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Critical Survey of Short Fiction, 2d Rev. Ed. Stephen King Born: Portland, Maine; September 21, 1947 Principal Short Fiction Night Shift, 1978 The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, 1982 Different Seasons, 1982 Skeleton Crew, 1985 Dark Visions, 1988 (includes stories by Dan Simmons and George R. R. Martin) Four Past Midnight, 1990 Nightmares and Dreamscapes, 1993 Hearts in Atlantis, 1999 Other Literary Forms Stephen King is best known for his horror novels, which he is known for publishing at the rate of approximately one per year, several under the name Richard Bachman. His most notable are Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with Frightening Power (1974), Pet Sematary (1983), and Misery (1987). Several of his novels have been made into films, and he has written several screenplays himself, including original works specifically for the screen, such as Cat's Eye (1984) and Stephen King's Sleepwalkers (1992). His teleplay Storm of the Century (1999) was also published in novel form the same year. A few of his poems have been included in his short-story collections, and he has written an analysis of horror fiction entitled Danse Macabre (1981). Achievements Stephen King became, in a relatively short time, one of the most popular writers in the United States. Nearly every book he has published has reached the best-seller lists, whether in hardback or paperback, and has often remained there for months. He is respected in the field of horror fiction, and several of his books have received World Fantasy Award nominations. He has received the World Fantasy Award for his short story "Do the Dead Sing?" (1981), a British Fantasy Award for Cujo (1981), and a Hugo Award for his nonfiction work Danse Macabre. He has won special recognition for his contributions to horror fiction by both the British Fantasy Awards and the World Fantasy Awards. In 1986 Skeleton Crew won the Locus Award for best collection. The short story "The Man in the Black Suit" won a World Fantasy Award in 1995. Biography Stephen Edwin King was born in 1947 in Maine, where he lived the majority of his life. His parents had adopted his elder brother, David, several years before King was born, since his mother was told that she would be unable to have children. King's father abandoned the family when King was two years old. After his parents' separation, King's mother moved the family to Indiana, then Connecticut, and finally, in 1958, back to Maine to be near her aging parents. King's mother was a strict Methodist with fundamentalist leanings, and David and Stephen attended church and Bible school several times a week. King began to show an interest in writing at age seven or eight, partly to amuse himself during frequent periods of illness. His mother often read to her sons, including some of Classic Comics' adaptations of famous novels; King was impressed by H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He was always an avid reader and loved adventure stories and science fiction; thus, even his juvenile work was influenced by fantasy and horror. At the age of twelve, he sent stories to the magazines Fantastic and Fantasy and Science Fiction; soon afterward, he discovered the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and began reading a range of horror fiction, including the works of Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, several gothic novelists, and Richard Matheson, whose horror novels, set in modern times, greatly influenced King. King entered high school in 1962, and in 1965 his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber" appeared in Comics Review, a fan magazine. He wrote all through high school and printed several of his stories on his brother's offset printing press. In 1966, he entered the University of Maine at Orono and made his first professional sale, of "The Glass Floor," to Startling Mystery Stories. He also began work on two manuscripts that were eventually published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in the 1970's. At the university, he received encouragement from several of his professors and was influenced by such naturalist writers as Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote a column, "King's Garbage Truck," for the university newspaper and was active in campus politics. In his senior year, while he was working at the college library, he met fellow student Tabitha Spruce, whom he married in 1971. King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a degree in English and a teaching certificate; unable to find work as a teacher, however, he took a job in an industrial laundry, an experience on which he drew for several of his stories. In 1971, he was hired to teach high school English at Maine's Hampden Academy, where he spent two years. In 1973, King sold his first novel, Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with Frightening Power, to Doubleday. New American Library's purchase of the paperback rights allowed King to quit teaching and write full time. In 1976, the film version of Carrie gave King's popularity a boost, but he was already selling quite well and producing virtually a novel per year. In 1979, King wrote his first