Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

14 THE END OF THE WHOLE MESS

As 2005 began, Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida. As his schedule continued to slow down—maybe there was something to this “retirement” thing after all—his kids started to ramp up their careers.

Joe’s first collection of stories, 20th Century Ghosts, was published in 2005 in a limited edition of two thousand copies by PS Publishing, a small specialty publisher, after every American publisher who had taken a look rejected it. The book won two Bram Stoker Awards and a World Fantasy Award—other winners that year included Haruki Murakami and George Saunders—and the British Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Collection.

Joe wanted to distance himself from his father as much as possible, choosing to make it on his work alone. When he first began to write seriously and submit his work shortly after graduating from college, he chose his namesake, Joe Hill, for his pen name. “I figured if I wrote genre fiction as Joseph King, it would look like a grab at my dad’s coattails,” he explained. “Whereas I could write whatever the hell I wanted as Joe Hill. I had ten years to write and not have the pressure of being a famous guy’s kid.”

His work style is very different from his dad’s. “I’m not the kind of guy who can or wants to write thirty stories a year,” he said. “It takes me a month or more to write a good story, not a week. I try like hell not to be boring and make an effort to avoid adverbs, which is how I describe my fiction: horror stories with few adverbs.”

Joe met the woman who would become his wife, Leanora LaGrande, in the MFA program at Columbia University. “A lot of people marry their moms,” Joe said. “I kind of married my dad. I’ll go from the manuscript I gave her and the manuscript I gave him and go back and forth, and it’s the same comments.” Joe adds that Leanora reads Steve’s manuscripts too.

Like his father, Joe started to work in other venues. He got in touch with an editor at Marvel Comics and wrote “Fanboyz,” an eleven-page tale for Spider-Man Unlimited. “Working on that story was the fulfillment of a very intense childhood fantasy,” he said.

Like his older brother, after Owen attended Vassar College, he got an MFA from Columbia, though he had reservations about entering grad school. “Writing programs aren’t for everyone, and if you want to write straight genre stories, you’ll have a real battle on your hands,” he said. But he benefited greatly from the time he spent at Columbia. “I had wonderful teachers who focused very hard on the details, on the precision of good writing, and helped coax work out of me that I’m very proud of.”

Unlike his brother, however, he decided to keep his name intact. “Obviously I have an advantage as a writer in terms of name recognition, but it’s also a disadvantage because people expect it just to be a nepotistic exercise and for you to suck,” he said, which is the major reason why his stories are different from his father’s. “I write more contemporary straight fiction with no supernatural elements. I wanted to find my own place in the world, not make any bread off his name.”

Owen’s first book, We’re All in This Together, a collection of one novella and four short stories, was published by Bloomsbury in June 2005. As with his father, the inspiration for the title novella came from two disparate places: “I was morbidly depressed after Bush won the election in 2000, and I had this crazy idea that he’d step down because he didn’t get the popular vote. I thought about what kind of person would actually do something about it and how he’d get his point across.” He thought back to a family from Bangor that would write slogans and draw pictures on a billboard outside their house according to the season. He combined the two concepts into the novella.

Also like his brother, Owen met his future wife, Kelly Braffet, when he was in graduate school at Columbia. When reporters interviewed him for his book, they never failed to mention that the couple lived in a deconsecrated Catholic church in Brooklyn. Braffet, author of the novels Josie and Jack, the story of a brother and a sister who are psychologically dependent on each other, and Last Seen Leaving, about a mother and a daughter who are estranged from each other, said that Owen takes after his father as far as his work habits. “Owen works a hell of a lot more than I do, which makes me feel guilty, which makes me work more,” she said.

Owen’s thought trajectories also follow his father’s. Braffet says that he’ll come home from a simple trip to the corner store for a sandwich with an idea for his next novel. “I’ve got a great idea for a story,” he’ll say. “See, there’s this birthday-party clown with Tourette’s and he’s got a brother who’s a financial adviser, and they go deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean surrounded by all of these urns of ancient olive oil.”

For his part, Steve enjoys both his sons’ works, though he does see clear differences: Joe clearly gravitated toward writing genre fiction, while Owen studiously avoided it. “I read Joe’s stuff, and I relate to it because it’s plot-driven and high conflict,” Steve said. “Owen writes more like Bret Easton Ellis, flavor-of-the-month New York relationships.

