Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

5 RIDING THE BULLET

Carrie was published in April 1974 in hardcover with a cover price of $5.95. Steve was thrilled that his first novel was finally available in bookstores, but his satisfaction was greatly tempered by his mother’s death. Novels on the New York Times bestseller list that month were Jaws, by Peter Benchley, and The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders. But Carrie wasn’t one of them. The book’s first printing was thirty thousand copies, but only thirteen thousand sold.

Though Steve was already a heavy drinker, the depression that set in after his mother’s death caused him to drink even more. He also plunged into his writing: shortly after his mother died, he wrote “The Woman in the Room,” the story of a grown son who helps his terminally ill mother end her life.

Tabby and Steve thought they needed a change of scenery and decided to move to another part of the country, at least temporarily. After all, they could afford to live almost anywhere now. They got a copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas and opened it to a map of the United States. Steve closed his eyes and stabbed his finger on the page; it landed in Colorado.

With the movie rights to Carrie sold and a multibook contract from Doubleday, Steve finally loosened up enough to spend a little bit of his windfall and bought a brand-new red, white, and blue Cadillac convertible. But he felt uncomfortable when he visited his friends back in Durham and instead took a rusty 1964 Dodge Dart for his trips home.

In August 1974, the family climbed into their new Cadillac and drove to Boulder, Colorado. They rented a house at 330 South Forty-second Street, and Steve set out to find ideas for new books and stories.

In Boulder, Steve had a hard time focusing on work. He started one story after another, but nothing clicked. Thinking a few days off might help, he asked a couple of neighbors where he and Tabby could spend a quiet weekend. They recommended the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.

The night before Halloween, Steve and Tabby left Naomi and Joe with a babysitter and headed for Estes Park, about forty miles away. It didn’t take long for Steve’s imagination to go into overdrive. On the way to the hotel, they passed a sign that read ROAD MAY BE CLOSED AFTER OCTOBER. His antenna perked up. When he and Tabby entered the hotel, he noticed that three nuns were leaving, as if the place were about to become godless, and when he and Tabby checked in, they learned it was the last day of the season before the hotel closed for the winter.

As the bellman was showing them to their room, number 217, they passed a fire extinguisher with a long hose coiled up tightly hanging on a wall. Immediately Steve thought, “That could be a snake.”

Further adding to his glee, they discovered they were the only guests in the hotel that night. At dinner, the orchestra played even though they were the sole diners. All the other tables in the restaurant had the chairs turned upside down and placed on top. It was windy and a shutter outside had loosened and banged against the window, a regular thumping rhythm that didn’t let up the whole night.

After dinner, Steve’s excitement continued to build once they returned to their room. “I almost drowned in the bathtub that should have had scratch marks on the side, it was so deep,” he said.

A few weeks before their trip to Estes Park, Steve had been playing around with the idea for a story about a child with ESP at an amusement park. But once he saw all the marvelous props and the spooky setting at the hotel, the idea came to him in a flash, and he changed the story’s location from the park to the Stanley. “By the time I went to bed that night I had the whole book in my mind,” he said. He immediately began writing the story of a little boy with ESP who is acutely sensitive to the evil in the haunted Overlook Hotel and has to deal with his alcoholic father, who wants to kill him.

Admittedly, the money helped ease their lifestyle considerably, but Steve was still surprised at the anger and rage he felt, particularly toward his kids. It especially surfaced while they were living in Colorado; it was the first time he had lived outside his native Maine, and away from familiar territory he felt unsettled. “I felt very hostile to my kids there,” he said. “I wanted to grab them and hit them. Even though I didn’t do it, I felt guilty feelings because of my brutal impulses.”

After he became a father, Steve discovered that when it came to the rule-book on fatherhood, he had to make it up as he went along. The fifties sitcoms Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were his role models: “I thought I’d come in the door at night and yell, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ and the kids would sit around the table and eat their peas and share their interesting little adventures. I wasn’t prepared for the realities of fatherhood.”

Naomi was born when Steve was twenty-two, and Joe came along a couple of years later. Without planning on it, he began to write several books about fatherhood so that he could at least understand it better. “I had feelings of anger about my kids that I never expected,” he admitted.

One day when Joe was three years old, the boy got hold of one of Steve’s manuscripts and thought he’d write like Daddy. So he took his crayons and drew little cartoons all over one of Steve’s novels-in-progress. When Steve saw it, he thought, “The little son of a bitch, I could kill him.”

