Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

7 DIFFERENT SEASONS

Spurred on by her husband’s success, Tabby’s urge to write had returned with a vengeance. However, with three children to care for, ranging from four to eleven, she found it hard to carve out time for herself. She’d start stories and never finish them and complain to Steve about the lack of time. After hearing Tabby grumble once too often, Steve presented her with a brand-new typewriter and told her to rent an office outside the house where she could work without interruption. After they moved to the West Broadway house, she began going to an office regularly and worked on the story that would turn out to be Small World, her first published novel.

Tabby was never shy about admitting that she was riding on her husband’s coattails, at least in terms of getting a quick look from an editor, whereas the manuscripts of other first novelists would end up in a publisher’s slush pile, lucky to get read at all. “Being Steve’s wife helped, either in providing me with a decent agent, or perhaps some publisher thought they would make sales on the novelty,” she said. Steve passed Small World to his editor, George Walsh, at Viking, who later told Tabby that he grudgingly decided to read it as a favor to her husband and that he wasn’t expecting it to be anything more than a first good effort, albeit unpublishable. But he liked it, accepted it, and scheduled it for publication in 1981.

Though Steve was indeed proud of his wife, he did admit that he felt a tiny bit threatened when Tabby returned to the writing she had all but neglected since college.

“I felt jealous as hell,” he said. “My reaction was like a kid’s. I felt like saying, ‘Hey, these are my toys, you can’t play with them.’ But that soon changed to pride when I read the final manuscript and found that she had turned out a damned fine piece of work.”

As usual, Tabby had a more prosaic view: “I think we’re both willing to say that I put ten years into helping him advance in every way that I could, from socializing to reading the manuscripts and making suggestions, as he did with mine. It was quite a trick to write when the children were small. Fortunately, they got used to being ignored. Kids need a modicum of being ignored, just as they need a soupçon of boredom. Being ignored is how you find out you’re small potatoes, and boredom often leads to actual thought, exploration, and discovery.”

That it was now her turn to shine had as much to do with her approach toward writing as with raising the kids. Whereas Steve could write in the middle of a tornado and would go through withdrawal if he couldn’t write, Tabby was never that obsessed. “For me, the problem has always been getting started,” she said. “I am one of the world’s greatest avoiders. But once I start, I’m hard to turn off.”

Along with differing in their drives, their work styles varied as well. Tabby loved nothing more than to bury herself in the research before writing a word. “I have my compulsions, but they’re not in the direction of working every day,” she said. “They’re more in the direction of researching the living crap out of it and then entering the story.”

Steve, on the other hand, loathed research. “If I read a few case histories, I tend to get a kind of feel for it,” he said. “I’ll sit down and write the book and do the research after, because when I’m writing a book, my attitude is ‘Don’t confuse me with facts. Just let me go ahead and get on with the work.’ ”

Tabby was an inveterate outliner, but Steve rarely sketched out anything in advance. “I start with an idea and I know where I’m going, but I don’t outline,” he said. “I usually have an idea of what’s going to happen ten pages ahead, but I never write any of it down because that sort of closes you off from an interesting side trip that might come along. Theodore Sturgeon told me once that he thinks the only time the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen next is when the writer didn’t know what was going to happen. That’s the situation I’ve always written in. I’m never sure where the story’s going or what’s going to happen with it.”

In the original Doubleday hardcover edition of The Stand, Harold Lauder left a chocolate fingerprint on a diary after eating a PayDay candy bar. However, PayDays didn’t contain any chocolate back then, and many fans sent Steve irate letters and PayDay bars to prove it. In the subsequent paperback editions he changed the candy bar to a Milky Way, but later on, PayDays did come in chocolate. Fans write to him in droves after each new book is published to point out errors, and he always fixes them. Some suspect he deliberately inserts an error to make sure fans are paying attention.

After Steve’s first editor, Bill Thompson, left Doubleday, he took a job at a small publisher called Everest House. He asked Steve to write a book that would be partially a memoir of King’s early horror influences and partially a history of Americans’ fascination with the horror genre. Steve loved the idea and began working on Danse Macabre, his first nonfiction book.

As he started to write the book, an idea that he had kicked around for years—and had successfully ignored—was knocking on the door again. In the summer of 1981, Steve realized he finally had to face it head-on and start writing.

“I had to write about the troll under the bridge or leave him—IT—forever,” he said. “I remember sitting on the porch, smoking, asking myself if I had really gotten old enough to be afraid to try, to just jump in and drive fast. I got up off the porch, went into my study, cranked up some rock and roll, and started to write the book. I knew it would be long, but I didn’t know how long.”

Cujo was published a few months after Steve started writing IT.

He got the idea for Cujo by continuing his habit of connecting two seemingly unrelated subjects. With Carrie, it was “adolescent cruelty and telekinesis.”

With Cujo, it was two incidents a couple of weeks apart. While bringing his motorcycle in for service to a mechanic located on a remote back road, his bike gave out in the yard. He called out, but instead of a human, a mammoth Saint Bernard galloped out of the garage heading straight toward him, growling all the way. The mechanic followed, but the dog continued to charge. When the dog lunged at King, the mechanic hit the dog on the butt with a massive socket wrench.