“There are two great things about this. The first is that what Owen is doing doesn’t bear any resemblance to my writing. And the second thing is, thank God he’s good.”

Naomi was also finding a firm foothold in her chosen field of the ministry. She graduated with a master’s in divinity from Meadville Lombard Theological School in June 2005, where she won the Robert Charles Billings prize for excellence in scholarship, awarded to the student with the highest academic standing. After graduation, she was ordained by her home church, the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth and was assigned to her first parish later that summer: the Unitarian Universalist Church of Utica, New York.

As in her days as a restaurateur, she bristled whenever anyone asked about her parents. When asked what drew her to the Unitarian faith, she replied, “We begin and end with primary experience: awe, wonder, fear, trembling, amazement. Everything else is commentary.”

After she got settled in upstate New York, Steve had to change the automatic response he’d given over the years whenever someone asked where he got his ideas from. “I used to say that I got my ideas from a small used-idea shop in Utica. I’d bring them down, dust them off, and they worked just fine. When Naomi became a pastor in Utica, I had to stop making jokes about it.”

But that didn’t mean he had to stop joking with her. “I tell her that Unitarianism is God for people who don’t believe in God, and she just laughs.”

In the summer of 2007, she left her position as pastor at the First Unitarian Church in Utica, New York, to become the minister at the River of Grass Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Plantation, Florida.

The Unitarian/Universalist faith is known for its acceptance of gay and lesbians, and even though she was warmly acknowledged by her own church, Naomi became easily enraged at those who weren’t able to see past her sexuality and felt like shaking her fist at the world even though she was an ordained minister.

“I struggle with tolerating the theology that doesn’t allow me to exist,” she said. “Hellfire and damnation for gay and lesbian people, for women in ministry, for Unitarian Universalists. My paradox is learning to love more fully people who don’t see those of us who are also people, created and beloved of God.”

She maintains that she hasn’t entirely abandoned the family business: “Everyone in my family tells stories. They use the written word and I tell stories through sermons.”

The way she talks about giving a sermon sounds a lot like how her father has described writing. “To me, giving a sermon is thrilling. It’s like dancing for a long time. Your sense of beginning and ending disappears, and you never know what will happen.”

She has also followed her father’s habit of incorporating popular-culture icons into her sermons. In the fall of 2007, she mentioned the Island of Misfit Toys, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Harold and the Purple Crayon in her sermons, among others.

Steve and Tabby are understandably proud of their grown-up brood. “It’s such a surprise when kids are suddenly strong adults,” said Tabitha. “For a long time, my basic standard of parenthood was nobody’s in jail.”

When editor Charles Ardai first got in touch with Steve about the Hard Case Crime series, a new line of original and reprinted detective paperback novels, the most he hoped for was a cover blurb for one of the books. A big fan of the genre, King decided he’d rather write a book than a blurb, with the result being The Colorado Kid, which was published in October 2005 to lead off a season including books by Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Donald E. West-lake. The novel was extremely short by King’s usual standards, only 184 pages, but it was just a warm-up for King’s next project. And it looked as if he had returned to his old ways, starting to crank them out again.

Steve finished writing Cell in July 2005 after he spent four months on the first draft. The next book scheduled to be published was Lisey’s Story, in the fall of 2006, but Scribner switched gears and wanted Cell to come out first, almost instantly, as it turned out. Their target date was January 2006, because John Grisham didn’t have a novel coming out that month, as he usually did, which meant there was a slot to fill. Publisher Susan Moldow also wanted to publish Cell first because she believed it would boost Lisey’s numbers when it came out.

Steve turned around the final two drafts by October, and Cell was published in January.

Chuck Verrill edited Cell, as he had done with most of Steve’s other books. But Steve wanted Nan Graham, who edited Frank McCourt’s bestseller Angela’s Ashes and has worked with Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, at Scribner to edit Lisey’s Story, because he thought it needed a woman’s touch. “I thought Chuck got a little out of joint about it because he had done all the other ones, but he did a great job on Cell, and Nan did a great job on Lisey’s Story,” Steve said. “The books were like apples and oranges, so editing Lisey’s had to be different from Cell, which really was an instant book.”

