what, for the anthology, which put Steve in the esteemed company of some of his childhood heroes, including John D. MacDonald and Shirley Jackson.

He’d written “Quitters, Inc.” back in the seventies, when he habitually listened to blasting rock and roll while he wrote. Now, however, he started to gravitate toward a subgenre of country music called cross-country, a cross between rock and country. While he still listened to rock and roll, he no longer listened to it blaring through the speakers while working on a first draft of a short story or novel. Now when he was working on a first draft, he worked in complete silence, a first for him.

One thing hadn’t changed, however: the more rabid fans still camped out in front of the bat-garnished wrought-iron fence for hours in hopes of a glimpse of Steve. They’d occasionally throw packages over the fence, books and presents, and sometimes harangue people driving through the gate. After September 11, however, the entire country was skittish, including Steve and Tabby, who had dealt with crazed fans for years. One day not long after the terrorist attacks, a fan left a package on the walkway leading up to the house and the police were called. But the parcel was not an explosive device: instead, a copy of IT got blown to bits, tiny shards of paper littering the entire neighborhood after the bomb squad was called in.

September 11 also had an adverse effect on Black House, since it was to be published on September 13. Steve and Peter were scheduled for a heavy-duty publicity tour that included national TV talk shows and interviews and book signings, but in the end everything was canceled. “It was almost like the book never happened,” said King. “I called Peter on the phone and told him I didn’t think anyone would want to read about a supernatural cannibal after what just happened. The book eventually did pretty well, but not at the time. Nothing did really.”

Stephen King’s Rose Red, a three-part miniseries with an original script by King, debuted on ABC on January 27, 2002. Scribner wanted to publish a book to tie in with the movie but preferred a prequel to the story, not just a novelization of the miniseries, and they came up with the title: The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red. Stephen was busy writing the script for the miniseries, so they asked him for some suggestions for writers who could handle the job. Ridley Pearson’s name came up from his association with Steve playing in the Remainders. Since Pearson had first joined the band, he’d written several well-received novels, including Chain of Evidence and Beyond Recognition.

Steve immediately agreed, though it was the first time he allowed a book to be written as a prequel to his work, as well as not by his own hand. Ridley flew out to Seattle, where he and Steve spent several days on the movie set, hashing out the story line and interviewing the actors. “He’s an amazingly generous guy,” said Pearson. “We split royalties on the book and he helped me immensely whenever I had questions about the story.”

Though they had spent time together with the band, this was the first time they were able to sit down and talk one-on-one, not only about the book and the show, but also about life itself.

“He’s a sixty-year-old man who acts like a goofy teenage boy who also happens to be the smartest man in the room,” Ridley said, adding that he never got the sense that Steve was comfortable with his physical self. “He’s a big man, and you know how some big guys carry themselves like if the door’s in his way he’s going to knock it down? Stephen isn’t that way. He’s more gawky and geeky. He carries himself as if he doesn’t want to be as tall as he is.”

One time Ridley visited Steve and Tabby in Bangor, and she took him on a tour of the underground part of the house. She led him to the library, where Steve had an old-fashioned paperback rack from a drugstore, with “lots of fifties paperbacks because I love the covers, and a certain amount of pornography from the sixties, paperback pornography that was done by people like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, just because it amuses me,” said King. “You see little flashes of their style.”

Tabby nonchalantly mentioned to Ridley that the library held around seventeen thousand books. “We got to the end and there was one little cabinet that had a label that said TBR on it, with about thirty books in it,” he said. TBR stood for “To Be Read.” Pearson pointed at the label and she nodded, which meant that Steve had read every book in that library except for the thirty books in the cabinet. “I said, ‘That’s not possible,’ and she said, ‘I assure you he has read them all.’ ”

When Rose Red was published, it hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it appeared and stayed there for almost three months. It was Pearson’s first number one bestselling book. Though Steve was pleased that Pearson had written the prequel to Rose Red, he warned his friend about the fallout that would come after the book was published.

“He called me up and said, ‘Ridley, watch out because from here on out, mark my words, the reviewers are going to savage you.’ And he was absolutely right,” said Pearson. “That was the beginning of the end. Before that everybody loved me. After that everybody hates you.” Steve knew from firsthand experience that once an author becomes popular and hits the bestseller lists, many critics no longer believe his work is any good, and their disdain will show up in their reviews.

Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida.

