Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

4 DESPERATION

One month before his college graduation, Steve was arrested by the Orono, Maine, police in a bizarre incident involving three dozen rubber traffic cones. He’d been drinking heavily at a local bar, and on the way home he’d hit a traffic cone so hard that it had snagged the muffler from the dilapidated Ford station wagon he was driving at the time. Earlier in the day, he had seen that the town highway department was painting new crosswalk marks all over town and had set the cones so motorists and pedestrians would know to watch for the wet paint.

Not Steve. He was so indignant that he had to buy a new muffler for his car that he decided to teach the town a lesson. “With a drunk’s logic, I decided to cruise around town and pick up all the cones,” he remembered. “The following day, I would present them, along with my dead muffler, at the Town Office in a display of righteous anger.”

He’d collected about a hundred cones in the back of his wagon before running out of room. He knew he was far from finished, however, so he went back to his apartment to clear out his car and deposit the cones before returning to the streets to round up the rest of the offenders. He had gathered up a good number on his second run when a cop spotted him and turned on the blue lights. The policeman spotted enough cones in the back of Steve’s car—even on the second cone run—to arrest King for larceny. “Had I been caught with the hundred or so already stashed in my apartment building, perhaps we would have been talking grand larceny,” he said.

A trial date was set for August.

Stephen King graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in the spring of 1970 with a BS in English and a certificate that qualified him to teach at the high school level. A draft board examination conducted immediately after he graduated declared him to be 4-F and unsuitable to be drafted due to his high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums. Undoubtedly, for the first time in his life, instead of looking back at the sadistic doctor of his childhood with revulsion, he may have been just a wee bit thankful.

Even though he was no longer a student, Steve continued to write for the Maine Campus. One of the stories was “Slade,” the story he’d started writing on that odd-size green paper a few months earlier.

Tabby’s first child, Naomi Rachel, was born on June 1, 1970, just after Steve’s graduation but a year before her own. Though he and Tabby were thrilled, they were understandably nervous about how they would be able to support a child when they were having trouble supporting themselves. As he had planned to do all along, Steve applied for a teaching position at Hampden Academy, and when he found no openings, he applied at a few other high schools in the area, only to be told the same news.

He had to make some money and didn’t want to return to work at Worumbo Mills, so he got a job pumping gas at a service station in Brewer. The working conditions were intended to keep the attendants on their toes. If a customer filled up his or her tank, Steve had to morph into salesman mode.

“With a fill-up you got your choice of The Glass—an ugly but durable diner-style water tumbler—or The Bread, an extralong loaf of spongy white,” he said. “If we forgot to ask if we could check your oil, you got your fill-up free. If we forgot to say thank you, same deal. And guess who would have to pay for the free fill-up? That’s right, the forgetful pump jockey.”

After footing the bill for several customers’ free fill-ups, Steve learned his lesson, even though the job was incredibly boring. In August, his trial came up for cone theft, and he took the day off from work to go to court. But he didn’t want his boss to think she had hired a miscreant, so he said he needed the day off to attend the funeral of one of Tabby’s relatives.

He headed to Bangor District Court, defended himself without a lawyer, and was promptly found guilty. The judge fined him a hundred bucks, but he’d recently sold a horror story to Adam called “The Float” about four college students who swim out to a raft in the middle of a lake one fall day only to encounter a creature beneath the murky water, so he used the check to pay the fine. If the judge only knew where the money had come from . . .

The next day when he showed up for work at the gas station, he was fired for lying about the reason for his absence the day before. One of the boss’s relatives had followed Steve in the court docket and told his aunt that her employee had been in court the same day.

He needed to find another job immediately, so he applied at several different places and was offered a job that paid $1.60 an hour at the New Franklin Laundry, which handled laundry from commercial establishments and businesses.

He thought long and hard before accepting it. After all, at one point his mother had worked in a laundry, and the last thing he wanted was to replicate his mother’s life, something she would wholeheartedly agree with.

Despite his college degree, he was well on his way down Ruth’s depressing path: supporting a wife and a newborn created a lot of stress for Steve. Although he knew in his heart the easy way out would have been to replicate his father’s life, to excuse himself after dinner one night to go buy a pack of cigarettes and then put his head down, keep walking, and never look back, he knew he could never go down that path.

Besides, he had made contact with an editor in New York who liked his work and who thought he had a future as a novelist.

Since graduating from college, Steve had been working on a novel he called Getting It On, the story of a high school student who kills two of his teachers and holds his entire algebra class hostage. He finished it over the summer and thought it was as good—or better—than a lot of the paperback novels he was reading at the time and decided to send it to a publisher. He’d recently read a novel called Parallax View by Loren Singer that he admired. He saw similarities between his own novel and Singer’s, which was published by Doubleday, so he packaged his up and addressed it to the “Editor of Parallax View” at Doubleday in New York. Unbeknownst to Steve, that editor had since departed the house, so his manuscript landed on the desk of a fiction editor named Bill Thompson.

