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Stephen King

AKA~ Richard Bachman

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Hello, I AM NOT STEPHEN KING, my name is Darlene and I am a really big Stepehen King Fan! I have 99% of all his movies and books. This site is set up for those who love Stephen King and his works. Where fan can meet other fans
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"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk." -Stephen King_______________
ABOUT THE MAN:
Stephen Edwin King is an American author best known for his enormously popular horror novels. He also wrote under aliases, as John Swithen and between 1977 and 1985 as Richard Bachman.
Stephen Edwin King was born September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, the son of Donald and Nellie Ruth King. After Donald King mysteriously disappeared, Nellie Ruth moved to several towns with Stephen and his adopted older brother David, before finally settling down in Maine. King grew to stand 6’4” tall.
King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently and sold them to his friends for thirty cents. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered. The stories were copied using a mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy a newspaper, Dave's Rag, which he self-published. Dave's Rag was about local events, and King would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately hooked on these genres.
Stephen King's public career first started in 1965 when he had a story "I was a Teenage Grave Robber" (about 6,000 words in total) published in the magazine COMICS REVIEW.
Today, Stephen King is the best selling novelist in the world, and his influence on popular culture and public consciousness is large and wide-ranging. Since the publication of his first novel, Carrie, public awareness of King is as high as any horror genre icon since the Universal Studios horror classics of the 1930s, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, or The Twilight Zone.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen King lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife Tabitha King, who is also a novelist. They also own a house in the Western Lakes District of Maine. Stephen spends winter seasons in an oceanfront mansion located off the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida. Their three children, Naomi Rachel, Joseph Hillstrom King (who appeared in the film Creepshow), and Owen Phillip, are grown and living on their own.
Both Owen and Joseph are writers; Owen's first collection of stories, We're All in This Together: A Novella and Stories was published in 2005. The first collection of stories by Joe Hill (Joseph's pen name), 20th Century Ghosts, was published in 2005 by PS Publishing in a very limited edition, winning the Crawford Award for best new fantasy writer and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. Tom Pabst has been hired to adapt Hill's upcoming novel, Heart-Shaped Box, for a 2007 Warner Bros release.
King's daughter Naomi is a Reverend in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Utica, New York.
Stephen King is a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox, and is frequently found at both home and away baseball games.
When not writing and directing, King spends his free time bowling, playing poker, and is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band with some of his pals, including Amy Tan and Matt Groening (the man behind The Simpsons).
He is also an active supporter of charities such as the American Cancer Society, and funds scholarships for local high school students.
In his private role as father, King helped coach his son Owen's Bangor West team to the Maine Little League Championship in 1989. This experience is recounted in the New Yorker essay "Head Down", which also appears in the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. King has called "Head Down" his best piece of nonfiction writing. In 1999, King wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which involved former Red Sox team member Tom Gordon as a major character. King recently co-wrote a book entitled Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season with Stewart O'Nan. This work recounts the authors' roller coaster reaction to the Red Sox's 2004 season, a season culminating in the Sox winning the 2004 American League Championship Series and World Series.
In 1992, Mansfield Stadium, a Little League ballpark (which also host High School and Senior League games) opened in Bangor, Maine. This facility, nicknamed the Field Of Screams, was made possible through the efforts and donations of King and his wife Tabitha.
In the 2005 film Fever Pitch, about an obsessive Boston Red Sox fan, King tosses out the first pitch of the Sox's opening day game.
Car accident In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of writing On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother.
On June 19, about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right shoulder of Route 5 in Center Lovell, Maine. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler named Bullet, moving in the back of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a depression about 14 feet (4 meters) from the pavement of Route 5.
Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless. Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's official website, however, states that this was incorrect, and that King was walking facing traffic. In any case, Smith was turned and leaning to the rear of his vehicle trying to restrain his dog, and was not watching the road when he struck King.
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family, but in considerable pain. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital. His injuries — a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip — kept him in Central Maine Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks later.
Earlier that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel where one of the characters dies in an automobile accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it." Certainly car accidents and their horrors had figured into King's work before. His 1987 novel Misery also concerned a writer who experiences severe injuries in an auto accident, and auto wrecks figure prominently in The Dead Zone and Thinner. Also, Stephen King made a cameo as a truckdriver in a segment that he wrote for a movie Creepshow 2, where a woman runs down a hitchhiker in her car. The hitchhiker, bloodied, ends up following her throughout the segment.
After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on “On Writing” in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable.
King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for $1,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. The van was later crushed at a junkyard, though King mentioned, during an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, wanting to destroy the vehicle with a sledgehammer. Smith, a disabled construction worker, died in his sleep on September 21, 2000 (King's birthday) at the age of 43.
King incorporated his accident into the final novel of his Dark Tower series, in which the hero Roland Deschain and his ka-tet try to stop King from being fatally injured by the van. In the story, Roland hypnotized both King and the driver in order to make them forget his appearance.