“He must not like your face,” he said, then asked Steve about the motorcycle.

Even though they were now flush, Steve and Tabby were still driving the Ford Pinto they had bought new with the $2,500 advance from Carrie, even though the car had been plagued with problems from the beginning. A couple of weeks after Steve’s run-in with the Saint Bernard, the car acted up and Steve’s wild imagination thought back to what if Tabby had driven the car to the mechanic and the dog had lunged toward her? And what if there no humans were around? Worse yet, what if the dog was rabid?

Steve didn’t come up with the idea of making the dog the main character until later. At first, he was just chewing on the idea of a mother and son who were confined to a small space. One angle that he started to pursue was that the mother would be rabid, and the suspense in the book would revolve around her fighting herself not to injure her son as the rabies engulfed her.

However, Steve had to backtrack a bit after he did a bit of research about rabies and discovered that the gestation period took a bit longer. “Then the game became to see if I could put them in a place where nobody will find them for the length of time that it takes for them to work out their problem.”

Steve was off and running, and before he knew it, he had churned out close to a hundred pages of the story with his motto of never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. This shows how a story starts as a seed in Stephen King’s mind: “You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it makes a story,” he explained. “But you never know when it’s going to happen.”

Cujo was an experiment for King, the first book he had written where the story was told all within the confines of a single chapter. It didn’t start out that way; he had initially envisioned the story in terms of traditional chapters. But as the story developed, along with the sense of horror, he altered his approach: “I love Cujo because it does what I want a book to do. It feels like a brick thrown through somebody’s window, like a really invasive piece of work. It feels anarchic, like a punk-rock record: it’s short and it’s mean.”

Readers gave him an earful about it, and he received letters by the truck-load that criticized him for letting a child die in a book, albeit one who was innocent and simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, unlike the dozens of teenagers who were killed in Carrie, who seemingly deserved it because of their actions.

But the characters in Cujo felt as if they were light-years away from Steve’s own existence for another reason: the subplot showed a woman having an affair and what happened when her husband found out. Just as Steve had procrastinated about writing the difficult scene of the woman in the bathtub in The Shining, Steve put off writing a scene in Cujo.

“The hardest scene I ever had to write in my life was when the husband goes home and confronts her,” he said. “I’ve never faced that situation, not even with a girlfriend, but I wanted to work it out in a way that would be fair to both of them, and I didn’t want to turn one of them into a villain.” He wrestled with the characters, the dialogue, the action. “It was easy enough to react to the man because I know how I’d feel. It was tougher to react sympathetically to the woman.”

It took him two days to hammer it out when he would normally have banged out a scene of similar length in ninety minutes. “It was a lot of sitting and looking at the typewriter and looking at the page,” he remembered. “But it wasn’t where I’m trying to frame a sentence, it was more like, ‘Why did she do that?’ And the answers are not perfect in the book as to why she did that. But what’s there is honest enough.”

Six years of cocaine and alcohol addiction was taking its toll. He was such a heavy user that to continue his late-night marathon writing sessions, he was snorting coke through the night, having occasionally to remove the blood-soaked cotton balls he stuck up both nostrils to keep the blood from dripping onto his shirt and the typewriter.

He would later admit that when he did the revisions for Cujo in early 1981, he had no recollection of doing so.

With his growing success and international acclaim, Steve was still sending his short stories to magazines because they all knew that running his name on the cover would give them the boost so many of them desperately needed. Sometimes it even meant the difference between continuing to publish or shutting the doors. When Cujo was scheduled for publication, Steve contacted Otto Penzler, a mystery editor and publisher who was running a small publishing company called Mysterious Press, and offered to let him print a limited edition of Cujo. He accepted Steve’s generous offer and printed 750 copies with a cover price of $65 in 1981.

“The income from that one book covered the printing bill for Cujo as well as our previous book, and there was enough money left over to have another book printed,” said Penzler. “I probably would have gone out of business if it hadn’t been for Cujo.” He’d heard similar stories from several other small presses, all of whom had no money and were constantly struggling. When Steve offered the limited-edition rights to a book, they were soon not just back on their feet but prospering and growing. Penzler’s press became partners with Warner Books in 1984, who bought him out five years later.

Steve and Tabby also made a new friend and kindred spirit. Penzler ran the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, and the Kings would often visit the store together to buy books and ask Penzler’s advice on what to read next. He found their respective tastes a bit curious. “I always thought it a bit bizarre that she tended to like really tough, violent, serial-killer books while he liked P. D. James,” Penzler said.

One of the unexpected benefits of working at home was that Steve was able to spend a lot of time playing and reading with his kids.

When he heard that the average father spends an average of twenty-two minutes with each of his kids in a week, Steve thought that was pathetic. “Mine are in my hip pocket all the time,” he said. “And I like it that way.”