screenplay, Creepshow (1982), and in 1986, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists released Maximum Overdrive, which King had both scripted and directed. The reading world was shocked in June of 1999 when King was struck by a vehicle while he was taking a stroll near his summer home in Lewiston, Maine. He sustained multiple fractures to his right leg and hip, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. Although grateful to be alive, King regretted most not being able to write during his long recuperation. Analysis Stephen King credits writers Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch, in addition to Lovecraft and Poe, with showing him that the horror story could be brought out "of the foggy moors and the castles and into those 7-Eleven stores and suburbia." He said, "The [horror] genre exists on three basic levels, separate but independent, and each one a little bit cruder than the one before. There's terror on top, the finest emotion any writer can induce; then horror; and, on the very lowest level of all, the gag instinct of revulsion." King's stories easily fit the various levels of horror that he describes. Not particularly worried about style, he aims for the impact of plot. Not all King's stories can be labeled solely horror; many have elements of science fiction, and many of his best stories contain a strong sense of psychological tension. Most of the stories, however, even those that cannot neatly be pegged as belonging to a particular genre, attempt to create a sense of uneasiness. King explains their popularity by how they serve as emotional releases for his readers: "When you've got a lot of free-floating anxieties, the horror story or movie helps to conceptualize them, shrink them down to size, make them concrete so they're manipulable. . . . [T]here's probably some minor catharsis involved." "Jerusalem's Lot" The kind of horror with which King is most often associated, that of things that go bump in the night, is well represented in his short-story collections. Two of the stories, "Jerusalem's Lot" and "One for the Road," are connected by setting and plot elements to King's novel 'Salem's Lot (1975). In "Jerusalem's Lot," set in 1850 and told in a series of letters and journal entries, Charles Boone, hoping to regain his strength after a serious illness, moves into his ancestral home along with his friend Calvin McCann. They hear noises in the walls and attribute them to rats, but they soon learn that the townspeople of Preacher's Corners believe otherwise. Between the stories they glean from a townswoman and a journal that McCann finds in the house, Boone and McCann discover that Boone's mad great-uncle, Philip Boone, had joined with a malign preacher to unleash the evils found in a satanic bible called The Mysteries of the Worm. Boone tries to eradicate the evil by burning the book, but while he starts to set the pages on fire, his friend McCann is killed by an enormous worm. Boone commits suicide, and the story ends with a note written in 1971 by a distant Boone relative who disbelieves the evidence of the letters of Charles Boone but mentions hearing rats behind the walls of the ancestral home. "Jerusalem's Lot" has all the trappings of horror in the gothic tradition: a house shunned by the townspeople, inexplicable noises behind the walls, an abandoned town, religion that has been twisted to serve evil, and a monster in the cellar. The tale, written originally for a college class in gothic fiction, is perhaps the only King story that takes place not in modern suburbia but in the past, in a setting somewhat akin to the lonely moors and castles of the gothic writers. "One for the Road" "One for the Road," though also set in Jerusalem's Lot, is a modern vampire story. The car Gerard Lumley and his family are in has gone off the road near Jerusalem's Lot in a bad snowstorm. Lumley leaves his wife and child to find help. When he returns, both his wife and daughter have become vampires. King commented that "I've always believed that if you think the very worst, then, no matter how bad things get . . . they'll never get as bad as that. If you write a novel where the bogeyman gets somebody else's children, maybe they'll never get your own children." Fear for loved ones is a common theme in King's stories. Because Lumley is afraid for his wife and daughter, he risks his own life to get help for them. While he is gone, the worst happens to his wife and daughter: They have become something alien, something that no longer loves him. "The Monkey" In "The Monkey," King creates a high level of tension from the protagonist's fear for his family, especially for his youngest son. When Hal was young, he discovered a toy monkey with a worn-out mechanism for clanging the cymbals strapped to the monkey's paws. When someone near Hal is about to die, the monkey clashes the cymbals. Hal attempts several times to get rid of the monkey, finally throwing it down his aunt's well. Years later, when Hal and his family are clearing the attic of his aunt's house after her death, Hal's eldest son finds the monkey. In a desperate attempt to be rid of the maniacal toy, Hal rows out to the middle of the lake and drops the monkey into the water, nearly drowning as his boat breaks