Steve’s mother’s words echoed in his ears while he worked on the story that would become The Shining. Just as she had told him to say something three times in a row to prevent it from happening, Steve held a hope that if he wrote about something bad—particularly a rage that dwelled deep inside him—he’d never feel compelled to act it out.

“I never wrote anything about children out of a sense of sadism or anger or anything; it was more like, if I write this, it won’t happen, like I’m trying to keep the hex off,” he explained.

But he was surprised that the rage remained, because although sudden financial success had already smoothed over a lot of things, it didn’t necessarily eradicate the demons that had lived within him for most of his life: the shame over his father’s leaving.

He wrote most of The Shining blazingly fast, but when it came time to write one particular scene, he hit a brick wall. Try as he might, he was petrified of writing a scene where a long-dead woman in a bathtub suddenly sits up and heads straight for the boy. “I didn’t want to have to face that unspeakable thing in the tub any more than the boy did,” he said. For several nights before he wrote the scene, he had a nightmare about a nuclear explosion. “The mushroom cloud turned into a huge red bird that was coming for me, but when I finished with the scene, it was gone.”

On the surface, he knew he was writing The Shining to keep his violent urges toward his kids at bay. However, even though he didn’t realize it at the time, he was also writing about his drinking and alcoholism, which by the midseventies had become crucial to his daily life.

“I had written The Shining without realizing that I was writing about myself,” he said. “I’ve never been the most self-analytical person in the world. People often ask me to parse out meaning from my stories, to relate them back to my life. While I’ve never denied that they . . . have some relationship to my life, I’m always puzzled to realize years later that in some ways I was delineating my own problems, and performing a kind of self-psychoanalysis.”

At one point, The Shining became too close for comfort and he took a break from it to start work on another novel that was sparked by the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. “I was convinced that the only way anybody ever could really understand the whole Hearst case was to lie about it,” he said. His working title was The House on Value Street, and as was usual with Steve, the story unwittingly grew when another news item crossed his path: he’d heard about a chemical spill in Utah that killed some livestock and that inspired a Midwestern preacher to spread the word that the world was about to end as a result.

He had already been working on the novel, which would become The Stand, on and off for a couple of years alongside his other projects when he was suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, and it looked like he might not continue. One day he was browsing in a bookstore when he picked up a new book called Survivors, written by Welsh author Terry Nation, who had also written Doctor Who. “It was about a virus decimating the world and the survivors that were left, and I thought, ‘Great, this guy has just written my book,’ ” he said.

He returned to finish writing The Shining, then completed The Stand despite the competing book. “I felt like my blood was really flowing out of my stomach, and if I didn’t finish the book and stanch the flow, I’d just die,” he said.

The family lived in Boulder for about a year before returning home to Maine in the summer of 1975, where they bought their first house for $150,000 on Kansas Road in Bridgton, a town about forty miles from Portland. “We didn’t feel comfortable in Colorado,” Steve said. When he looked back on the books he wrote in Colorado—The Shining and The Stand—he saw that the characters still carried the sensibility of the working-class people that he grew up with. “We were in Colorado, but I really took my Maine with me,” he said. “You carry your place with you wherever you go.”

Salem’s Lot was published in hardcover in October 1975; the paperback rights sold for $500,000. Again, Stephen got half. His first two novels had made him almost half a million dollars, which was phenomenal for a new writer, and there was the promise of more money from the sale of the movie rights. However, Doubleday published only twenty thousand copies of Salem’s Lot, since the thirteen-thousand-copy sell-through on Carrie had not met the publisher’s projections. To help boost sales, just before the book went to the printer the sales department decided to lower the price of the book by a dollar, changing the price on the dust jackets to $7.95 from $8.95. Salem’s Lot did not hit any bestseller lists, but Steve didn’t really care. He was a full-time novelist and no longer had to worry about providing for his family. He was living his dream.

In the winter of 1976, Steve went to a publishing party in New York where he met an agent who primarily worked with fantasy and horror writers. Kirby McCauley, who had recently moved to New York from the Midwest, had read only one of King’s two books when they met, Salem’s Lot, but after chatting with Steve discovered they shared many of the same interests in obscure authors from the 1940s and ‘50s. As they spoke about such authors as Frank Belknap Long and Clifford Simak, McCauley saw out of the corner of his eye that most of the other writers were queuing up to talk with author James Baldwin, who was holding court in a corner of the room. But Steve was happy to stay with McCauley, and he was impressed when the agent mentioned some of his other clients, including Frank Herbert, Piers Anthony, Robert Silverberg, and Peter Straub. When Steve told him he didn’t have an agent, McCauley told Steve to keep him in mind.

