suffered similar results—constant programming shifts, a mid-season suspension and cancellation after
the first season; and made similar arguments as to the reason (see Kingdom Come in this chapter; and
A Kingdom That Didn’t Come in The Later Columns—The Pop of King chapter).
This important article appeared in the August 2, 1991 edition of Entertainment Weekly
magazine. Back issues are available from used magazine sites on the Internet, eBay and the usual
King-related resources.
Horrors! (October 25, 1991)
This piece consists of six celebrities— Vincent Price, Linda Blair, Diane Ladd, Stephen King,
Chucky (the killer doll in the movie Child’s Play, ‘via creator-screenwriter Don Mancini’) and
David Ellefson—talking about movies and books that scare them. In his section of only a paragraph
King mentions the films Night of the Living Dead and Dementia 13; and the novel, William
Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
It appeared in the October 25, 1991 edition of Entertainment Weekly magazine. Back issues are
easily secured at various Internet and used magazine sources.
Dream Team: Just Another Horror Show (August 9, 1992)
This longish article is about America’s Olympic basketball ‘Dream Team’ and specifically the
behavior of Team members around the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. King again proves he has a sharp
eye for American culture, specifically underlining certain shortcomings: ‘I’d go so far as to say that
these high-salaried, promotion-conscious pros, with their baggage of bad court habits, loud mouths,
and absolutely staggering basketball skills, can serve as a perfectly apt epilogue to the last twelve
years of American life, when the almighty buck swamped just about everyone’s principles, when the
deal became more important than the game, and any sane discussion of athletics and what they mean
disappeared into a welter of Chroma-Key effects, slow motion, and game-diagram supers, all before
fading into the next beer ad, naturally.’ He is appalled by super athletes squabbling over brand names
and staying in Monte Carlo hotels, while poor nation team members slept in gymnasiums while
preparing for the honor of representing their country.
He closes: ‘It was a bad idea. No one likes to risk sounding like a Boy Scout by coming right out
and saying it, but I will, just this once: Sliding away from sound ideals in favor of fast results is
always a bad idea. Whether it’s basketball or bonds, junk is still junk, and a sellout is still a sellout. /
It was a bad idea, a bad dream, if you will. Let’s not do it again.’
This article appeared in the August 9, 1992 edition of The New York Times and is relatively
easy to obtain, as major libraries archive the newspaper.
Untitled (October 1992)
Author Fritz Leiber died on September 5, 1992. King’s deeply touching and heartfelt
appreciation was published as part of a collection of retrospectives. He shows both his sorrow at
Leiber’s death and an understanding of the loss of any notable individual: ‘The sense of shock at Fritz
Leiber’s death will be, I think, mercifully short-lived. He had not been in the best of health in recent
years (although you could not tell that from reading his work; it remained as witty, as interesting, and
as idiosyncratic as ever), and he was eighty-two years old. Yet shock is not really what the loss of
our old comrades and colleagues is about, I think—it’s sorrow and that sense of displacement that
comes with consideration of a world where that person’s living influence no longer exists. Yes, we
can be grateful that Fritz was not cut down in mid-flight, as was Charles Beaumont or Henry Kuttner
or H. P. Lovecraft, but that’s not apt to lessen the sense of loss, and it certainly will not fill the empty
place in our ranks that was once filled by Fritz’s long-shouldered form, and intelligent, civilized
face.’
King recounts meeting Leiber in 1982, buying him a (non-alcoholic) drink at a hotel bar and
closes: ‘Goodbye, Fritz. If there is another side, I hope you’ll let me buy you a drink or two,
alcoholic or otherwise, when I get there. In the meantime, all your old comrades and colleagues miss
you. There was never a writer like you, and never will be.’
