Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

8 MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE

If Steve had even been thinking of cutting back on his increasing cocaine and alcohol consumption, the publication of Pet Sematary all but squelched it. He was so upset that the book had been published—and he still fumed at the way Doubleday had essentially blackmailed him into giving them the book—that he cranked his already sizable consumption of beer and cocaine up a few notches. Though Tabby and his kids occasionally tried to intervene, Steve continued to deny that he had a problem.

Cycle of the Werewolf was originally published in 1983 as a limited edition by the small publisher Land of Enchantment. The story of a small Maine town that has to deal with the sudden appearance of a werewolf that starts terrorizing the residents, Cycle of the Werewolf is ridiculously short by King’s standards, 128 pages, and was published in paperback two years later with a new title, Silver Bullet, to tie into the movie based on the book. King wrote the screenplay, and it was the directorial debut for Daniel Attias, who would go on to direct one of Steve’s favorite TV series over two decades later, Lost.

King spent the first six months of 1984 campaigning for presidential candidate Gary Hart and held a fund-raising dinner at his house that winter. Hart was there and Steve played the proud host, inviting all of his friends to meet with the candidate and donate money to the campaign.

Sandy Phippen noticed that Steve acted differently during the fund-raiser. “The house was packed, there were a lot of people, and he basically shifted into his public Stephen King persona,” he said, describing this mode as the opposite of his private one. “He was playing the role. That’s what you learn to do after a while, and that’s what people want to see.”

Even Owen knew there were two Stephen Kings. Whenever Steve would leave Bangor to go on a book tour or to meet with movie producers or bookstore owners, his seven-year-old son would say, “Daddy’s going out to be Stephen King again.”

A flurry of movies based on his books followed that fall, including Graveyard Shift and IT, which became a made-for-TV miniseries.

In May of 1984, the movie Firestarter came out. A twenty-five-year-old Egyptian producer by the name of Dodi Fayed had acquired the rights to the movie for $1 million. Later, he would become known as the man who died with Princess Diana in her fatal car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.

Dino De Laurentiis viewed eight-year-old Drew Barrymore as the Shirley Temple of her generation and decided to cast her in the lead role of Charlie McGee. Barrymore was already familiar with the book; when it first came out, her mother saw the book and thought the picture of the girl on the cover resembled her daughter. They bought it and Drew started to read. A few chapters into the book, the little girl told her mother, “I’m the Firestarter, I’m Charlie McGee.”

De Laurentiis served as producer and Mark Lester, whose previous credits included Roller Boogie and Truck Stop Women, directed Firestarter. When he first saw the movie, Steve, who didn’t write the screenplay, thought the movie was on the same level as The Shining. “Firestarter was one of my most visual novels and a resounding failure as a film,” he said. Steve’s dissatisfaction with the movie resulted in a bit of a public feud between writer and director.

“I was appalled at some of the things he said,” said Lester, who added that King had earlier said he liked the way the film turned out. “I’m just appalled that a man of his wealth would actually stoop to these slanderous comments that he makes about people, attacking these movies.”

“Mark’s assertion that I saw the movie and loved it is erroneous,” Steve volleyed back. “I saw part of an early rough cut. When I saw the final cut months later, I was extremely depressed. The parts were all there, but the total was somehow much less than the sum of those parts.”

Although Firestarter bombed both with Steve and with the critics—Roger Ebert wrote that despite a roundup of interesting characters, “the most astonishing thing in the movie is how boring it is”—King’s name was still held in high regard across the board, and requests for him to star in a variety of sometimes surprising venues began to pour in.

One of the few he agreed to was a TV commercial for American Express. In the early 1980s, the charge-card company had created a campaign featuring famous people whose faces weren’t necessarily well-known. Some of the other eighties-era celebrities who would ask viewers, “Do you know me?” in the ads included John Cleese, Tip O’Neill, and Tom Landry. Dressed in a smoking jacket, Steve wandered through the stage set of a haunted house complete with spooky organ music and lots of fog and thunder.

He would later admit that it was a mistake to do the ad. “He felt like he created his own Frankenstein monster with those commercials,” said Stanley Wiater, author of several books about King, because his portrayal in the ads clearly played up to the stereotype of how people expected him to act.

Yet, he’d had lots of practice, albeit on a much smaller stage. “The man is a frustrated actor,” said Tabby. “Peek in and listen to him read to his children. It might be from Marvel comics, or The Lord of the Rings, or something he’s written just for them. Or perhaps there’s an improvised puppet show with a makeshift stage and a cast of Sesame Street puppets, and our own repertory company of dragons, vampires, assorted Things.”

After the American Express ad, the offers kept coming. If Steve had wanted to, he could have guest-starred on The Love Boat or channeled Rod Serling by hosting an updated weekly version of The Twilight Zone. He didn’t want to do them for a number of reasons: despite his increasing visibility, he still preferred that people and the media focus on his work, not him. He also knew even from being on the sidelines of Salem’s Lot that network censors would place unreasonable demands on him to water down his work.