up, while his younger son watches. "The Monkey" is an effective story that evokes terror, the highest on King's list of horror-story levels. Like all King's stories, it is intensely visual. His settings and characters are familiar and easy to empathize with, and King forcefully uses the monkey as a symbol of evil that survives despite all efforts to keep away from it. "Trucks" and "The Mangler" Numerous King stories deal with the destruction wrought by mechanical devices. "The Monkey" is perhaps the most effective, as the monkey is never seen to do anything other than strike its cymbals when it should not be able to do so. The connection between the clash of cymbals and death is made in the mind of Hal, and though it seems to be supported by the evidence, the connection could be pure coincidence. In "The Mangler" and "Trucks," however, the machines are clear agents of wholesale destruction. "The Mangler" is set in an industrial laundry: A mangler is a machine that irons and folds material fed into it. This mangler develops a taste for blood and sucks several workers into its internal mechanism: "A devil had taken over the inanimate steel and cogs and gears of the mangler and had turned it into something with its own life." After two men unsuccessfully attempt to exorcise the machine, the mangler tears itself loose from its moorings and moves toward the town. "Trucks" concerns vehicles that turn against their owners, running them down when they try to escape. The trucks encircle a diner, crashing into it after their human hostages refuse to acknowledge a Morse code signal beeped out on a horn to refuel the vehicles. Both "Trucks" and "The Mangler" envisage machines that were built to serve human beings, turning to demand sacrifice and service themselves. King has commented that he finds machines frightening because he does not understand how they work. Both stories, too, while they play on one's fear of death and mutilation, are also rather amusing in a dark sort of way. "The Woman in the Room" In many of his stories, however, King treats death in a far more realistic manner, and in some ways these stories are more disturbing than stories such as "The Mangler." While "The Mangler" graphically describes violent death—fitting into King's third level in the horror genre, the "gag instinct of revulsion"—the plot is clearly unrealistic. It is one of those stories that takes the fear of death and makes it manipulable and even laughable. Industrial accidents do happen but not because machines turn malevolent. A story such as "The Woman in the Room," however, is more introspective and is based on King's own feelings when his mother was dying of cancer. It is highly realistic in both plot and emotion. In it, a son visits his mother in the hospital, where she has just had a "cortotomy," an operation to destroy the pain center in her brain so that she will not be in agony from the cancer in her stomach. The operation has also destroyed 60 percent of her motor control. Seeing her weak, unable to move freely, and with no hopes of recovery, the protagonist, Johnny, considers giving her some Darvon pills that he found in her medicine cabinet at home to end her suffering and her life. During his visit, his mother says, "I wish I was out of this. I'd do anything to be out of this." Finally, he brings the pills to the hospital, shows his mother the box, and shakes six pills into his hand. She looks at them and tacitly agrees to end her life by swallowing all six. Her last request is for Johnny to see if her legs are together: She wants to die with some dignity. She also tells Johnny that he has always been a good son. "The Woman in the Room" reflects on a very personal, touching level the incredible difficulty of watching a loved one experience a painful death. King's style is as plain and as colloquial as ever; he does not try to elevate it to suit the subject. The story is told in the present tense, and the very artlessness and transparency of King's style give the story an air of honesty. It is by no means a horror story, yet it evokes what King calls "the finest emotion any writer can induce"—terror: fear that one's own parents will get cancer; fear that one will be faced with the same painful dilemma as Johnny; or ultimately, fear that oneself will end up lying in agony in a hospital bed, as Johnny's mother did. "The Body" Another psychologically honest story is "The Body," which became the 1986 film Stand by Me. In it, four twelve-year-old boys walk along a railway track in search of the corpse of a boy who has been hit by a train. The intense friendship between the boys, their silly jokes and twelve-year-old bravado, strikes the reader as real and true to life. Because they are young, the idea of finding the body excites them, making this trip an adventure. It is not until they actually see the boy's body that they finally confront the reality of death: The kid was dead. The kid wasn't sick, the kid wasn't sleeping. The kid wasn't going to get up in the morning anymore . . . or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead. Their quest and their discovery of the body are a rite of passage to which each of the boys reacts slightly differently; soon after they return to town, to their usual lives and