Thompson wrote back to say that he liked Steve’s novel but that it needed some work, spelling out the changes he wanted the young author to make. Excited beyond belief, Steve made the changes and sent the revised manuscript back to Thompson. After a few months, the manuscript came back with a note that the other editors on staff wanted to see a few more changes. Steve fixed the story for the second time and sent the manuscript back.

Thompson sent it back a third time, apologetically asking for yet more changes that were this time requested by the editorial board. Steve hesitated, but he figured this was what publishing was like, so he dutifully followed the board’s suggestions and returned the manuscript.

When the thick package came back a fourth time with the Doubleday return address, Steve’s spirits sagged. He ripped open the envelope to discover that after all of his hard work and despite doing everything the editors had asked for, Getting It On was rejected.

“It was a painful blow for me,” he later wrote, “because I had been allowed to entertain some degree of hope for an extraordinarily long time.”

He licked his wounds for a short time before starting on the next project. After all, Thompson liked his work and told him he would have accepted Getting It On long ago if the decision were solely up to him. Plus, Steve didn’t feel totally dejected, as he had learned a lot about the editorial process and the nitpicky things that some editors preferred and others detested. Later on, Steve would find out that Bill had actually sent the novel to a few editors he knew at other publishing houses in hopes of placing it elsewhere, something he could have been fired for if the top brass found out.

Bill had asked Steve to keep him in mind for other novels he might be working on, and so Steve took the next novel in the stack and sent it along. The Long Walk was about a group of a hundred boys who participate in a yearly punishing walk with myriad rules—no breaks are allowed, walking speed must not drop below four miles an hour—that lasts until only one walker remains. Again, the same pattern commenced: Bill requested a few changes, then the other editors wanted to get their two cents in, followed by the editorial board, which finally turned thumbs-down on the project.

All this was happening while Steve was working full-time at the laundry and writing short stories for the men’s magazines, where his track record was better than with Doubleday.

Steve had made his first sale to Cavalier over the summer, and “Graveyard Shift” was published in the October 1970 issue. The story was about giant rats in an old factory basement and the men who were sent in to clean out the basement. He’d based it on the stories he’d heard from the July Fourth cleanup crew at Worumbo Mills. Maurice DeWalt was the editor in charge of screening over-the-transom short fiction at Cavalier, a hip alternative to Playboy that began publishing in the late sixties. Along with contemporary articles and fiction, the primary appeal of the magazine was the photos of sparsely clad female models.

One day DeWalt called his main editor, Nye Willden, to tell him that he had just read an amazing story by a writer named Stephen King. “But,” said Willden, “he also told me that it had little or no relevance to the kind of stories we published at the magazine. I told him to bring it over anyway, and when I read it, it truly gave me chills.”

He wrote to Steve to accept the story and said he’d pay a hundred bucks. Steve wrote back immediately to accept the offer and enclosed a few more stories for Willden’s consideration.

Of course, it was a skin magazine, but Steve knew he had to pay his dues, and he was still optimistic about his future. He continued voraciously reading anything he could get his hands on, the more popular the genre and the trashier the cover art, the better. But occasionally he’d be waylaid when he picked up a book at the library where the covers weren’t anywhere in sight. “I’d open it up and in the front I would see something like ‘The author would like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for the money to write this book,’ and I’d think, ‘You fucking shithead, where do you get off taking that money so you can sit on your ass in some cabin in New Hampshire while I’m trying to write a book at night and I’ve got bleach burns all over my hands? Who the fuck are you?’

“Steam would come out of my ears, I was so mad and jealous of these guys,” Steve said. “And I would think it was all because they would all sit around and sniff each other’s underwear in the literary sense. Some English professor says to his grad student, ‘You ought to go out and read some Nathaniel Hawthorne,’ and the kid comes back and says, ‘Gee, chief, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great. Will you sign my application for the Guggenheim scholarship?’ It used to make me crazy.”

Back on the home front, Steve and Tabby planned to get married, but she had one condition: he get a better job than working at the laundry. So he promised to apply for more teaching jobs in the spring.

“I married her for her body, though she said I married her for her typewriter,” he later said. Indeed, her Olivetti was a vast improvement over the ancient Underwood that he’d been banging away on since the late fifties. But the typewriter was a nice added attraction. “Hers had a rather square typeface, a Nazi-salute kind of typeface.”

Steve and Tabby were married on January 2, 1971, in Old Town, where Tabby grew up. Steve paid $15.95 for two matching wedding rings from Day’s Jewelers in Bangor. The ceremony was at the Catholic church—Tabby’s religion—while the reception was held at the Methodist church, the denomination of Steve’s youth.

Though Steve had looked for other jobs, they were scarce so he was still working at the laundry at the time of their wedding. They specifically set the date so there would be no conflict with Steve’s schedule at the New Franklin Laundry. “We got married on a Saturday because the place was closed on Saturday afternoons,” he said. “Everyone wished me well, but I still was docked for not being in that Saturday evening.”

Tabby graduated from the University of Maine in June 1971 with a degree in history. It had been a long, hard slog, as she had continued to attend classes while pregnant, and then while dealing with a newborn.

