The Library Policeman began as a passing remark from King’s son Owen (now also a published
author) about the ‘Library Police’, who would supposedly visit if one did not return overdue books.
Owen’s Aunt Stephanie had told him about these lawmen108. King had also heard of the Library
Police as a child and had spoken about them with Peter Straub in the early 1980s. As he began a tale
titled ‘The Library Police’, the real story began to unfold as King realized ‘something I knew already:
the fears of childhood have a hideous persistence. Writing is an act of self-hypnosis, and in that state
a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and terrors which should have been long dead start
to walk and talk again.’
Four Past Midnight: A note on ‘The Sun Dog’—Four Past Midnight (1990)
In this note King deals with the insulting question of when he will get tired of horror/fantasy and
‘write something serious’. He notes, a little defensively, that if ‘real’ is the definition of ‘serious’ that
many famous and critically regarded authors had written fantasy—among them Kafka and Orwell. He
says he writes what he does as the ‘tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the
world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they
continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary
question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions.’
He notes that most of the ‘Really Serious Things’ he has to say ‘have to do with the small-town
world in which I was raised and where I still live’—‘… aside from the firm belief that a story may
exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is
mine.’ This is indeed one of King’s trademarks. As example, he gives a relatively short, but very
enlightening description of his relationship with the mythical town of Castle Rock, Maine (‘… Castle
Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem’s Lot without the vampires’) and his decision to leave it
behind. It is here Constant Readers first learned of as yet unwritten/unpublished events in the town’s
history: ‘how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father’s
car, how Ophelia Todd’s husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck
lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off by a fan and the family dog ate it).’
The Glass Floor: Introduction—The Glass Floor (Fall 1990)
The Glass Floor had the honor of being the first piece of fiction for which King was
professionally paid (all of $35 for its appearance in Startling Mystery Stories for Fall 1967). He
was but twenty when he received this first payment for his years of writing, and the five years of
rejection slips he had collected perhaps seemed to shrink a little on its receipt.
Nearly a quarter century after its first publication King allowed the story to be reprinted in the
Fall 1990 issue of Weird Tales. 109 As to the revision King says in the Introduction, after acknowledging that the story was not as bad as he’d thought: ‘Darrell Schweitzer, the editor of Weird
Tales, invited me to make changes if I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea.
Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a paragraph break (which was probably a
typographical error in the first place), I’ve left the tale just as it was. If I really did start making
changes, the result would be an entirely new story.’
In fact the most significant change is toward the end of the story, in which the original read: ‘The
ladder was still there, stretching up into the darkness and down into the glimmering depths of the
mirror’; and was changed to: ‘The ladder was still there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of
the mirror.’
Author’s Note—The Bear (1990)
The Bear is described in King’s Author’s Note as ‘the first section’ of his upcoming third Dark
Tower novel. In fact, while it broadly duplicates the first nine-and-a-half subchapters from the Bear
and Bone chapter, which begins The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, the version included in that
novel the following year is significantly different.110 The Bear was published in the December 1990
issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & science-fiction, which also included King’s short story, The
Moving Finger; a King bibliography compiled by his assistant, Marsha DeFilippo; and an article on
King by F&SF’s Books Editor, Algis Budrys.
The Author’s Note itself (only four paragraphs in length) is in the form of the Arguments King
presents in volumes two through five of the Dark Tower Cycle—setting the scene for readers of the
following story.
Author’s Note—The Woman in the Room (1991)
This piece appears only in the following volumes: The Complete Masters of Darkness, edited
by Dennis Etchison (Novato, CA; Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller), released in February 1991 as a
Limited Edition of 345 numbered copies, signed by King and other contributors, and in a hardcover
trade edition; a trade paperback released later in 1991; and a mass-market paperback, under the title
Masters of Darkness III, released in May 1991. The hardcover and paperback are available via the
usual dealers.
King’s original manuscript for this piece is headed, ‘Concerning “The Woman in the Room”’. In
a letter dated August 16, 1996 the anthology’s editor Dennis Etchison refers to the piece as the
‘Afterword’. In the same letter Etchison refers to an attached letter from King. That correspondence,
dated January 30, 1991, on King’s Bangor home address letterhead, refers to the tip-sheets (on which
the various authors penned their signatures) and is revelatory of King’s humor:
‘Here are the tip-sheets. Apparently neither the years nor the sobering reality of a brand-new
war have been able to moderate my essentially sick nature very much. As I was sitting at my desk and
signing away like the good fellow I mostly am, my eye dropped from one of those utterly mad Jack
Vance scrawls to the blank for Joseph Payne Brennan’s signature. It occurred to me that I might
scribble the following on one of those blanks: [King had drawn a signature with the last name tailing
off as if Brennan had...well, you’ll see] / Sick, sick behavior. Hope this finds you well. / Best,
[King’s signature]’.