It almost sounded as if he were in his second childhood, or perhaps the first real one that he’d had, where now he had the control and power, not to mention the money, that he lacked as a kid. “It’s like being in a time machine. If you don’t have kids, there are a lot of things you never have a chance to reexperience: taking kids to Disney pictures, and watching Bambi and saying, ‘Jeez, what schlocky shit this is.’ And then you start to cry, because it pushes the old buttons.”

Joe, nine years old at the time, was turning into a miniature version of his father. They loved to go to horror movies together, and Joe said that when he grew up, he wanted to be a writer like his dad. Said Tabby, “The kid can write a story, he’s really got the bones down.” Owen, five years younger, wasn’t far behind. The walls of his room were plastered with superhero and space-adventure posters while a toy Loch Ness monster presided over his bed. Even at his tender age, like his brother, he also seemed to have a natural affinity for horror movies, the gorier the better. “You know what parts I like best? The bl-o-o-d-y parts!”

While their parents clearly benefited from the sheer abundance of time they were able to spend together as a family, it was impossible to avoid thinking about the downside for too long, specifically their father’s fame and notoriety.

“They’re going to realize someday that there are people who will want their acquaintance only because their father’s famous,” said Tabby in 1982. “They haven’t gotten to the hard part, the moment they have to decide whether they’re going to rebel against us or imitate us. We all come up against this, but it’s a little more difficult when your parents are well-known. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”

It wasn’t likely that Steve’s fame was going to diminish anytime soon. In August 1981, he made publishing history as the first writer to have three titles on the Publishers Weekly list simultaneously: Firestarter in hardcover, and The Dead Zone and The Shining in paperback.

The pressure was continuing to build around him, not only from his fans, but from his publisher. Michael Pietsch today is the publisher at Little, Brown and the editor for James Patterson’s books. With his words about Patterson, Pietsch could have been speaking about King’s early blockbuster years.

Pietsch said that the hardest part of editing a star author is the pressure that comes from the publishing and business side: “When an author gets to a very high level of success, they become part of the company’s financial planning, basically, for the budgeting part of the month-by-month planning. So the time pressures can become much more urgent because those books are really counted on to be published at a particular moment as part of the company’s highest-level strategy.”

King knew he was extraordinarily fortunate to have built a successful career in such a short time. In 1982, he decided to extend a helping hand to struggling artists and writers by letting them use the star power of his name. He supplied blurbs to novelists for the covers of their books and granted film rights to his short stories to amateur filmmakers in exchange for a dollar, as long as they were not shown for profit in movie theaters and he received a copy of the final film. He referred to the movies as Dollar Babies, and the first, The Boogeyman, was directed by Jeffrey C. Schiro and released in 1982, based on a short story that appeared in Night Shift.

In addition to Mysterious Press, Steve was also helping a few other small publishers keep their heads above water. Donald M. Grant was running a small press called Donald M. Grant, Publisher, when he read Steve’s story “The Gunslinger” in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1978. He told Steve he wanted to turn the story into a limited-edition book. King agreed, but first he wanted to polish the story and convert it into chapters of a novel as he had originally intended. The book appeared four years later with a printing of ten thousand with a limited edition of one thousand signed copies, and they all sold out quickly. Everyone was pleased with the final product, and no one thought anything more of it. Though Steve knew he wanted The Gunslinger to be the first of seven books in a projected series, he had enough on his plate and knew he couldn’t return to Roland Deschain’s world anytime soon.

Plus, it was very different from his bestsellers. “I didn’t think anybody would want to read it,” he said. “It was more like a Tolkien fantasy of some other world. And it wasn’t complete. There was all this stuff to be resolved, including what is this tower and why does this guy need to get there?”

In May of 1982, The Running Man, the fourth book written under the Bach-man pseudonym, was published and met with the same fate as the previous three: published to little fanfare, it disappeared from paperback racks within two months.

That fall, the movie Creepshow came out. The legendary horror director George Romero, one of King’s childhood heroes, who directed The Night of the Living Dead, teamed up with Steve. The movie consisted of five of his short stories: “The Crate,” “Father’s Day,” “Something to Tide You Over,” “They’re Creeping Up on You,” and “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” which featured King in the leading role. The movie paid homage to the beloved E.C. Comics of his youth.

The pair first met in the summer of 1979, when Romero headed to Maine with producer Richard Rubinstein to discuss The Stand with Steve, to which they held the rights. Steve was eager to start on the film version of The Stand, but all three agreed to first prove themselves with a smaller low-budget project first, which they could then present to the studio as a success and therefore justify the cost for the big-budget The Stand. However, once they started brainstorming and decided the cast needed well-known actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, and Ted Danson, the budget ballooned from less than $2 million to more than $8 million.

Romero and King found in each other kindred spirits. “I think we automatically got along because we’re both guys who live somewhere in the middle, avoiding New York and L.A.,” said Romero, who started out in the business directing commercials but went on to direct the classic cult horror movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968. “We can both sit and giggle at the most gruesome sights, probably because neither of us can conceal his delight—and his amazement—in the fact that he’s not the victim himself. I think we both really do toss out our nightmares for the consumption of others.”