Once she graduated from college, she encountered the same problems that Steve did: she couldn’t find a job that fit her qualifications, and for the rest she was vastly overqualified. She applied for a job at Dunkin’ Donuts. At first the manager didn’t want to hire her because of her bachelor’s degree, but he eventually took her on.

In time, Steve and Tabby viewed the smell of doughnuts the same way they viewed lobster. “It was a nice aroma at first, you know, all fresh and sugary,” said Steve, “but it got pretty goddamned cloying after a while. I haven’t been able to look a doughnut in the face ever since.”

Tabby only intended to work as long as it took them to get caught up on the bills. “As soon as we were paid up, I’d stop working because otherwise it was Steve working the day shift, me working the night, not seeing Naomi, not seeing each other, it wasn’t good,” she said.

“I think that my wife and I had a lot of traditional values from the start,” Steve said. “We were old fogyish by the standards of a lot of our friends. We had our kids, and we were raising them in this traditional family home life.”

King realized that his dream of becoming a full-time writer wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so when a teaching position opened up at Hampden Academy—the school where he had student-taught in his senior year of college—starting in the fall of 1971, he accepted the job at a starting salary of $6,400, a step up from the job at the laundry.

At the time, Tabby, Steve, and Naomi were living in a rented trailer off Route 2 in Hermon, about seven miles from the school. Steve commuted in a 1965 Buick Special. Before he turned the key in the morning, he crossed his fingers that the car would start; the car was held together with little more than chicken wire and duct tape.

As a high school English teacher, he was finally putting his college education to good use, though he quickly discovered that teaching wasn’t what he had expected. “I thought by teaching school I was insuring myself a middle-class life, I didn’t think it meant poverty,” he said. “Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your ears, draining all the juice out of you. You come home, you have papers to correct, and you don’t feel like writing. We were planning to have a car, we were supposed to have a real life, and we were worse off than when I was in the laundry.”

He tempered the frustrations of the job by watching how the students acted. He came away with a lot of stories and ideas from studying them and by tormenting them in class, albeit always in a fun way.

He occasionally threatened students who offered little during a class discussion with a novel punishment. “When I was a student teacher, my supervisor had a surefire cure for the Class of the Living Dead,” he said to his students.” ‘Does anyone have any idea why Willy Loman’s depression seems so deep in Death of a Salesman?’ she’d ask. ‘If no one answers in fifteen seconds, I’ll take off a shoe. If no one answers in thirty seconds, I’ll take off another shoe.’ And so on. By the time she began to unzip her dress, someone usually came up with an opinion on Willy Loman’s depression.”

In between teaching, correcting papers, and spending time with Tabby and his daughter, Steve continued to summon up the time and focus to crank away at a couple of novels, but discovered that writing short stories was more lucrative and certain, at least in the short run. He was still in touch with Bill Thompson at Doubleday, but after extensively revising two novels that were still rejected, he decided to concentrate on writing short stories for the men’s magazines, which he could crank out in a few hours and sell for at least a couple of hundred dollars.

Besides Cavalier and Adam, he also wrote for magazines with the titles Dude, Gent, Juggs, Swank, and Gallery. When he told his mother that he was selling his stories regularly, she was thrilled and understandably wanted to see them in print. Even though the stories were mysteries and not the pornography that appeared elsewhere in the magazines, he still didn’t want her to know which magazines they had appeared in. So Tabby would make copies of the printed stories but first block out the ads for X-rated films, lotions, and sex toys that filled the margins of the pages where his stories appeared.

In fact, the editors thought so highly of his work that they asked him to try writing some of the porn stories; after all, they paid better than the horror stories. He made a valiant attempt, but writing about sex just wasn’t in his emotional toolbox. He wrote about fifty pages before giving up. “The words were there, but I couldn’t handle it. It was so weird, I just collapsed laughing,” he said. “I got as far as twins having sex in a birdbath.”

He said that it wasn’t due to being uncomfortable with sex, but rather from a discomfort in writing about sex outside of a monogamous relationship. “Without such strong relationships to build on, it’s tough to create sexual scenes that have credibility and impact or advance the plot, and I’d just be dragging sex in arbitrarily and perfunctorily,” he said. “You know, like it’s been two chapters without a fuck scene, so I better slap one together.”

Steve’s decision to concentrate on writing short fiction was right on the mark. In 1972, Cavalier published four of his stories: “Suffer the Little Children,” “The Fifth Quarter,” “Battleground,” and “The Mangler.” It was sure money and regular bylines, and once Nye Willden had told him that readers were actually starting to ask for his stories, Steve was thrilled. He hadn’t completely abandoned his dream of writing a novel that a publisher would want to buy, and he still occasionally corresponded with Bill Thompson, but Steve had nothing to send to him, and he was gun-shy after his extensive revisions were in vain.

Steve had written “The Fifth Quarter,” about a common criminal who wants to avenge the death of a friend during a botched robbery, under the pseudonym of John Swithen. He chose another name because this story was different from the others he’d written for the magazine. It was more a hard-boiled crime story than a supernatural horror story, and he used the pulp writers from the fifties as his model. “They used a lot of different names back then because they poured that stuff out,” he explained. “This was my time to pour the stuff out too, so I used the John Swithen name, but I never used it again because I didn’t really like it.”