“One of the jobs of an agent is to look ahead at what’s down the road so the writer’s career is protected,” he told King. At the time, a long-term career wasn’t even on Steve’s radar, since his sole purpose up to that point was to write as many books and stories as he could churn out. However, Steve filed it away for the future.

Once the family was back in Maine, Steve was just as productive as ever, and he was grateful that the books continued to sell and that readers were clamoring for more of his work. “Money makes you a little saner,” he said. “You don’t have to do things you don’t want to do.”

He bought himself a Wang word processor so he wouldn’t have to retype his manuscripts, which would give him more time to create stories. He gave Tabby’s gray Olivetti typewriter—the machine he wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot on—to Naomi, who was exhibiting an interest in writing stories. As he was beginning to enjoy his success, a few nagging, little health problems started to surface, even though he was just shy of thirty years old.

He took medication for high blood pressure, and he occasionally complained of insomnia. Plus, he began to experience migraine headaches, which he referred to as a “work symptom.” And he was still drinking heavily.

In November, Carrie, the first movie based on one of Steve’s books, was released. Brian De Palma, who had directed a few low-budget thrillers, was the director, and Paul Monash produced the film. The production designer was Jim Fish, who was married to actress Sissy Spacek. She was invited to audition for the roles of Sue Snell and Chris Hargensen, but De Palma thought she’d be better cast as Carrie and asked her to read for the part.

The film was a box-office smash. Carrie was made for less than $2 million dollars but ended up grossing $30 million in the United States alone. And it exposed Steve to an entirely new audience. “Carrie the movie put King on the map in a way that a book just won’t,” said George Beahm, author of several books on King. “It got people who don’t normally go into bookstores through the doors.” Once there, they bought Carrie and Salem’s Lot, and they knew to buy The Shining when it was published two short months later.

Steve loved how Brian De Palma interpreted the book into film. “He handled the material deftly and artistically and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek,” Steve said. “In many ways, the movie is more stylish than my book, which I still think is a gripping read but is impeded by a certain heaviness, a Sturm und Drang quality that’s absent from the film.”

Some things had to be changed in the movie. In the book, as she wandered back home in shock after the prom, Carrie blew up a few gas stations, which sent the entire town into flames. De Palma struck it from the movie because the special effects would cost too much.

More good news followed in January when Sissy Spacek was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Piper Laurie, who played Carrie’s mother, received a nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

The movie sold more of Steve’s books and attracted a larger audience who wanted to know more about his motivations as well as his background. “A question started to appear in their eyes, sort of like, ‘Where are all the bodies buried, Steve?’ ” he recalled. “Or else they’d casually ask me about my childhood and if I was ever beaten or burned with cigarettes. And I’d say, ‘Really, I’m just like you are,’ and they’d step back.”

Whenever interviewers broached the question, he’d crack a joke and then begin his rote explanation: “Basically, all I’m doing is saying things that other people are afraid to say. The job’s not much different than being a comedy writer. What’s the one thing that nobody wants to talk about, the literary equivalent of taking a fork and scraping it across a blackboard, or making somebody bite on a lemon? And when I find those things, generally the reaction from readers or moviegoers is ‘Thank you for saying that, for articulating that thought.’ ”

High sales and increasing name recognition gave Steve the confidence to ask Doubleday to publish books that had been rejected before Carrie was released. Stephen was keen to have Getting It On, the first novel he wrote back in college, published. The story was about a student who takes over a school and holds his classmates hostage, but Doubleday didn’t want to saturate the market with his name.

He had several first drafts of completed novels and others he had written before he had written Carrie. While some writers may have considered these novels to be just apprenticeship books, learning opportunities and unpublishable, Steve wanted them to be given a chance to see the light of day as finished books. Back then, editors and publishers didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by one author, believing that each new book would cut into the sales of the others. But Steve was annoyed with the publishing industry’s attitude of “We do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done.”

So instead of sending it to Doubleday, Steve sent Getting It On to Elaine Koster, his editor at his paperback publisher, New American Library. The single-book credo wasn’t an issue because, from the start, Steve maintained, he wanted the book to be published under a pseudonym, to see if it could find an audience on its own without the growing star attraction of his name.

“I was emphatic about not wanting the book to be publicized,” he said. “I wanted it to go out there and either find an audience or just disappear quietly. The idea was not to just publish a book that I thought was good, but to honestly try to create another name that wouldn’t be associated with my name, like having a Swiss bank account.”

The pen name he originally chose for the book was Guy Pillsbury, the name of his late grandfather. Koster passed the manuscript around to other editors and the marketing department for their opinions, but word soon traveled that King was the author. He was so incensed that he took back the book and decided to make a few changes so the same thing wouldn’t happen again.