And both the writer and the director—seven years older than Steve—have loved horror movies since childhood. “If you love horror movies, you have to have a love of pure shit,” said Steve. “You turn into the kind of person who would watch Attack of the Crab Monsters four times.”

Though King always liked to see how a director and actors interpreted his stories, he wasn’t crazy about being a part of the process in his starring role as Jordy Verrill, least of all the time he had to spend in makeup and wardrobe. Near the end of filming his segment, he had to spend six hours a day having a green AstroTurf-like substance applied to his body.

In one of the scenes, Steve sticks out his tongue and it’s covered with fungus, but first the designer Tom Savini had to make a mold of his tongue. “He slathered this stuff onto my tongue with a stick, and I had to sit there for ten minutes with my tongue out and about ten pounds hanging off it,” Steve said. Savini got a perfect cast of the tongue, from which he made four green latex tongues, as thin as surgeon’s gloves, that King rolled onto his tongue. Perhaps because of the arduous process, Steve decided to have a little fun with it.

One day he was wandering through a nearby shopping mall between takes and took one of the tongues with him. When a salesgirl asked if he needed any help, he stuck out his tongue. She screamed and called mall security. Steve laughed and explained it was just a prop. “It was worth it, it was so funny.”

He liked being on the set, though it was tedious at times. Working cooperatively with other people was light-years away from how he normally spent his working time, by himself in front of a computer. “It isn’t that I didn’t have fun playing Jordy, but I really think of it as work,” he said. “You just try to do it, and you know when you’re doing a good job and you know when you’re doing a bad job.”

At first, not surprisingly, he was doing a poor job of acting compared to the work of the other actors in the Creepshow stories, including Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, and Leslie Nielsen. Romero helped Steve get up to speed. “He wanted a caricature of a dirt farmer, not a real one, and I had a little trouble giving it to him,” Steve said. After one particularly bad take, Romero pulled him aside and told him to think back to the Roadrunner cartoons. “You know how Wile E. Coyote looks when he falls off a cliff?” Romero asked. Of course, said Steve, and George told him that’s how he wanted him to act. From that point on, Steve nailed the part.

Steve wasn’t the only member of the family with a starring role in the film. Romero noticed that Joe resembled the sketch of the boy in the promotional poster for the movie, and he asked Steve if he could try him out for the role of Billy, the child of an abusive father who appeared in the prologue and epilogue reading a comic book. Steve said okay, Joe tested for the role, and Romero cast the boy, who was nine at the time.

At first, it was a bit unnerving. “He did get freaked out for a while,” said Steve. “For a little boy to be in his pajamas with a whole bunch of people around his bed on a movie set with all the lights and everything was pretty unsettling. But he got to the point where it was either freak out or go to work, so he went to work.”

The benefits of being on a set of a horror film were definitely attractive to a little boy. Taking after his dad, Joe had long exhibited a love of creepy things, and people on the set let him play with whatever was at hand. The nine-year-old boy had a field day. “There were all these cool rubber monster parts lying around,” Joe said years later. “For a little kid, it was a blast.”

One day not long after shooting began, Steve asked his son what he thought of the experience so far.

Joe blithely told him that he had worms crawling out of him in one scene while they hammered a nail into his head in another. Watching the two converse from afar, the scene could have been nothing more than a cozy little father-and-son powwow. They could have been discussing a Little League game.

After another day of shooting, Steve and Joe headed back to the motel where they were staying and stopped to pick up dinner on the way. Joe still had his movie makeup on—complete with bruises, cuts, and scabs—when they went through the McDonald’s drive-through window. Steve had a full beard at the time and admittedly looked pretty rough. The girl at the drive-through took one look and called the cops, then stalled Steve for a few minutes. “The next thing you know,” said Steve, “the cops have us in the back of the cruiser and Joe’s eating his fries saying, ‘It’s just a movie,’ and I’m going, ‘That’s right, just a movie, officers.’ ”

In August 1982, Different Seasons, King’s first book of short stories to be published since Night Shift four years earlier, came out. One of the stories in it was “The Body.” His old college buddy and roommate George MacLeod bought the book and read it, just as he had bought and read all of Steve’s other books. When he got to “The Body,” he smiled when he saw Steve had dedicated the story to him. But as he started to read, he froze.

One day back in college at the apartment on North Main Street in Orono, Steve asked what MacLeod was working on, and he told him the plot and details of a short story based on an incident from his own childhood. He and a few of his friends had heard of a dead body near the railroad tracks, and they went off to find it. Though he described the story in great detail and knew exactly how it would end, he never finished writing it.

“He stole it from me,” said MacLeod. “I recognized that story as being literature, and Steve recognized it too, though not on a conscious level. He later told me he had borrowed my story to write his. All of those anecdotes were lifted right out of my story, and essentially the difference is that he had a dead body in his and I had a dead dog in mine. Other than that they were pretty much the same.”

In interviews, King has described “The Body” as his coming-of-age story. “A lot of ‘The Body’ is true, but most of it is lies,” he said. “As a writer, you tell things the way they should have turned out, not the way they did.”