The novel Dreamcatcher, which was released after King's accident, features a character recovering from a car accident. The series premiere of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital involved the main character, a painter out for a morning run, being hit by a pickup truck, and was also inspired by the accident. In fact the scene was depicted in a way remarkably similar to that in which he described his real accident occurring, the only exception being that the driver in the show was driving drunk in addition to trying to restrain his dog.
On one episode of Family Guy, Brian is driving a car when he suddenly runs over a man. He asks if he was Stephen only to find out that it was Dean Koontz. Brian then gets back into the car and backs over Dean Koontz.
Kings Writing style In King's nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King discusses his writing style at great length and depth. King believes that, generally speaking, good stories cannot be called consciously and should not be plotted out beforehand but are better served by focusing on a single "seed" of a story and letting the story grow itself from there. King often begins a story with no idea how the story will end. He mentions in the Dark Tower series that, halfway through its lengthy, nearly 30-year writing period, King received a letter from a woman with cancer who asked how the book would end, because she was unlikely to live long enough to read it. He stated that he didn't know. King believes strongly in this style, stating that his best writing comes from freewriting.
He is known for his great eye for detail, for continuity, and for inside references; many stories that may seem unrelated are often linked by secondary characters, fictional towns, or off-hand references to events in previous books. Read as a whole, King's work (which he claims is centered around his Dark Tower magnum opus) creates a remarkable history that stretches from present day all the way back to the beginning of time (with a unique creation myth).
King's books are filled with references to American history and American culture, particularly the darker, more fearful side of these. These references are generally spun into the stories of characters, often explaining their fears. Recurrent references include crime, war (especially the Vietnam War), and racism.
King is also known for his folksy, informal narration, often referring to his fans as "Constant Readers" or "friends and neighbors." This familiar style contrasts with the horrific content of many of his stories.
King has a very simple formula for learning to write well: "Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer."
King also has a simple definition for talent in writing: "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented" (from "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully — in Ten Minutes").
Shortly after his accident, King wrote the first draft of the book Dreamcatcher with a notebook and a Waterman fountain pen, "the world's finest word processor."
In 1996, King won an O. Henry Award for his short story "The Man in the Black Suit." In 2003, when King was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, there was an uproar in the literary community, with literary critic Harold Bloom denouncing the choice:
He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.
Others in the writing community expressed their contempt of the slight towards King. When Richard Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King's work as non-literature, Orson Scott Card responded: "Let me assure you that King's work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite."
Influences King has called Richard Matheson "the author who influenced me most as a writer". Both authors casually integrate characters' thoughts into the third person narration, just one of several parallels between their writing styles.
King is a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, discusses him at length in Danse Macabre, and has used several of Lovecraft's writing techniques in his own work. Lovecraft is probably influential on King's invention of bizarre, ancient deities, subtle connections between all of his tales, and the integration of fabricated newspaper clippings, trial transcripts and documents as narrative devices. King's invented trio of afflicted New England towns--Jerusalem's Lot, Castle Rock and Derry-- are reminiscent of Lovecraft's Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth. King differs markedly from Lovecraft in his focus on extensive characterization, and naturalistic dialogue, both notably absent in Lovecraft's writing. In On Writing, King is critical of Lovecraft's dialogue-writing skills, using passages from The Colour Out of Space as particularly poor examples.
Edgar Allan Poe, one of the fathers to the contemporary literary horror genre, exerts a noticeable influence over King's writing as well. In The Shining, the phrase "And the red death held sway over all" hearkens back to Poe's "And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" from "The Masque of the Red Death." The short story "Dolan's Cadillac" has a theme almost identical to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," including a paraphrase of Fortunato's famous plea, "for the love of God, Montressor!" In The Shining, King refers to Poe as "the Great American Hack".
King acknowledges the influence of Bram Stoker, particularly on his novel Salem's Lot, which was envisioned as a retelling of Dracula.[6] The short story prequel to Salem's Lot, Jerusalem's Lot is very reminiscent of both H.P. Lovecraft's work and Stoker's Lair of the White Worm.
King has also openly declared his admiration for another, far less prolific author: Shirley Jackson. Salem's Lot opens with a quotation from Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Tony, an imaginary playmate from The Shining bears a striking resemblance to another imaginary playmate with the same name from Jackson's Hangsaman. A pivotal scene in Storm of the Century is based on Jackson's The Lottery.
King was a big fan of John D. MacDonald as he was growing up, and he dedicated the novella Sun Dog to MacDonald, saying "I miss you, old friend." For his part, MacDonald wrote an admiring preface to an early paperback version of Night Shift, and even had his famous character, Travis McGee, reading Cujo in one of the last McGee novels.
In an interview with Amazon.com, King claimed that the one book he wishes he'd written is William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
King makes references in several of his books to characters and events in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
info sorce:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King
http://www.askmen.com/men/entertainment/55c_stephen_king.htm l
http://stephenking.kraftysworld.co.uk/theman.htm
http://www.horrorking.com/biography.html
http://www.stephenking.com/biography.php
http://www.answers.com/topic/stephen-king
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Stephen King enjoys rock music is in the band "Rock Bottom Remainders".
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NEWSNew Stephen King thriller coming to Esquire
Horror novelist’s ‘Gingerbread Girl’ to span 23 pages in magazine
The Associated Press
Updated: 1:55 p.m. ET June 11, 2007