When school let out for the summer, Steve returned to working full-time at the New Franklin Laundry, and though it was a hot, thankless, exhausting job, it had an upside. As was the case when he worked in the Worumbo Mills right after high school, the laundry environment and its workers would occasionally offer up an idea for a story.

At the laundry, one of King’s coworkers was missing his hands and forearms and had to wear prosthetic devices with a hook on the end. He’d been working there for almost three decades and had one day been working on the ironing and folding machine. The employees had nicknamed the machine the Mangler, because that’s what happened if anyone got too close. On this unfortunate day, the guy’s tie was accidentally pulled into the machine. He went to pull it out and his left hand was sucked into the machine. Instinctively he tried to pull his arm with his other hand and that got pulled in as well.

When Steve worked there in the early seventies, the guy with the hooks introduced himself to new employees by first running hot and cold water over the hooks and then sneaking up on an unsuspecting coworker and setting the hooks on the back of his neck. After Steve had observed this prank more than a few times and been an unwilling participant on the business end of the hooks himself, he thought it would make a good story. “The Mangler” was the result.

One day in the summer of 1972, one of Steve’s friends, Flip Thompson, stopped by the Kings’ trailer in Hermon for a visit. He read some of the stories Steve was writing and some of the published ones from the men’s magazines and started to chew him out. In the early seventies, women’s liberation was in full swing, and any enlightened man who expected to win over the modern woman was supposed to be sensitive to women’s issues.

Flip asked why Steve continued to write this macho crap for the titty magazines.

“Because the stories don’t sell too well to Cosmopolitan” was Steve’s retort.

Flip accused Steve of not having any feminine sensibility at all, and Steve replied that he could write with that in mind if he wanted to, but that’s not what Cavalier and the other magazines buying his stories were looking for.

“If you’re a writer and a realist about what you’re doing, you can do nearly anything you want,” Flip countered. “In fact, the more of a pragmatist and carpetbagger you are, the better you can do it.”

He bet Steve ten bucks that he couldn’t write a story from a woman’s point of view, and they shook on it. Steve had been kicking around an idea that he thought might work for Cavalier, about an outcast girl with supernatural powers who strikes back at the kids who have teased her for most of her life. He thought back to his school days and his outcast classmates: one girl who had only one outfit to wear for the entire school year, and the other who had grown up with a life-size crucifix in her house.

Since he’d gone back to work at the New Franklin Laundry, he’d noticed an older female employee who was a religious fanatic, and he thought he might use her to develop the mother of the outcast girl in the story.

He had the germ of his story. Now he just had to sit down and write it.

He set the first scene in a girls’ locker room. He wrote the first few pages about a high school girl who started menstruating while she was in the shower and started screaming because she thought she was bleeding to death. She didn’t know the facts of life because her ultrareligious parents didn’t believe in discussing sex with their children.

Her classmates responded by throwing tampons at her, and that’s when he ran into a brick wall. How did the girls get all those tampons? Weren’t they in coin-operated machines? He didn’t know. After all, he’d only been in a girls’ locker room once before when he worked alongside his brother, David, at his a part-time summer job as a janitor at Brunswick High School.

So he asked Tabby about the coin-op machines. She laughed and told him they were free.

“It was a tough story,” he said. “It was about girls and it was about girls’ locker rooms and it was about menstruation, a lot of things that I didn’t know anything about. The iceberg was a lot bigger. It was women! It was girls! Women are bad enough! Girls are even more mysterious.”

He continued to slog away on the story, but after he’d written fifteen single-spaced pages, he gave up and tossed it in the trash. Not only was he having problems with the female part of the story—maybe Flip was right after all—but the story also couldn’t be contained in only three thousand words, the limit of his stories for Cavalier. He’d only sold one story to the magazine that was longer.

“A short story is like a stick of dynamite with a tiny fuse,” he explained. “You light it and that’s the end. It suddenly occurred to me that I wanted a longer fuse. I wanted the reader to see that this girl was really being put upon, that what she did was not really evil and not even revenge, but it was the way you strike out at somebody when you’re badly hurt.”

After he threw away the pages, he needed to relax. Back then, Steve’s idea of heaven—besides spending all day at the typewriter—was taking a bath while he smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, and listened to a Red Sox game on the transistor radio propped up on the sink. That was how Tabby found him when she entered the bathroom, snapped off the radio, and wagged the crumpled pages in his face. “You ought to go on with this,” she said, “it’s good.”

“But I don’t know anything about girls,” he protested.

“I’ll help you.”

Perhaps Flip was right, but he didn’t realize Steve had another source to help him understand the female psyche.

Tabby also told him that the story deserved more than three thousand words, and that it could be a full-fledged novel. Back in college, Steve was attracted to Tabby partly because she was his ideal first reader. “She’s an avid reader and a terrific critic,” he said. “She’ll say, ‘This part doesn’t work,’ she’ll say why, and then she’ll suggest a few different ways to fix it.”