MacLeod has admitted that Steve always has his ear tuned for a good story, whether it comes from a book, a movie, or a friend’s story. “If he’s near something, he will absorb it like a sponge,” said MacLeod. “He’s Velcro when it comes to popular culture, he picks it all up. It’s his strength, and naturally it’s his weakness, too.”

Sandy Phippen, author of numerous novels and short stories and a friend of both, witnessed the whole thing: “Steve published it as his own story, and of course, what do you say about that? But Shakespeare did the same thing; I mean, the story belongs to him who tells it best.” Phippen added that it wasn’t the first time he’d heard of King borrowing another writer’s story, whether spoken or already published.

“I don’t know if I’d call it plagiarism,” Phippen said, but he did hear about an author who had a good track record of selling books, and several of her stories were packaged in one of the Twilight Zone anthologies from Rod Serling. One was about a car that was inherently evil and killed anyone that came in its path, the exact plot of Steve’s novel Christine, which would be published in 1983. Phippen would later mention the story to a friend who was a cousin of Serling’s, and Phippen asked if they knew about this. The cousin replied that they did indeed know about it, but that they chose to let sleeping dogs lie.

MacLeod still felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He let it slide until a few years later when he saw a TV commercial for Stand by Me, the movie based on “The Body.”

According to Phippen, MacLeod got in touch with Steve, who asked him what he wanted. MacLeod told him that he wanted his name on the movie and some money. Steve didn’t agree, and that was the end of their friendship.

It wasn’t the first time that a relationship with an old friend was severed because he expected Steve to bring him along on his coattails, at least a little bit. Steve’s childhood friend Chris Chesley also prided himself as a writer, and though Steve had read some of the work Chesley had written as an adult, he declined to pass it along to an editor or agent who could help. Supposedly Chesley became irate and refused any further contact with Steve.

Steve not only attracted a number of overzealous fans but also women who wanted only one thing from him.

“There are a lot of women who want to fuck fame or power or whatever it is,” he said. “Sometimes, the idea of an anonymous fuck is appealing when some gal comes up at a bookstore signing and asks me to go to her place when I’m leaving the next morning. And I’m tempted to say, ‘Yeah, let’s pour Wesson oil over each other and really screw our eyes out.’ ”

But he says he would never risk his marriage for a one-night stand. “Besides, sexually, I’m not terribly adventurous, there are no orgies in my life,” he admitted. “My marriage is too important to me, and anyway, so much of my energy goes into my writing that I don’t really need to fool around.”

He added that Tabby was not someone he was about to screw around on. “I don’t necessarily believe in marriage,” he said cryptically, “but I believe in monogamy. She’s a rose with thorns, and I’ve pricked myself on them many times in the past, so I wouldn’t dare cheat on her!”

“Infidelity is a shooting offense,” Tabby concurred.

While he had addressed some of his greatest fears in his work so far, he said he hadn’t yet dealt with one sexual fear: “I’d like to write a story about the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, where you were making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off.”

Instead of writing about this he put the finishing touches on another book, this time about a Gypsy curse. At the time he was writing Thinner, he was unsure whether to publish it as a King or a Bachman book. Though his earlier Bachman books were edgier and rougher around the edges since they were written in his pre-Carrie days, Thinner was different.

The idea for the book arose when he was in the doctor’s office for his annual exam, and the news wasn’t good. He knew he had gained some weight, and when he entered the exam room, the first thing the doctor asked him to do was step on the scale. “I remember being pissed off because he wouldn’t let me take off my clothes and take a shit before I got up on the goddamn scales.” After the physical exam, the doc handed him the bad news: he was overweight, his cholesterol levels were through the roof, and he needed to lose weight and stop smoking.

King’s reaction—possibly because the whole world loved him, he could write a laundry list and it would end up on the New York Times bestseller list, and no one dared to say boo to him except for Tabby—was absolute rage. He left the doctor’s office and hibernated, fumed, for a few days: “I thought about how shitty the doctor was to make me do all these terrible things to save my life.”

After his funk ended, he decided to follow his doctor’s advice and lose the weight and stop smoking, or at least cut back. He started to lose a few pounds, and while part of him was happy about it, he was surprised to discover that another part of him was in distress: “Once the weight actually started to come off, I began to realize that I was attached to it somehow, that I didn’t really wanted to lose it. Then I began to think about what would happen if somebody started to lose weight and couldn’t stop.”

Another random experience or stray comment, another book. Just another day in the life of Stephen King.

“I really don’t prepare for my novels in any kind of conscious way,” he said. “Some of the books have germinated for a long time, the ideas just won’t sink. My mind is like this very deep pool: some things sink and others keep bobbing up. Over time I begin to see them in a different way. Sooner or later everything comes up, and I use everything.”

When Steve had signed his first contract with Doubleday back in 1974, the contract contained a clause on the company’s Author Investment Plan, allowing the publisher to hold on to all but $50,000 of the money due to the writer per year, while investing the rest. Of course, most writers didn’t earn that much money in a year back then, or even now, but King’s books were selling so well that he and his accountants knew the publisher was making money hand over fist.

