The beginnings of Stephen King

Claudio Hernández

My little Stevie, my great genius of horror

The Beginnings of Stephen King

Copyright

First Edition eBook Spanish : December 2016

Second English Edition eBook : May 2017

© Claudio Hernández, 2016. All rights reserved.

© Ivan Ruso for the cover, 2016

© Daniela Castillo, translated  December 2017

LEGAL DEPOSIT:

In the part of this publication, including the cover design, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, optical, Editor or author.  All rights reserved.

For my wife Mary, who puts up with rubbish like this in times of crisis.

The spelling mistakes are mine. The story, Stephen King’s.

Stephen King conceived Carrie, the Stranger, like it’s known in Brasil, at the age of 19 and it wasn’t until he was 27, after seeing his mother die, when the novel was published, on April 5, 19746. The movie adaption came from the hand of Brian de Palma on 1976. From there, Stephen King’s name, Steve for friends, began to wake a notable interest among his readers, which grew with gigantic steps when he had his third and most famous novel on the bestseller list. It was almost biographical and splendorous: The Shining. But not everything began there, but way before, and that is precisely what I’m going to tell...

Prologue

Everything you’re going to read here is about Stephen King, so be prepared for a good and satisfying trip to the mind of this popular writer. Many believe that Stephen King writes in his house on Maine with cobwebs on the ceilings and bats attached to the victorian doors, but no, he does it in the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, in a building where his office evidently is, in a dead end. A little higher there’s an armory, a snow plow, and, right after, an ancient cemetery, not even painted for the occasion. From the outside, the building seems like a deliberate choice taken for King’s tranquility, from which Edgar Allan Poe’s mom, H.P. Lovecraft or more recent ones like Bradbury and Matheson. But let’s start from the beginning. Stephen Edwin King is the second natural child, as the first was adopted (because the gynecologist told her she could not be a natural mother), of the marriage between Donald King and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, although King saw his father figure disappear at the early age of two. This fact scarred him for life. However, King does not reproach anything or wonders why he left home to never look back or what forest he’s buried in. In this dramatic episode, King remembers he found, at his thirteen years, a box full of manuscripts written by his father (which never saw the light) in one of the many houses he lived in during his teenage years. There were also many books by H.P.Lovecraft. There are some who say this forged him to write his most famous collection of stories for ten years: Night Shift. He was 23 when he completed them. Ten years earlier, King also went to the movies, walking many miles, to see a movie about monsters or aliens and then write his own version. This kid was forged in poverty until his mother’s death, and is now the most respected man for his job as author and thinker. Yes, you read that correctly, because if Stephen King had not been an author, he would have probably been a psychiatrist. It is deduced due to his high knowledge of the human brain, fear and its consequences, King was born in Maine on September 21st of 1947 and, today, in the year 2016, he has 69 years, in which he has written almost a hundred books, using even a pseudonym for six of them and another one for a story. King dominates two types of universes that link in his every work. On one side, we have his first and mayor successes like Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Stand or The Dead Zone, and on the other side we have a much intriguing and premature King , who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman some novels such as Rage, The Long Walk, Thinner or The Running Man. Like John Swithen signed a story titled The Fifth Quarter for the Cavalier magazine (as if it were a pseudonym of Richard Bachman), as Stephen King also published in in adult magazines such as Penthouse or Cosmopolitan (checks often arrived on time to buy his son Owen’s antibiotics or to pay the phone bill). Stephen King is a very restless person, he always explains how he came up with this or such idea and how it is to be written, and then he dips into his nightmares and torments, because it is for him to whom he writes for and about. If we read all of his work we get an X-Ray of his life, his fears, his concerns, his good knowledge. Everything. He writes novels of more than a thousand words and works as long as The Dark Tower, of 10,000 words, where he reveals to us in crowded paragraphs how he really is, what he hides behind his thoughts, in his self. King has a  very particular writing style that has become universal, every horror writer want to be like him. His style anchors in the human brain and has a writing of great length and depth. He likes to plant a small seed and make it grow to maturity. He stops in the details, visual communication of the scenes, continuity and internal references. Like I mentioned before, King does therapy when he writes and he himself has gotten to say he has filters in his brain that filter that which others can’t. Besides, many agree that part of King’s secret is in creating characters with whom we can empathize and anguish when they do. King has recognized, on many occasions, not remembering writing Cujo, for example, but does remember the fear that was involved in writing Pet Sematary. So, King is a person just like us, with his fears, phobias and joys. Besides, his books, contain many references about his culture and country, and mixes them with his characters’ personalities, which are a clear reflection of a North American on foot, to which he manages to extract his fears, temptations, thoughts, attitudes... everything. Just like that, King uses quite an informal type of narration, but effective, referring to his fans as constant readers and even, as friends. He knows how to get into your mind.