NEW YORK - A new Stephen King thriller will be published in its entirely in the July issue of Esquire. “The Gingerbread Girl,” a 21,000-word novella covering 23 pages, will arrive at newsstands Tuesday.

“Over the last year, we’ve been trying to breathe life back into magazine fiction,” Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger said Monday in a statement. “The best way to do that is to publish nothing other than event fiction-stories that have something in addition to their literary merit to call attention to themselves.”

Esquire has a long history of publishing original fiction, including Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream.” King, too, has released works through other media. In 2000, he serialized an original novel, “The Plant,” from his Web site.

According to Esquire, “The Gingerbread Girl” tells “the story of Emily, who flees to the secluded Vermillion Key off of Florida’s coast after the death of her infant child. Her new neighbor also enjoys the privacy of the key, but the women he brings with him never return home. Emily’s curiosity leads her right into the hands of the madman, but it’s her legs that are her only hope for survival.”

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19172874/

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Movies:



Horror fiction, Fantasy, Science fiction... And of course all of my work!! lol

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Television:

Don't have time for Television. I am busy writing horror stories for you to enjoy..lol

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Books:

Stephen King books have now been translated into 33 different languages and have been published in over 35 countries. There are well over 300 million copies of his novels in publication.

Horror fiction, Fantasy, Science fiction... And of course all of my work!! lol
The A to Z of Stephen King A is for... Hearts in Atlantis
King's collection, now in paperback and first published in late 1999, has five tales of childhood and college days in the 1960s, intertwined so that it reads more like a novel than a collection of novellas. King didn't go to Vietnam, high blood pressure and burst ear-drums prevented him, but that war haunts these stories as students protest, are drafted and survive or change because of it. Less to do with the war is the opening story, which some consider the best, Low Men in Yellow Coats. Here the monsters from King's Dark Tower series are invading a small town and only impoverished kid Bobby and his mum's lodger Ted Brautigan can fight them. Local bullies are turning on the kid too echoing one of King's favourite books, Lord of the Flies. King is once again at his best evoking pictures from our own childhood and formative years...
B is for... Bag of Bones
There is a huge debate going on between fans about whether the "new", less ghastly Stephen King books are as good as the classics. One camp declares not, the books are less gripping and scary than before and it is after all "horror" that they read the books for. The other camp sees the move towards more reflective and realistic situations as a sign of maturity and that "serious" literature reviewers can now take King much more seriously. I fall somewhere between the two. I certainly don't want to read formula novels where the author's heart is clearly not in them - Desperation shows signs of that. On the other hand I feel that books like Bag of Bones are too long to sustain the reader's complete interest. Essentially a story about a haunted house or rather a haunted town, the book is actually at its best when dealing with the grief of the narrator, Mike Noonan, over his recently deceased wife and the effect this has on his ability to write. It has some creepy moments but for me the villain is not strong enough and the point of view, the book is told entirely in the first person, hinders the development of secondary characters which strengthen so many of his other novels.
C is for... Carrie
The Brian de Palma film of King's first novel, Carrie, in which a child, abused by her obsessively religious mother and taunted mercilessly by her classmates, is driven to use her telekinetic powers against them, did much to establish the writer as the undisputed King of horror and to set standards in the horror cinema genre. The casting of child and mother, with Sissy Spacek as Carrie and Piper Laurie as her mother, was nothing short of genius and both fully merit their academy award nominations. Spacek is both pitiful and endearing in the opening scenes, beautifully handled by de Palma, making us pity the girl and to a certain extent share the embarrassment and disdain of her classmates. The film also contains one of movie's all-time famous moments, the heart-thumping slow-motion build up to the bucket of blood dropping on the "heroine" and the split-screen aftermath is a scene that has to be seen in the cinema to be truly appreciated. The novel was almost lost during its creation when Stephen King threw it in the trash - luckily his wife Tabitha rescued it. Although it had only modest sales as a hardback, the paperback set King up for life and while over-shadowed a little by the film and later novels, it remains a favourite amongst King's fans and has much to recommend it.