For his part, he even handled his second and third drafts on each book differently. With Cell, Steve edited the book on a computer to respond to Chuck’s comments and questions. When Steve edited Lisey, he followed his usual path of editing on paper, incorporating Nan’s suggestions into an entirely new draft that he wrote again from the beginning. He viewed the books as falling into entirely distinct categories, along the line of how Graham Greene saw his books: some were novels and some were sheer entertainment. In King’s eyes, Lisey’s Story was a novel, while Cell was entertainment.

He was starting to exercise the same managerial style—deciding which editor was best to handle a particular book—when it came to movies based on his stories and novels, even if he had made up his mind that it was a hands-off film project. He wanted to have final casting approval over the actors who would appear in the films, even though he didn’t usually object. In one case, however, he put his foot down. A producer was preparing to launch Misery on Broadway and sent Steve a list of candidates for the major characters. One of their choices for Annie Wilkes was Julia Roberts, but Steve immediately nixed the idea. “Roberts is a fine actor, but Annie is a big, brawny woman who’s capable of slinging a guy around,” he said. “Don’t give me a pixie!”

After he put the finishing touches on Cell, Steve turned his attention to Lisey’s Story. He’d wanted to write about a long-term marriage similar to his own for a long time.

“You fall in love with someone that every once in a while you’d like to strangle, but it’s the relationship that I have enjoyed for the longest time,” he said. He specifically wanted to explore how couples develop a secret language all their own. “In a long-term marriage, you might have words that you might not want to trot out in public. They aren’t necessarily dirty, but they may be so babyish so as not to sound good inside that environment.”

He also wanted to write about how over time a married couple essentially creates two worlds: their own inner world and the outer world. “The whole idea of the book was that it would be centered on their interior existence,” he said. In doing so, he knew he would have to dig deeper emotionally. “I wanted to write something like a Hank Williams song that would convey something about the essential loneliness in people, and how you can love, but sooner or later it ends.”

But he was also wanted to test out one of his ideas about retirement: that he could continue to write but not necessarily publish, a concept that was solidified when he recalled a story that Bill Thompson, his editor at Doubleday, had told him years before:

J. D. Salinger went into his bank to put a package in his safe-deposit box. A woman at the bank asked if the parcel was a new book. He nodded, and she asked if he planned to publish it. His reply: “What for?”

“What if there was a writer like that and somebody held up the bank, not for money but for the unpublished manuscripts?” Steve theorized, going one step further. “What if a famous writer died and there was a crazy person who wanted the unpublished manuscripts? That turned out to be Dooley in Lisey’s Story.”

Steve poured his very essence into the book, more than he had ever done with any other book, and yet he knew when he finished, he might decide not to publish it.

That decision would be up to Tabby. She read the book in two sittings before she offered her opinion.

“It’s about another writer,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“People will think that Scott and Lisey are you and me.”

“I’ll tell them it’s not,” he said.

“This book is important to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What would you say if I say it worries me?”

“Then I’ll put it away.”

“It does worry me, but it’s too good not to publish.”

When the book came out, critics said it was the most intimate book he’d ever written, as well as one of his best-crafted novels. “King is as cagey as a veteran pitcher, employing a career’s worth of tricks to good effect,” wrote Jim Windolf in the New York Times.

“It’s a very special book,” Steve said. “This is the only book I’ve ever written where I don’t want to read the reviews, because there will be some people who are going to be ugly to this book. I couldn’t stand that, the way you would hate people to be ugly to someone you love, because I love this book.”

In June 2006, Tabby also had a book published, Candles Burning. She had agreed to complete an unfinished manuscript left behind by the writer Michael McDowell, a friend who died in 1999.

She referred to McDowell, a supernatural horror writer who had also written the screenplay for Beetlejuice, as her soul mate.

They met at a mystery convention, though she was already familiar with his Cold Moon over Babylon as well as the Blackwater Chronicles, a serial novel published in six monthly installments in 1983.

McDowell had left behind several hundred pages of Candles Burning, and Tabby was unaware that her friend had even been working on it. A few years after his death from AIDS, McDowell’s editor, Susan Allison, contacted Tabby to see if she wanted to try finishing it. She was eager to take a look, primarily because she knew that he was a great writer to work with. “He collaborated with so many people, on all kinds of things,” she said. “That takes a generosity that isn’t common.”