Stephen King has written over a hundred works and has sold more than 400 million books around the world (translated into more than 30 languages), also being the author most adapted to the cinema and television. Everything he writes has to be portrayed in images out of need. Stephen King writes on a daily basis, except on the 4th of July and his birthday. King does not stand up from his work chair, since he writes at least ten pages a day. If it is not so, he does not stand up. After the first draft, which he never shows except to Tabitha, his wife, he commits to finish the first correction in less than three months. If it is not so, he believes his characters loose credibility and his story tears up on its own. Writer’s mania. Sometimes, he writes a novel in two weeks or in a month, and others, he takes years to do so. Under the Dome was one of them. He set off from an idea he had when he was 19 and finished it almost 30 years later. The long walk, however, he wrote it in only 72 hours at the short age of 18. King is methodical and disciplined. When he gets asked, quite often, about his opinion on a blank page, he always responds graphically that his only concern is placing one word after another and make them all fit in together. King knows how a story starts, but never knows how it will end. While he writes, King loves listening to rock music at full volume. He takes up his evenings with his friends and family, when there’s no Red Sox match on the TV, of which he is a staunch follower. He reads a lot, according to King himself up to 60 books a year, sometimes more. He always said that to write well you need to read everything that surrounds you, wether it’s good or bad, since you can learn from anything. Criticized by many, King is worshipped by his fans and loathed by the critics. They believe his writing is the equivalent of Mc Donald’s: pure trash, but many sales. When you stop being a critic and really read a book of his, you rapidly discover it is not like that, that he is a genius of letters.

King is also a screenwriter and that was how Creepshow was born in honor to the horror comics that used to be published in the 50’s. The movie is a tribute to EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear that King absorbed with utter distress. He also wrote the script, among others, of Cat’s Eyes or Silver Bullet in 1985. Not happy with the Stanley Kubrick with The Shining, King wrote a new script to adapt it the way he wanted to and for the TV. He wanted to show his audience how Jack Torrance was really like. Curiously, neither did the acclaimed work of  The Dead Zone, adapted by David cronemberg, was of King’s taste, but he never rewrote another adaption of the movie. King believed his works are not always well adapted, like it did with Shawshank Redemption, that was nominated with no less than seven Oscars. The movie was directed and adapted by Frank Darabont, which whom he forged a serious friendship relationship.

Stephen King got a degree on english language on the Lisbon Falls High School, and completed his education on the University of Maine of Orono. In those years, King showcased an almost careless appearance with a great beard and long hair, inclining towards politics, getting to be member of the Students Senate and getting involved on the anti-military movement of the Orono Campus against the Vietnam war, but those were also the years in which his best ideas were born, beginning with Carrie, which he wrote in the back of his caravan. There lived the king of horror when he was already married to Tabitha King, also a writer, who one day observed a handwriting on the trash. She took it out and saw something very interesting in those crumpled and dirty sheets. So, that was when she encouraged her husband to keep writing Carrie and he said he did not know women deeply enough to write a novel about a woman. Carrie was published in 1974, but it was not his first written novel (his mother never saw the novel published, even though she read it before dying from lung cancer). He had already written other three novels that would later be published with the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, like it has been mentioned earlier. More than 4 million copies were sold of Carrie. First, he received an advance of 2,500 dollars and then another of 400,000, that way discovering the first real swoon of King. Before, he had written and gathered in his teenage years a big part of the stories of the book Night Shift that we cited earlier, maybe the best recompilation of stories of King that have left a mark. Almost all of his stories were adapted at some point of his life, like Children of the Corn, the most known for all of us. On 1971, his career began as a High School professor on Hamden Academy, while he continued his literary activity writing during the night. He had finished Carrie, and Bill Thompson, his literary agent in Doubleday, asked him for a new story. So, King had two manuscripts, Blaze and Second Coming. Thompson decided for this last one, a story about vampires, and told him that they would soon box him as a horror writer if he kept it up. When writer’s block knocked on King’s doors, he left to write in Colorado, a peaceful zone, in a hotel called Stanley (on the rocky mountains of colorado and, besides, on the low season, during winter, when there were barely any guests), and did it locked inside the room 217. There he let go, once more, getting inspired in it, The Shining was born, his peak work. At that time, King was trying to keep away from drugs and alcohol, and suffered from many of the moments that appear so much in the novel as in past characters from other novels of his. He spent his long nights walking through the carpeted halls, thinking that from one moment to the next a horde of ghosts would come out of those walls and floors coming towards him. He rebaptized the hotel as Overlook.

And it’s that, if someone deserves success, that is Stephen King, because he did not have it easy in life. He lived on a caravan when he wrote Carrie and Second Coming, and his great difficulties to face the day to day made his alcohol and certain drug addiction easier, which he would later end giving up. It was in that time when he wrote one bestseller after another, and later said he did not remember. This is how The Dead Zone, Cujo, Eyes of Fire or Apocalipsis, to cite some.