“You can’t show someone getting punched in the nose more than once in an hour of prime-time television, and you want to put horror on TV?” he asked rhetorically. “I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to be on TV for six weeks and then be axed because everybody tuned out when they found out there was nothing there to watch.”

He continued to be a bit dumbfounded by the way people glommed on to him just because he was famous: “I’m a little bit amazed by the whole thing, and I don’t really understand it. Writers are not stars, they’re not supposed to be stars. It’s a thing that will play itself out in time. It’ll pass.”

Famous last words. In any case, Steve knew he’d reached a saturation point when he received a call from a producer who asked if he wanted to appear on the game show Hollywood Squares. He turned down the opportunity, but not long after he was reading a story in the Boston Globe about the Red Sox when the reporter compared a particular game to one of his novels.

“I’ve sort of become what I was writing about,” Steve said. “In a way, it’s the ultimate horror and the ultimate comedy at the same time.” But he took it in stride. “I think that America needs Santa Claus, and to some extent America needs the Easter Bunny, and America really needs Ronald McDonald, more than Santa Claus now, I think. But America needs a bogeyman too. And Alfred Hitchcock’s dead, so I got the job for a while.”

Though he continued to live as normal a life as he could, his international exposure meant things had definitely changed when he went out in public. He especially rued going to a mall. If he arrived early to do a book signing, he’d often wander around to do some window-shopping. That’s when the whispers started: “That’s Stephen King!” He tried his best to ignore it, but people would often follow him around.

The publishers and editors who published him in the early days—and whom Steve continued to help out with an occasional story or introduction here and there—were also not immune from taking advantage of Steve’s star power. Not only did the magazines put his name in forty-eight-point type on the cover, but the anthologies such as Stalking the Nightmare, Tales by Moonlight, and some of the annual fantasy-story collections were quickly turning into the worst offenders. He couldn’t fault them entirely since these collections of stories by many different writers needed a few marquee names to get readers to pick up the book in the first place.

However, he thought they were getting a bit carried away. “My name has been used prominently on enough covers stateside to make me feel a little bit like the come-on girl in the window of a live sex show on Forty-second Street,” he said.

He announced that from that point on he would refuse to do “whore duty for some marketing guy” and altered all anthology contracts to dictate that his name appear alphabetically in the list of contributors as well as appear in the same-size font as theirs on the cover.

With so many people grabbing at him, hoping to benefit from his success, he retreated more fully into his life at home. Bangor was one of the few places where he felt he could completely let down his guard and be himself. But he was also ambivalent about the place where he’d grown up and that had nurtured him as a writer.

“I love Maine and I hate it,” he said. “There’s a bitter feel to the real country of Maine. Most people think of Maine as lobsters and Bar Harbor. But the real country is poor people with no teeth, junked-out cars in front yards, and people who live in pup tents in the woods with great big color TVs inside them.”

He saw no reason to go looking far afield for stories when plenty were right under his nose in Bangor: “The small town is a great setting for a story of suspense, because we understand that there’s a microcosm. In New York City, there might be one hundred thousand town drunks. We really only need one. And in a small town, you only have one.”

As Steve hunkered down in Bangor, he spent more time with Tabby and the kids. One of the family’s favorite pastimes was to sit at the dining room table and pass a book around, with each family member reading a passage before giving it to the next in line.

They’d also play a game in which Steve would provide the setting and first few lines of a story before handing it over to one of the kids to continue. Later on, Owen and Joe would play a variation of the game on their own called the Writing Game, with one writing a page of a story before the other would take over.

Joe, in particular, was showing signs of taking after his father. At age twelve, he wrote an essay and sent it to the Bangor Daily News, which printed it a few days later. “I thought I was on the verge of major celebrity,” he said. His feelings changed, however, when the story came out. “When I read it in the newspaper, I realized it was full of trite ideas and windy writing. At the end, they had added a little postscript that said, ‘Joseph King is the son of bestselling novelist Stephen King,’ and I knew that was the only reason they published the piece. At that age, the fear of humiliation is probably worse than the fear of death, and not long afterward I started to think I should just write under a different name.”

Steve and Tabby never censored their kids’ choice of books or movies. In Joe’s case, it resulted in a higher-than-usual tolerance for the movies his father liked. For his twelfth birthday, he told his parents he wanted to invite his friends over to watch Dawn of the Dead. It was Joe’s tenth viewing of the film, but the first for most of his guests. Slowly, his friends left the room, but a couple stayed behind, wordless and white as ghosts.

As Steve discovered with the flap over including The Gunslinger in his list of published books in Pet Sematary, an increasing number of people wanted to own everything he’d written, whether it was a limited edition of Cujo or a copy of one of the men’s magazines that contained one of his stories. They were known as completists: collectors who want to own everything he’s ever published, and then some.

Even by 1984, the unofficial list of Everything King was long. In addition to first-edition hardcovers, there were first-edition mass-market and trade paperbacks and every foreign translation in all formats. In the limited-edition category were signed-and-numbered and signed-and-lettered books. Then there were audiotapes, video games, scripts, posters, and other promotional materials from Stephen King movies, not to mention the book-club editions, both U.S. and foreign, and lastly, Tabby’s novels.