This still held true even though Steve had switched publishers in 1977. By the end of 1982, millions of dollars had accrued in the AIP fund, but Steve was still receiving a paltry $50,000 per year. King asked Doubleday to cancel the agreement and remit all the money he was owed. But according to the contract he’d signed nearly a decade ago, the publisher was not legally obligated to do anything.

When King threatened to sue, McCauley had another idea. He suggested that King give Doubleday a novel to publish in exchange for releasing the funds. Since all the Bachman books were already spoken for by NAL, only one remained: Pet Sematary. Though Steve was angry with his old publisher, he agreed to give them the one novel he’d written that he had never wanted to see in print.

“I couldn’t ever imagine ever publishing Pet Sematary, it was so awful,” he said. “But the fans loved it. You can’t gross out the American public, or the British public for that matter, because they loved it too.”

Since his first bestseller in 1977, The Shining, a little voice in the back of Steve’s head had always whispered that perhaps Donald King, the father he’d never known, would come forward, admit the errors of his ways, and want to be a part of his son’s life.

Steve kept writing his stories and never forgot that his father might one day show up, much as his mother had held out hope, although it had all but disappeared by the end of her life.

What would Steve do if Donald King ever showed up? He had numerous ideas about how he’d react, each of which could serve as the germ for a new novel or story.

1. See what I’ve been able to accomplish on my own even after you ditched us?

2. Maybe Steve’s writing would cause his father to come back and beg his forgiveness and Steve would accept him back into his life.

3. Or maybe Donald come back after his son had become a household name, beg to be part of his life, and his son would refuse.

The questions came fast and furious once people discovered the common ground between many of Steve’s stories and his early abandonment. In the end, Steve would never know if his father knew that Stephen King was his son.

“There are a lot of fathers in my stories, and some are abusive and some try to be loving and supportive, which is what I had always hoped that I would be myself, as a dad,” Steve said. “But my father was just an absence. And you don’t miss what’s not there. Maybe in some sort of imaginative way I’m searching for him or maybe that’s just a lot of horseshit, I don’t know. There does seem to be a target that this stuff pours out toward. I am always interested in the idea that a lot of fiction writers write for their fathers because their fathers are gone.”

Indeed, after reading just a couple of his early books, from Salem’s Lot to The Shining, it’s easy to see why a reader would think Steve assumes that buried deep within every man who appears normal on the outside, there’s an absolute monster and murderer scratching to come out.

Steve agrees up to a point: “I don’t think it’s in every man, but I think it’s in most. I think that men are wired to perform acts of violence, and I think that we’re still very primitive creatures with a real tendency toward violence.”

Michael Collings, an acquaintance of King’s and a scholar who has written several books analyzing King’s work, believes the issue of an abandoned child permeates every word he writes: “The issue of his father’s abandonment is in everything, but it’s never in any one thing completely,” he says. “Very rarely is there a functioning father in his stories. If there is one, he’s like Jack Torrance, who’s out to get the kid. In every one of his stories is the sense that somehow the father, and occasionally even the mother, has abrogated the crucial role. That’s the one thing that’s consistent throughout his work.”

Steve has admitted that he has thought about trying to find out what happened to Donald, but he always hesitated: “Something always holds me back, like the old saw about letting sleeping dogs lie. To tell the truth, I don’t know how I’d react if I did find him and we came face-to-face. But even if I ever did decide to launch an investigation, I don’t think anything would come of it, because I’m pretty sure my father’s dead.”

Maybe Steve already knew from the few ties that still remained to his father’s family, and he didn’t want to get the media all hot and bothered over the issue. After all, it would call attention to Steve, and not his books, which is where he preferred that the focus remain.

While he was constantly aware of his past, he was also prescient about his legacy. Even in the early eighties, Steve had a sense of how his work would be regarded by future generations, and he was sanguine about all of the critical and negative reviews that had appeared over the first decade of his life as a published author:

“After a while, if you live long enough, by the time you’re so old that you’ve begun to parody yourself, and you and your contemporaries have all had your strokes and your heart attacks, then people start reviewing you well, mostly because you’ve survived the demolition derby. That’s when you get good reviews, after you’ve done your important work.”

Part of the issue may have been that he was cranking out a few more books than people knew about, under his Bachman pseudonym, in addition to writing articles and short stories, and traveling to promote the books that were just published. Be careful what you wish for, because the more he wrote, the more his publisher wanted, which meant that the quality had to suffer somewhere along the way. In his case, it came from accelerated publication schedules.

His habitually wrote three drafts for every book. For the first two drafts, he still followed what his editor John Gould at the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise had told him way back in high school: “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story, and when you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Steve’s third draft came after he’d received comments from his editor and incorporated those he wanted to keep along with a final polish of the other changes he’d implemented. “As the successes have mushroomed, it’s been tougher to get my editors to give me time for the third draft,” he said. “I’m really afraid that one will say a manuscript is great just because it fits the publication schedule. Every year I’m on a faster and faster track. I’m supposed to read the proofs in five days, and what if a bunch of dumb errors go through? We’ll fuck up real good one of these days and then people can say, ‘Steve King writes for money,’ and at that point they’ll be right.”

