What Is Stephen King Trying To Prove?

What Is Stephen King Trying to Prove? In the same year as an accident that nearly killed him, the world's most successful living author has written a memoir, released an audio-only short-story collection, put out the first mass e-book and even self-published a novel on theWeb, scaring the staid book business out of its wits. By STEPHEN J. DUBNER Books Feature

• A Retrospective of Stephen King's Career from the Archives of the New York Times

Stephen King. Photograph by Jeff Riedel for The New York Times. KING'S EMPIRE

The Eyes of the Dragon, 1984

The Talisman, 1984 (written with Peter Straub)

The Drawing of the Three, 1987

The Green Mile, 1996, (published in six installments)

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, 1999

Blood and Smoke, 1999, (audio only)

Maximum Overdrive, 1986, (he also directed)

The Regulators, 1996 tephen King is addicted to writing. It isn't a matter of liking to write or even loving it. He needs it, chemically, the way years ago he needed his cocaine and his beer, sometimes a case a day. "Writing is just this great big conduit, this outflow pipe that keeps the pressure nice and even," he says. "It just pours all this [expletive] out. All the insecurities come out, all the fears -- and also, it's a great way to pass the time." And if he hadn't been able to make a career of it? "Oh, I'd be dead. I would have drunk myself to death or drugged myself to death or committed suicide or some goddamn thing." In June 1999, he almost died anyway. He and his family were staying at their lake house in western Maine. It was late afternoon and King was finishing up his daily four-mile walk. As usual, he was carrying a book. Although he often reads while walking -- on dirt roads, for instance, or down Broadway while visiting New York -- he was not reading at the moment, for this stretch took him up a steep hill alongside a small highway. Suddenly a blue Dodge minivan crested the hill and pinballed King off its windshield. He came down in a clump. His head was bleeding, his lap seemed to be turned sideways and he saw that a bone in his right leg was pointing in the wrong direction, skyward, bulging out of his jeans. A short while later, one of his lungs collapsed. This was all happening in a blur, literally, for King's eyeglasses were missing. They had somehow landed on the front seat of the minivan. They would help convince Bryan Smith, the man driving the van, that he had hit a person and not, as he first thought, "a small deer." Five weeks later, after King knew he would survive but before he knew if he would walk again, he resumed writing. His wife, Tabitha, who is his rock and his redeemer, set him up at a makeshift desk in the back hallway of their Victorian sprawl in Bangor. It reminded him of the laundry room in their old trailer, where he wrote "Carrie," back when he washed motel sheets for a living and she sold Dunkin' Donuts. Now he sat in a wheelchair, propped up by foam cushions, brimming with pain and painkillers. Besides the fractured hip, mangled leg, collapsed lung and lacerated scalp, he had four broken ribs and a chipped spine, and he had lost 50 pounds. He didn't feel like working, but a voice in his head -- yes, Stephen King, like his characters, hears voices -- told him to. If there is an opposite of writer's block, King has it. As a teenager, he would come home from a Roger Corman movie, write a novelization in two days, mimeograph a few dozen copies and sell them at school for a quarter each. By the time he was a college sophomore, he had five finished novels in a drawer. Last month, his hyperproductivity paid off yet again. Reaching into another drawer, he pulled out a novel called "The Plant" and did something with it that made worldwide headlines: he published it himself. A few months earlier, he became the prince of e-publishing by releasing, through Scribner, an Internet-only novella. Its success tickled him, and made him yearn for an even closer-to-home publishing experience. Enter "The Plant." Instead of a mimeograph machine, he used his Web site to release it; instead of a quarter a copy, he suggested a $1 payment for the first installment, with more to come only if 75 percent of the downloaders paid up. "My friends," he wrote on his Web site, "we have the chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare." ADD YOUR THOUGHTS Make Your Stand on Stephen King

Too good to call trash? Too fun to call literature? What do you think of King and other writers who "walk between the rows" of the genres? Add your thoughts and see what other readers are saying in Abuzz. Or ask your own question about Books.