In coming years, the challenge for a completist would only grow and would come to include a signed, limited-edition Stephen King guitar. In 1997, a guitar-manufacturing company bought the black-walnut tree featured in the film version of Cujo and made 250 guitars from the wood. Each guitar had a sticker inside with King’s signature.

Although he has authorized limited collectors’ editions of his own work, mostly to help fledgling publishers who are struggling, he began to have mixed feelings about the trend: “People would bring me books all wrapped up in cellophane and say, ‘Oh, please, just be very careful when you lift the cover, that binding has never been broken!’ I’d tell them what in the world were they talking about, it’s just a book! It’s not the fucking Mona Lisa.”

King was still making public appearances at the horror and fantasy conventions that he had first started to attend back in the late seventies, though by the early eighties he had started to cut back. The fans were becoming scarier, in his opinion: “I’ve been at a couple of science-fiction conventions, and those people were out in a fucking void. There were people there who were literally separated from reality. Fundamentally, it seemed to me that they all felt alien, and maybe that’s why they like science fiction.”

He did attend the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic and the Arts in March 1984, where several scholars and professors studying King’s work were scheduled to present papers and talks. Tony Magistrale, then an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, had written an essay entitled “Stephen King’s Viet Nam Allegory: An Interpretation of ‘The Children of the Corn,’ ” about the Vietnam elements in King’s short story.

Afterward, Steve went out with several of the presenters, and he zeroed in on Magistrale’s paper. “He told me there was no way in hell he intended that story to be an allegory for Vietnam,” said Magistrale, who thought that it didn’t matter, adding the main criterion of English teachers and professors everywhere: “Literary criticism isn’t about what you meant, it’s about what I can prove.”

Magistrate noted, “To me, there were so many things that stood out in the story: the guy was a medic in Vietnam, kids were getting killed at eighteen, the land had become tainted and polluted, and the high school was named after JFK. Steve didn’t concede my point, but we just chalked it up and laughed.”

Magistrale included the essay in his first book on King, Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic.

In November 1984, Thinner, the fifth Richard Bachman book, was published.

This, the first Bachman book to appear in hardcover, was heavily promoted with advertising and pushed as a featured title at the American Booksellers Association Convention in May 1984. It was also heavily promoted to booksellers throughout the country.

“As the publisher of some of the finest horror novels ever written, it takes a lot to get me excited about a new horror writer. Such a writer has now appeared,” Elaine Koster gushed in a promotional letter sent to booksellers with advance reading copies.

“I wanted to jump up and down and say, ‘This is Stephen King!’ But I couldn’t,” said Koster. “We had many questions, but we never led anyone to believe that it was Steve. We stonewalled it, even though it would be to our advantage not to. It became a mission for me to respect Steve’s privacy.”

The photo on the back of the book was of Richard Manuel, a friend of Kirby McCauley’s who lived near St. Paul, Minnesota, and made his living building houses. “We had to find someone who lived a long way from New York,” said McCauley. “There was a chance that someone in New York would recognize Manuel walking down the street.”

For his part, Manuel was amused. After the book came out, a few friends and relatives called him to let him know of the striking resemblance he bore to the author of the hot new thriller.

Soon after publication, readers began to send irate letters to Bachman, accusing him of deliberately copying Stephen King. “A lot of them were angry with me for that,” said Steve, who read the letters addressed to Bachman. “ ‘You can’t copy him,’ they said.”

Thinner brought renewed interest to Bachman’s previous books. All but one, The Long Walk, were still in print after six years, highly unusual for a mass-market paperback by a supposedly no-name thriller writer, given the brief shelf life of most mass-market paperbacks.

After Thinner came out, however, the questions about whether King was really Bachman started to come fast and furious. Each time King denied it, though he admitted he knew Bachman informally and that he was a chicken farmer, was shy, and disdained publicity. “The poor guy was one ugly son of a bitch,” he’d tell reporters.

King and his publisher continued their denial for a couple of months in the face of a barrage of calls from all the major network TV shows from Good Morning America to Entertainment Tonight. Even a buyer at B. Dalton’s, then a major bookstore chain, called NAL with their suspicions and committed to purchasing thirty thousand copies if they would just fess up. One of the major book clubs, the Literary Guild, accepted Thinner, and King was amused when one of the club’s early readers remarked, “This is what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write.”

The cover was blown by Stephen P. Brown, who worked in a bookstore in Washington, D.C. Brown was a big King fan who had also read all of Richard Bachman’s books. After reading one of the advance reading copies of Thinner that came to the store a few months before publication, he suspected that Bachman and King were the same. “I was about eighty percent convinced Bachman was Stephen King,” said Brown.

He looked at the copyright pages on each of the first four novels, and Rage listed Kirby McCauley as the copyright holder. He sent a letter to King telling him of his discovery, thoroughly expecting to receive a letter of outraged denial. Instead he picked up the phone one day at the bookstore to hear the following on the other end:

“Steve Brown? This is Steve King. Okay, you know I’m Bachman, I know I’m Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.”