Etchison explains: ‘The letter from King regarding one of the contributors to an earlier volume,
Joseph Payne Brennan, refers to his experience with the signature pages for the Underwood-Miller
edition. Through an unfortunate error Brennan’s name was printed on the sheets, despite the fact that
he was by then deceased, and King could not resist commenting upon this morbid detail.’
In this short but very powerful piece King lays bare his soul, relating that his mother was
diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 1972: ‘She was a woman who had worked hard all her adult
life, and during the second half of 1972 and the first two months of 1973, she did her hardest job,
which was waiting to die with dignity and patience. / She did a good job of it—as she did with most
things—but it was a dark and difficult time for her loved ones...This story is about a young man who
collaborates with his mother in an act which might be murder, or suicide, or simple mercy. The
actions are fictitious; the feelings are not. As my mother’s end drew nearer, there were many times
when I wished I’d had the guts to do what the character in the story does. / When my mother’s dying
was done, I wrote this story...[it] was my therapy. I have never enjoyed rereading it, but at times I
do...because my mother’s death was also part of my life. And, you know, writing it made me feel
better. If there is a stronger moral justification for the reading and writing of stories, I have never
found it.’
Argument—The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991)
This is the second of the Arguments King uses to set the scene for readers at the beginning of
volumes two to five of the Dark Tower novels. He also penned an Author’s Note to an excerpt from
this novel, The Bear, in The Magazine of Fantasy & science-fiction for December 1990 (see earlier
this chapter).
King has this to say (again, see the section about the Argument for The Drawing of the Three
earlier in this chapter) about Jake’s New York death: ‘Jake Chambers died with the man in black—
Walter—peering down at him, and awoke in Roland’s world.’ It is unclear why King would still be
making this argument when it is very clear from The Pusher section of The Drawing of the Three that
it is not Walter, but Jack Mort, who pushed Jake, although Robin Furth argues ‘… he was no more
than a pawn of Walter, also known as the Man in Black.’ 111 A careful reading of both versions of The
Gunslinger does show, however, that Jake had deliberately averted his gaze from the man dressed as
a priest, the man in black, and died looking at his own hand.
Later in this Argument King adds to the debate: ‘Roland has never had any cause to doubt Jake’s
story of how he died in our world, nor any question who Jake’s murderer was—Walter, of course.
Jake saw him dressed as a priest as the crowd gathered around the spot where he lay dying, and
Roland has never doubted the description. Nor does he doubt it now; Walter was there, oh yes, no
doubt about that. But suppose it was Jack Mort, not Walter, who pushed Jake into the path of the
oncoming Cadillac.’ By the time he wrote the Argument for The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
King’s position was this: ‘The pusher was a man named Jack Mort...except the thing hiding inside of
Mort’s head and guiding his murderous hands on this particular occasion was Roland’s old enemy,
Walter.’ There is one more slight revision to King’s position on this incident, in The Final Argument
t o Wolves of the Calla: ‘The pusher was a criminal sociopath named Jack Mort, Walter’s
representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower.’
He closes by acknowledging he has taken ‘certain geographical liberties with the city’ of New
York. ‘For these I hope I may be forgiven.’ Actually, it becomes clear by the end of the Dark Tower
Cycle that it is possible none of the New York cities members of the ka-tet are drawn from and visit
is the one that exists in our reality.
Author’s Note—The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991)
King begins, ‘The fourth volume in the tale of the Dark Tower should appear—always assuming
the continuation of Constant Writer’s life and Constant Reader’s interest—in the not-too-distant
future. It’s hard to be more exact than that; finding the doors to Roland’s world has never been easy
for me....’ In fact, King’s life would nearly be terminated between the fourth and fifth volumes; but
Constant Readers certainly never lost interest and there was irritation from the most committed Dark
Tower fans over the six years it took before that fourth volume would appear. That was partly driven
by the hanging ending of The Waste Lands, with Roland and his ka-tet hurtling toward their possible
deaths, trying desperately to find a riddle to confound Blaine the Mono. Of this King says, ‘although
you are not obligated to believe me, I must nevertheless insist that I was as surprised by the
conclusion to this third volume as some of my readers may be. Yet books which write themselves (as
this one did, for the most part) must be allowed to end themselves....’