First, he changed the title to Rage, then he looked around his office for inspiration for his pen name. He spotted a book by Richard Stark on the shelf—the pseudonym of mystery writer Donald Westlake, whose work Steve greatly admired—and a record by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, one of his favorite bands, was playing on his stereo.

Richard Bachman it would be.

Koster accepted the novel with the caveat that no one at the publisher would know who the real author was.

The Shining, published in January 1977 with a first printing of fifty thousand hardcover copies, was Steve’s first hardback bestseller. He was in a whole new league. Book reviewers from the New York Times to Cosmopolitan lauded King’s ability to hook the reader into one of the first novels to really explore in depth the actions of an abusive parent.

He based the title on a song by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band called “Instant Karma,” with a refrain that went “We all shine on.” But he had to change the title to The Shining after the publisher said that shine was a negative term for African-American.

But it was too scary for others. Because of the book’s visibility and popularity, it was the first of King’s books to be banned from school libraries, most often instigated by parents, and some teachers, for portraying a father as being truly evil. A few school librarians called Steve—this was at a time when he was still answering his own phone—and asked for his opinion.

He replied that it was okay if some parents felt that way, since they’re the ones who paid the taxes for the library, and since the school was legally responsible for the kids during school hours, they were within their rights to remove the book. He then added a caveat: “But I think that every kid in the school should know it’s been banned and should immediately get to the nearest bookstore or public library to find out what it was that their parents didn’t want them to know. Those are the things kids really ought to know, what people don’t want them to know.”

Readers and reviewers criticized the murderous Jack Torrance and questioned why Steve felt compelled to write about such things. He explained his motivation for writing the book by describing the impulses that dwell inside every human being, giving the example of a typical headline from the National Enquirer or the Weekly World News in the late seventies: “Baby Nailed to Wall.” “You could say you never did that to your kids even though you had the impulse a couple of times, and that’s where the horror is born,” he said matter-of-factly. “Not in the fact that somebody nailed a baby to the wall, but that you can remember times when you felt like knocking your kid’s head right off his shoulders because he wouldn’t shut up.”

Though Steve was notorious for telling interviewers that he just wrote his stories, he didn’t stop to analyze them, The Shining was one of the first stories where he came right out and said the main character Jack Torrance was tormented by his father, though he stopped short of adding that he’d suffered the same fate.

“People ask if the book is a ghost story or is it just in this guy’s mind. Of course it’s a ghost story, because Jack Torrance himself is a haunted house. He’s haunted by his father. It pops up again, and again, and again.”

However, Steve failed to mention anything about the theme of alcoholism in the book, as he wasn’t ready to admit—to himself or others—that he shared something else in common with Jack Torrance.

As expected, Hollywood came knocking, especially given the success of the movie Carrie, which had been released two months earlier.

Despite his runaway success and his now having enough money to live on for the rest of his life, Steve continued to write stories for the men’s magazines, which had helped him buy medicine for his kids when he and Tabby were living in virtual poverty just a few short years earlier. Partly it was a way to thank the magazines and editors that had helped give him his start, but he also appreciated that the magazines provided an outlet for the stories that continued to pour from him.

Since his first publication in Cavalier in October 1970, Steve had continued to submit stories to his editor Nye Willden. Since the first story, “Graveyard Shift,” had been published, almost a dozen of King’s stories had appeared in the magazine. One day, Willden thought it might be a great idea to have a short-story contest in Cavalier. Steve would write the first half of a horror story and readers would be invited to finish the story, with prizes awarded to those who finished the story the best, according to King.

Willden found a facial close-up photograph of a strange, insane-looking cat, and he thought the image would spark a great first half-story from Steve, who loved the idea, and the editor sent him a copy of the photo.

A couple of weeks later, back came a manuscript entitled “The Cat from Hell,” with a note: “There was no way I could write just a half of a story,” Steve wrote, “so I wrote a complete story. Cut it where you wish for your contestants and maybe, after you award the winner you might want to publish my complete story to show what I did to it.”

The first five hundred words of “The Cat from Hell” appeared in the March 1977 issue of Cavalier, with Steve’s full-length version appearing in the June issue along with those of some of the winners and runners-up.

After the success of The Shining, Doubleday wanted another novel from King to be published the following year. But King had already started to work on The Stand, and he knew it wouldn’t be ready in time. So instead he offered Doubleday a short-story collection of the pieces he had sold to Cavalier and other men’s magazines over the last seven years and called it Night Shift. The book contained the stories “The Mangler,” “Battleground,” “Trucks,” and “Children of the Corn,” among others.