D is for... Dreamcatcher
The eagerly awaited first full novel by King since Bag Of Bones is Dreamcatcher released in late March 2001. The story tells of four childhood friends who as adults are attacked by aliens while on a hunting trip. There are echoes of both It and Tommyknockers in the new novel theme and since these are probably my two favourite King books, I'm really looking forward to it. Incidently in May 2000 while doing research for the book Stephen King took a tour with water officials of the Quabbin Reservoir, which serves the city of Boston.
E is for... Eclipse
One of the pivotal scenes in Dolores Claiborne involves an eclipse of the sun... Perhaps King's first diversion from the horror formula and also overshadowed by a strong film adaptation, Dolores Claiborne is a novel that concerns a housekeeper accused of murder for the second time in her life. In the book the story is told by the main character herself and delivers piece by piece the details of her life with an abusive and drunken husband. The film however concentrates more on Dolores' relationship with her estranged daughter whose descent into drugs and alcohol is threatening to mirror the extremes of her father's addictions... Kathy Bates gives a great performance as Dolores while both book and film paint realistic pictures of rural, island life...
F is for... Fears
Despite the fact that King is a giant of a man at 6 foot 4 and 200 pounds, and that he's been happy giving the rest of the world the heebie-jeebies all these years, King has many phobias of his own. These include death, insects, closed-in places, deformity, rats, snakes and the dark. Perhaps it's his understanding of these phobias that makes his scenes so memorable - he's scaring himself as he writes them. The scene in the mining hut in Desperation with all sorts of slithering, crawling things in complete darkness in an enclosed space must have been particularly difficult to visualise...
G is for... The Green Mile
When Stephen King released The Green Mile in 1996 as a series of six novellas, cynics may have seen it as clever sales technique, but fans were riveted by what turned out to be one of King's best stories for years. Set in the Death Row of a Southern prison during the depression the story is narrated by an old guard years after the supernatural events have passed. A huge prisoner, John Coffey, is sentenced to the prison and slowly his special gifts begin to affect the guards and prisoners around him. The story has now been published into a single volume and, of course, has been adapted to the big screen with Tom Hanks in the narrator's role. After a series of less successful films and mini-series, a big hollywood production of a King book was long overdue, and director Frank Darabont, who also directed King's screenplay The Shawshank Redemption, brings the series to life with great skill.
H is for... The Dark Half
The Dark Half has an intriguing (and illuminating, perhaps) plot. In parallel with the author in Misery, Thad Beaumont kills off his pseudonym George Stark who for years has been paying the bills by churning out trashy ultra-violent thrillers in order to write more literary novels. However a feeling of foreboding, backed up by nightmares, is haunting the writer and soon it becomes clear that while he may be finished with George Stark, his dark half isn't yet finished with him. As a novel it works out reasonably well although there is more threatened violence than real action, and much about the psychopomps (a word that unfortunately sounds more silly than frightening), gatherings of small birds, harbingers of the living dead. At the time I first read this book, I remember wondering whether King was about to give up horror altogether or whether the killing of his own pseudonym Richard Bachman (see "P"), was less of a career change and more an act of necessity...
I is for... It
Once you've read this book you will never look at clowns or balloons in quite the same way... One of King's amazing talents is his ability to recall what it was like to be a child. There are many, many passages in It where I was transported back to my own childhood, to long days mucking about playing in ponds and streams, to scary days when you just couldn't seem to escape the local bully, to bold days being the leader of games in a weedy, little gang, to dark days where family life was grim and running away seemed a good option. Coupled with this ability King also has the guts to put children in extreme and horrifying danger and yet show the strength of youth where maturity falters and crumbles... The ending doesn't satisfy everyone but like The Stand the getting there is easily the best writing of its kind... A personal favourite and one that was adapted into a especially good mini-series for TV...
J is for... January 1971
Stephen King married Tabitha Spruce in January 1971. They had met in the Fogler Library of the University of Maine where they both had worked. During the years before Carrie was born the Kings had little money but a few sales of short stories helped the family along. They have three children Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip and one grandchild, Ethan, son to Joe and his wife Leanora. They have lived mostly in Maine throughout their marriage apart from a brief stay in Boulder, Colorado and a cut short stay in the UK in 1977. Maine features in almost all of King's books and as the biographical note in many of them says it is "his home state and the place where he feels he really belongs".