“All the Bachman books are sad books, they all have downbeat endings,” said Brown, which runs counter to King’s general philosophy about his books, that they should end on an up note. Pet Sematary and Cujo were the exceptions, while Thinner more closely resembled a King book with its upbeat ending, which is perhaps why so many people suspected Bachman of being King.

“The Bachman books didn’t fit into his career very well,” said McCauley. “He was known for his supernatural horror novels, and his fear was that he would lead his audiences astray.”

King officially came out as Bachman in the Bangor Daily News on February, 9, 1985, under the headline “Pseudonym Kept Five King Novels a Mystery.”

Once the cat was out of the bag, the number of copies of Thinner in print jumped tenfold, from 28,000 copies to 280,000. Regarding his unveiling as Richard Bachman, “I never meant that to come out,” said King. “I thought I could get away with it.” Bachman “died of cancer of the pseudonym.”

He said, “When I write as Richard Bachman, it opens up that part of my mind. It’s like a hypnotic suggestion that frees me to be somebody who is a little bit different. I think that all novelists are inveterate role players, and it was fun to be someone else for a while, in this case, Richard Bachman.”

Even though he wrote the book as Bachman, some of King’s habits stuck. In several places in the story the characters talk among themselves in Romany, the Gypsy language. “I yanked some Czechoslovakian editions of my books off the shelves and just took stuff out at random, and I got caught,” he admitted. “I got nailed for it by the readers, and I deserved to be because it was lazy.”

The Talisman, his first joint venture with Peter Straub, was published the same month as Thinner, with a first printing of 600,000 copies. The novel is the story of a twelve-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer who sets off on a coast-to-coast walk from New Hampshire to California in search of a talisman that will save the life of his mother, who is dying. Along the way, he finds himself in the Territories, a parallel universe set in medieval times. As before, attaching King’s name to anything resulted in a veritable gold rush.

“The book is full of little tricks between us where we’re trying to fool the reader into thinking that the other guy wrote it,” said Peter Straub. “If you come along something you think is a dead giveaway, it’s a trick.”

“One of the biggest practical jokes they played was to imitate each other,” said Bev Vincent, a friend of King’s and author of The Road to the Dark Tower. “If you read a section of The Talisman that has something to do with jazz, the natural assumption is that Peter wrote it, while in reality Steve did. And if there’s a rock-and-roll section, it’s probably Peter pretending to be Steve.”

“We both agreed that it would be nice to make the book seamless,” said King. “It shouldn’t seem like a game to readers to try to figure out who wrote what. When I worked on my half of the copyediting, I went through large chunks of the manuscript unsure myself who had written what.”

Once The Talisman came out, Straub was taken aback at his increased visibility, especially among the fans. “He got a taste of Steve’s life when the hard-core Stephen King fans started to follow him around trying to find out what Steve was really like,” said Stanley Wiater. “Things got pretty wild there for a while with people knocking on his door and calling him to pick his brain. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.”

Nineteen eighty-five was another breakneck year of accomplishment and accolades. Skeleton Crew, another collection of short stories, appeared in June. Given his unveiling as Richard Bachman earlier in the year, a collection of his first four pseudonymous works was published in October with the title of The Bachman Books, including Rage, Roadwork, The Long Walk, and The Running Man.

The only downside was the growing number of fans who traveled to Bangor every year to see the famous mansion and hopefully catch a glimpse of their idol, as well as a corresponding increase in mail. Steve had to hire a couple of assistants to help out not only with the deluge—more than five hundred fan letters were coming into the office each week by the mideighties—but also to assist with the contracts, agreements, and business correspondence Steve had to respond to. At one point, Shirley Sonderegger, one of his assistants, suggested that King launch a monthly newsletter, Castle Rock, in the hopes that this would satisfy his more rabid fans and cut down on the amount of fan mail that he and his staff had to answer. He agreed, though he wanted nothing to do with the publication beyond contributing an occasional article.

He never forgot that his success was due not only to his talent but also to being in the right place at the right time. “I think if I started publishing in the midsixties, I would have become a fairly popular writer,” he said. “If I started in the midfifties, I would have been John D. MacDonald, somebody that twenty million workingmen knew about, that they carried in their back pockets to work.” He just wouldn’t have been Stephen King, household name.

For years, Hollywood—and Dino De Laurentiis in particular—had been bugging Steve to direct a movie based on one of his stories, but he kept turning the idea down. Things came to a head when he handed in the screenplay for a film based on his short story “Trucks,” where trucks, tractors, and machinery of all kinds turn on humans, killing anyone in their path.

In his screenplay, which he wrote with no thought of directing, Steve included hundreds of specific camera shots, which suggested to De Laurentiis that Steve would be a competent director. Steve turned him down, but Dino wouldn’t take no for an answer. Steve reluctantly accepted, with one condition: if at any point in the project De Laurentiis felt that Steve was dropping the ball, Dino would not hesitate to replace him. They agreed, and production started in July at the De Laurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Once Steve warmed up to the idea, he was happy that his virgin attempt at directing would be Maximum Overdrive, the name they chose for the film. “I did Maximum Overdrive because I thought I wouldn’t have an actor walk off and have a tantrum if the actor happens to be a Mack truck,” he said. “Or that the electric knife won’t say it couldn’t do the nude scene because it was having its period. I thought that working mostly with machines would be easier than working with actors.”