Despite the novel's plot -- a writer sends a man-eating plant to a publishing house that rejected his manuscript -- Big Publishing did its best to appear unruffled. "I don't feel particularly threatened," said Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, King's offline publishing house. The literary agent Mort Janklow told a reporter, "That's a fellow sitting up in Maine having fun, but it's not a way to run a business." The day after "The Plant" was released, King said in an e-mail message: "I'm satisfied with the downloads -- about 40,000 as of 4 p.m. yesterday, and we're estimating a total pay-through of maybe 88 percent. Let Mort Janklow put that in his pipe and smoke it!" Lost in the hubbub was the novel's provenance. King began "The Plant" back in the early 1980's but shelved it because it too closely resembled "Little Shop of Horrors." It was distributed only to the people on his Christmas-card list. "If I gave someone a coffee maker and they sold it at a yard sale, it wouldn't bother me," he said at the time. "If they want to sell 'The Plant,' fine. It's theirs. They can tear out the pages and use 'em for toilet paper, if that's what they feel like doing." This may be what his friends mean when they call him a genius. After all, who but the chairman of Stephen King Inc. would think to turn 15-year-old toilet paper into an Internet rage? The book he finished in his wheelchair, meanwhile, "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft," will be published in -- yawn -- early October. With paper and cloth and glue. For King, 52, it was one of the scariest books he has written. While a large part of it gives point-blank advice to the aspiring author ("The adverb is not your friend"), it also tells the true story of how writing saved Stephen King from the sort of life -- or death -- that he has instead had the luxury of turning into fiction. e has two offices in Bangor: one in the house for writing, the other in a low-slung flesh-colored building near the airport. This is where he and two assistants manage the empire that has arisen in the wake of more than 40 books and nearly as many films based on the writing of Stephen King and Richard Bachman, King's pseudonymous counterpart. It's a Monday morning, mid-June, almost a year to the date of his accident. King uses one red metal crutch to get from his pickup truck to the office door. He is sick of the crutch. At a recent reading in New York, he was determined to appear without it but was stymied by three steep flights of stairs. Once onstage, however, he leaned the crutch against a wall and limped to the microphone. He got a standing ovation. King, as his longtime editor puts it, "is the rock star of writers." Stephen J. Dubner is the author of "Turbulent Souls," a family memoir. He is working on a book about hero worship.

Now, after telling his assistants, Marsha and Julie, how nice they look, King lowers himself into a jungle-print recliner. He appears healthily haggard, if that's possible -- still underweight but generally fit. He's wearing faded jeans, a blue sweatshirt and, on his feet, soccer socks (maroon-and-white stripes) and karate shoes (soft white leather). The combination invokes something like a woodsman who breaks at lunch for ballet. At one point in the conversation, he raises his right pant leg to illustrate the story of visiting his beloved Red Sox at spring training: "Nomar comes over, Bret Saberhagen comes over, Tim Wakefield comes over, and Tim goes, 'Come on, get it up, get it up!' They wanted to see the leg, and they all knew what the injury was." The major scar, running the length of the calf, is surrounded by any number of puckers and pockmarks. The leg is not pretty (maybe it never was), but it's there. Attached to the rest of him. "I tell Tabby this is the bonus round," he says. "And I believe it, man. I have a lot of pain, but there's so much that doesn't hurt, that I'm capable of. To be able to walk around, to still be able to make love to my wife -- because that could have gone as well, it's just a physiological thing. I'm grateful for everything that I have, and I try to stay as grateful as I can, because it doesn't matter how much money you've made or how rich you are or whether your book's on the Internet or anything else. If you snap your spine, you're a quad, and mine was chipped in five or six places, almost down to the bare wires in a couple of places, so I'm very lucky." His desk is stacked with books to be autographed, the rest of the office thick with Kingalia. It traces the arc of a long and variegated and uniquely successful career: a "Green Mile" director's chair, a "Pet Sematary" rug, a chipper little sign reading "Redrum" (if you have to ask . . . ). In the bathroom, there's a framed photo of a very large woman in a bathtub, presumably a fan, with a thought bubble above her head: "A Ton of Fun?" King doesn't want for fans. In the summertime, tour buses idle outside his house. On the Internet, King rumors swarm: his minivan encounter was not an accident (false); he is suffering from writer's block (false); someone else -- maybe his wife, also a novelist -- actually writes some of his books. That rumor is also false, as far as anyone can tell. Still, King's prolificacy borders on promiscuity. "You almost expect when he refers to 'the boys in the basement"' -- King's term for his internal muses -- that maybe there are real people, doing at least his typing," says Chuck Verrill, a literary agent who is also King's personal editor.