Stephen King graduated with a BSC in English from the University of Maine in 1970 but although he was qualified to teach at high school level, he was unable to find a post straight away. For a time he worked in an industrial laundromat and then as a janitor before securing a job at the Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this period he continued to write and managed to sell a number of stories to men's magazines, many of which would be later collected in Night Shift. In early 1973 Carrie was accepted by Doubleday & Co, and when the novel's paperback rights were sold King was able to give up the day job and concentrate on writing full time. His connection with Hampden Academy didn't end however, he now provides scholarships for students through the school.
K is for... Stanley Kubrick
The idea for King's third book in print, The Shining, was born on a weekend trip with his wife away from the children. They stayed in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park but during the weekend King found the place unsettling and disturbing. He imagined the entire book in his head and wrote it very quickly afterwards. It's not just a story of a writer driven by the ghosts of the hotel to attack his wife and child but about a man who cannot face failure and who through alcohol, visits the abuse taught to him by his own father on his own child. The novel was taken up by renowned director Stanley Kubrick, whose previous films included 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove. His film is not fully faithful to the book as he preferred to suggest the hotel's influence on Jack rather than state it, and to rely on visual images than explanations. Jack Nicholson played Jack Torrance with Shelley Duvall as his wife. Both give impressive performances although Kubrick heartlessly kept Shelley Duvall in a state of distress during the later scenes by criticising her constantly and continually changing her lines and cues. Still, both book and film are classics in their own ways. A mini-series more faithful to the book was made in the 90s although it has to be said with an inferior cast.
L is for... The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Another child in danger is the main character in one of King's latest books, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Not typically a horror story but rather one of survival, we follow nine-year-old Trisha McFarland as she steps off a forest trail to have a pee and is suddenly separated from her mother and brother. As she wanders deeper into the woods trying to find her family, her dangerous situation slowly dawns on her. And with it the realisation that she is being followed by something deadly. Reactions to the book are mixed but those fans who love King's masterful characterisations will adore Trisha... and the friends, family and heroes she remembers or invents while she tries to find her way home...
M is for... Misery
It's true that fiction often mirrors reality but it's spooky when the opposite is true. In June 1999 Stephen King was walking on a quiet country road when a motorist lost control of his Dodge Caravan and struck the writer inflicting serious injuries. King had to endure many operations and has only recently returned to public life. Paul Sheldon, the writer in King's book Misery, suffers a similar accident when his car crashes on a snowy mountain road. Fortunately for him, he is rescued by his "number one fan", Annie Wilkes, who lovingly nurses him back to health in her snow-bound house. Lovingly that is, until she learns her favourite character has been killed off in Sheldon's latest as yet unpublished novel. Then her psychotic fury is unleashed as she forces her captive to write a new book... The novel was filmed with Kathy Bates and James Caan in the main roles and while the relationship differed slightly from King's original vision, the split-personality of Bates' Wilkes (for which she won an Oscar) and the sharp-witted cunning of Caan's Sheldon make a memorable movie...
N is for... Nellie Ruth King
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland General Hospital, Maine on the 21st of September, 1947. His mother was Nellie Ruth King nee Pillsbury, and father Donald King, a former captain in the Merchant Marines, who had changed his name from David Spansky. Stephen has an older brother, David Victor, born and adopted in 1945. King's birth was something of a surprise as the Kings had believed they could not have children. However when Stephen was two, his father abandoned the family. After a number of years between various relatives in Indiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine, the boys and their mother settled in Durham where she looked after her own parents who by this time were advanced in age. After they died Nellie worked at various jobs usually clearing up after people who looked down on her and her family. Although she rarely complained, Stephen saw the injustice of the way his mother was treated, and it is a theme that often turns up in his novels. Sadly Nellie King died in 1973 of cancer, living just long enough to see her son's book Carrie accepted for publication but not to see it in print.