Christine came out in April of 1983 and hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it was published. Because it had long been regarded as a forgettable American car, Steve had chosen a 1958 Plymouth Fury to serve as the car that was inherently evil from the time it was still on the assembly line. “They were the most mundane fifties car that I could remember,” he said. “I didn’t want a car that already had a legend attached to it, like the Thunderbird or the Ford Galaxie. Nobody ever talked about Plymouth cars anymore.”

Richard Kobritz had produced Salem’s Lot the TV miniseries back in 1979, and he had also bought the film rights to Christine. The film would be released to theaters in December 1983.

As was the case with Salem’s Lot, King had no control over the production nor did he write the screenplay. In December 1982, Kobritz received a script from screenwriter Bill Phillips—his sole credit was for Summer Solstice, a made-for-TV movie that was silent-film star Myrna Loy’s last starring role—and the green light to start production came the following April. John Carpenter, who had directed some of King’s favorite movies including Halloween and The Fog, finished shooting the picture two months later.

The challenges Kobritz faced as producer of Christine were different from those on Salem’s Lot, though there were some similarities. “The hard part of doing a horror movie is that a lot of the suspense is in the imagination of the reader and in the author’s description,” said Kobritz. “The light that comes through at the bottom of the door, the vibration that the person feels on the other side, and what’s behind it in visual terms without making it corny or repetitive has always been the problem. It’s not expressed in dialogue, it’s expressed in mood, in lighting, and occasionally in special effects. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Kobritz, Carpenter, and Phillips faced a specific problem with Christine. “We were working on the script when I asked if the car was born bad or did it become evil later in life, and none of us had an answer,” said Kobritz. “I called Steve and asked him. He said he didn’t know and that we could do whatever we wanted, so we elected to make the car inherently evil. That’s why the car killed a man on the assembly line, which wasn’t in the book. But it did show you that the car was born bad.”

Kobritz bought twenty-four different 1958 two-door Plymouth Furies, Belvederes, and Savoys—other Plymouth models with similar body styles—and had them shipped to Santa Clarita, California, where most of the movie was filmed. In 1958, just 5,303 Furies came off the assembly line. The techs on the film cannibalized parts of each the twenty-four so they ended up with seventeen working cars, each earmarked for a specific purpose in the script: one was the burning car, one was retooled with a rubberized front hood, and so on. After filming was complete, only two cars were left: one was donated to a public radio station in Santa Cruz, California, for their annual auction, while the other was awarded to the winner of a contest at a new cable channel called MTV.

When Steve saw the rough cuts of Christine, he told Kobritz he was happy with the way they told the story. The Dead Zone movie had come out a couple months earlier, and Steve was pleased with that one as well.

“I thought Christopher Walken was about as right for Johnny as any mainstream Hollywood actor I could think of,” Steve said.

Despite his hands-off approach to the film, he had retained approval for casting, and his first choice was Bill Murray. Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer who was involved with such hits from the seventies as Serpico, Lipstick, and King Kong, was producing the film and thought Murray would work for the starring role too, but the actor had a prior commitment. Then DeLaurentiis suggested Christopher Walken, and Steve thought he was a great choice for the role.

Of his two movies released in 1983, he was batting a thousand, but he was still hedging his bets. After all, he still was skittish about dealing with Hollywood after The Shining. For the most part, critics reviewed The Dead Zone favorably. Critic Roger Ebert wrote that the movie “does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: it makes us forget it is supernatural.”

Although he was talking with Hollywood on the phone and doing deals with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, Steve still preferred to hang out with his old friends. He was grateful for his success and was only half-joking when he said he was glad that he had escaped the path he’d feared he would follow for the rest of his life.

He’d joke with his friend Sandy Phippen, who taught English to high school students, that Phippen’s life was his worst nightmare. In addition to working as a teacher, Phippen was also the book editor for Maine Life magazine. He was four years ahead of Steve at the University of Maine, so their paths never crossed until they’d both been out in the world for some time.

In the early eighties, Steve started making money hand over fist with movie options, paperback deals, foreign deals, audio deals, royalties, and book advances. Steve had loosened up about spending the money by this time, but his first big splurge after buying the Bangor house and a couple of cars was a couple hundred bucks for a really good guitar, which was something he’d always wanted but could never afford. After he bought it, he left the price tag on to remind him how much it cost.

However, when it came to spending money on other people and helping them out, he never hesitated. “He and Tabby were always very generous with everybody,” said Phippen. “They’d pay for a new set of tires on a friend’s car, they’d cover the rent, you could ask them for anything. Once I needed to borrow a couple hundred dollars, and I saw that Tabby was having a book signing in Bangor. So I drove to the bookstore and stood in line, and when she signed the book, I told her I needed some money. She took out her purse and wrote me a check just like that.”