King knows how 'On Writing' will sit with his critics: 'Like the town whore trying to teach women how to behave.'

In the year since King went back to work, he has written the second half of "On Writing"; "Riding the Bullet," the e-novella whose success prompted a storm of the-future-is-here coverage; the better part of a haunted-house screenplay for a six-hour ABC miniseries; and a 900-page novel, "Dreamcatcher," which opens with a group of hunters coming upon a man who claims to have been lost in the woods. (He finished another novel, "From a Buick Eight," just before his accident, but its release has been pushed back, in part because it involves a nasty car crash.) As King says in "On Writing," the first draft of a novel shouldn't take more than three months. That, after all, is how it works for him. He writes seven days a week, with the stereo turned up loud (lots of Eminem, Kid Rock and Wilco these days), but he often knocks off by lunchtime. Friends say that despite his ambling disposition, King is fiendishly focused and gets more done per hour -- whether writing or not -- than any other human they know. "He's curious about everything around him," says Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who founded the Rock Bottom Remainders, the authors-only rock band that includes Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Dave Barry and, on rhythm guitar, King. "You can't mention a book he hasn't read, you can't mention an obscure musician who he can't sing a lyric of one of his songs." King's brain is known as an extraordinarily fecund place, constantly sprouting jokes, opinions and, above all, story ideas. King alone fails to marvel at his output. That would be like a sprinter gloating over his speed. What does delight King is his forward momentum. He is not only the richest and most famous living author but also among the most entrepreneurial. A few years ago, he pulled a Dickens and published "The Green Mile" in six serial installments. (At one point, all six volumes sat on The Times's best-seller list.) Earlier this year, he released a short-story collection exclusively as an audiobook. Even his contract with Scribner is an anomaly, sacrificing gigantic advances for a bigger piece of the back end. (He doesn't remember the specifics, he says: "I think the deal is a million dollars a book and split the royalties pretty much down the middle.") And now he has given e-publishing a kick-start. "Riding the Bullet," released in March, was the world's first mass e-book, with more than 500,000 downloads. The number of actual readers was another question because the encryption caused countless computers to crash. Still, thanks to King, online publishing seemed a real possibility at last. (Never mind that the Web was already swimming with downloadable music and movies; even though plain words are far easier to upload, it was somehow taken for granted that Big Publishing would be the last one in.) King was stunned by the success of "Riding the Bullet." In Scribner's office pool, he had predicted 16,000 downloads. Now he wanted to try again. He made up a wish list: a downloadable story without encryption . . . released in serial form . . . with honor-system payments . . . published by . . . ME! Thus was "The Plant" brought forth from its drawer and posted on www.stephenking.com. The media worked hard to turn King's insurgent act into a writers' revolution. It is probably not. Most writers, unlike King, can't book themselves on the "Today" show and "Good Morning America" on the day of their launch. Most writers, like Carlos Detweiller of "The Plant," would make more of an impact by sending a man-eating vine to the publishing house. For King, though, anything is possible and, in time, probable. "I've continued to say yes to these things rather than kind of pulling back and saying, Well, I'm going to write a book a year, and that's what I'm going to do," he says. "I dislike writers who behave like old cart horses, dozing their way back to the stable." Now he has written a how-to-write book laced with memoir. Some critics, King says, "think I can't write," and he knows how "On Writing" will sit with them: "Like the town whore trying to teach women how to behave." He doesn't care. In the book, he even invites his readers-writers to submit their work to him. He's thinking about publishing the best offerings in the paperback edition. uch approachability is a major upside of King's down-to-earth reputation. Even in his native Maine, where celebrity is considered a sort of disease, he is extraordinarily well regarded. It doesn't hurt that he and his wife are world-class philanthropists, but their just-folks nature is just as deeply appreciated. There is at least one more upside to his earthiness. "He said to me recently," Verrill says, "that one of the advantages of not being an acclaimed literary novelist is that you get to write about stuff like --," and here Verrill names a variety of bodily functions that are regularly featured in King's work.