Once the estate and the publisher agreed that Tabby was the best writer to finish the book, they left her alone with the unfinished manuscript and pages of notes with the instructions to do what she thought was best with this supernatural Southern gothic novel with plenty of ghosts to go around.

To prepare to finish the book, she read the unfinished manuscript and reread a few of McDowell’s books, then researched the cities where parts of the story took place, New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, among them. Though McDowell had not written an outline or provided a firm ending to the story, once Tabby had grounded herself in the work-in-progress, she listened to the characters and started to write according to where they took her.

When Candles Burning was published, she already knew what kind of reception to expect: her familial connections would attract a good deal of attention to the book, but in the end the quality of the story and the writing would pull her through. “People tell me, ‘I’ve never read one of your books,’ and I say, ‘Millions haven’t!’ ” she joked. “Steve set a standard for millions and millions of books sold that no sane person expects to reach.”

Though she planned to travel to promote the book, her plans were limited. “I’ve got a big streak of that Yankee live-in-the-woods mentality,” she said. “Too many people stimulate me too much. I can only take three days in New York and twenty-four hours in L.A. It’s unnerving for me to spend that much time with people not looking at you.”

As usual, Steve was taking the opposite tack. He decided to challenge himself by setting a novel in a place other than Maine, and since he was spending so much time in Florida, he set it there.

Along with his outlook on life, which has mellowed, his writing habits have changed. “My brains used to work better than they do now,” he said. “I wrote something last week and I looked at it the other day and thought it looked familiar, so I went back a hundred pages and found that I had duplicated something that I had written before. Paging Dr. Alzheimer.”

He was no longer writing two thousand to three thousand words a day. Now he was happy if he cranked out a thousand words during a writing session.

Life was changing, but life was good.

In February 2007, the first issue of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born was published by Marvel Comics in comic-book format. Seven issues were planned to cover the first book in the series and would appear each month through August. The entire seven-issue run of The Gunslinger Born was collected into a hardcover edition, released on November 7, 2007.

Though King had always intended The Dark Tower to exist only in book form, he jumped at the chance to see how it would look as a comic book. “It’s a blast to see them adapted in an illustrated form, and that’s all that I wanted out of it,” he said.

He was also starting to come around to the idea of having someone rework his epic for the silver screen. Frank Darabont had suggested doing it, but even he realized it was a pie-in-the-sky dream. “The thought of adapting that saga makes me break out in a cold sweat, curl into a ball, and weep,” said Darabont. “It’s just so metaphysical and trippy. So much of it is almost impossible to visualize on-screen.”

In February, Steve announced that he’d sold an option for The Dark Tower to J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, creators of the TV show Lost. Steve loves the show, and he figured he’d give Abrams and Lindelof a chance to see what they could do. For the privilege, he charged them $19.

That same month, Joe Hill’s real identity came out when his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published. “My real secret to keeping a low profile was failure,” he said. “Nothing helps a writer stay under the radar like not getting published. I didn’t want someone to publish my book because of who my dad was or what my last name was. And in that sense, I feel like getting turned down was actually a case of my pen name doing its job.”

Even before the book was published, however, the online rumor mill had already started to buzz about the resemblance between Joe Hill and Stephen King, not only physically but in writing style and subject matter. “I had pretty much run to the end of my rope around that time,” said Hill, describing a book signing he’d done in the UK where readers had commented on the similarities in appearance. “It would have been nice if the book could have come out and been out for a while, but it just didn’t work out that way.”

While Tabby totally got why Joe chose a pen name, Steve didn’t understand why his son needed to hide who he was. Indeed, Hill said it was hard for his father to say nothing: “My dad likes to boast on his kids and isn’t used to keeping quiet about anything. Secrecy is not his strong suit. But he did it.”

“I didn’t offer any advice, just encouragement,” said Steve. “Everyone does it their own way. I just told them to read everything within reach and treasure the bad, because that shows there’s hope for you.”

Just as Steve told readers not to think that the married couple of Lisey’s Story was a mirror image of himself and Tabby, Joe also warned his fans to avoid a knee-jerk reaction that he’s referring to his own father when he writes about bad fathers. “I can write a bad father, and he’ll just laugh,” Joe said. “He won’t see it as a stand-in for himself.”