He would have offered Doubleday one of the Richard Bachman novels, except that King felt his pseudonymous books were of a different flavor, and besides, he had already promised his earlier novels—The Long Walk, Rage, and Roadwork—to New American Library, the publisher of his paperback novels and the Bachman books.

Doubleday agreed to the short-story collection, though the publisher believed interest in such a book would be limited, and so in February 1978 fifteen thousand copies of Night Shift were published. The first printing was less than that for Salem’s Lot.

To everyone’s surprise, Night Shift went into a second printing shortly after publication, and Doubleday was caught off guard by the demand. They had to raid the stash of books they supplied to the book clubs—including their own in-house book club, the Literary Guild—and sent books made with cheaper paper out into the marketplace to satisfy bookstore and distributor demand.

Though Steve loved his work and was thrilled whenever he saw a book with his name on it on a bookstore shelf, he realized he was starting to burn out a little, and he started talking about taking a break.

“I keep telling myself I’ll take it easy for a while after I finish a book, but after a few days I think it would be fun to work up one of the ideas I’ve stowed away while I worked on the previous book,” he said. “Sure, writing is fun. After all, you’re entertaining yourself too, you know.”

But he had an added incentive to cut back on his workload, because on February 21, 1977, a third child was born to Steve and Tabby: Owen Phillip King.

From the beginning, they suspected that their third child was not going to be as smooth sailing as the first two. Owen’s head at birth was extremely large in proportion to his body, and Steve and Tabby thought he might have hydrocephalus, a congenital condition where fluid builds up in brain tissue to create pressure that can lead to hemorrhage, coma, and brain damage.

Over several weeks, they brought Owen to the hospital for a battery of medical tests. Though the tests proved inconclusive, Steve’s fear over having one of his children die obsessed him.

“I always wondered how parents coped with a handicapped child,” he said. “It was stunning to discover that I not only loved Owen in spite of his big, mushroom-shaped head, but because of it. It’s a shock to look back at our home movies and see what an odd little duck of a baby he was, this long, skinny, pale person, with his little face under his bumper of a forehead. He wasn’t hydrocephalic, just a kid with a monster head, but we went through a terrifying period in which we feared for both Owen’s death and his life.”

Despite now being able to publish two novels a year—one under his real name with Doubleday and one with NAL under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman—Steve was becoming increasingly perturbed at Doubleday, his hardcover publisher, particularly at the way the publisher’s executives were treating their number one author. Other top authors at the publisher were Alex Haley, author of Roots, and Leon Uris, who wrote Trinity, who both seemed to be given more respect.

“Every time he came to New York to meet with me or go over manuscripts, some of the top brass would walk by and they never once recognized him. I would have to introduce him all over again,” said Bill Thompson.

In September of 1978, The Stand was published with a first printing of thirty-five thousand copies. Steve considered the book to be his first masterpiece, an apocalyptic novel about a superflu that kills most of the population. The survivors are then engaged in a battle of good against evil. He viewed it as his version of Lord of the Rings set in the American landscape. He pegged good guy Stu Redman against Randall Flagg—stand-in for the devil—and tossed the sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder into the mix to see which side he would pick.

“I wrote the line ‘A dark man with no face,’ and then combined it with that grisly little motto, ‘Once in every generation a plague will fall among them,’ and that was that,” he said. “I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand. It got to the point where I began describing it to friends as my own little Vietnam, because I kept telling myself that in another hundred pages or so I would begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

“To a large extent, Harold Lauder is based on me. With any character that a writer creates, you try to look at people and get a feel for them and understand the way they think. But Harold is a terrible loner, and he is somebody who feels totally rejected by everybody around him, and he feels fat and ugly and unpleasant most of the time.”

Steve also said that the destructive side of his personality had a particularly good time when he was writing The Stand. “I love to burn things up, at least on paper, and I don’t think arson would be half as much fun in real life as it is in fiction,” he said, citing one of his favorite scenes, when the Trashcan Man set the tanks at an oil refinery on fire. “I love fire, I love destruction. It’s great, it’s black, and it’s exciting. The Stand was particularly fulfilling because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race and, man, it was fun! Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke. That’s the mad-bomber side of my character, I suppose.”

Steve noted, “Although many people still regard The Stand as an anthology of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had not even been identified when the book was first published. When the AIDS thing started to happen, I couldn’t believe how much it was like The Stand. It was almost as though I’d invented it myself.”