The Dodge minivan that almost turned King into a permanent bag of bones should have had a license plate that read "MISERY." Photograph by Jeff Riedel for The New York Times. The thing is, King wants to write from the gut and be an acclaimed literary novelist. His complaints are by now familiar: the literary establishment has long misunderstood popular fiction, and just because he sells millions of books, serious readers won't take him seriously. King has recently made headway. His novels have come to be reviewed more respectfully; a Hawthorne-ish short story he wrote, "The Man in the Black Suit," won a 1996 O. Henry Award. King was happy for the award, "but it made me feel like an impostor too," he says. "Like someone made a mistake." In the main, King is right: serious readers generally haven't read him. When they do, they are usually impressed. Cynthia Ozick, for instance, had never given King much thought until they did a reading together. "It dawned on me as I listened to him that, never mind all the best sellers and all the stereotypes -- this man is a genuine, true-born writer, and that was a revelation," she says. "He is not Tom Clancy. He writes sentences, and he has a literary focus, and his writing is filled with literary history. It's not glib, it's not just contemporary chatter and it's not stupid -- that's a bad way to say that something's smart, but that's what I mean." If King wanted to find the genesis of his bad reputation, he might try looking in Hollywood. Except for "Carrie" and "The Shining," most early King films -- think "Pet Sematary" or "Maximum Overdrive" or "Children of the Corn" -- were dopey gorefests. As King the author became a brand name, his movies gave serious readers everywhere reason not to read him. But as his writing matured, so did the films. In 1986, Castle Rock released "Stand by Me," a sharp coming-of-age film based on a King novella. Castle Rock has since made five more King films: "Misery," "Needful Things," "The Shawshank Redemption," "Dolores Claiborne" and "The Green Mile." Each one was a few thousand percent better than "Children of the Corn." Too bad for King that Castle Rock wasn't around in the 1970's. On the other hand, he often hurts his own cause. Last year, King gave himself a party at Tavern on the Green to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of "Carrie." It was a fancy night, full of literary V.I.P.'s, capped off by . . . a highlight reel including the goriest moments in King's film repertory. King never set out to be a horror writer and doesn't consider himself one now. Horror, he implies, is a cheaper version of fear, and it's the fear he's interested in: the frantic bleats in a protagonist's mind more than the monster causing them. Two of his recent works, "Hearts in Atlantis" and "Bag of Bones," seemed intent on minimizing the monstrous. They are driven by character, not scenario, and are each rooted in sober realism. They are big, serious-ish books; Scribner even classed up their dust jackets. But by story's end the ghosts have arrived. A reader feels almost as if the writer wanted to resist but couldn't. A reader feels more of King at work than of most writers. His narrative voice, extraordinarily controlling and full of wry intrusions, is always right in your ear, just outside the campfire's light. But what most makes King unique is that he fully exploits the writer's great natural advantage: he is the one making up the story. If there is a single trait common to most of King's writing, it is the reader's feeling that the author is playing God. He can and will make really bad things happen to his beloved creations. He will then watch them confront this evil, occasionally offering aid. Finally, after they've been scared witless and have proved themselves worthy, they are welcomed back into His warm embrace, humble and grateful. "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon," a novella that King published last year, is a good example. In it, a 9-year-old girl gets lost in the woods and ends up praying to her hero, the Red Sox pitcher Tom Gordon, to help save her. It is a simple, beguiling, frightful story. It begins in innocence, passes through the valley of the shadow of death and ends with a benevolent wink of an author's note: "The woods themselves are real. If you should visit them on your vacation, bring a compass, bring good maps . . . and try to stay on the path." ing says he might soon retire -- I think that my trick bag is pretty well empty" -- but instantly cautions that he probably won't be able to. Those who know him well agree. He is preternaturally driven, they say. But by what? Warren Silver, a Bangor friend and one of King's lawyers, says that "he's just a competitive guy who wants to be the best at what he does." King has befriended John Grisham -- a few years ago, they paid their own way to the National Book Awards, in sly protest of being perennially unconsidered -- but he is bothered by the inferiority of other best-selling authors. "I never wanted to be content with being, let's say, a Robin Cook or even a Michael Crichton, who's a little bit better," he says. Of Danielle Steel and Mary Higgins Clark, he complains, "These people are selling fairy tales."