While Joe’s book is a bestseller and editors are clamoring for more of his work, he still sounds a bit wistful about the days when he could write under the radar: “If one of my stories appeared in a magazine, people just read it as a story. They didn’t have any preconceptions. Now I feel like there’s a bit more pressure because there’ll be some comparison.”

On April 14, 2007, Sarah Jane White Spruce died at age eighty-three. Tabby’s mother was gone, and Steve had lost a devoted mother-in-law.

There wasn’t much time to mourn, however, because the accolades for Steve’s accomplishments in fields other than horror continued. Two weeks after his mother-in-law’s death, he attended the annual Edgar Banquet by the Mystery Writers of America and was given the Grand Master Award for 2007. The prize is akin to a lifetime achievement award in the field, and Steve was heartened by the reception of his peers, unlike what had happened at the National Book Foundation award back in 2003.

Then in June, King received a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association. He was the first non-Canadian to win the award since its inception in 2000.

He also frequently attended awards ceremonies to honor other celebrities. Steve and Tabby planned to attend a dinner in Los Angeles held by a Jewish philanthropic organization to honor the actor Billy Crystal, but Tabby didn’t go because she wasn’t feeling well. Steve called Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who played with him in the Remainders, and invited her to go with him instead. She said she’d love to. Because she has an informal northern-California style and it was a formal dinner, “I got three calls from his office making sure I knew I was supposed to wear a dress,” she said, laughing.

“When we walked through the doors of the hotel to go to the banquet, the explosion of lightbulbs and people jumping out at Steve was terrifying,” she said. “I have never seen paparazzi before in my life and I’m sure I never will again, but then I realized that this is something that happens to him all the time.”

Goldmark was impressed by how he handled it. “We couldn’t have a conversation or even finish a sentence because people were constantly coming over to talk to him. I had a different look at what his life was like in that world and why the band is such a nice, comfortable place for him because people aren’t treating him like some weird famous guy.”

After a hiatus of several years, Steve played once again with the Remainders at Webster Hall in New York on June 1 in connection with BookExpo America (BEA).

“It’s like camp for grown-ups,” said Amy Tan. “I’d kill the whales to do this.”

King said that he never took the band seriously, and that he just did it for fun. “Somebody once said that the Remainders without Stephen King is like the Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia, which I thought was really sweet,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to go out and do something that is more of a hobby than work.”

He was well aware that his bandmates had different ideas. “Dave and Ridley and Greg [Iles] take this very seriously,” he said. “It’s like watching three type A people prepare for the GREs. I’m just a hood ornament on this band.”

Though the band members loved to play music, Ridley Pearson said the primary reason they schedule three-city tours is to hang out with each other. “With a one-night gig, there’s not enough time to spend quality time with everybody in the band,” he explained. “When we do a tour, we’re all trapped in airplanes or buses and that’s what we love because we all get to hang out and talk and have fun together. Of course, the band should be a lot better since we’ve played together for fifteen years, and we aren’t. But the friendships are way better.”

Though Steve loved going on tour, Tabby had become more cautious. “She’s more down-to-earth than Steve and she really looks out for him,” said Pearson. “I remember she told me once that she didn’t want the band to be Steve’s John Lennon moment.”

Pearson remembered a gig in Rhode Island where they needed twenty state police to form a human barricade to get Steve through the crowds: “It was just insane, just like the Beatles. People were throwing stuff at us and trying to touch him.”

In June 2007, Blaze was published. A Bachman book he wrote before Carrie, Steve had referred to it as one of his “trunk novels,” one written for practice that he had forgotten about long ago.

Frank Muller, a professional audiobook reader who’d narrated several of King’s books onto CD, had become permanently disabled from a motorcycle accident in the fall of 2001 and would never be able to work again. Not only did he have no money, but he had no insurance and owed back taxes to the IRS. He had one child and a few days before the accident he found out that another was on the way.

Steve regularly listened to audiobooks, and he’s served as a reader on some recording sessions, so he had a great respect for what Muller did. “It’s exhausting work because there are a lot of takes and it is very difficult work,” Steve said. “I think no book really exists until it has been done in audio. Good work gets better when it is read aloud, and bad work is mercilessly exposed. It’s like taking a strong light and shining it on facial structure. When you do that, even good makeup won’t hide bad writing.”