So he uncrumpled the pages and returned to the story. He got stuck when he got to the prom scene once Carrie had unleashed her telekinesis. “I really wanted to reap destruction on these people but couldn’t think of how it was going to happen,” he said. “Tabby suggested using the amplifiers and electrical equipment from the rock band.”

He also drew on his own experience teaching high school students. “There’s a little bit of Carrie White in me,” he admitted. “I’ve seen high school society from two perspectives, as has any high school teacher. You see it once from the classroom where the rubber bands fly around, and you see it again from behind the desk.”

He followed Tabby’s advice, expanded the story, and in only three months he wrote what turned out to be a seventy-thousand-word manuscript. He was encouraged by his progress and how the novel had turned out, but not all was well. Not only did he have to work in the laundry Monday through Friday, handling restaurant tablecloths loaded with bits of lobster and clam and bloody bed linens from hospitals, infested with maggots, but the family had also moved around a lot. Since Naomi was born, the family had lived in two apartments in Bangor—one on Pond Street and another on Grove Street—and in a trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon.

Though Steve enjoyed teaching and looked forward to returning to the classroom in September, he was beginning to have nightmares that he’d get stuck as an English teacher with a bunch of manuscripts tucked away in his desk drawer or hall closet. “There were times when I was writing Carrie when I felt depressed and really down,” he said.

After he finished the manuscript, he thought about sending it to Bill Thompson, but refrained. After all, Doubleday had already rejected two of Steve’s novels, why should this one be any different? So he stuck it in a drawer instead and started to think about an idea for his next novel.

In the freshman English classes he taught at Hampden Academy, Steve was teaching Dracula along with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Of course, he loved talking about vampires with his students, but he also explored Wilder’s descriptions of how people interact with each other in a small town and how a town doesn’t usually change. Being from a small town, Steve could readily associate with the characters.

After a long day in the classroom, but before he retreated to the laundry room that served as his office in the trailer, he discussed the two works with Tabby at dinner.

“Can you imagine if Dracula came to Hermon?” she asked.

Steve’s brain shifted into overdrive and he came up with the idea for a novel about a small Maine town that is invaded by vampires with the working title Second Coming.

He loved writing the novels, but again knew that the short fiction he sold to the men’s magazines was his bread and butter. And so he continued to send stories to Nye Willden. And at the time, he needed more sure things, because Tabby was pregnant again. The Kings’ second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born on June 4, 1972.

Tabby named him after Joe Hillstrom, better known as Joe Hill, a union organizer and songwriter from the early twentieth century. Hill was executed in 1915 for a murder he may or may not have committed and inspired several writers to pen songs and poems about his life. One of the poems, written by poet Alfred Hayes in 1930, was turned into the song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Depression-era songwriter Earl Robinson, which sixties icon Joan Baez then sang at Woodstock.

Steve returned to Hampden Academy to teach in the fall of 1972. He was a good teacher, but others often noticed that his attention was elsewhere.

“King was a promising teacher,” said Robert Rowe, the principal at Hampden. “It was hard to catch him without a book under his arm, and if he had any spare time, he’d be reading a book. But he always took the time to write.”

Brenda Willey had King as a teacher at Hampden. “He was a good teacher who had seven classes a day and a study hall,” she said. “He told us that he liked to write, and I think he wanted us to write. He was fun and had a pretty good sense of humor.”

During the fall he taught all day, came home and marked papers, then prepared lessons before retiring to the trailer’s laundry room to write. For at least several hours a night he sat in the cramped space banging out stories.

One day, Steve and Tabby gathered up the kids and headed down to Durham to visit his family. Naomi had a history of developing ear infections, and on the drive back north, she was showing clear signs of getting sick, howling and crying the entire time. From past experience, Steve knew they needed amoxicillin—what they called the pink stuff—but it was expensive, and on that day they were flat broke. Steve felt his rage and helplessness float up into his throat like bile.

When they got back to Hermon, Tabby unloaded the car and gathered up the kids while Steve checked the mailbox to find a letter and a check for $500 for a story he’d mailed off to Cavalier a few weeks earlier. When Tabby reached the door with two squawling kids, he told her not to worry, that they could get the pink stuff.

“There were other, much bigger checks that came along later,” he said years later, “but that was the best. To be able to say to my wife, ‘We can take care of this. And the reason we can take care of it is because we wrote our way out.’ ”

Despite the occasional checks that seemed to fall from the sky like pennies from heaven, there was never enough money for the first few years of their married life. Every few months, they’d call the phone company to disconnect the phone because they just didn’t have enough money left at the end of each month to pay the bill. He knew that many spouses wouldn’t be as understanding as Tabby. “It was a time when she might have been expected to say, ‘Why don’t you quit spending three hours a night in the laundry room, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer we can’t afford? Why don’t you get an actual job?’ ”

Things were so bad that if she’d asked him to take on a second job at night, he would have done it. At the time, the prospect of a part-time job was a real possibility for Steve. The debate club at Hampden needed a new faculty adviser, and Steve’s name was offered as a candidate. The job paid $300 over the school year, a good chunk of money that would definitely help—but it would require him to work evenings.