to school, they drift apart, growing up in different directions, affected in different ways by what they experienced on that brief trip. King's plain, unornamented style again renders a believable and realistic story. "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" is quite different from most of King's other short stories. It is not horror, but neither is it completely realistic. The story concerns a paranoid writer who believes that a "Fornit" inhabits his typewriter to help him write. His editor, humoring him, goes along with the idea and says that he has a Fornit too. Soon, the editor, who has begun to drink heavily, begins finding messages on his typewriter from his Fornit when he wakes up from his periodic blackouts. The last message warns him that the writer's Fornit is about to be killed. When the writer hears this warning, he buys a gun to protect his Fornit but ends up killing himself after he watches his Fornit die. The flexible bullet of the title is madness; it kills just as surely as a lead bullet does, but in an unpredictable way. The story walks a neat tightrope between dismissing the Fornits as products of a deranged mind and admitting their existence: The writer's wife wonders if madness is catching when she thinks she hears the dying screams of the Fornit from inside the typewriter. "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" ends in violent death. The writer attempted to kill his wife and the housekeeper and her son before shooting himself. No matter what type of story King is writing, he usually seems to return to terror, horror, or the gag reflex. King has commented that "the horror story makes us children. That's the primary function of the horror story—to knock away all this stuff . . . to take us over taboo lines, to places we aren't supposed to be." King does not limit this function of his stories to those of the horror genre; whether his characters are confronting death by mutilation from a mad mangler or death by cancer, King takes his readers over taboo lines, making them confront by proxy such subjects as madness, fear, and death. "The Man in the Black Suit" With the publication of "The Man in the Black Suit" in the October 31, 1993, issue of The New Yorker, Stephen King created what might be considered one of his most "literary" stories. This story received both popular and critical acclaim, both camps voicing appreciation for King's storytelling ability and his perceptiveness in delving into the deep recesses of humanity. More important, "The Man in the Black Suit" creates a psychological depth that many of King's other stories lack. "The Man in the Black Suit" is the story of a nine-year-old boy coming face to face with the devil. The story is recounted as the boy, now eighty, faces quickly approaching death in his nursing-home bed. The further one moves into the narrative, the more apparent the complexity of the situation becomes, and how it fits into the Stephen King canon is appreciated. In the classical American tradition, King allows his protagonist, Gary, to make a decision that will have lasting consequences for his sanity and spirituality. When Gary goes off on an afternoon fishing expedition, he must promise his parents that he will go no further than where "Castle Stream forks." However, like poet Robert Frost's traveler, Gary decides to go further, and his decision governs the remainder of his life. As he moves deeper into the wilderness, Gary becomes more apprehensive, indicating to the reader that something evil lives here in the wild. After catching two fish, Gary decides to take a nap. Awakening from his nap by a bee on his nose, Gary comes into contact with "the man in the black suit," very out of place in the wilderness. Gary knows immediately that the man is the devil and is afraid of him. The demon threatens Gary, but the young boy is able to escape, eventually meeting his father who had come to join him fishing. The father intimates that Gary may have merely dreamed his encounter with the devil, but the boy knows the truth. Although he does write a psychologically complex work, King retains many devices that tie this story to earlier ones. The boy remembers this particular event many years after it occurred, a plot device used in It (1986), The Green Mile (1996), and "The Body." His protagonist is a teacher and writer of sorts, the type of character prominent in numerous other works. King allows wickedness to emerge from a setting that houses stored-up evil, as happened in It, ‘Salem's Lot, and Pet Sematary. However, the most prevalent King element is the old man's realization that "what you write down sometimes leaves you forever," echoing King's own argument that by writing about the things that terrify us the most, we are able to elude them. Other Major Works Long Fiction: Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with Frightening Power, 1974; 'Salem's Lot, 1975; The Shining, 1977; Rage, 1977 (as Richard Bachman); The Stand, 1978 (unabridged version 1990); The Dead Zone, 1979; The Long Walk, 1979 (as Richard Bachman); Firestarter, 1980; Cujo, 1981; Roadwork, 1981 (as Richard Bachman); The Running Man, 1982 (as Richard Bachman); Christine, 1983; Pet Sematary, 1983; Cycle of the Werewolf, 1983 (novella; illustrated