When King first handed in the manuscript for The Stand, at twelve hundred pages and weighing in at twelve and a half pounds, Doubleday said it was too long. Doubleday’s press at that time could only bind a book that was so thick—around eight hundred pages—and that was it. They told Steve they needed to cut four hundred pages, saying he could do it or they could do it.

He said he would do it, though he was becoming increasingly incensed at his publisher. Given the millions of dollars his books had generated for Doubleday, he felt he had the right to call his own shots. But they insisted on cutting the book by one-third, or else they refused to publish the book. To make matters worse, because of the first contract he had signed, which doled out money in small yearly increments, he wasn’t even seeing his share of the profits. The original contract specified that the publisher would invest the author’s royalty income, paying him up to $50,000 a year. Most authors, then and now, came nowhere near generating that amount of income each year. But Steve did. And he asked Doubleday to alter the clause. They refused, even though he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the movie rights as well as the foreign editions. He felt Doubleday was deliberately ripping him off. He was reaching his limit with the publisher who had thrilled him in 1973 when they told him they would publish Carrie. Based on the income the publisher was generating just on the paperback sales of his books, King felt he not only deserved more respect but more money. The Stand was the last book that King contractually owed the publisher, so he threw a deal on the table.

Doubleday would get his next three novels if they paid an advance of $3.5 million.

Thompson, always an advocate for his star author, pressed his bosses to meet Steve’s demand, but they refused. The publisher offered $3 million.

Steve thought back to the literary agent Kirby McCauley, whom he’d met the previous year, and asked him what he should do. McCauley suggested they turn to the most logical publisher next, one who was familiar with the revenue his books could generate: his paperback publisher, New American Library. They met Steve’s demand, and even though they only published paperbacks, NAL became Steve’s publisher, selling the hardcover rights to Viking.

Steve severed his relationship with Doubleday, hired McCauley to be his literary agent, and Thompson ended up a casualty of the cross fire. “When I left Doubleday, they canned him,” said Steve. “It was almost like a taunt: we’ll kill the messenger that brought the bad news.”

Steve thought the instant change of publishers and news of the million-dollar deal would float all boats, including his first Richard Bachman book, Rage, published in mass-market paperback in September of 1977 by NAL. While it was a great story, King forgot that his name wasn’t on it, but his pseudonym.

The book disappeared without a trace a month or two later. After all, the world was not looking for a Richard Bachman book, but it was looking for a Stephen King book. While he was obviously pleased that some of his early work was appearing in print, because his name wasn’t on the cover, obviously the sales didn’t come close to those of The Shining. Steve was clearly frustrated, even though he had made it clear that he wanted Rage to sink or swim on its own.

In the aftermath of the Doubleday difficulties, Steve and Tabby thought it was time for a change of scenery. “I thought that people would get tired of everything being set in Maine,” he said. “England was the land of the ghost story, so I thought I’d go over there and write a ghost story. So we took the kids and put them in school for a year abroad.” They rented a house with the name of Mourlands at 87 Aldershot Road, Fleet, in Hampshire. Author George Beahm said that the Kings had advertised for a home as follows: “Wanted, a draughty Victorian house in the country with dark attic and creaking floorboards, preferably haunted.”

Almost immediately, Steve discovered the move was a big mistake: his work suffered: “I was totally flat while overseas. It was like my umbilical cord had been cut.”

One good thing that came out of the trip was that he met Peter Straub, an American writer who lived in London at the time. Straub had written several well-received novels including Julia, Under Venus, and If You Could See Me Now, and his novel Ghost Story was just about to be published when he and King met. One night the writers and their wives, Tabby and Susie, got together for dinner at the Straubs’ house on Hillfield Avenue in London, and the men stayed up drinking and gabbing long after their wives had gone to bed. “We ought to write a book together,” said Steve, and Peter immediately agreed. However, when they compared their schedules, they discovered that both writers were so booked up that the first chance they would have to start was four years into the future. They shook hands on the deal and wrote the date into their appointment books.

During the year they lived in the U.K., the Kings couldn’t get warm. The rented house they were living in was cold and damp, and they could never heat it properly. After Steve and Tabby moved back to the United States, Susie Straub wrote in a letter, “It really does take time to get used to the English notion of heating, I swear to you, they don’t like being warm.”

The Kings had intended to stay a full year in England, but after only three months, they decided to return home in mid-December and purchased a new lakefront home in Center Lovell, Maine, where the majority of residents only lived in town for the summer.

In 1978, Steve was on a roll, cranking out novels and short stories, though with the success of The Stand, he was getting a quick lesson in what it meant to be a celebrity author in America.