Steve was tormented about his friend and certainly knew what it took to recover from a life-threatening accident. Steve set up the Wavedancer Foundation in 2002 to help Frank. But that got Steve to thinking about other freelance performing artists who suffer disabling accidents or illness, so he started another nonprofit called the Haven Foundation to provide grants to freelance writers, artists, and performers who are not able to support themselves because of a sudden disability or illness.

Steve invited authors John Irving and J. K. Rowling to perform in a two-night benefit at Radio City Music Hall called “Harry, Carrie, and Garp” so the Haven Foundation could raise enough money to begin offering grants.

Steve had long thought about giving the copyright to one of his books to the foundation, which would then receive 100 percent of the revenue from advances, royalties, and foreign rights sales, and he thought of Blaze.

He dug it out, reread it, and thought it really wasn’t that bad, just needing some revision and a polish. Scribner published it in June. Booklist gave it a starred review, calling the novel a tribute to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and it hit number two on the New York Times bestseller list the first week it was out.

In 2007 Steve and Tabby expanded their real estate holdings yet again. In May they bought another house on Casey Key in Osprey, about two miles away from the one they’d bought five years earlier. At $2.2 million, the new one was a bargain compared to their main house, which was now assessed by the county at more than $12 million.

Then in October, Steve and Tabby bought the mansion next door to their home in Bangor. The white Victorian house with a mansard roof, known as the Charles P. Brown House, was built in 1872 and valued then at $10,000. The Kings paid $750,000, according to city records. Steve mentioned that he wanted to turn the house into a library, or perhaps a museum, and he planned to build an underground tunnel connecting the two houses and ride a trolley between them.

“I fantasize about this and Tabby says, ‘Why do we need to do that?’ And I tell her, ‘Because we could!’ ”

Steve was chosen to serve as guest editor for the Best American Short Stories 2007, published in October. In a sense, he’d come full circle. Short stories had given him his start and pulled his hide from the fire numerous times in his early days, a check arriving just as Naomi had come down with an ear infection and Tabby had run out of pink stuff from the toddler’s previous bout.

Indeed, Steve was in high demand in the short-story market that year. Otto Penzler planned on asking him to be guest editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of 2007, but Heidi Pitlor, the editor of Best American Short Stories beat him to it. “I’ll just have to ask him again in the future,” said Penzler.

The inevitable, grumbling about the dumbing down of American culture came when it was announced that King would serve as editor for the 2007 edition. But he must have been heartened by the company he kept among previous guest editors of the series: Margaret Atwood and Richard Ford, Michael Chabon and Walter Mosley.

Though his previous collection of short stories, Everything’s Eventual, had come out five years earlier, he maintained that he still loved the form and wanted it to continue even though the number of short-story markets had precipitously declined through the years.

“I’ve fallen away from writing short stories and thought maybe if I reac-quaint myself with what’s going on in the short-story landscape, I’ll be rein-vigorated and want to write them again,” he said. “I’ve never really lost my taste for them, and it would be sad to feel that a skill I once had had slipped away.”

He dove into the project headfirst: “I wanted to expand the playing field and find stories online and in magazines that I hadn’t seen represented before, like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder on a book in my life than I did on this one.” Pitlor said she read more than 4,000 stories and passed 120 along to King that she felt were good enough, but by hunting on his own he estimated that he plowed through more than 400 stories.

His gig as editor accomplished exactly what he wanted it to do: it jump-started his short-story writing skills again. About the same time that the anthology came out, Steve sold a story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which paid $500. While some would call it charity on King’s part, he disagreed, and the old frugal native Mainer came out:

“I wouldn’t say it’s charity because I could buy some hot dinners with that, but I’d love to see the magazine reach a wider reading public,” the subtext being that because his name was on the cover, the magazine would likely order a higher print run and sell out.

He wrote another story called “A Very Tight Place.” When he and Tabby are in Florida, Steve goes for a daily walk on a relatively isolated stretch of road. One late afternoon he saw a Porta Potti at a construction site. The workers had all gone home for the day, and Steve, still a mile from home, thought he’d take advantage of it.