It turned out to be totally different. “The trucks and the machinery were the real prima donnas!” he complained. “They fucked up without fail, while my actors always gave me more than I expected.”

Everything that could go wrong did, and not just due to King’s inexperience. Trucks refused to start, an electric knife got broken, and Armando Nannuzzi, the director of photography, lost an eye when a possessed lawn mower ran over a pile of wood chips and threw a splinter. But there were funny moments as well. The truck-stop set constructed for the movie looked so authentic that at least once a day a real truck would wander onto the set and the driver would hop out expecting to get some grub.

In one scene, a beer truck was supposed to get blown up and send hundreds of cases flying through the air. However, beer cans—which Miller donated to the movie for a plug—fly through the air a lot better when they’re empty. The cast and crew were all but ordered to take mass quantities of beer home and return the empty cans the next day. But even they couldn’t polish off enough beer. Steve postponed the scene as long as he could, but when the fateful day arrived, the crew poured the rest of the beer down the drain.

Despite his admonishments to both De Laurentiis and the crew to treat him like any other first-time director, for the most part they left him alone. “Once you get successful enough, there’s a perception of power that goes along with that so that people who know you’re messing up will stand back and sort of allow you to mess up,” he said, describing it as “the emperor’s new clothes” syndrome.

“I wish someone had told me how little I knew and how grueling it was going to be. I didn’t know how little I knew about the mechanics and the politics of filmmaking. People walk around the director with this ‘don’t wake the baby’ attitude. Nobody wants to tell you this, that, or the other thing if it’s bad news.”

What made matters even worse was that the mostly Italian crew spoke little English—De Laurentiis had brought the crew over from Italy—and Steve didn’t speak Italian, which meant that comments and direction that would normally have run a minute or two easily snowballed into ten or twenty minutes.

Later, he said that he hated the experience: “It was too much like real work. It took too much time and I was away too much. It made things difficult for Tabby and for the kids, and I just can’t see going through that kind of thing again.”

When the movie came out a year later, Steve was invited to be a guest VJ on MTV for an entire week, to coincide with its release. Among his favorite videos he introduced that week were “Who Made Who” by AC/DC, “Come On Feel the Noise” by Quiet Riot, and “Addicted to Love” from Robert Palmer.

While he was making the movie, an antipornography law went into effect in North Carolina. A lifelong proponent of free speech—after all, censorship is a direct threat to his livelihood—he saw the effects of the obscenity law firsthand: “When their antiporn statute became law, between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, all the Playboys and Penthouses disappeared from the convenience store where I stopped for my morning paper and evening six-pack. They went so fast it was as if the Porn Fairy had visited in the middle of the night.”

Of course, another little issue on the set was Steve’s escalating drug use. “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. During postproduction on Maximum Overdrive, his editor Chuck Verrill visited him, and he was appalled at the change in his author. “He was gargling Listerine and popping pills,” said Verrill. “He was still a nice guy and coherent, but he did seem to be strung out.”

Sandy Phippen saw the trouble brewing, describing how Steve ended up in the drunk tank at the Bangor police station one night. Steve also lived in an apartment in Brewer for a time after Tabby had reached the limits of her patience and kicked him out of the house.

Just as Steve liked to drink beer at book signings, he brought along a couple of six-packs when doing readings for local fund-raisers. Phippen was the librarian in Hancock Point, a summer colony about forty miles from Bangor. In 1982, he invited Steve to speak at an event at the local chapel to raise money for a new roof for the library. Sandy poured beer into an old white pitcher so members of the audience would think Steve was drinking water. But it was obvious, and some of the ladies were so appalled that he would be drinking beer in the church that they walked out.

The same thing happened during a talk he gave at the Virginia Beach Library Pavilion in 1986. Fifteen minutes into his talk, he pulled out a beer from an inside pocket and yelled, “Who’s going to be at the Silver Bullet tonight?” to the crowd. When the first can was gone, he popped open a second and lit a cigarette. The next day, some people called the library to complain.

Twelve years into his career, King was seemingly indestructible, and nothing and no one could stop him. Certainly the booze and the cocaine weren’t interfering with his output.

Steve continued to insist that he didn’t have a problem with drugs and alcohol, that he could quit anytime he wanted. But a part of him still needed to get high. He didn’t see a reason to stop. And until he was forced to, he wouldn’t.

In October 1985, King broke his previous record by having four books hit the New York Times bestseller list at the same time: Skeleton Crew in hardcover, and Thinner, The Talisman, and The Bachman Books in paperback.

His literary agent, Kirby McCauley, also made headlines when he negotiated a $10 million, two-book contract with New American Library—with a twist. Instead of the standard deal, assigning rights to a publisher for the life of the copyright, King decided to license books to a publisher for fifteen years. If he was happy with how the publisher marketed and promoted the books at the end of that time, he’d renew the deal for another fifteen years. If not, he’d look for another publisher.