O is for... On Writing
One of King's projects for 2000/01 is a book called On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, which concludes the three book deal covering Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis. The book will be in two parts: firstly, King will describe how and why he became a writer, an autobiography of sorts. The second part is a how to guide. Fans of course are already familiar through his books on how or how not to write - many of the leading and supporting characters are novelists or poets themselves. However it will be interesting to read how the author achieves the richness of character that populate his worlds, and how he plots a successful story. Having the talent and determination to follow his example may be perhaps beyond most of us, but it will be fun having a go nevertheless...
P is for... Pseudonym
While some of King's fictional authors use pseudonyms for their books, King of course does not. However after the publication of Thinner, the fifth novel by co-horror writer Richard Bachman, KIng was confronted by a part-time bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, and asked whether King and Bachman were one and the same person. They were. With the cat out of the bag so to speak, work on Bachman's next novel Misery was abandoned... Strangely few people at King's publishing house had been aware of the identity of Bachman either. The five books already published Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner are darker books than the normal King novel where the lines of good and evil are more apparent, and lean more towards the science fiction writing of King's youth. A sixth novel, The Regulators, a kind of companion book to King's Desperation was published posthumously in 1996. Some of these novels have now appeared with King's name on the cover... Why Stephen King adopted the pseudonym to write these books is an interesting question. Some were based on early works rejected before Carrie so perhaps the rescue of these works was the reason. Or perhaps King wanted to stray from the horror path a little without losing his audience? Whatever the reason it strikes me that King's alleged literary aspirations would be better served by the use of another pseudonym... Then again perhaps they already are?
Q is for... Quiz Book
One of the fun things I came across while researching these pages was a Stephen King Quiz Book written by Stephen Spignesi. Published in 1990 the book only covers those novels up to The Dark Half (of course) and has sadly run out-of-print. Since then Spignesi has also published The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia. If you can find the quiz book it is fun although be warned - if you've been saving some of King's novels to read in the future then this book contains many spoilers. Hopefully an up-to-date version will be released someday. Anyway here are few sample questions from it for you to test your knowledge of the man and his books...
1. What was Misery's last name? 2. What brands of food did Cujo eat? 3. Where was the Black Hotel in The Talisman? 4. In the short story "Apt Pupil" what was Harold Pegler's nickname? 5. Who sold Christine to Arnie? (The answers below)
S is for... The Stand
The book which started my lifetime fascination for Stephen King is the wonderfully wrought story of germ warfare catastrophe, The Stand. From the opening car crash through the death of almost the entire human race, to the stand between the good in Denver and the bad in Las Vegas, King grips you with characters (that you feel you've known all your life) and situations that you don't want to be reading alone in the middle of the night. For many of the characters the line between good and evil is heavily blurred, making you despise some of the heroes and sympathise with a few of the villains, and although the ending is somewhat of a let down the book is so memorable, it stays with you for a long time. I'm not sure if the "uncut" version adds much (except bulk) but, apart from It, I doubt you'll find a better novel from King's early work.
T is for... The Dark Tower Series
It's difficult for me to comment on King's Dark Tower series because as an opponent of genre fiction's overwhelming move into series production, I have yet to read any of the books. However from the reviews I've read and conversations I've had with other fans, it seems I'm missing one of King's better works. The series begins with a novella collection, The Gunslinger and advances through The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands to the recently published Wizard and Glass. Time-travelling between recent decades and flitting from our universe to others, the epic is likely to spawn more volumes as King has admitted he could live to 300 and not be done... Perhaps I better get started if I'm ever to catch up?
U is for... The Undead