When he stepped inside, he felt it rock slightly and his mind went into overdrive. “If one of those things fell over on its door with a person inside, he’d be in trouble. Immediately I’m thinking about Poe and his story ‘The Premature Burial’ and all the buried-alive stories that I’ve ever read, but I’ve never read a story about anyone trapped in a Porta Potti. I’m not a particularly claustrophobic person myself, but I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is wonderful!’ ”

It was continuing to be a busy fall 1997 with the release of The Mist in November. Steve wrote the novella back in 1980.

He was living in Bridgton, Maine, at the time and went to the market to pick up a few things for Tabby. He was headed for the checkout line when he suddenly looked up and noticed that the entire front wall of the market was made of plate glass. The first thought that popped into his mind when he saw the window was “What if giant bugs started to fly into the glass?”

As usual, he was off and running. The story appeared in Dark Forces, an anthology edited by Kirby McCauley, his former agent.

When Frank Darabont wrote the screenplay for The Mist, he deliberately changed the ending of the novella, which had been unclear at best. Though it usually bugged Steve when his story line was radically changed, this time he didn’t mind; in fact, he thought Darabont, who also directed the movie, greatly enhanced the story.

“I thought it was terrific but it jarred me,” Steve said. “I knew what was coming the first time that I looked at the movie in a rough cut, and it still jarred me. It took a second viewing to get used to the idea that it was probably the only ending in terms of the world that had been created in that story.”

Duma Key was published in January 2008 and represented yet another departure for Steve. For one, the novel was set in Florida and Minnesota, but it was also the story of a divorced man who began to pursue artwork as a hobby, both of which were outside King’s realm of personal experience.

“I love art, but I couldn’t draw a picture of a cat,” he said. “So I took what I feel about writing and put it in a book about an artist. After all, the last thing I need in my books is another author.”

The initial spark for the novel came when he was out on his daily afternoon walk. “I was walking on this deserted road—the only kind of road I walk on now—when I saw this sign that said Caution: Children. I thought, what kind of children do you have to be cautious about? Then I got this image of two dead girls.”

Though Duma Key was critically acclaimed and hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it came out, Steve has pretty much accepted that he is no longer at the top of the heap when it comes to bestsellers. Tom Clancy and John Grisham and King are often mentioned in the same breath, but King has had a good degree of attrition among readers, and his numbers have fallen more rapidly than those of the other guys, a trend that can directly be traced back to when he began to stray from the straightforward horror formula that had made him famous. For instance, the first print run for Lisey’s Story was 1.1 million copies, while the combined print run for Desperation and The Regulators was 3 million. Also, the bookselling business, and overall readership numbers, have dramatically changed since he first published Carrie.

“The bottom line is always sales,” he said. “Grisham outsells me four to one, but it’s not a big deal to me anymore. I look at the New York Times bestseller list and ask, ‘Do I really want to bust my ass to be on this list with Danielle Steel and David Baldacci and the born-again books?’ ”

Though he has long regretted his 1985 statement “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” he no longer feels he has to defend himself against it. “I’m still paying for that remark,” he admitted. “What I meant by it is that I’m tasty and I go down smooth, but I don’t think that a steady diet of Stephen King would make anybody a healthy human being.”

“He glories in popular culture and popular literature,” said George MacLeod. “It’s just the basic dynamic of who he is, and I don’t think he’s ever going to change.”

After more than thirty-five years since his first book was published, a wide-ranging oeuvre, and the admission that if he couldn’t write, he’d die, it would be reasonable to assume that Stephen King has gotten the writing part of his life down to a science, that it’s streamlined. But he says that through the years it hasn’t gotten any easier, he just knows how to push the right buttons so the work will flow. While he also adds that it hasn’t got any harder, he’s discovered that he needs to continue to push off into directions that are unfamiliar to him.

He admits that his Entertainment Weekly column has gotten more difficult to write as time passes: “I want it to be good, but at the same time I want it to feel casual and off-the-cuff, and that’s not easy to achieve all the time.”

Steve said, “It’s grow or die. If you’re only going to get to go to the dance once, you ought to do more than just the box-step waltz.” With that, he and John Mellencamp are putting the finishing touches on their collaborative musical called The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and testing it out through readings and workshops before bringing it on the road and ultimately to Broadway.