“We’re not selling the books anymore, we’re renting them,” said Steve.

This was a novel arrangement even among bestselling authors, and many publishers were not happy since they expected that other internationally famous writers would insist on the same kind of deal in the future.

With all the money, however, Steve’s wealth still felt surreal. “Basically, I’d like to be like Scrooge McDuck and put all of my money in Shop ’n Save bags and keep it in a vault to play around with,” he said. “Then it might seem real.”

He also spoke about retiring from writing: “I want to clear everything off, get this stuff out of the way, and not take on any more commitments. Then I’m just going to sit around.” He described his perfect day: “When I get up in the morning, I’ll just grab hold of a book and go somewhere and sit in the corner and read all day long—except I’ll take a walk in the morning, and I’ll break at lunch for some hamburgers at McDonald’s, and take another walk in the afternoon.”

But he knew it was just a pipe dream. “I’d be bored shitless. I would be real unhappy if I were doing that. But that is the sort of goal that I always have in mind.”

In fact, in 1986, he moved his office out of the house and into a former National Guard barracks on Florida Avenue in Bangor, out near the airport behind a General Electric plant and next to a tuna-processing plant. To his friend Tony Magistrale, his choice of location was entirely appropriate: “That’s the heart of Bangor, which is perfect for Steve, who came from poverty and has strong blue-collar roots.” When Magistrale visited King in Bangor, he wanted to meet him at his office, not his house, because he felt it provided a clearer picture of the real Stephen King.

“There are two Stephen Kings,” Magistrate explained. “There’s the Stephen King who’s the Horatio Alger story of America, and the other Stephen King, the working-class hero who can create salt-of-the-earth characters like Stu Redman and Dolores Claiborne.”

Steve had repeatedly said, in interviews and to anyone who would listen, that he used his writing as an outlet for his fears in the hopes they would dissipate somewhat, if not disappear entirely. The funny thing was, with every book and screenplay he churned out, his fears not only didn’t go away, but they burned brighter in some cases. He even developed a few entirely new fears.

“I can still find fear. I can find more fear than I used to be able to find,” he said. “I can’t go to sleep in a hotel without thinking who’s in the room underneath me, dead drunk and smoking a cigarette and about to fall asleep so that the room catches fire, and when was the last time that they changed the batteries in the smoke detector?”

His biggest fears concerned his kids. “Because I have some money, I worry about whether bad guys are going to come and kidnap my kids and hold them for ransom. I’m afraid of what it’s doing to their lives, I’m afraid of what it’s doing to my life.”

Of course, the kids thought their parents’ fears were overblown. The thing that bugged Naomi most when she was a teenager was when teachers singled her out and strangers would gush over her because she had a famous father. “It’s sort of like somebody recognizing Robin because he’s Batman’s sidekick,” she said. “It impresses the hell out of some people, but it puts you on a pedestal.”

It appeared that the Kings’ desire to raise their family as normally as possible and out of the glare of the spotlight by living in Bangor had been the right choice, for both kids and adults. “There are a lot of people who don’t know who I am, and that’s what I love about western Maine,” said Tabby. “And if they do, they don’t care. To them, I’m just another woman driving around with a dog in her car.”

Steve seemed to be particularly protective of Owen, yet also calmer. After all, Steve was closing in on forty, his success seemed pretty much entrenched, and his three kids were turning out fine so far. Given his vasectomy, there wouldn’t be any more, so a certain tenderness came over him when it came to his youngest child.

“Lately my smallest son has got this horror of going to school on rainy days,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, maybe they wouldn’t let him into the building. He’s only six and it’s in his brain but he can’t get it out of his mouth, it’s too big. So I keep him in the car on rainy days until the bell rings and it’s time for him to go in. A psychiatrist would say that I’m treating the symptom but not the cause, but I couldn’t give a shit about the cause. If keeping him in the car until the bell rings makes him feel better, then okay.”

One day Owen was complaining that whenever he needed to go to the bathroom, he had to raise his hand. “Everybody knows that I have to go pee-pee,” he told his father. Steve started to tell him he shouldn’t feel that way, but suddenly stopped because he’d felt the same way when he was in elementary school decades earlier. He comforted his son as best he could and immediately began to think how he could use the experience in a story, using the idea of “mean old teachers who make you raise your hand in front of all these little kids, and they all laugh when you’re walking out of the room because they know what you’re going to do.”

The result was “Here There Be Tygers,” published in Skeleton Crew in June of 1985. Steve dedicated the book to Owen.

As he began to treat his youngest with more compassion, Steve began to remember back to his own childhood more. “None of us adults remember childhood,” he said. “We think we remember it, which is even more dangerous. Colors are brighter, the sky looks bigger. Kids live in a constant state of shock. The input is so fresh and strong that it’s bound to be frightening. They look at an escalator, and they really think that if they don’t take a big step, they’ll get sucked in.”

Nineteen eighty-six was the first year since 1980 that King published only one novel. But given the size and scope of IT, published in September, it’s understandable. The book was mammoth, a 1,138-page tome with more than half a million words, King’s longest to date, although The Stand should have been just as long, or longer.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s my final exam,” he said. “I don’t have anything else to say about monsters. I put all the monsters in that book.”