When he told Tabby about the debate club adviser job, she asked him if the additional work would leave him time to write, and he replied that he would have a lot less.

“Well then,” she said, “you can’t take it.”

He was grateful for his wife’s blessing, but Steve still felt as if he were walking a tightrope. The stress from working a job he didn’t like and never having enough money to pay the bills was building. The only two things that helped were writing and, increasingly, drinking.

“I started drinking far too much and frittering money away on poker and bumper pool. You know the scene: it’s Friday night and you cash your paycheck in the bar and start knocking them down, and before you know what’s happened, you’ve pissed away half the food budget for that week. There was never a time for me when the goal wasn’t to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that always seemed to me like kissing your sister. To this day I can’t imagine why anyone wants to be a social drinker.

“I saw myself at fifty, my hair graying, my jowls thickening, a network of whiskey-ruptured capillaries spiderwebbing across my nose—drinker’s tattoos, we call them in Maine—with a dusty trunkful of unpublished novels rotting in the basement, teaching high school English for the rest of my life and getting off what few literary rocks I had left by advising the student newspaper or maybe by teaching a creative-writing course.”

He obviously loved his family. “On the one hand, I wanted nothing more than to provide for them and protect them, but at the same time, I was also experiencing a range of nasty emotions from resentment to anger to occasional outright hate. It was a vicious circle: the more miserable and inadequate I felt about what I saw as my failure as a writer, the more I’d try to escape into the bottle, which would only exacerbate the domestic stress and make me even more depressed. Tabby was steamed about the booze, of course, but she told me she understood.”

“I was more angry at the five bucks that went out every week for the carton of cigarettes than I was anything else,” she said. “It was the literal burning of money that drove me nuts.”

“The only thing that kept our heads above water were these stories for men’s magazines,” he admitted. “I’ve autographed a few of those over the years, and it always gives me a cold shudder to think about where I was when I wrote those stories. My underwear had holes in it in those days.”

One day, Steve came home from work and Tabby was standing at the door with her hand out. “Give me your wallet,” she said. He handed it over and she emptied the wallet of all the credit cards, the gas cards, the store cards. Then she took an enormous pair of scissors and cut them in half.

“But we’re paying our bills,” Steve protested.

She said, “No, we’re paying the interest. We can’t afford to anymore, we’ve got to pay as we go.”

Tabitha listened to a fair amount of her husband’s pissing and moaning and finally told him it was time to stop. “She said to save my self-pity and turn my energy to the typewriter,” he said. “I did because she was right and my anger played much better when channeled into about a dozen stories.”

George MacLeod, his old college roommate, would occasionally visit when Steve and Tabby were living in Bangor. “It was a crap apartment, the kids would be running all over the place, and there would be Steve over in the corner typing away,” MacLeod said. “The noise just didn’t bother him. He could be in the middle of a crowded room and throw a cloak over himself and disappear into his safe cocoon world of fiction and connect with the story line and the characters. Mentally, his fingers were on the keyboard all the time.”

Steve was still focused on cranking out short stories for the men’s magazines since they were almost certain to bring in a couple of hundred bucks or more, though of course he still thought about his novels, those he had already written, those in progress, and those for which ideas were still swimming around in his mind. Though he and Bill Thompson at Doubleday still kept in touch, it had been months since the editor had heard from him, so Bill decided to contact Steve. He asked why Steve hadn’t sent him anything lately, adding that he didn’t want to discover that Steve had signed up with another publishing house.

Figuring he had nothing to lose, Steve dug the manuscript for Carrie out of the drawer and sent it to Bill, though Steve held out little hope that this book would turn the tide. Indeed, he thought that of all of his novels, Carrie was the least marketable.

“As I worked on it, I kept saying to myself this is all very fine, but nobody is going to want to read a make-believe story about this little girl in a Maine town,” he said. “It’s downbeat, it’s depressing, and it’s fantasy.”

When Thompson read it, however, he liked it and thought that this time he could really sell it. But as before, it needed some tweaking. Though he was reluctant to ask Steve for another rewrite, he knew this one had the best chance of all to fly. He promised his unpublished author that if he made the changes, he would do everything in his power to get the book published.

After all, ghost stories and horror were hot. The Exorcist was published in hardcover in June 1971 with the hotly anticipated movie based on the book due out in December of 1973, and The Other, a movie about identical twin brothers, one good and one evil, had come out in 1972 to top box office. And Rosemary’s Baby was still being talked about since first appearing on movie screens in 1968. Publishers and movie producers were clamoring for the next big thing in horror, and Bill Thompson had an inkling that Carrie would strike gold. The novels Steve had previously sent to Bill didn’t fall into the category of horror. Carrie did.

Despite his doubts, Steve dutifully revised the manuscript and sent it back to Bill within a few weeks and promptly forgot about it to return to writing a few stories he could send to Nye Willden at Cavalier for some quick cash. He also resumed work on Second Coming, which he had renamed Salem’s Lot in the meantime.