Mellencamp initially approached Steve with the idea to collaborate on a musical set in the 1950s based on a true story about two brothers in love with the same girl. One brother accidentally shoots and kills the other, and the girl and the remaining brother bring him to the hospital. They’re speeding, and on the way to the hospital they drive into a tree and are both killed. Mellencamp offered to write the music if Steve would write the play. He loved the idea and, true to form, sat down and cranked out a sixty-seven-page treatment.

“In a way, John came to me at the right time,” Steve said. “He’s been doing what he does for a long time, and I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. He’s tried to keep the music fresh and try different things and formats.”

The two clicked immediately when they started working together and got along famously. “I love Steve, he’s nothing like everyone thinks he is,” said Mellencamp, “and we really have a lot in common. He lives in the middle of nowhere, I live in the middle of nowhere. He’s not comfortable being around a lot of people and neither am I. We’re kinda antisocial guys, and we’re big mouths too.”

While Steve continued to expand his horizons, he still feared to tread in a few places. For instance, the idea of directing another movie still occasionally crossed his mind: “I’d never say never, and I think it would be great to direct a movie when I wasn’t drunk out of my mind and see what came out. But I’m not crazy enough to do it again.”

He’s long said he writes about the things that scare him most, such as rats and airplanes, but he hasn’t yet managed to work up the courage to cover one subject in particular.

“I want to write about spiders because it’s the one theme that cuts right across and scares just about everybody,” he said. “To me spiders are just about the most horrible, awful things that I can think about.”

Today, work is his sole drug, and in one way it’s taken up the slack in the vacuum of his drug-free life: when he’s not writing, his brain and body go into withdrawal.

He still smokes cigarettes, though he’s down to only three a day. He kicked alcohol, cocaine, powerful prescription painkillers, and almost every mind-altering substance under the sun.

“I’m not as angry as I used to be because I’m not twenty-five anymore,” he said. “I’m sixty, and that’ll kick your ass every time.”

Both his charitable organizations, the Haven Foundation and the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, are going strong. “Steve believes religiously in tithing, and I don’t,” said Tabby. “I just believe you can’t take it with you, so we try to unload as much as we can. We’re happy to do it and we wish we could do more. There’s the feeling that it’s the teaspoon against the sea.”

“Give away a dime for every dollar you make, because if you don’t give it, the government’s just going to take it,” Steve said. “If you think you can’t afford it, just look at the taxes you pay on every gallon of gas you buy.”

“Steve is coming to the end of what has been an extraordinary career,” said Tony Magistrale. “He’s got money, he’s got popular acclaim, the only thing he doesn’t have is for people to take him seriously and recognize that this is not a hack writer.”

But even that has been changing in the years since the New Yorker published his first story. One senses that he feels a bit torn about the respect. “People ask me when I am going to write something serious, but questions like that always hurts,” he said. “They don’t understand it’s like walking up to somebody and asking how it feels to be a nigger. My answer is that I’m as serious as I can be every time I sit down at a typewriter. It took me about twenty years to get over that question and not be kind of ashamed about the books I write. There’ll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck.”

But one thing hasn’t changed: Steve still doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in his life.

“I think we all feel that way,” said Ridley Pearson. “After all, we spend most of our time in a little room typing, and there’s nothing interesting about that. But that’s who he is, he’s not an egocentric kind of guy.”

That is not to say he isn’t competitive, because he’s extremely competitive. “Despite the fact that he’s already had it thirty-six times, Steve still wants that number one spot on the list every time he publishes,” said Pearson. “But he doesn’t think that there’s anything remarkable about that, and he just feels that there are a lot more interesting people around than him.”

He’s a grandfather three times over now; Joe and Leanora have three sons: Ethan, Aiden, and Ryan.

The title for Stephen’s new short-story collection is Just After Sunset, though his original title for the book was Unnatural Acts of Intercourse. The book was published in November 2008.

“The appeal of horror has always been consistent,” he said. “People like to slow down and look at the accident. That’s the bottom line.”

Through the years, he’s been tempted to hide out, to deny who he is when he’s recognized. “The day that I deny my identity, the day that I say that I am not who I am, is the day I quit this business forever,” he said. “Close up shop, turn off the word processor, and never write another word. Because if the price of what you do is a loss of your identity, it’s time to stop.”