This piece first appeared in the October 1992 issue of Locus magazine. It next appeared as part
of a piece simply titled, Fritz Leiber in Gummitch and Friends, Special Edition by Fritz Leiber,
published in a deluxe limited edition of 1000 copies by Donald M. Grant in 1992 (that edition
includes 36 pages of tributes by King and others that are not available in the trade edition). Finally, it
was reprinted as A World Without Fritz in Nebula Awards 28: SFWA’s Choices for the Best
science-fiction and Fantasy of the Year, edited by James Morrow and published in hardcover and
trade paperback by Harcourt & Brace in 1994. The deluxe limited edition is the hardest and most
expensive way to obtain this piece. Back issues of Locus are relatively easy to obtain, as are copies
of the Morrow anthology.
Son of Best Seller Stalks the Moors (June 6, 1993)
King has often shown an acute awareness of the businesses in which he has been directly
involved—publishing and movies. This article deals with a trend of the time—publishers hiring
authors to write sequels to classic novels by long-dead writers! He opens: ‘The book business, which
hardly used to be a business at all, has in the last 10 years begun to search for The Next Big Thing
with a zeal once found only in the movie business. And what is The Next Big Thing in the book biz?
Oh honey-chickie-baby, have I got an answer for you. Ready? O.K.: Sequel rights. Did you get it?
Good.’
From his earliest days as a ‘brand name’ King has consistently stood up for the little known
artist. He knows that there are multitudes of unheard of artists working in their respective crafts who
have no way or means of breaking through: ‘The point is: There are good writers out there telling
good stories— stories no one has ever read before! —and a lot of these writers and stories are not
finding their audiences. Some could be “broken out” by dedicated publishers and publicity
departments, but the money isn’t there, nor is the commitment. What the publishers want is
blockbusters. They want Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, but if they can’t have us they can
at least chase after the dead with those two words— sequel rights! sequel rights! —flashing ahead of
them like poison-green neon. What the book biz wants is words that won’t disturb, outrage or
frighten.’
This article appeared in the June 6, 1993 edition of The New York Times Book Review, which is
easy to obtain, as larger libraries archive the newspaper.
Stephen King (June 1993)
This piece, in which King discusses dreams and the writing process, appeared in Writers
Dreaming: Twenty-six Writers Talk about Their Dreams and the Creative Process, by Naomi Epel.
Carol Southern Books published the book in a 1993 hardcover; a trade paperback book club edition
appeared the same year; and Vintage Books released a further trade paperback in 1994. Copies can
be secured from secondhand book sources such as abebooks.
The chapters of the book consist of interviews about dreams and writing. Of course, the
workings of the subconscious have been the basis for many writers’ work, and King is a prime
example: ‘One of the things that I’ve been able to use dreams for in my stories is to show things in a
symbolic way that I wouldn’t want to come right out and say directly. I’ve always used dreams the
way you’d use mirrors to look at something you couldn’t see head-on—the way that you use a mirror
to look at your hair in the back. To me that’s what dreams are supposed to do. I think that dreams are
a way that people’s minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrate the
answers to their problems in symbolic language.’ He describes some of his dreams and applies them
to his writing, including those that inspired specific scenes in IT (the junkyard), ’Salem’s Lot (the
Marsten house), and The Body (the leeches).
We all have dreams but rarely remember them for long after wakening and only some are very
clear. King’s take on this: ‘The dreams that I remember most clearly are almost always early dreams.
And they’re not always bad dreams. I don’t want to give you that impression. I can remember one
very clearly. It was a flying dream. I was over the turnpike and I was flying along wearing a pair of
pajama bottoms. I didn’t have any shirt on. I’m just buzzing along under overpasses— kazipp—and
I’m reminding myself in the dream to stay high enough so that I don’t get disemboweled by car
antennas sticking up from the cars. That’s a fairly mechanistic detail but when I woke up from this
dream my feeling was not fear or loathing but just real exhilaration, pleasure, and happiness. It wasn’t
an out of control flying dream. I can remember as a kid, having a lot of falling dreams but this is the
only flying dream that I can remember in detail.’
He also describes the same repeating dream/nightmare he described in a short untitled piece for
Dreamworks journal, in 1981 (see Untitled above).