On this cold, gray late-winter day in March of 1973, Steve’s foul mood reflected the weather. He was back in the classroom, teaching reluctant students, and the Kings were once again without a phone.

An announcement came over the PA system, telling Steve that his wife was on the phone—she used a neighbor’s phone if there was an emergency—and could he please come to the office. He rushed over with two thoughts in his head: either one of the kids was really sick or Doubleday wanted to buy Carrie.

When he picked up the phone, Tabby told him that Bill Thompson had sent a telegram to say the book would be published and offering an advance of $2,500. The couple were ecstatic.

Bill later told Steve that not only did he love the novel, but once it started to make the rounds of the office, it all but caught fire, specifically because of the opening scene in which Carrie gets her period for the first time in the locker room and is pelted with tampons. Female editors made copies of the manuscript and handed them out to secretaries at the company, who then snuck them to friends.

The manuscript required little in the way of changes or revision, but Steve wanted to make one crucial change. When he wrote Carrie, he set it in Massachusetts, in the towns of Boxford and Andover, because he never imagined it would see print. When Bill accepted it, Steve said he wanted to change the setting to Maine.

Once Carrie sold, Steve bought a blue Pinto, the Kings’ first new car, for just over $2,000 and they moved to a four-room apartment at 14 Sanford Street in Bangor for $90 a month.

Best of all, the stress Steve had felt because he thought he was failing at his primary role as breadwinner of the family had disappeared. “I don’t know what would have happened to my marriage and my sanity if Doubleday didn’t accept Carrie,” he said.

Once they had moved into their new apartment, they ordered another phone. Which turned out to be a good thing.

After Doubleday bought the hardcover rights, Bill Thompson had told Steve that the publisher planned to sell the paperback rights, and that they could expect $5,000 or $10,000 dollars from the sale, which would evenly be split between publisher and author as spelled out in the contract.

Though Steve was tempted to quit his teaching job to write full-time after the hardcover rights sold, he knew he couldn’t afford it. He was resigned to teaching freshman English to sullen teenagers for a third year starting in the fall.

But on Mother’s Day in 1973, all that changed. Tabby had taken the kids to visit her family in Old Town while Steve spent the afternoon in the apartment relishing the time alone to tinker with Salem’s Lot.

The phone rang. Bill Thompson was on the other end, and Steve thought it was an odd thing for him to call on a Sunday. He asked if Steve was sitting down.

“Should I be?”

Thompson then told him that the paperback rights to Carrie had been sold to New American Library.

“For how much?”

“Four hundred thousand.”

Steve thought he’d said $40,000, which was still a hell lot more money than he’d ever seen before.

“Forty thousand is great!”

That’s when Thompson corrected him. “No, Steve, four hundred thousand. Six figures.”

Half of that—$200,000—would be Steve’s.

Steve hadn’t heeded his editor’s advice to sit down. The phone was attached to the wall in the kitchen, and when the numbers sank in, he suddenly lost all the strength in his legs. “I just kinda slid down the wall until the shirttail came out of my pants and my butt was on the linoleum,” he said. They continued talking for about twenty minutes, but when they hung up, Steve couldn’t remember a word of the conversation except for the $400,000 part.

He couldn’t wait for Tabby to get home. He paced back and forth across the kitchen floor for a while until he suddenly decided he wanted to buy Tabby a present. Of course, a litany of worries immediately began to overwhelm his overactive imagination.

“As I crossed the street, I thought that was the time when a drunk would come along in a car and he would kill me, and things would be put back in perspective,” he said. He made a beeline to LaVerdiere’s drugstore a couple of blocks away and spent $29 on a hairdryer for his wife, who had stuck by his side and believed in his writing even when he didn’t. “I scuttled across those streets, looking both ways.”

When she came home with the kids a few hours later, Steve handed her the hairdryer with a big grin on his face. She got angry, saying they couldn’t afford it. He told her they could and then explained why. Then they both started crying.

Thompson later told Steve that NAL’s first offer for the paperback rights was $200,000, which caught everyone at Doubleday off guard. According to Thompson, Bob Bankford, the publisher’s subsidiary rights manager in charge of selling paperback rights, was a great poker player, and when NAL’s initial offer came in, he hesitated, then drawled that they were expecting a bit more. The publisher then raised the offer.

The money bought Steve his freedom. Now he could definitely quit teaching and do what he was born to do: write novels.

Best of all, Bill Thompson was now clamoring for Steve’s next novel. He turned his full attention to finishing Salem’s Lot.

Steve and Tabby could hardly believe their luck. “It was like someone opened a prison door,” he said. “Our lives changed so quickly that for more than a year afterward, we walked around with big, sappy grins on our faces, barely daring to believe that we were out of that trap for good.”

Before the paperback rights sold, Steve had only bought one hardcover book in his life: William Manchester’s Death of a President, which he bought as a gift. Now he could buy hardcovers with a vengeance, as many as he wanted.