One of the questions that Stephen King has answered the most throughout his career is: What really scares you?. Without a doubt, this is a great question... What scared a horror writer?

Probably, everything he writes. He has always replied he fears usual things, like darkness, snakes, funerals, cemeteries, the number 13... But, above all, he fears the thin line that divides good from evil; that spring that hops in certain people turning them into authentic human monsters. That is what he is really afraid of, which is why it’s not wild to say that if King had not been a writer he would have been a psychiatrist. And what he is also afraid of is of death itself. It is a natural process and he says everyone goes through it, but that it wakes our most hidden fear of unknowing us, the process of dying, what happens in that instant, where we go. Because of that, a great part of King’s work revolves around death, that mystery that is still so unknown even for an expert like him.

Stephen King continues to work without rest even when, after being run over by a van in 1999, he decided to stop writing temporarily. A spanking for his fans and himself, who did not find strength to do it. Today, fully recovered, his body has gotten older, but his mind seems to shine like the first day, maybe even more. King continues distilling his profound style, catalyst, and a skilled combination of elements of classic horror with para-psychological fantasied or science fiction of great suggestive power, in stories set in the everyday life that leave us hypnotized after his precise descriptions that are minutely analyzed. What I said in the beginning, you’re going to get to know a marvelous mind that goes by the name of Stephen King.

Claudio Hernández

Biography

Little Stephen King comes to the world.

Destiny was written. Nellie Ruth Pillsbury already had a child, but not from his husband Donald King. It was about David King and he was adopted. It was 1945, so David had two years of life when Stephen Edwin King, not yet with a name, cried for the very first time when he saw the light of this world. This time yes, the son was natural of both of them. A gynecologist had told Ruth rotundly that she could not get pregnant. Those were the times when maternity test were made with frogs or spiders, in the case of Steve King, the little King, that would soon be a beardy guy of almost two meters of height. It was September 21st and Ruth did not imagine what his son would soon become. Now, when they named his Stephen Edwin King, the destiny mechanism was beginning to spin. Now, millions of followers adore him, him and his literature. This is the story of little Steve, now grandpa Steve.

Her parents and the origin.

The last years of his life, after the home abandonment of his husband Donald, were frantically restless times, in pursuit of where to eat and give shelter to her two children, moving throughout the north of America, on the state of Maine. And that was how it was until her death (some biographies locate it in Mexico). It was not entirely true that his origin knew so much poverty, but the other way around. Ruth’s family or, better said, her ancestors, had never known extreme hunger or poverty, not even after the North American crack. From his great grandfather (1790, Jonathan Pillsbury) and during all of the descendants, had enjoyed abundance and status. They were landlords, manufactured houses in that place and boats in Scarborough. So much that, between 1915 and 1932, they managed their own hotel called Pillsbury’s house. In that time, Scarborough was a port city where land was cultivated and there were local activities that included fishing and boat construction, and all of this in the middle of an environment full of sea side restaurants, hotels and pensions, as it was a good place for tourism. Nellie Ruth Pillsbury was born on February 3rd of 1913 and married a marine  merchant captain called Donald Edwin King on July 23 1939. From there they did not establish a fixed house for at least 6 years, as they travelled through a big part of North America, from Chicago to New York, but Ruth was ingrained to her land, Maine. Donald was born on March 11, 1914. Ruth was the fourth of eight siblings, fruit of the union of Guy Herbet and Nellie Weston Fogg Pillsbury, and Donald, Ruth’s husband, abandoned her and her two children, David and Stevie, in 1949. Donald had left behind the merchant marine and worked in anything he could, one of those jobs was going from door to door selling Electrolux vacuums. But the economical struggles asphyxiated Donald more and more and one day he decided to go for a pack of cigarettes to never come back.

The marriage composed by Donald and Ruth shared a taste for literature and general culture. It’s worth remembering that Ruth’s mother was a teacher and this interfered in her intelectual growth. Donald was a compulsive writer, moved by his taste in science fiction and horror, but he was not constant, and yet he managed to finish many manuscripts and stories that, however, were rejected by all of the publishers he sent them to. One of his idols was H.P Lovecraft. When the family disappeared, he left three boxes full of books and manuscripts. Ruth, unknowingly, changed her place of residence for more than four years, since little Stevie was two until he turned six: Chicago, Indiana, Ford Wayne, Malden, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. This is why Stevie acquired great knowledge of the people from each place that were later embodied in his works.

The marriage tumbles and the movings began.

The marriage went cold fast, even though Donald, after the end of World War ll, decided to land and devote himself to family. The first six years were empty of any contact because of his isolation. Then, when he came back, things did now turn out so well either. The relationship went cold for moments. Neither the adoptive son David King or the birth of his natural child Stevie made things better. Donald’s precarious job, and the low economic income worried the father of the family, who sheltered himself in writing without much success for the publishers of that