The Neighborhood of the Beast (August 1994)
This important and lengthy piece is King’s chapter in the book released by a band of which he
was a member for some years (he played guitar and sang—his rendition of Stand By Me is an
experience). The Rock Bottom Remainders is a group of writers and critics (with help from
professional musicians from time to time) and is involved in raising funds for literary charities. King
has not participated in a gig since his 1999 accident. Other members over the years have included
Dave Barry, Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Kathi Goldmark, Matt
Groening, Barbara Kingsolver, Al Kooper, Greil Marcus, Ridley Pearson 203, Joel Selvin and Amy
Tan.
King begins with a memory that came back to him while he was ‘holed up in one of two
incredibly grotty backstage bathrooms at a honkytonk Nashville nightspot called 328 Performance
Hall.’ This memory was of a day in 1971 when he almost drowned. After recalling this incident, he
realized that if ‘I’d screamed for help I would have panicked. And if I’d panicked, I really might have
drowned.’ All this recollecting occurred shortly before King was supposed to appear on stage, but he
was stuck in the bathroom with a bad case of diarrhea!
To help calm his nerves he decided to study the graffiti on the walls of the bathroom stall: ‘My
favorite...was dead ahead, written on the back of the bathroom door, and exactly on a level with my
eyes as I sat there fifteen hundred miles from home, sick as a yellow dog, and wondering how I ever
could have been mad enough to let myself in for this in the first place. This graffiti, as ominous as it
was clever, said: 664/668: THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE BEAST.’ The author later revealed he
keeps a notebook of interesting graffiti and used that as inspiration for his tale, All That You Love
Will Be Carried Away.
Eventually, King realized he’d be able to appear: ‘That little nerve down there went hot again
for a second or two, and my thoughts returned briefly to that long, long swim back to the beach at
Peaks-Kenny in June of 1971. Here we go again, I thought, and realized the weirdest thing: sick
stomach or not, hungry crowd or not, scared or not, I was really happy.’
There is a long discussion about guitar bar chords and King’s trying to learn them from Jamie
Chesley, brother of Chris Chesley (his co-author for their juvenilia collection, People, Places and
Things). ‘My best moment on the tour? Easy. It didn’t come at Nashville, or at any of the gigs. It came
during the first rehearsal at Musician’s Wharf in Boston. Al Kooper came up to me and asked if I’d
been practicing my bar chords. And I, with the insane nonchalance one can muster only after finally
learning (or partially learning, in my case) a skill that has eluded him over many long years, ripped
off the rapid bar G’s and bar C’s that constitute the chorus of “634.” Al’s eyes widened in an entirely
unaffected expression of surprise, a look I will be able to remember—and treasure—even if I live to
be as old as George Burns.’
King’s chapter appeared in Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour
America with Three Chords and an Attitude, edited by Dave Marsh (photographs by Tabitha King).
Viking published the book in a 1994 hardcover; as did Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom
the following year, when a US trade paperback was also released. King’s chapter was excerpted in
an advance promotional booklet in 1994; and as Rockin’ with the Remainders in Playboy magazine
for September 1994. Editions of the book can easily be sourced online, as can Playboy. For the
completist, sources for the booklet include King resellers and eBay.
Untitled (October 6, 1994)
This Internet post was placed from a bookstore at Cornell University, a stop on King’s cross-
country motorcycle tour promoting his novel Insomnia. ‘The new book is Insomnia, and that’s what
I’m promoting. I’m glad so many people liked Frank’s version of Shawshank, and I hope to see many
of you on my tour...if the Harley doesn’t break down...or if I don’t break down. The question that
occurs is whether or not the people reading this will believe I’m me. It really is, but if I put in
something only I would know in order to prove it, everybody would know it.’ King tries to prove his
identity by updating Constant Readers on upcoming projects: ‘Oh, I think I DO know how to prove
I’m me. First, the next book is called Rose Madder—June of 1995 from Viking. Second, it will be
Eddie, not Roland, who saves the party of travellers (sic) from Blaine the Mono. Joe Bob sez “Check
it out. Catch ya on the flip-flop.”’