At the time, his mother was working at Pineland Training Center, a home for the mentally retarded in New Gloucester, Maine, twenty miles north of Portland. “She served meals, cleaned up shit, and wore a green uniform,” said Steve. He went to Pineland to tell her about the paperback sale. “She was pulling a truck of dishes,” he remembered. “She looked so strung out; she’d lost forty pounds and was dying of cancer but it hadn’t even been diagnosed. I said, ‘Mom, you’re done,’ and that was her last day working. I didn’t have the paperback money yet, but I borrowed from a bank and she went to live with my brother in Mexico, Maine.”

News of such a large paperback sale for a novel by a first-time author meant that it didn’t take long for Hollywood to come sniffing around. The movie rights sold to Twentieth Century–Fox, which were then passed to United Artists.

Despite the sudden influx of more money than he’d ever hoped to see in his lifetime, Steve discovered it was difficult to spend the money. Tabby said he was being ridiculous; after all those years of poverty, he was a success and he should spend some of it and have some fun with it.

“Tabby and I argued more about money after Carrie than we ever had before,” he said. “She wanted to get a house and I would say no, I don’t feel secure. She got very exasperated with me.”

After years of scraping by, and after so many false starts with revised novels that didn’t sell, he didn’t entirely trust what was happening. “My idea was the success would never happen again, so I should trickle the money out,” he said. “Maybe the kids would be eating Cheerios and peanut butter for dinner, but that’s okay, let ’em! I’ll be writing.”

With only a month left to teach, he finished out the school year at Hampden, and after spending the first few years of married life living in and around Bangor, he and Tabby decided to move to southern Maine, so they could be closer to Steve’s mother. They rented a house on Sebago Lake in North Windham, about sixteen miles northwest of Portland and 130 miles from Bangor, and moved at the end of the summer of 1973.

Steve called on his college buddy George MacLeod to help out, who was surprised to learn that Steve literally didn’t know how to move, even though he’d moved from one ramshackle apartment to another several times over.

MacLeod borrowed a friend’s old panel truck, an International Travelall, hooked up a trailer behind it, and loaded up all of Steve’s stuff. MacLeod drove with the Kings loaded into the front, and he couldn’t help thinking he was in a Maine version of The Beverly Hillbillies. “We headed down Interstate 95 and delivered the meager stuff he had into this palatial house in the pouring rain,” said MacLeod. “It was a huge estate and it was totally empty.”

Once they moved in, Steve settled into a routine of writing several hours a day while visiting his mother in between.

He finished writing Salem’s Lot and sent it to Bill Thompson, along with Roadwork, another novel he had written during college about a man who is forced from his home when the city decides to build a new highway running through his house and his workplace, a laundry. When Steve asked his editor which one he wanted to publish first, Bill told him he wouldn’t like the answer. “He said that Roadwork was a more honestly dealt novel, a novelist’s novel, but that he wanted to do Salem’s Lot because he thought it would have greater commercial success,” said Steve. Bill warned that Steve would get stereotyped as a horror writer. “Like Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley? I didn’t care. They did type me as a horror writer, but I’ve been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.”

But first, as usual, Bill asked Steve to make a few changes. “He suggested that I rewrite the book a little bit in the beginning to try and keep the reader in the dark for a certain period of time, and I told him that anybody who reads this sort of thing is going to know that it’s vampires from the first,” said Steve.

His editor politely disagreed. “You’re not writing for an audience of forty thousand people,” he said. “We want to break you out so you’ll appeal to an audience of millions of people, and they don’t read Weird Tales.” Steve made the changes and later agreed that Thompson was on the mark.

He also asked Steve to rewrite one of the scenes where Jimmy Cody, the local doctor, is eaten alive by a horde of rats. “I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companion upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue,” Steve said. “I loved the scene, but Bill made it clear that no way would Doubleday publish something like that, and I came around eventually and impaled poor Jimmy on knives. But, shit, that just wasn’t the same.”

While Steve was writing Salem’s Lot, he visualized Ben Mears as the actor Ben Gazzara, though in his writing he left the physical characteristics deliberately vague. “I don’t usually describe the characters that I write about because I don’t think I have to,” he said. “If they seem like real people to the readers, they’ll put their own faces on them. All I really said about Ben Mears is that his hair was black and sort of greasy. Then somebody told me that Gazzara was too old for the role Steve envisioned for Ben Mears, and I saw him in some gangster picture a while later and thought, by God, he is too old.”

Bill Thompson made an offer for Salem’s Lot before Carrie had even been published and signed Steve to a multibook contract. In the meantime, Ruth’s condition was worsening and she didn’t have much time left. Steve felt cheated. After all his mother had done for him, supporting his writing, going without food so he could have a little pocket money in college, and now she wouldn’t live long enough to see his first published book, though she had seen the galleys for Carrie, which Steve had read to her.

On December 18, 1973, Ruth King died of uterine cancer, and something right out of the books Steve had grown up with happened that night. “The night my mother died of cancer—practically the same minute—my son had a terrible choking fit in his bed at home,” he said. “He was turning blue when Tabby finally forced out the obstruction.” Steve had never had a fear of choking before, but resigned, he added it to the list.