After spending several winters in Florida, the Kings decided to spring for a house in Osprey, about ten miles south of Sarasota. They paid $8.9 million for a waterfront, seventy-five-hundred square-foot, contemporary home on Casey Key, which set a record for the highest-priced house in Sarasota County; it took another five years for a pricier house to sell.

Steve spent every day he could at Red Sox spring training, just down the road in Fort Myers, and admitted that the location of their house had more than a little to do with his favorite pastime. “I’m not going to say that we moved down here the way that alcoholics move into barrooms, but there might have been an element of that involved,” he admitted.

Tabby usually stayed home. “I stopped being interested in professional sports a long time ago,” she said. “I’ll watch a little hockey and a little ball, but it’s a boys’ club with no girls allowed. So to hell with it.”

But her then eighty-two-year-old mother, Sarah Spruce, loved to talk baseball with her son-in-law, often tying up the phone line for the entire game to offer comments and opinions and commiserate when necessary.

“She’s Steve’s baseball buddy,” said Tabby. “She’s one of those Maine women who’s been following the Red Sox forever.”

Steve had become so well-known as a long-suffering Red Sox fan that baseball fans flocked to the games as much to see him as to see the game. “I’ve become sort of a Red Sox mascot,” he said. People approach him to gab but also to give him gifts, such as CDs, baseball caps, and even fake bloody socks, after the stitches in pitcher Curt Schilling’s ankle let go during Game 6 of the AL play-offs against the Yankees in 2004 and again in Game 2 of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals; Steve’s collection of bloody socks stood at seven.

For the most part, however, fans just wanted to talk baseball with him. They’d ask his opinion on the prospects for the coming year and the merits and weaknesses of the players on the roster. They’d spend an afternoon happily watching the game and offering commentary.

By the time Everything’s Eventual, a collection of short stories, was published in March of 2002, Steve was hard at work writing the final three books of the Dark Tower series. Though he was always a fast writer, he worked even more feverishly with these books than any others he’d written since he had quit cocaine, which had admittedly been a big part of the reason for his marathon writing sessions in the early eighties.

So why rush now? “Because it seemed to me that once I got started with the actual writing, this time it felt like one of those WWF wrestling matches where it’s for all the beans,” he said. “And I felt like if I didn’t finish this time, I never would, so I just hammered away until they were done. And once they were done, there was no reason not to publish them as soon as possible.” Though he wanted all three books to be published at the same time, the publisher didn’t concur.

Due to the long gaps between the first four books, Steve also knew that many readers didn’t want to start reading the first book knowing that the last one wasn’t even written yet. NAL decided to reissue the backlist in June 2003, then Scribner scheduled the publication of Wolves of the Calla, the first of the new Dark Tower books, five months later, in November. Song of Susannah—number six—followed in June 2004, and the final book, The Dark Tower, was published on Steve’s fifty-seventh birthday, September 21, 2004. “I think it made up for all the waiting people had to do, to be able to say to them that these books are going to come in fairly rapid succession,” he said.

Like clockwork and despite his feverish workload, Steve announced—for maybe the fourth or fifth time in his career—that he would be done writing books after the few more required by his contract. He made the announcement in anticipation of his next novel, From a Buick 8, which would be published in September 2002. He was worried that he was starting to repeat himself and that people would regard his new novel as a reworking of material he used in Christine, since both stories featured a supernatural car from the 1950s.

His editors, fans, and family had all heard it before, and so their first inclination was to say, “Yeah, right,” and nod right along to humor the boy who cried wolf. “Of course, for Steve that means that instead of three books a year, he’ll only write one,” said Stanley Wiater.

Some believed that his public announcements of never publishing another book had ramped up in the years since he had quit drinking and drugging as a way to replace the countless times through the seventies and eighties he had promised Tabby he would quit the booze and cocaine, or at least cut back. Saying he was going to retire and not following through had just replaced his pronouncements of earlier years.

“Work is his only drug,” said Wiater.

“I have nightmares when I’m not working,” Steve admitted. “I think that basically what doesn’t come out on the page just has to come out some other way.”

“Steve used to say he’d commit suicide if he couldn’t write, which has always pissed me off,” said Tabby. “I tell him if he pulled an Ernest Hemingway on me, I’d kick his body into the street and dance on it!”