This is the first of two King posts to appear on the Internet newsgroup alt.books.stephen-king
and was posted on October 6, 1994 (it is easily found through a search engine). It also appeared in
The Lost Work of Stephen King by Stephen J. Spignesi, published in hardcover by Birch Lane Press
in 1998. The Overlook Connection published an expanded edition that year; and in 2002 Citadel
Press reprinted that edition in trade paperback.
Robert Bloch: An Appreciation (November 1994)
In this appreciation of author Robert Bloch, who passed away on 23 September 1994, King
writes of Bloch’s talent and kindness while recalling the first time they met: ‘He was a fine writer
and an even finer human being. I remember how pleased I was—aw, tell the truth, how star-struck I
was—when I first met him in California, and how quickly he set me at ease, telling stories about
movie stars (we were in L. A. at the time), and cracking me up by referring to Forest Lawn Cemetery
as “the Disneyland of the Dead.” Some years later, at the World Fantasy Convention in Maryland,
Bob showed up beside me at a raucous room-party and said, “Kirby McCauley [then King’s agent]
says I’m supposed to tell you some stories about how it was in the old days. Do you want to hear?”’
Of course, King did!
He also addresses a Bloch quote he often uses: ‘“I actually have the heart of a young boy,” Bob
liked to say. “I keep it in a jar on my desk.” It was a line I used often, always attributing it to
Bob...because it has a sly sort of charm...There’s a comic subtlety in the line that Bob could almost
have trademarked. But he didn’t have the heart of a small boy; he had the heart of a kind, imaginative
man whose vision was keenly attuned to the fantasy community, and he’ll be missed by yours truly,
Steve the Ripper, in a much more personal sense. Even now, I can’t believe that his spooky, sarcastic
voice has been silenced. There is no voice on the contemporary scene which can replace it, and that
is a great loss.’
This piece first appeared in Locus magazine for November 1994. It was reprinted in Robert
Bloch: Appreciations of the Master, edited by Richard Matheson and Ricia Mainhardt, published in
a 1995 hardcover and 1997 trade paperback by Tor. The magazine and the book may be secured from
the usual secondhand or King resources.
Title unknown (November 1994)
Stephen King participated in this article, in which thirty authors write about what they did on
April 22, 1994. It was published in le nouvel Observateur, a French newspaper, in a November
1994 ‘Special Edition.’ No further information is known about this piece, including if there is a more
specific date of publication. King’s office has it listed on their official bibliography, but they do not
have a copy. If any reader is able to track this piece down, please contact the authors via the
publisher.
A Note from Stephen King (1994; 1999)
King begins this four-page letter to members of The Book-of-the-Month Club’s Stephen King
Library writing of his early career and specifically of the experience selling Carrie. He is allowing
the Library to offer his books because ‘I still want to report on the things I see beyond the edge of the
world, and I still want to take Constant Reader with me, if he or she wants to come. Looking back
over those previous trips to the brink is like reading a map in progress, a charting of a strange
countryside where cars sometimes drive themselves, where vampires prowl the night (sometimes in
polyester leisure suits), where madness is as close as a kiss.’
He closes: ‘In my novels The Dark Half and Needful Things, there is a county sheriff named
Alan Pangborn who uses his hands to create parades of shadow animals on the wall whenever he is
deep in thought. It is a habit that I sympathize with and understand. This body of work, as
unremarkable as it may be in purely literary sense, is my parade of shadow animals: lions and tigers
and bears, oh my. It is wonderful to see them all together, and I am grateful to Book-of-the-Month
Club for according me—and those readers who may want to catch up on those previous stories—that
unexpected privilege.’
The letter was distributed in both 1994 and 1999 to those who joined The Stephen King Library,
a series of the author’s books available through The Book-of-the-Month Club. The chances of
obtaining a copy are slim, excepting through another member of the King community. From the Desk
of Stephen King temporarily replaced this letter in 1998 (see below, along with A Word From
Stephen King).