About 15 years ago, his wife emptied his trash before family and friends. Out poured beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles, coke spoons caked with blood, tranquilizers, cough syrup and even bottles of mouthwash.

If King's Internet orgy proves anything, it's that he likes attention, a lot. What doesn't drive King is money. "The truth is, Stephen King is rich because he never set out to be rich," says Susan Moldow of Scribner. "If the money mattered to him, it wouldn't be there." But it is, many times over. Responding to an e-mail query about his finances, he wrote: "I don't know how much I make in a good year. Gross could be $40 million, I'd think. What finally nets out is maybe a third." For the movie of "The Green Mile": "I think I got $3 million plus a piece of the back end (up to a certain point). The movie has earned, unlike most of them, so I think I'll see some back end. I saw some from 'Stand by Me,' too. Mostly (people won't believe it) the movies are just sort of fun. Like investing in some weird margin stock like United Kurmfurling or Yermal SpringTronix. I can't break my finances down further than that, and you are impudent to ask (I say it without rancor, but you know it's true). The money isn't very important. The idea is to take care of your family and have enough left over to buy books and go to the movies once a week. As a goal in life, 'getting rich' strikes me as fairly ludicrous. The goal is to do what God made you for and not hurt anyone if you can help it." The not-hurting-anyone credo is important to King, and personal. When he was 2, his father "did a runout." King grew up with his mother and older brother, on the move and poor. In "On Writing," he recalls this childhood with typical candor (which can be very moving) and typical scatalogical flair (which will probably keep him, for now, on the wrong side of Art). His mother set high standards, worked like a martyr, encouraged his writing; he loved her. Shortly before his first book was published, she found out she had uterine cancer. "We could hear the pause after each rasping breath she drew growing long and longer," he writes. "Finally there were no more breaths and it was all pause." Today, King's own family is his greatest happiness. He speaks of Tabitha with the ardor of a newlywed and the awe of a Lourdes pilgrim. It was Tabitha who, about 15 years ago, gave him a choice: clean up or move out. He was a mess; he says he can't really remember writing "Cujo" at all. Tabitha took him before a group of family and friends and emptied his trash can onto the rug. Out poured, he writes, "beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash." He bought a little time, as addicts will do, but soon started treatment and stuck with it. King seems genuinely surprised that he has lived to see his first grandchild. He and Tabitha have had an eventful marriage; friends say it is one of the strongest they have seen. For Tabitha, who has published seven novels, it cannot have been easy being the No. 2 writer in this two-writer home. Worse yet, for years they shared a publisher. Tabitha's last manuscript got caught in limbo when Elaine Koster, Tabitha's editor and Stephen's paperback publisher, left Penguin Putnam in 1997. Stephen wound up signing his lucrative deal with Scribner. Tabitha's novel wound up dead. Now two of their three children are writers, Joe near Boston (who writes under a pseudonym) and Owen in New York (who doesn't). "I read Joe's stuff, and I kind of relate to it because it's like plot-driven, it's high conflict," King says. "Owen is more like this sort of -- I don't want to dis him but -- Bret Easton Ellis. I don't know, more like flavor-of-the-month, New York relationships." The Kings' daughter, Naomi, is a Universalist minister. "I tell her, and I think it's true, that Unitarianism is God for people who don't believe in God, and she just laughs." Naomi, who once owned a restaurant in Portland, Me., now lives in Chicago. "She met a woman out there, and she's going to marry this woman or have a commitment thing or something like that." Last summer, the whole family was up at the lake, including Joe's wife and infant son. It was the first time in