But people had a real concern that maybe this time he was serious. After all, the accident had created lots of changes in his life, and also in his demeanor. He seemed calmer, more resigned to the onslaught of time and to the decrease in his fan base somewhat due to the well-trumpeted charges that he had turned literary. His books stayed on the top of the bestseller lists for only a few weeks now; previously, they would perch at number one for months.

“I’ve killed enough of the world’s trees,” he said, quickly tacking on that it didn’t necessarily mean he would stop writing. “I’ve always rejected the idea that every book had to be available to every consumer, but I’d never stop writing because I don’t know what I’d do between nine and one every day, but I’d stop publishing. I don’t need the money.”

He simply explained that after the last of the Dark Tower books was published in 2004, he felt that he had said everything he had ever wanted to say in his life, and then some.

Despite that he insisted that this time he was really going to retire, no one around him believed him, least of all those people in the business who had heard it all before. Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, didn’t believe a word he said. In the five years since King had signed with Scribner, she estimated that he’d threatened to retire at least six different times.

Even Peter Straub concurred. “I have a great deal of difficulty believing it,” he said, joking that From a Buick 8 “might be his last novel for the year.”

Two months later, Steve reiterated his desire, though he tempered his words a bit: “I can’t imagine retiring from writing. What I can imagine doing is retiring from publishing. If I wrote something that I thought was worth publishing, I would publish it.”

But this was just another of those times he was toying with his fans, and his constant threats to retire were in reality a long-running tongue-in-cheek joke that most people were in on. “A year from now, people will say the idea that this guy was going to retire is a laugh,” he said.

Even he knew he was a hopeless case: “I’m like a drug addict, I’m always saying I’m going to stop, and then I don’t. When I’m not working, my mind doesn’t take kindly to being unhooked from its dope. I get migraines and very vivid nightmares. It’s almost like the d.t.’s, like my mind and body are trying to scare me back to work.”

As 2003 began, it looked as if King were doing the impossible and sticking to his guns about kicking back and retiring. He wrote numerous articles for magazines and newspapers and contributed new introductions to revised editions of his work. His only book published that year was The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. According to his prediction, after the last two books in the series were published, the world would have seen the last new Stephen King book.

In June, the first four books of The Dark Tower were reissued, and the first book bore significant changes from their original versions. “I rewrote the whole thing,” he said. “After all, they were written when I was young. It always seemed to me like I was trying too hard to make it be something really, really important, so I tried to simplify it a little bit.”

In August, he started writing a regular column for Entertainment Weekly, reviewing new books, movies, and music. It was a culmination of everything he’d loved about pop culture through the years and bore great similarities to “The Garbage Truck” column he wrote in college.

“It’s exactly the same,” said Tabby. “He’s engaged with pop culture in a way that I’m not. Most of the new-music suggestions come from our children. He goes to movies, and I don’t. I’m old enough to have seen every damn movie, and all they’re doing is remaking them at this point.”

His taste in music would surprise those who knew him as an aficionado of loud rock, the harder the better. In particular, he confessed his admiration and appreciation for the rapper Eminem.

“I understand Eminem,” said Steve. “He’s funny and clever and really angry. And he’s a kindred spirit.”

He was also beginning to realize that he was on the downhill side of life and started to cooperate with old friends and colleagues who were in a position to help shape and interpret his legacy. He granted Tony Magistrale, his old buddy from the University of Vermont, an interview for his new book, Hollywood’s Stephen King.

Though Steve maintained that he was fully recovered from the accident, Tony was taken aback when he first saw his friend; after all, the last time he’d seen him was a couple of months before the accident.

“He had changed physically, he looked fragile and he was still walking with a cane,” Tony said. “He showed me his leg, and it was a mess. He was still working with the doctors to come up with a cocktail of medications that would be effective, allow him to sleep and allow him to experience life without too much pain. So he was still struggling.”

Magistrale added that he saw an emotional change in his friend as well. “There was a period there for about five or seven years where he was obsessed with the accident, which manifested itself in Kingdom Hospital,” a TV series that King wrote and produced and debuted in March 2004 and ran for one season on ABC.

But happily, Tony saw that some things about Steve hadn’t changed. Tony asked him to recommend a few places to eat in Bangor, and the only places he named were diners.

One day Tony asked him outright, “ ‘Steve, you made fifty-five million dollars last year. What are you doing in Bangor, Maine?’ He looked at me like I was some sort of bug.”

Steve answered, “Where would you like me to live, Tony? Monaco?”

“We both had a good laugh at that,” said Magistrale.