The idea for IT came from a couple of different places. First, one of his favorite cartoon segments as a kid was when the entire cast of the Bugs Bunny Show came on-screen at the beginning of the opening credits. He wanted to write a book where all the monsters he came to love during his childhood—Dracula, Frankenstein’s creature, the werewolf, and others—could all be in one place as well.

Then he thought back to a fairy tale called “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and the bridge the characters crossed. “What would I do if a troll called out from beneath me, ‘Who is trip-trapping over my bridge?’ ” he said. “All of a sudden I wanted to write about a real troll under a real bridge.”

Once he started to work on IT, some surprising things began to happen. For one, as he began to explore the stories of the kids in the book, memories from his own childhood began to surface, so he incorporated some of them into the book. But to his distress, though he usually knew where a story was heading a few writing sessions in advance, he drew a blank when it came to IT and didn’t know what was coming next.

He had written about eight hundred pages of the manuscript and needed to write a scene about the body of a young girl that was going to be found. As he wrote the preceding scenes, he still didn’t come any closer to knowing her fate, and he became increasingly anxious. The night before he was due to write the scene, he still had no clue, so when he went to bed, he willed himself to have the idea by the time he woke up the next morning.

He fell asleep and began to dream that he was the girl he was writing about, and he was standing in a junkyard filled with discarded refrigerators. He opened the door to one and saw what looked like pieces of macaroni hanging from the shelves. One of them suddenly grew wings and flew onto his hand. “All of a sudden, this thing turned from white to red, and the rest of the shells flew out and covered my body. They were leeches. When I woke up, I was very frightened, but also very happy, because then I knew what was going to happen. I took the dream, dropped it into the book, and didn’t change a thing.”

He knew he needed some outside feedback, so he turned to Michael Collings, the author of several books about King, and a retired professor of English and director of creative writing at Pepperdine University. They had been corresponding for a while, and Steve felt comfortable with how Collings viewed his work from an academic standpoint, so he sent along the manuscript for IT in the spring of 1986 with a warning: “Never write a book whose manuscript is bigger than your own head.”

“He told me IT was his magnum opus and that the novel would not only be the culmination of his exploration of the theme of the child in jeopardy, but would also be the last monster-oriented novel he would write,” said Collings, who read the manuscript, suggested a few changes, and sent it back. When the book was published six months later, he was pleased to see that King had incorporated his advice.

“I have a sense of injustice that came from my mother,” said Steve. “We were the little people dragged from pillar to post. We were latchkey kids before there were latchkey kids, and she worked when women basically cleaned up other people’s messes. She never complained about it much, but I wasn’t dumb and I wasn’t blind, and I got a sense of who was being taken advantage of and who was lording it over the other people. A lot of that injustice has stuck with me, and it’s still in the books today.”

“All of his works are rooted in childhood trauma, or a violation of childhood in some way,” said Collings. Maybe Steve kept revisiting this theme in his books in an effort to eradicate it—after all, he forgot about the bad things in his life when he was writing—but also in a way to try on different personae and to live vicariously through the lives of other kids, who ultimately found a way to be powerful, as opposed to Steve’s real life, in which he was always reminded about the lack of power that he and his poverty-stricken family had as compared with the rest of the world.

When he first started writing IT, he deliberately put himself in a frame of mind where he could return to childhood. At first, he struggled to remember anything. “But little by little, I was able to regress, and the more I wrote, the brighter the images became,” he said. “I started to remember things that I’d forgotten. I put myself into a semidreaming state and I started to get a lot of that stuff back.”

After writing more than a dozen novels, one thing hadn’t changed: Steve rarely provided detailed physical descriptions for the characters he created. “For me, the characters’ physical being is just not there. If I’m inside a character, I don’t see myself because I’m inside that person,” he explained. “If a character goes by a mirror or if there’s a situation where his or her physical looks become important, then I provide a description.”

And after he finished writing IT, he announced he was done with writing stories of traumatized children. “When I wrote the books that people remember so clearly, like The Shining, Salem’s Lot, and Firestarter, I had kids in rubber pants and diapers all those years,” he said. “And now, my youngest kid is nine, and I don’t seem to have so much to say about kids anymore.”

If King seemed inclined to rest on the laurels of his magnum opus, the next fourteen months changed all that as four more books followed in quick succession: The Eyes of the Dragon (February 1987), The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three (May 1987), Misery (June 1987)—with a first printing of nine hundred thousand copies, it was the fourth-bestselling hardcover novel for the year, according to the New York Times bestseller list—and The Tommyknockers (November 1987), whose initial print run was 1.2 million. He continued his frantic pace of public appearances and fund-raisers and contributed to small magazines. Time magazine made him its cover story in October 1986, calling him “The Master of Pop Dread.”