He says Roland’s world ‘still holds me in thrall...more, in many ways, than any of the other
worlds I have wandered in my imagination’; and speaks briefly of the events to be described in the
fourth volume (Roland’s youth; the reappearance of the Tick-Tock Man and Walter) before quoting
the first stanza of his inspiration, Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Untitled—on Gerald’s Game (1992)
An American Booksellers Association edition of Gerald’s Game was sent to bookshops in May
of 1992. It included a facsimile of a handwritten letter from King, dated April 11, 1992 and
addressed, ‘Dear Booksellers/Constant Readers’. King says that, although he’d been writing ‘horror
stories’ for over twenty years, he had ‘very little idea...what scares readers’ and ‘I only know what
scares me.’ He goes on to argue ‘by that yardstick’ this ‘is my most successful novel since The
Shining.’ He briefly says he first visualized the story while flying to New York (‘and nary a langolier
in sight’). Having created three months of ‘broken sleeps and bad dreams’ for its author he hoped to
pass those effects on. King also thanks the booksellers for their ‘efforts on my behalf’ over the years:
‘So thanks...and pleasant screams [this last word is crossed out and replaced with—] dreams.’
As King included no author’s material in the mainstream publication of this rather graphic and
telling novel this piece is a key reference. However, copies of this edition are extremely rare and
difficult to source. Start with specialist King resellers.
Introduction: Myth, Faith, andRipley’s Believe It or Not! —Nightmares & Dreamscapes
(1993)
This is one of King’s better introductions and we highly recommend it be read in full (feel free
to do so right now. We’ll wait). There are a number of themes in these action-packed six pages—
King’s own credulity (Tabitha King ‘delights in telling people that her husband cast his first
Presidential ballot...for Richard Nixon. “Nixon said he had a plan to get us out of Vietnam... and Steve
believed him! ’’’); the link between belief, myth and imagination (‘I think that myth and imagination
are, in fact, nearly interchangeable concepts, and that belief is the wellspring of both’); and how
difficult it had become for him to write short stories (the risk of self-parody; the fear ‘I may have
already said everything I have to say’; and ‘these days it seems everything wants to be a novel’).
In a revelatory section King says: ‘I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it
sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but
actually saves them. Nor am I speaking metaphorically. Good writing—good stories— are the
imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter
from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable. I can only speak from
my own experience of course, but for me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror
as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.’
Late in this piece King says he considers Nightmares & Dreamscapes the third book in a trilogy
of short story collections, following Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. Having said he’d avoided
including ‘trunk stories’ and other older, uncollected tales for this collection he states: ‘All of the
good short stories have now been collected; all the bad ones have been swept as far under the rug as I
could get them, and there they will stay. If there is to be another collection, it will consist entirely of
stories which have not as yet been written or even considered...and I’d guess it will show up in a year
which begins with a 2.’
In fact, King’s next collection was a Limited, from his own Philtrum Press, Six Stories and was
released in 1997. As we might be seen to be a little disingenuous here, we’ll point out that the next
pr i nt mass-market short story collection (2000’s Blood and Smoke was an audiobook) was
Everything’s Eventual, in 2002. That collection, true to King’s word, included not one story that had
been published (and most likely, written) when he penned this Introduction in Bangor, on 6
November 1992.
Author’s Note to Sorry, Right Number—Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
There is a lengthy Notes section at the end of this volume (covered shortly) but King still chose
to jump in before three of the pieces with short notes, apparently because he felt each of these notes
needed to be read before the tale itself.
For Sorry, Right Number he gives a short lesson in screenplay abbreviations to assist readers.
Author’s Note to Head Down—Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
In the case of King’s non-fiction baseball piece, Head Down, which is reviewed in our Baseball
chapter, the note reads: ‘I am breaking in here, Constant Reader, to make you aware that this is not a
story but an essay—almost a diary. It originally appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 1990. /
S.K.’
Notes—Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
Even for King these Notes are lengthy, at ten pages in the first edition hardcover, and cover
seventeen of the twenty-four pieces in the book. The pieces about which King apparently had nothing
to say are: The End of the Whole Mess, Chattery Teeth, Sneakers, Rainy Season (there is a brief
reference to this tale but no note of its own), Crouch End and The Doctor’s Case. Written on the
morning of September 16, 1992 they are prefaced by a short dissertation on the work that is necessary
to get stories right and the magic of a story’s genesis. As to the stories themselves what follows are
some short takes from King on each.