six months they had all been together. On June 19, a Saturday, Owen was returning to New York, so his father dropped him at the airport, drove home, took a nap, then headed out for his daily constitutional. Owen had just walked into his apartment when he got a phone call from Tabitha: his father had been in an accident. He flew back. King had been airlifted to the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. Tabitha, Joe and Naomi arrived, and later, Owen. "What they did to me there was apparently set something in my leg," King recalls, "and there's this horrible scream -- it came out to where they were signing papers. Joe turned pale at that. The nurse gave them a form, a do-not-resuscitate kind of thing. Tabby said Joe realized it was serious and he just left, went out for a while. He had his Red Sox cap. He put the cap over his face until he was in control." King, leaning forward in his recliner, takes a pause, and a breath. "Later, they all gathered around." Now he's fully choked up. He whispers, in a model of Maine understatement, "They're good people." King's near-death, as the facts came forth, unspooled like a scene from his novels, full as they are of automotive menace and rural blunderings. The driver who hit him, 42-year-old Bryan Smith of Fryeburg, is known locally as a bit of a simpleton. King recalls a sheriff's investigator visiting him in the hospital and saying, "That Pepsi can has more I.Q. than Bryan Smith." When Smith hit King, his minivan was well onto the right shoulder. He had been distracted by his Rottweiller's trying to get into a food cooler. Smith came back and sat with King to wait for the ambulance. A woman and three children soon joined them. According to her, Smith apologized and told King he had never even gotten a parking ticket before, to which King replied, "Well, I've never been hit by a car before." The local weekly, The Bridgton News, later reported that Smith actually had a long history of driving violations. He had been convicted for operating under the influence, driving to endanger and failure to stop for a police officer. Once, after running several cars off the road, he pulled into his driveway and promptly passed out on his lawn, in view of the police officer who had been chasing him. In 1998, his license was suspended three times but each time was restored. At it turned out, Smith has a brother, Everett, on the Fryeburg police force. The sheriff's deputy who responded to the King accident, Matt Baker, used to serve on the Fryeburg force with Everett Smith. And the only eyewitness Baker took a statement from on the scene was his own uncle, Chip Baker. "It's not nepotism, it's ineptness, that's what I would credit those police departments with," says Lisa Williams Ackley, who covered the story for The News. The Kings were enraged when it was announced that only misdemeanor charges would be pressed against Smith. The accident, they felt, should be treated as a seriously criminal act. "They should have impounded the vehicle, and they should have tested him for drugs and alcohol at the scene, and they didn't do it," says Warren Silver, the Kings' lawyer in Bangor. Silver had gone to western Maine shortly after the accident to investigate it and meet with Smith. He came home with an idea that he prayed Smith hadn't had: the 1985 blue Dodge Caravan, fresh with King's dents, might fetch a frighteningly high price on eBay. The next day, Silver called Smith, offered him $1,500 for the van and had it shipped back to Bangor. King wants to use the van for a charity event: three sledgehammer swings for $5. "But my wife is kind of like, 'Why don't we just get past this whole thing,"' he says. He smiles at his own grisly perseverance. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts the glasses back on. They are the same lenses he was wearing that day; only the frames had to be replaced. Why is he still wearing them? "I guess that I wanted to say that things that we ordinarily would see as quite fragile aren't necessarily that fragile," he says. "It's true of the glasses, and it's true of me. I got bent, I got busted around a lot, but I'm still here."

Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company