My Little Serrated Security Blanket (December 1995)
This article first appeared in the December 1995 issue of Outside magazine. Some libraries
keep back issues in their archives. It was also reprinted in The Stephen King Desk Calendar 2007.
Stephen King kindly allowed the authors to reprint this entertaining and difficult to find article
here, for which we are profoundly grateful.
My Little Serrated Security Blanket
By Stephen King
This is not the sort of gadget to inspire nursery rhymes. I look at the
DMM Predator ice ax and I think of murder. I take it out into the
garage, find a piece of scrap wood, and drive the pick end into the
grain, trying not to envision how easily this same tip could penetrate
the skull and skewer the soft gray matter beneath. It makes a solid,
satisfying chuk. This, I believe, makes the electroshock devices, the
cans of pepper gas, and the ninja throwing stars in the pawnshop
window look minor league. You could do some big damage with
this. Real big damage.
The pick end is sharpened along the top and pointed at the tip. It is
serrated beneath, presumably to keep it from slipping out once it’s
been plunged in, and when I examine the holes in the wood, I see
that they are not the punch-points I expected—like a child’s
oversize, drawn periods, but lozenge-shaped, like cough drops.
Looking at these holes, I am helpless not to imagine them peppered
over the human body. I keep seeing the ax swung at the gut, the
throat, the forehead. I keep seeing it buried all the way to its
eleventh serration in the nape of the neck or the orbit of an eyeball.
Boy, I think, you are one sick American.
Or maybe I’m not. Like many tools—hammers, screwdrivers, drills,
augers, and chisels come to mind—the Predator ice ax has a certain
gallows fascination, a bleak beauty with a sternness so extreme that
it seems almost neurotic. But study it and you see there’s no part of
the ax that doesn’t work, from the rough-hewn butt end with its
wrist-loop strap to the arched line of the handle to its wicked,
burrowing tip. I’m not sure what the thing on the other end is for, the
piece of metal looks like Paul Bunyan’s bottle opener, but I’m sure
it has a clear purpose, which those dedicated enough—and mad
enough—to put their lives at risk climbing mountains and ice falls
readily understand and utilize.
This brings me to a new conclusion: What I really feel when I hold
this in my hand isn’t so much the possibility of murder as the gravity
of mortal things. It speaks to me of the vulnerability of human flesh,
but also of the resilience and determination of the human mind:
Lying on my desk, it whispers, “If you need me, I’ll be there. If you
need to hang all 215 pounds of you off me, I won’t let go—if, that
is, you plant me deep.”
I have no plans to go climbing; I get vertigo when I ascend to the
top of a stepladder. But I keep the Predator under my bed. Why not?
One never knows when one might need a good tool, the sort of thing
that might make the difference between life and death.
© Stephen King, 1995
Stephen King (1996)
This two-paragraph note consists of explanatory text for a photo showing King at his writing
desk. He outlines his writing schedule: three hours of important work in the mornings and a “toy
truck” story (for fun, could be published or not) in the afternoons. His self-disparaging streak comes
out: ‘I don’t take notes; I don’t outline; I don’t do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamned
thing...I’m a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can’t sell it as
caviar.’
This piece appears only in The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz. Published by Random House in
a 1996 hardcover, copies are easily secured via secondhand dealers.
Untitled (November 21, 1996)
This is a newsgroup post about the Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass preview booklet
distributed with copies of The Regulators and Desperation when bought together in bookstores, and
serves as a response to those who were complaining about not being able to get it. The booklet was
given away in lieu of a “Keep You Up All Night” book light the publisher ran out of during the sales
run of the two novels: ‘The booklet was my idea, not the publisher’s.’ King advises fans to show the
bookstore their receipt and request a copy of the booklet if they bought both books individually
because there were no gift packs combining the two novels available. ‘If you’re just jacked because
you want to read the first two chapters of Wizard and Glass, wait until the whole thing comes out. Or
put it on your T. S. List and give it to the chaplain. In any case, those of you who are yelling and
stamping your feet, please stop. If you’re old enough to read, you’re old enough to behave.’ Prefatory
text to the message explains King posted through someone who worked at Penguin USA.