But it seemed that the more the world encroached on his life, the more he would pull back. Occasionally, the stress from everybody wanting a piece of him would become too much to bear, and Steve would simply disappear for a while. Stanley Wiater recalled a few such occasions when he was trying to get in touch for some follow-up questions for an interview, and he contacted Peter Straub, whom most of Steve’s cohorts considered to be his best friend.

“Where’s Steve?” Wiater asked.

Straub didn’t know, adding that Steve wasn’t even responding to his calls. “He’s in one of his reclusive states,” Straub told him.

Wiater said that King once told him that every so often the fame got to him and he had to drop out. “He’s a driven man, compulsive and obsessive. If he doesn’t write every day, he gets cranky,” said Wiater. “I’ve known other writers who are like that, but I’m not one of them. Steve lives with a book for months, sometimes years. Basically, he just has to get out of his own way and occasionally shut down.”

King continued to use his name to benefit others, especially when it came to education.

He and Tabby had given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to friends, strangers, and charitable organizations since Carrie was published, and in 1987 they decided to create their own foundation—The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation—to make it official, not to mention to simplify bookkeeping for tax purposes. This way, nonprofits could apply directly for grants instead of a friend of a friend asking if the Kings could help out with fund-raising for a particular charity.

Steve funded an endowment to award four college scholarships of $2,000 a year to graduates of Hampden Academy. When a high school student in California wrote telling him that she was unable to go to college due to recent cuts in federal education funds, King obtained her high school academic records and decided to pay for her to attend the University of Southern California for four years.

Influenced by the effects of the antipornography statute he had witnessed in North Carolina the previous year, King began to use his fame for political clout in his home state. In the spring of 1986, the Maine Christian Civic League issued a referendum to prohibit the sale of pornographic material in the state. Steve spoke out against the bill as well as other forms of censorship, and voters turned it down in the June 10 primary.

Perhaps with IT finished, and Steve vowing not to write any more books about the lives of disenfranchised, abused kids, he turned to helping his own children with their writing. It was clear the writing gene had taken hold of all three of his offspring.

At sixteen, Naomi was already writing feature articles for Castle Rock, King’s fan newspaper. Just as her father was regularly deluged with unintelligent questions from his fans, so were his kids. Steve taught them to regard the inquiries in the same light that he did: with as much sarcasm and over-the-head irony as possible.

In response to the number one question, “What’s it like being the daughter of Stephen King?” Naomi replied, “He is thoughtful, considerate, and kind. He doesn’t beat or molest us, and we don’t get locked in dark closets.”

Instead of the fishbowl the family has lived in all their lives, Naomi not-so-secretly wished that her father tended more toward the J. D. Salinger mold. “There are people out there who think my father can walk on water,” she said. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he can’t, and that’s the honest truth.”

Joe was pursuing a writing career of his own. When he was twelve years old, he sent a story to Marvel Comics for the company’s Try-Out Book, which provided aspiring comic-strip writers with the beginning of a story and let them write their own ending, which was reminiscent of Steve’s 1977 story “The Cat from Hell.” Joe worked on his story and sent it off, only to receive a form rejection letter a short time later. But again, like his father, who had thrilled when an editor had taken the time to scrawl a brief note on the slip, Joe was ecstatic that the editor in chief, Jim Shooter, had written on his note. “I felt great euphoria at the idea that he had read some of my script, and felt like I was on my way,” Joe said. “It definitely motivated me to write more.”

Even Owen got into the act. An avid collector of everything G.I. Joe, he wrote to Hasbro suggesting they introduce a new doll that could see into the future and name it Crystal Ball G.I. Joe. The toy company accepted his idea and brought out the Sneak Peek G.I. Joe the following year. As payment for his suggestion, Owen received several boxes of G.I. Joe dolls and assorted accessories.

The kids were also turning out to be a chip off the old block when it came to another of their father’s obsessions: baseball, and the Red Sox in particular.

One of King’s loneliest memories of childhood was when he was nine years old and the family were living in Stratford, Connecticut. Steve was sitting alone in front of the TV on October 8, 1956, when he watched Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitch a perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. He was ecstatic at the conclusion of the game, but lamented that he had nobody with whom to celebrate the momentous occasion. He felt not only his brother’s absence, but more painfully, the acute lack of his father—after all, Steve knew his friends’ fathers celebrated with them—and it became all too much for the young boy to bear. He switched off the TV and waited in the silent apartment until his mother and brother came home.

Exactly three decades later, King took Owen, who was nine years old, to Fenway Park in Boston to see a World Series game, where the Red Sox took on the New York Mets. Steve studied his son closely. “His eyes are everywhere, trying to take in everything at once,” said King. He was painfully aware of the “almost ceremonial way in which the joy of the game is handed down from generation to generation. Plus,” he said, not bothering to try to hide the giddiness in his voice, “there was a dad in the picture this time around.”

Unfortunately, the Red Sox lost to the Mets 7–1.

Owen was caught unaware by his disappointment over the loss, and as father and son left Fenway, both were taken aback by Owen’s tears. King told him about that lonely day thirty years ago when he watched Don Larsen’s perfect game. Twenty minutes later, the Red Sox’s loss didn’t seem so bad. And quite possibly, the edge had been smoothed over on that still painful memory.