A Brief Guide to Stephen King Read Online Free Page A

Fiction
.
    While working on
The Dead Zone
and then
Firestarter
, King’s addictions started to get worse, as he was now mixing in circles where cocaine was freely available. In interviews as well as in
On Writing
, he freely admitted that he was writing stories with paper stuffed up his nose to prevent bleeding, and that there weren’t many hours of the day when he was fully functional – hungover until 2 p.m. and then drunk from 5 p.m. till midnight.
    The stories continued to flow.
’Salem’s Lot
became a well-reviewed TV miniseries in November 1979, shortly before the Kings bought a house in Bangor, Maine, which, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be haunted. Stanley Kubrick filmed
The Shining
, and although he consulted with King on a number of issues, he didn’t use the author’s own screenplay, or remain faithful to the core of the book.
Cujo
appeared in hardback, and local small press publisher Donald M. Grant presented the first of his lavish editions of the ‘Dark Tower’ series with
The Gunslinger
in1982. King’s trunk novels
The Long Walk, Roadwork
and
The Running Man
were all published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, each slipping beneath the radar of the fans who were keen to buy anything with the Stephen King name on it.
    King enjoyed the luxury of spending time with his children – he and Joe both recall watching laser video discs (early DVDs) together of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
Duel
– and he was able to indulge his older son during the filming of
Creepshow
, an anthology movie based on five of his short stories directed by George A. Romero, released in 1982. Joe played young Billy, the reader of the E.C.-inspired comic book in which the tales appear, while King had a chance to stretch his acting muscles playing the lead in ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’. Not the author’s finest hour, perhaps, but it led to a tradition of King – like Hitchcock, or Spider-Man creator Stan Lee – making a cameo appearance in stories based on his work. He was also able to indulge his whims, buying the local Bangor radio station WACZ in 1983, renaming it WZON, and providing a solid diet of rock music.
    While Tabitha’s own writing career started to take off, King had a final tussle with Doubleday over the release of funds they owed him. To make a clean break, King gave them
Pet Sematary
, which he had believed would never be published. As well as Donald M. Grant, he worked with small publishers Land of Enchantment on
Cycle of the Werewolf
, which had originally been intended as a calendar.
    He hoped to continue the Richard Bachman pen-name as an outlet for other writing, but when
Thinner
was published in late 1984, an enterprising librarian, Steve Brown, became convinced that Richard Bachman and Stephen King were one and the same, despite King’s regular protestations. Investigating the copyright pages of the earlier books, he discovered that mistakenly King’s name hadbeen linked to
Rage
. He wrote to King, expecting a denial, but instead got a personal call from the writer inviting him to talk about what to do next. As a result, King went public with the news in February 1985 and provided a foreword for an omnibus reprint of
The Bachman Books
later that year. The collaboration with Peter Straub finally saw print at the same time as
Thinner
. In
The Talisman
both writers consciously imitated the other, as much for their own amusement as anything else.
    King wasn’t as amused on the set of
Maximum Overdrive
. Dino De Laurentiis had produced a number of movies based on King’s books – at this stage of the 1980s, most of King’s novels had been filmed, and short stories were either being expanded for feature films (such as ‘Children of the Corn’) or compiled into portmanteau movies like
Cat’s Eye
– and wanted King to direct one himself. King reluctantly agreed, but the shoot was a nightmare, since the Italian crew mostly didn’t speak English, and King himself was high