The literary establishment was up in arms again when it was announced that the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters would be given to Stephen King at the annual awards ceremony in November. He was tickled at the idea; finally, after decades of selling millions upon millions of books all around the world but having the literary world thumb their noses at him, here he was, getting the recognition he’d always craved and felt he deserved.

The backlash began almost immediately. Self-professed keeper-of-the-literary-keys critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom thundered, “Another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.” However, this exact prize had four years ago been given to Oprah Winfrey, without this sort of controversy. Previous recipients included Ray Bradbury, Studs Terkel, and Toni Morrison.

“I thought it was absurd for them to say, ‘Don’t give this award to Stephen King.’ It wasn’t as though they were giving me a National Book Award for a novel I wrote,” he said, joking, “They were giving me it the way they give the Miss Congeniality Award to a girl who’s not going to be Miss America.”

Steve admitted the award was more important than that, but he was extremely bothered by the continued prejudices of people who consider any novel that hasn’t been christened as literary to be beneath them and not worth the paper it’s printed on. “There’s an unstated prejudice that if it’s popular, it can’t be good because the reading taste of the American public is idiotic,” he said. “That kind of elitism drove me totally insane as a younger man. I’m better now, but there’s still a fair amount of resentment toward that.”

Steve made the rounds of TV and radio talk shows and interviews with newspaper reporters. He wasn’t feeling great, and his doctor had diagnosed him as having pneumonia and warned him against traveling and speaking. But the recognition was too great for King to pass up, so he continued a jam-packed promotional schedule in the days leading up to the awards dinner on November 19, which undoubtedly weakened him further.

“That award nearly killed me,” he said later. “I was determined I was going to accept it and make my speech.” He returned home after the ceremony and was hospitalized four days later with double pneumonia, the result of a long-festering problem dating back to the collapsed lung he suffered in the wake of the car accident. “My lung had collapsed and the bottom part of it had not reinflated, but no one knew that,” he said. “It stayed collapsed and got rotten and infected the rest.” He remained in the hospital for almost a full month; surgeons performed a thoracotomy, a major surgical procedure that allowed doctors to remove fluids and infected tissue from the lung.

While he was in the hospital, he contracted a bacterial infection that lasted for three months. By the time it had cleared up, he weighed only 160 pounds, “a skeleton on feet,” as he described it. In fact, he came closer to death during this hospital stay than as a result of his car accident.

Despite vomiting every few hours, he continued to write. “Even when I felt dizzy and weak, the words were always there for me,” he said. “The writing was the best part of the day.”

When the doctors told Tabby they were sure he was out of the woods, she asked him a question: “Can I redo your office?”

“I said yes because with a tube in my chest and another one down my throat, that was all I could say,” he said. “She knew I couldn’t argue.”

When he returned home a week before Christmas, he asked about her renovation of his office, but Tabby told him not to go in there because she thought he’d be upset. So, just as he had told generations of schoolkids to run out and read his books the second a grown-up told them they shouldn’t, one night when he had insomnia, he made a beeline to his office. The room was devoid of furniture, the rugs were rolled up, and the books were all in boxes. “It was like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, a vision of the future,” he said. “This is what it will be like in twenty or twenty-five years when I’ll be in a coffin and Tabitha will have rolled up the rugs and will be going through all my effects, all the papers and unfinished stories. It’s the clearing up after a life. My brother and me did it when my mother died of cancer.”

He thought back to the story he’d written a couple of years earlier, “Lisey and the Madman,” which was slated to be published in a forthcoming anthology, McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, with Michael Chabon editing, in November 2004. As he had done countless times before, he took two apparently disparate ideas and, just like a kid playing with a chemistry set, combined them to see what happened.

“Ideas come along and I have to follow them,” he had previously said whenever he announced his pending retirement and then didn’t. He started working on what would turn out to be the novel, Lisey’s Story.

He was off and running, writing about the wife of a famous novelist who is still muddling through daily life two years after his sudden, unexpected death. He later explained Lisey’s Story as transmogrifying from a novel about a still-grieving woman to a story about repression and how people tend to conceal not only things but feelings. Steve maintained he was writing a love story.

The novel had faint echoes of his 1998 book, Bag of Bones, which was also billed as a love story. The theme of that book was also about a dead spouse and a prolific novelist, except the roles were reversed, with a widower who wrote bestselling books but suffered from writer’s block for three years after his wife’s death.