A moment after King, sitting at roadwork behind a big green Cadillac, saw a hole and thought,
‘ Even a car as big as that Cadillac would fit in there’, the story appeared in his head, ‘firmly in
place, fully developed, and none of the narrative elements ever changed so much as one iota.’
(Dolan’s Cadillac). This section also details Dave (Steve’s brother) King’s brilliance and the
assistance he provided to researching the piece; and the interesting fact that King had hated the
finished product and put it in ‘one of the cardboard boxes of Bad Old Stuff I keep in the hallway
behind my office.’ Some years later, when King allowed Lord John Press to release the story as a
Limited (by this time it read much better to its author, although he mysteriously fails to mention its
previous publication in Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter four years earlier), he had to
retrieve it from ‘what I think of as the Hallway of Doom....’ One suspects many a King fan would give
quite a lot to visit that Hallway!
‘I like it quite a lot—it feels a little like the Bradbury of the late forties and early fifties to
me...Put another way [it] is a ghastly sick-joke with no redeeming social merit whatever. I like that in
a story.’ (Suffer the Little Children).
King sometimes discovers a supporting character who will not go away—in the case of Richard
Dees (originally from The Dead Zone) his reprise is as intrepid reporter for a supermarket tabloid
who gets more than he bargained for while chasing a vampire—he says Dees turned out to be a man
of ‘profound alienation’, who found the column of truth has a hole in it. (The Night Flier). ‘… is this
little boy’s grandfather the same creature that demands Richard Dees open his camera and expose his
film at the conclusion of ‘The Night Flier’? You know, I rather think he is.’ (Popsy).
King says the revised version of It Grows On You 112 in this collection is actually something of
an epilogue to the so-called ‘last’ Castle Rock story. ‘As I read the original story I began to realize
that these old men were actually the survivors of the debacle described in Needful Things. That novel
is a black comedy about greed and obsession; this is a more serious story about secrets and
sickness...it was great to glimpse some of my old Castle Rock friends one last time.’
‘It seems to me now that this story, originally published in 1985 was a trial cut for the novel
Dolores Claiborne (1992)...It’s not a very politically correct story, and I think a lot of readers are
going to be outraged by it.’ King also says Dedication articulates his unease about those among
famous, talented people who are ‘utter shits in person’.
King says The Moving Finger is the type of fantasy short story that, unlike movies, does not
have to explain why things happen and that the protagonist’s efforts to deal with the finger forms ‘a
perfectly valid metaphor for how we cope with the nasty surprises life holds in store for all of us...In
a tale of fantasy, this gloomy answer actually seems to satisfy us. In the end, it may be the genre’s
chief moral asset: at its best, it can open a window (or a confessional screen) on the existential
aspects of our mortal lives.’
King argues You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (couple meets dead rockers) and Rainy
Season (couple meets strange deaths) are not lapses into self-imitation of Children of the Corn,
suggesting the ‘peculiar-little-town story’ is a horror-tale archetype. We are told Home Delivery was
actually written to order, for an anthology of zombie tales113: ‘The concept fired off in my imagination
like a Roman candle, and this story, set off the coast of Maine, was the result.’
The note for My Pretty Pony provides the interesting information that The Dark Half was
reworked from ‘an almost complete novel called Machine’s Way, ’ written under the pseudonym of
Richard Bachman’s pseudonym, George Stark....’ Stark, of course reappeared in The Dark Half as
Thad Beaumont’s pseudonym (still with us?). When King ‘killed’ Bachman he was also left with six
chapters of a failed crime novel called My Pretty Pony, only one episode of which was reworked
into the short story of the same name. King calls the resulting short story, ‘...a little better than some,
not so good as others.’ And this is King’s entire comment on The Fifth Quarter: ‘Bachman again. Or
maybe George Stark.’
He explains that the version of Sorry, Right Number appearing in this volume is his first draft,
rather than the shooting script, and details the short voyage this tale took from concept to broadcast.
He also notes the genesis of The Ten O’Clock People was his noting the ‘odd pockets of sociological
behavior’ that are working smokers, forced out of their buildings and onto the streets to get their fix.
The House on Maple Street is King’s take on one picture in Chris Van Allsburg’s The
Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Tabitha and Owen King both wrote stories based on other pictures
from the book and he wishes he could publish their offerings as well).