Steve didn’t change his lifestyle one bit, at least not around Bangor. In fact, he was often out and about so much that it became a game with some people: how many times did you spot Stephen King this week? “I’d go shopping, and there he was,” said Phippen. “Or I’d go to a movie and he’d be there. He used to ride the city bus all around Bangor, reading books in the back of the bus. Some of my students would tell me, ‘Stephen King was on the bus this morning.’ He was the local famous person.”

In the meantime, Tabby’s notoriety was growing as well, as her second novel, Caretakers, was published in the fall of 1983. The story was set in Maine and explored a secret love affair between a man and a woman who belonged to different social classes. Of course, one of the first questions interviewers asked was about her famous husband, and sometimes they’d accidentally snag an interview with him when he wandered into the room. The obvious question was if he felt jealous.

“We work on entirely separate tracks, so it isn’t much of a problem,” he’d say. “Every now and then she’ll accuse me of stealing one of her ideas.”

While her novels revolved around personal stories that didn’t involve horror, Tabby admitted that she drew on the raw stuff inside the same way her husband did: “Every character I have ever imagined was rooted in some aspect of myself, including the nasty ones. I’m not saying that I’m a rapist or an alcoholic, but it’s my job to imagine what it would be like to be such a person.”

Another obvious question was if she wanted to be as famous as her husband. Her answer was always an unequivocal no.

“Steve published before I did because he’s better than I am and more driven and because I was busy having babies,” she explained. “He’s intensely ambitious and has always had a fantastic sense of priorities. I’m conflicted about ambition, am easily distracted, and don’t write anything like he does.”

She was also reluctant to pursue her writing more than she did because she feared how the attention would affect her life: “I resist the star-maker machinery because I witness the almost total loss of privacy my husband has had to suffer. I grant interviews, but always with reservations that have deepened over the years. People are inevitably disappointed when they learn that someone they thought they knew and loved is merely another flawed human being.”

Her feminist viewpoint was still as strong as it was back in college. “The wife of a successful man is still essentially seen as chattel,” she noted. “One of the reasons I rarely give interviews has to do with this assumption that I’ve taken up his fucking hobby. If I asked if it was okay with him if I wrote a book, it would be as unnatural as if I asked him if it was okay to have breakfast.”

When Steve traveled for meetings with his editors or to go on promotional tours, he liked to fly out of Logan Airport in Boston, partly because when he was heading home, the four-hour drive allowed him to decompress enough so that he could gradually cross the boundary from the frenzied life of the public Stephen King to the much calmer, radically different life of the private Stephen King.

On Halloween 1983, he got off the plane and jumped in a rental car, which was equipped only with AM radio. Steve had always liked hard-core rock and roll, the louder and meaner the better. The drive home that day seemed interminably long since then, as now, AM radio was a veritable wasteland of talk shows, sports, religious stations, news, maybe a few oldies stations, but no rock. Bangor had one rock station, WACZ, and it was on the AM dial. Steve had become friends with Jim Feury, also known as Mighty John Marshall, one of the DJs at the station, and after he returned home, Steve had complained bitterly about his drive back from Boston. Marshall filed this comment away.

One day Marshall asked Steve if he’d be interested in buying the station, which had just been put up for sale. If it was sold to someone else, the only way that WACZ could make a profit would be to run it via remote control, with automatic reel-to-reel machines and programmed Top 40 music.

Steve didn’t hesitate. He bought the station because he didn’t want Bangor to be without a rock station. It was selfish, but in a way, he did it for the same reason why he gives blurbs to unknown writers whose work he loves: “If no one plays groups like the BoDeans and the Rainmakers, they won’t get contracts. If that happened, some of the fun would go out of my life, that sense of liberation only fresh, straight-ahead balls-to-the-wall rock music can provide.”

In a way, he viewed the station, given the new call letters of WZON, as another form of expressing himself in addition to writing. “We’re going to do some things to make it an interesting station, and I’ve got to be able to harness some of my own talents to it,” he said in 1983, shortly after the purchase, admitting he was a novice when it came to running a radio station. “I’m studying how everything runs, it’s like I’m on my student driver’s permit.” If all went well with radio, he envisioned buying a TV station somewhere down the road; it would play horror movies twenty-four hours a day.

The same month he bought the radio station, the book he never wanted to see in print, Pet Sematary, was published. His deal with the devil, Doubleday, was fulfilled.

“That book came out of a real hole in my psyche,” he said. “If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don’t like it. It’s a terrible book, not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don’t really believe that.”

In Pet Sematary, in the front of the novel where previous books of an author are listed, sharp-eyed fans noticed a book they’d never heard of: The Gunslinger. When Pet Sematary came out, King’s office was flooded with calls and letters from readers who wanted the unheard-of book and became incensed when they were told they couldn’t have it, since the publisher Donald Grant had sold out of the limited-run copies through his mail-order business. Grant’s office, along with Doubleday, was also inundated with communications from angry readers. Grant asked if he could print ten thousand more copies, and Steve agreed.

Steve learned an important lesson about fans who were so adamant about reading every word he’d ever written that he could indeed publish his grocery list and haul in millions.