Some fans were starting to follow him into the men’s room at restaurants and pushing books under the stall for him to sign, though he admitted that people at home in Maine basically left him alone. “It’s different in Maine, you know the people you sign for, but I go some places and people can’t even believe that I exist,” he said. “There’s no way to explain it, you feel like a freak.”

Although by 1978 Steve had made enough money from his first three novels, a collection of short stories, and selling the movie rights to two books to make for a comfortable future, it didn’t mean that he was just going to throw it around. He couldn’t escape the frugality of his childhood. And even more than before, he didn’t like to feel he was being taken advantage of.

His high school classmate Pete Higgins remembers one evening they went out barhopping. “Though he had his Cadillac by that point, he was still driving his old Dodge Dart around,” said Higgins. Together they hit a dive bar in Lisbon, sat down, and ordered a couple of beers. The waitress told them if they wanted to get on the dance floor, they’d have to pay a cover charge of a couple bucks. They had no intention of dancing, but it was the principle of the thing, Steve thought. So they finished their beers and headed for a bar in Lewiston, a twenty-minute drive away.

“The cover charge there was five dollars,” said Higgins. “I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, ‘I’m not paying that,’ and I said, ‘Neither am I.’ So we left and ended up at another place with no cover charge. We sat down and we had a good night talking about old times and sipping down a few. But the point was he was into some money at this point and could have easily paid the cover charge for everyone in the room. But he refused.”

In 1978, he decided to give back to his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono, by teaching for a year. It was his way of thanking the university and, in particular, the English Department, for all that they had done for him as a young student who was trying to find his way to understand more about literature and become a writer.

Samuel Schuman, now chancellor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, was on the faculty of the English Department at UMO when Steve returned. He says that Steve’s main responsibilities were teaching a couple of classes to freshman, including Introduction to Creative Writing. “He didn’t do a lot of the kind of star literary turns you’d expect from a novelist of his stature, like readings and signings,” said Schuman. “He carried his share of the academic responsibilities that went along with the job, like serving on department committees and helping to plan curricular matters.”

According to Schuman, students initially were a bit in awe of him, but that wore off once they began to work with him and see his demeanor in the classroom, and from all appearances, the students treated him pretty much like any other professor.

“He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a daunting figure, and at that point he was still fairly young, casually dressed, and very informal in his manner,” said Schuman, adding that Steve would show up to teach a class and his shirt would sometimes not be buttoned right and his socks didn’t match. “He looked like the kind of guy who just jumped into his clothes when he got up in the morning.” Which probably made him less threatening to the students he was teaching.

“I found it interesting to see him come back as a famous person relating to people who had been his teachers,” Schuman continued. “He was still more deferential to his former teachers than they were to him. He treated them the same way that any college graduate treats his old professors, and the faculty treated him like a former student.”

One of the committees Steve served on was in charge of deciding which students were to receive a slate of departmental awards such as Best New Writer and Best Paper of the Year. “It was not a committee that people were fighting to get on, so they assigned it to Steve, who didn’t know any better,” said Schuman. “But the other professors were happy that he was willing to dig in and do that kind of work like everyone else.”

Schuman was impressed that King appeared to be remarkably unspoiled by his rapidly growing success and fame. “He really seemed like he had his head screwed on right in terms of his values and his sense of who he was.”

Of course, Steve drew on his experience teaching high school students during his tenure back at UMO, but he immediately noticed the difference in college students:

“The thing about high school is that the students look at school in a different way because they’re forced to go there, and a lot of times their attitude was that they might as well enjoy it and get what they could out of it. In college, a lot of my creative-writing students really wanted to be writers, so their egos were mortally involved in this. After a while I did the worst thing a creative-writing teacher can do, especially with a poetry class. I started to get very timid with all of my criticism because I was afraid that some student would go home and perform the equivalent of hara-kiri. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying anybody’s ego completely.”

Despite the change in venue and his day being taken up with teaching responsibilities, he continued to work on his own writing steadily. All he had to do was follow the same routine he had for years.

“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he said. “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from eight to eight thirty, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, ‘You’re going to be dreaming soon.’

“It’s not any different than a bedtime routine. Do you go to bed a different way every night? Is there a certain side you sleep on? I mean, I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don’t know. And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don’t know why.”

While Steve was teaching at the university, the Kings lived in a rented house on Route 15 in Orrington on the outskirts of Bangor. The house was on a busy road that they soon discovered was treacherous. So many animals were killed by speeding trucks that the neighborhood children had created their own burial ground in the woods behind the property.