King describes Umney’s Last Case as an ‘ambitious’ pastiche114: ‘I have loved Raymond
Chandler and Ross Macdonald passionately since I discovered them in college...and I think it is the
language of these novels which so fired my imagination; it opened a whole new way of seeing, one
that appealed fiercely to the heart and mind of the lonely young man I was at that time.’ He also says,
‘... of all the stories in this volume, it’s the one I like the best.’
A further note on Head Down, referencing King’s short time as a high school sports reporter115
pairs the piece with the elegiac baseball poem Brooklyn August (it ‘appears to have been
selected...upon occasion by editors who seem not to have the slightest idea of who I’m supposed to
be or what I’m supposed to do. And I really like that.’)116
Author’s Note to The Beggar and the Diamond—Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993)
The Beggar and the Diamond is the last piece in this collection (strangely, it actually appears
after the main Notes section; perhaps this is because The Beggar and the Diamond is not listed in the
Table of Contents in the first edition, presumably meaning it was added at the last minute). King’s
note reads: ‘This little story—a Hindu parable in its original form—was first told to me by Mr
Surendra Patel, of New York City. I have adapted it freely and apologize to those who know it in its
true form, where Lord Shiva and his wife, Parvati, are the major characters.’
Foreword: A Letter—The Green Mile (1996)
Due to the extraordinary and deserved success of the movie, The Green Mile is one of the best
known of all King’s tales. This piece first appeared in the first of the six monthly serial novellas in
which the novel was initially published, Part 1: The Two Dead Girls, in March 1996. It did not
appear in the remaining five parts and was next reprinted in the first omnibus edition, The Green
Mile: The Complete Serial Novel (1997). It was also issued as a pamphlet that was part of a
promotional packet called “The Green Mile File” distributed by Penguin UK.
Written on the rainy evening of October 27, 1995 this Foreword essentially explains the origin
of the serial format for the tale. King’s foreign rights agent, Ralph Vicinanza, in discussion with
another author, was reminded that many of Dickens’ original tales were serialized in the publications
of his time and, among many rejected ideas, put the concept to King as a way of releasing a tale. King
notes that the technique had been used since Dickens, most notably for Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the
Vanities, serialized in Rolling Stone. Notably, he says ‘I don’t think I am a modern Dickens—if such
a person exists it is probably John Irving or Salman Rushdie....’ Far be it from us to disagree,
but...Salman Rushdie? Apart from creating timeless stories and characters Dickens was read by the
masses. For all of the brilliance assigned to Rushdie’s works by the good and the great, can you,
Constant Reader, name a storyline, or a character created by Rushdie, or point to a widespread
audience? Irving, however, does match these criteria. We argue elsewhere 117 that King is a Dickens
of our time and shall let that matter rest for now.
King recalls the enjoyment he, his mother and brother had reading serialized stories in such
publications as The Saturday Evening Post and tells of catching his mother checking the ending of an
Agatha Christie potboiler while actually only on page fifty or so. He says the idea came along at ‘the
perfect psychological moment, I had been playing with a story idea on a subject I had always
suspected I would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair.’ King had already ‘filled a
notebook with scribbled pages of The Green Mile’ when the concept of the serial novel was raised
and Vicinanza suggested King write it the way it would be read—in installments; the author accepted.
Author’s Afterword—The Green Mile (1996)
King’s Afterword to this serialized experiment first appeared in The Green Mile Part 6: Coffey
on the Mile. It was next reprinted in the first omnibus edition, The Green Mile: The Complete Serial
Novel (1997). It was written in New York City on 28 April 1996, just before the second part of the
novel was released.
King says the speed at which he had to write the novel might have led to a number of errors and
anachronisms and says he may or may not correct those if the individual parts were ever collected. In
fact, they were included in a single volume the following year and King made only one notable
correction (see the section on the Introduction to the combined edition later in this chapter). He also
claims a combined edition could not be published of the installment version, although exactly that
occurred.
Learning that the method Dickens had used in serial novels to refresh his reader’s memory of the
storyline was to build the synopsis into the tale as a ‘front story’ King developed the concept of
Edgecombe’s secret at Georgia Pines, Mr. Jingles, to fulfill this need. This choice was also a result
of Tabitha King’s ‘telling me (she doesn’t exactly nag, but sometimes she advocates rather
ruthlessly)’ that King had ‘never really finished the story of Mr. Jingles.’ Further thanking his wife, he
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