by Berni Wrightson; also published as Silver Bullet, 1985); The Talisman, 1984 (with Peter Straub); The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984, 1987; Thinner, 1984 (as Richard Bachman); The Bachman Books, 1985 (omnibus edition, includes Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man); It, 1986; Misery, 1987; The Tommyknockers, 1987; The Drawing of the Three, 1987 (illustrated by Phil Hale); The Dark Half, 1989; Needful Things, 1991; Gerald's Game, 1992; Dolores Claiborne, 1993; Insomnia, 1994; Rose Madder, 1995; The Green Mile, 1996 (six-part serialized novel); Desperation, 1996; The Regulators, 1996 (as Bachman); Wizard and Glass, 1997 (illustrated by Dave McKean); Bag of Bones, 1998; Storm of the Century, 1999 (originally written for television); The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999. Screenplays: Creepshow, 1982 (with George Romero; adaptation of his book); Cat's Eye, 1984; Silver Bullet, 1985 (adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf); Maximum Overdrive, 1986 (adaptation of his short story "Trucks"); Pet Sematary, 1989; Stephen King's Sleepwalkers, 1992. Teleplays: The Stand, 1994 (based on his novel); Storm of the Century, 1999. Nonfiction: Danse Macabre, 1981; Black Magic and Music: A Novelist's Perspective on Bangor, 1983; Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, 1988 (edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller); On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000. Miscellaneous: Creepshow, 1982 (adaptation of the D. C. Comics); Nightmares in the Sky, 1988. Bibliography Beahm, George W. The Stephen King Story. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1992. A good, updated biography of King. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Hohne, Karen A. "The Power of the Spoken Word in the Works of Stephen King." Journal of Popular Culture 28 (Fall, 1994): 93-103. Discusses the tension in King's work between slang speech, which codifies a knowledge rejected by those in power, and monologic orality, which embodies that power; claims his works illustrate the tension between official and unofficial languages and ideologies that exists not only in literature but also throughout society. King, Stephen. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. Edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. Though many of the interviews collected in this volume become somewhat repetitive, they provide a good sense, in King's own words, of what he is trying to do in his fiction and why he does it. The interviews were held between 1979 and 1987; the opening transcript of a talk King gave at the Billerica Public Library is most useful. _______. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981. King researched and wrote this critical work on horror fiction and film at the instigation of his editor. He focuses on works since the 1940's and discusses novels, B-films, and horror comics to support his thesis that monsters such as Godzilla are a way of making tangible the fear of such things as nuclear war. Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to the Dark Half. New York: Twayne, 1992. Discusses King's work in the 1980's, including his nonfictional analysis of the horror genre in Danse Macabre, his Richard Bachman books, Misery, and the novellas of the Dark Tower saga. Also includes a 1989 interview in which King discusses fairy-tale references in his work, as well as his treatment of sexuality, masculinity, and race; discusses critical and popular reaction to his fiction. Miller Power, Brenda, Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, and Kelly Chandler, eds. Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice, and Popular Literature. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997. Examines issues at the heart of horror fiction. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Spignesi, Stephen J. The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Works of America's Master of Horror. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991. First published with the title The Shape Under the Sheet, this is an important guide for all students of King. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, 1976-1982. San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1982. This is another collection of articles on King's work. The articles vary in quality, with Ben Indick's "King and the Literary Tradition of Horror" providing a good introduction to the history of the horror genre. Douglas Winter's essay, "The Night Journeys of Stephen King," discusses several of the short stories. Includes a bibliography. Winter, Douglas E. The Art of Darkness: The Life and Fiction of the Master of the Macabre, Stephen King. 1984. Rev. Ed. New York: New American Library, 1989. Winter's work provides a perceptive critical overview of King's work, with long articles on each novel up to The Talisman and a chapter on the short stories in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. Winter also includes summaries of King's short stories, a short biography of King, and extensive bibliographies both of King's work and of books and articles written about him. Karen M. Cleveland Marwick, |
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