“Our son John and a little neighbor girl named Bethany Stanchfield started the pet graveyard,” said Noreen Levesque, who still lives in the neighborhood. “It started out with a little dead bird or squirrel they found out on the road, and in the beginning they would bury them in the sandbox in our backyard.” However, before long, cats and dogs joined the list of casualties, and they moved the whole thing up the hill.

“One of the kids would have his wagon, put the body in the wagon, and wheel it to the cemetery,” said neighbor Alma Dosen. “They’d hold a ceremony, dig the little graves, bury them, and make the markers. Then they’d have a little after-burial party.” At least thirty kids maintained the cemetery.

Like most things he saw or heard that were out of the ordinary, Steve thought he’d be able to use it in a story or novel someday. In the meantime, he and Tabby dragged a few lawn chairs to the burial ground, and he’d often head up there for some quiet time when he wanted to write. Whenever they were out on the front lawn playing with their kids, however, it was a different story.

“Like most toddlers, Owen thought that running away from Mommy and Daddy was a total scream,” said Tabby. “Just after we moved to Orrington, Owen made a serious break for freedom, heading across the lawn for Route 15, a truly terrifying stretch of road. We got him, but it left us both wrecks. Owen just laughed to see Mommy and Daddy collapsed on the lawn.”

Despite a laundry list of fears of all varieties, the incident confirmed that Steve’s greatest fear was of losing one of his kids.

Naomi’s cat Smucky was hit by a truck on the highway one afternoon when she and Tabby were out shopping. When they got home, Steve pulled Tabby aside to tell her what had happened, and that he had already buried the cat in the pet cemetery. “He wanted to tell Naomi the cat had run away, but I insisted on frankness,” said Tabby. The family held a funeral, made a grave-marker, and placed flowers on the cat’s grave. “And that was the end of it,” Tabby said wryly. “Almost.”

Steve used the experience to begin writing the novel he’d call his most terrifying. Pet Sematary was the story of a father who brings his child back from the dead. He was terrified by what he had written.

He gave it to Tabby to read, and she hated it. “When the two-year-old was killed on the road in the book, I found that very, very hard to read and deal with,” she said. Even his friend Peter Straub thought it was a horrible book and that Steve should stick it in a drawer and forget about it.

That’s exactly what Steve did. As usual, it didn’t take long for him to become distracted. On October 1, 1978, The Shining was published in mass-market paperback. With the release of the movie two years later, the paperback would eventually sell 2.5 million copies.

After he put Pet Sematary away, Steve started writing The Dead Zone, which he termed a love story, but was really a response to his increasing concern about the problems that fame was beginning to bring into his life, as well as into his family’s, and all because of his rare gift for storytelling and scaring the pants off people. Fans were beginning to knock on his door and ask for autographs and money, and they were becoming more aggressive. Steve wasn’t sure how to ensure his privacy but still wanted to live as a regular guy.

During this time, a manuscript resurfaced from several years earlier that he had written and also tucked away. But unlike Pet Sematary, he was quite fond of this manuscript: The Gunslinger. He found it by accident in the basement after a flood. “The pages were all swelled up but they were still readable, and I thought maybe I could sell these to a magazine of short stories.” He retyped it, sent it out, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published “The Gunslinger” in its October 1978 issue.

For Steve and Tabby, life was comfortable beyond their wildest dreams. But they had struggled for so long that it was still hard to get used to their newfound security.

“The money’s never been real,” said Tabby. “I have a kayak, Steve has guitars. Nevertheless, there it is, like an elephant in the living room. We grew up poor and people did for us. So we do for others.”

“The idea is to take care of your family and have enough left over to buy books and go to the movies once a week,” said King. “As a goal in life, getting rich strikes me as fairly ludicrous. The goal is to do what God made you for and not hurt anyone if you can help it.”

He was driven, to be sure. But it wasn’t clear how obsessive he could be until one day in 1979.

After Owen, their last child, was born, Steve decided to get a vasectomy. He went to the doctor’s office for the thirty-minute procedure, the doctor told him to take it easy for the next couple of days, and Steve headed home. All was fine until the next day when he was in the midst of a furious writing session and he started bleeding from the incision. He was finishing up a chapter in his new novel Firestarter when he realized he was bleeding, but he didn’t want to stop until he finished the chapter since the work was going so well.

When Tabby came into the office and saw him sitting in a pool of blood, she panicked. “Anyone else would have been screaming, but he said, ‘Hold on, let me finish this paragraph!’ ” she said. He continued to write until he finished the chapter. Then Tabby took him to the hospital.