This is the second of two King messages to appear on the Internet newsgroup alt.books.stephen-
king and was posted on 21 November 1996. Internet-savvy readers will easily find it on the web. It
was reprinted in the March 1997 issue of Phantasmagoria, a Stephen King “fanzine” published by
noted King scholar George Beahm; in The Lost Work of Stephen King by Stephen J. Spignesi,
released in a number of editions from 1998; and in The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen
King’s Magnum Opus by King newsgroup moderator Bev Vincent, published in a trade paperback in
2004 and in a limited edition by Cemetery Dance in 2005.
This UMaine Grad Happy to Give Something Back (March 16, 1997)
‘In spite of seemingly endless rounds of budget cuts and morale as low as I have ever seen it, the
University of Maine continues to do its job and turn out valuable citizens who often elect to remain in
the state they love,’ King says in this article. It’s no secret that King is a philanthropist; in February
1997, he made a large donation to the University of Maine, his alma mater. Here he recounts how one
of his English professors, Burton Hatlen, helped him when he was in danger of losing part of his
student aid: ‘So maybe it was fitting that it was Burt Hatlen—now dean of UMO’s arts and humanities
program—who accepted my check for a million dollars last month. If I had a guiding light during my
years at Maine, Burt was it. And he is a good man to have in the administration right now, because the
weather for public education in the state of Maine has turned decidedly nasty.’
This sets the tone for the piece, which at its heart, is a call for citizens to try and do their part in
deciding the fate of publicly funded education: ‘What I wish is very simple and very direct, and that
is for every person whose eyes have tracked this far to pick up a pen and write a very simple message
to Gov. King in Augusta: As a voterand a taxpayer, I want you to support and promote higher
education in Maine. Angus King is really not part of the problem, but he must be part of the
solution. / I hope the people of Maine will make it clear that that’s what they want him to be, and that
these last three years of the 20th century can be years of recommitment to higher education and state
support of higher education here in Maine.’
This article appeared in the Maine Sunday Telegram on March 16, 1997. The best way to
obtain a copy of this article is to visit a major Maine library, such as that provided free-of-charge to
Maine residents and visitors at the University of Maine’s Orono campus. Alternatively make an
interlibrary article request, which sometimes costs as much as $15 per article.
Uncle Clayton (July 1997)
This very brief excerpt from King’s 1983 Playboy interview with Eric Norden was published in
Dancing with the Dark: True Encounters with the Paranormal by the Masters of the Macabre,
edited by Stephen Jones. As an interview excerpt, it is arguably not an article by King. When the
author was young he used to listen to ghost stories and local legends, usually related by his Uncle
Clayton, who had a special gift: ‘Uncle Clayt had another talent, too: he was a dowser. He could find
water with a piece of forked wood. How and why I’m not sure, but he did it. I was sceptical (sic)
about dowsing at first, until I actually saw it and experienced it—when Uncle Clayt defied all the
experts and found a well in our front yard.’
The book in which the piece appears was published in the United Kingdom by Vista in 1997;
and in the United States by Caroll & Graf in 1999.
King Comments (Summer 1997)
This piece was posted on a promotional website as publicity for the Signet mass-market
paperback editions of Desperation and The Regulators—these novels use the same character names
in completely different roles and circumstances. The books were originally released in hardcover on
the same day; the first published by Viking under King’s name, the other by Dutton under his Bachman
pseudonym. In fact, if the US hardbacks are laid side by side the covers form one large picture. Much
was said about this unusual publishing move at the time of the hardcover releases and, a year later,
we find King commenting: ‘It doesn’t matter which [book people] read first. And, frankly, it doesn’t
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