Another early work of King's which was adapted into an excellent TV mini-series is Salem's Lot. Owing much to Bram Stoker's Dracula, King's novel is set in a small Maine town which like Whitby in the vampire original is slowly taken over by an undead creature with a human servant. The mini-series starred David Soul with James Mason as the delightfully creepy Straker. At the time it was genuinely scary to watch, with scenes which shocked more than any other TV series of its day. Unlike Stoker, King takes the story into darker more realistic territory, with the jealousies, secrets and small evils of the small town breathing life into the darkness that threatens to engulf it. Written at the time of (and perhaps influenced by) the Watergate scandal in Washington, King's second published novel is one of the best undead stories ever written...
V is for... Visitors From Space
Another personal favourite of mine and much more science fiction than horror, is Stephen King's 1988 novel, The Tommyknockers. Drunken, talented yet under-achieving poet Jim Gardener returns to the town where friend and fellow writer Bobbi Anderson lives. Seeking sympathy he instead finds the beginnings of madness not just in Bobbi but in the whole damn town. And it seems to be something that Bobbi has found in the woods near her home that's the cause, something which is giving everyone strange ideas... Despite its nasty turns, The Tommyknockers is full of creative and extremely witty inventions, and is the only King novel where I've laughed so much and still been gripped by the story. The ending, which doesn't suit everybody, seemed just fine to me... Wonderful. A mini-series of the book was made for TV and while it's well-made, it takes the whole thing far too seriously...
..blue W is for... Wealth
So just how successful is Stephen King? Well, it's difficult to say exactly but there's no doubt he is the world's most wealthy author, in 1996 his estimated earnings were $84 million. And yet if the stories are true, he receives about $200 a week for pocket money! Certainly he has simple tastes - dressing in jeans and casual clothes, preferring poker and bowling with friends to jet-setting or fancy parties. And he loves playing in his band, the Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow authors Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening and Roy Blount Jr not for money or even critical acclaim, just for the sheer fun of playing rock and roll classics. Maybe it's this down-to-earth approach to his success that has kept King in touch with his readers? If so then we're all the more richer for it...
X is for... the X-Files
First aired on 2nd August, 1998 Chinga, an X-Files episode written by Stephen King and Chris Carter, is the story of witchcraft and a demonic doll. Dana Scully, while vacationing in Amma Beach, Maine, is called to the assistance of a grocery store owner who has stabbed himself in the eye with a knife. Video footage shows that customers of the store were afflicted by a burning sensation in their eyes at the time and that a young mother pushing her baby out of the store seemed unaffected by the phenomenon. The locals believe the women is a witch but it seems it is her daughter and the doll given to her by her late father that's the cause. Creepy and gory the episode is a treat for King fans...
Y is for... Youth
As he grew up Stephen King and his brother worked on many writing projects together some of which they published by mimeograph or by hand and sold to local people. During this time he wrote a lot of science fiction, but his lack of scientific knowledge would turn him to a more effective genre for his work, horror. However it's clear from the novels that Stephen King didn't spend his childhood indoors writing - no-one can beat King's ability to get inside the minds of a child, and to remember the exhilaration of riding a bike, playing games in the woods or going to Saturday morning cinema.
Z is for... The Dead Zone
Another of King's 1970s novels, The Dead Zone is perhaps the one that has most effectively been translated to film. Ordinary John Smith awakes from a coma after five years to find the world has changed both in terms of society, and in his personal life where his fiancée no longer feels the same way about him. He has also changed, being given the power to see the possible future of those around him. In the film version Christopher Walken is superb as the emaciated and haunting Smith while Martin Sheen is gripping as the potential presidential candidate. Directed by (for a change a subtle) David Cronenberg this film is crying out for a DVD release...
Thanks for reading my A to Z of Stephen King. While it's in no way a definitive biography on the world's greatest genre writer, I have researched the facts widely and hope that they are accurate.
ANSWERS
1. What was Misery's last name?
Chastain
2. What brands of food did Cujo eat?
Gaines Meal and Ralston-Purina
3. Where was the black hotel in The Talisman?
Point Venuti
4. In the short story "Apt Pupil" what was Harold Pegler's nickname?
Foxy
5. Who sold Christine to Arnie?
Roland LeBay
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September 21,1947
HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEPHEN KING!
IT,
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