commodity. You will be wooed enthusiastically. What you will hear less frequently—and need to
hear, I think—is that you need it, as well. If you leave Maine, you’ll miss it. It slips into your mind. It
becomes part of your dreams and inhabits your heart. Five years after going, maybe only three, you’ll
be either planning your first vacation back—they don’t call it Vacationland for nothing—or scheming
a way to get back for good. So why don’t you cut to the chase? Just skip the going-away part and stay
here from the beginning? This is the ground floor. This is the good place. Good to live in, good to
work in, good to raise a family in. Of all the places in the United States, God touches Maine with the
sunlight first each day. Some people think it’s so we’ll get up early. I’ve always thought it’s because
He likes us best.’
A touching piece, putting on public display King’s love of his home State, it was posted on
Stephen King’s official web site in 2005. Again, this is a piece deserving of wider circulation,
especially among King fans, many of whom harbor a secret love of Maine, created through King’s
fiction, and often supplemented by actual visits. An excerpt of the speech was published as Don’t
Leave Home Without... Well, Just Don’t Leave Home in The Stephen King Desk Calendar 2006, an
item exclusive to Doubleday Book Club members but which appears regularly on eBay.
A Man with a Child’s Embrace of the Questions (May 30, 2005)
This is King’s very fond remembrance of Stephen Jay Gould (who died May 20, 2002), the pre-
eminent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. King tells readers
he once wrote ‘a vernacular version of the Book of Genesis (“The Street Kid’s Genesis,” I called it)’
and sent it to Gould, who termed the version ‘a fascinating study of nomenclature.’ He remembers
Gould’s gaze was ‘brilliant and full of unapologetic curiosity. About everything.’
Once, on a flight from Boston with Gould, he [Gould] pointed out the lights of the city and
started a conversation King remembers clearly and poignantly: ‘ “If there was a God,” he said, “he’d
be in that pattern. Think of all the intersecting lives it represents!” “And parallel ones, too,” I replied.
He considered it, then laughed and pushed the forelock off his brow. “Yes,” he said, “All those that
never touch at any point. Those, too.” It wasn’t the last time I saw him, but it’s probably the one I
remember best: discussing the lighted fingerprint of God at 10,000 feet over Boston. He was a man
with a child’s embrace of the questions. I’m glad that my life touched his life and am sorry that his
light has gone out.’
This article, strongly deserving of reprint and a wider audience, was originally published in the
May 30, 2005 edition of The Boston Globe. Microfiche copies are available at larger US libraries;
or a copy can be procured from major Massachusetts libraries, although this could cost up to $15.
The Sideshow Has Left Town (June 24—July 1, 2005)
Pop star Michael Jackson underwent a lengthy trial in 2005 on charges of child molestation. The
way the world media and the American public focused on this trial is best described by the term
‘media circus’. King breathed a sigh of relief when the trial finally concluded (with a ‘not guilty’
verdict).
Entertainment Weekly gave the author space to express his opinion on the matter, and outside
his usual The Pop of King venue at that: ‘It’s finally over. Can I be any clearer about my amazed
disgust at the amount of ink and TV time this show-trial consumed? At the amount of intellectual
house-room it took up? Thank God it’s over, how’s that? On the night of the verdict, the network news
programs devoted a significant percentage of their paltry 30-minute spans first to the verdicts, then to
analysis of the verdicts—as though not guilty needs analysis. The cable-news buzzards (Nancy Grace,
Larry King, Mercedes Colwin, and Pat Lalama of Celebrity Justice to name just a few of the plumper
ones) were all over it. Not-guilty roadkill isn’t quite as tasty—or as bloody—as guilty roadkill, but
it’ll do.’
King ends with weary cynicism: ‘Ah, but it doesn’t matter now. The Pale Peculiarity has floated
out of the courthouse to his black SUV for the last time. The sideshow has moved on...There’ll be
another sideshow eventually, but probably not one this good for a while. The best comment might
have been by a Jackson supporter, responding to a TV reporter after the verdict. Maybe I misheard it,
maybe it was just a particularly apropos malapropism, but it sure sounded like “You guys really hit
the jackal-pot.” Amen, brother.’
This opinion piece appeared in the June 24/July 1, 2005 issue of Entertainment Weekly
magazine; and was reprinted as The Pop of King: The Sideshow Has Left Town in the July 4, 2005
issue of Who, an Australian entertainment magazine (both are owned by Time Warner). Back copies
o f EW are freely available at used magazine sources, on eBay and at King resellers; the Who
appearance is more difficult to secure, but does appear on eBay irregularly.
Continuity Clarification from Stephen (October 7, 2005)
This very short note from King addresses an alleged mistake in his novel, The Colorado Kid,
pointed out in a USA Today review. He claims his placement of a Starbucks in the Denver of 1980 is
not a continuity error but a clue that Dark Tower fans might pick up on. (Neither author of this volume
is convinced, by the way!)
It was posted on Stephen King’s official web site on October 7, 2005. Older posts are no longer
accessible online but copies circulate in the King community.
Untitled (October 15, 2005)
This is a one-paragraph tribute to Ed McBain (a pseudonym of Evan Hunter), following his
death (see also On Ed McBain above). Hunter was a respected friend and fellow writer: ‘He will be
remembered for bringing the so-called “police procedural” into the modern age, but he did so much
more than that. And he was one hell of a nice man. His passing leaves a hole that cannot be filled.’
The tribute appeared in A Celebration of the Life and Achievements of Evan Hunter A.K.A. Ed
McBain, a paperback program booklet for the tribute held at the New York Society of Ethical Culture
in New York, New York on October 15, 2005. The chances of obtaining an actual copy are extremely
slim (keep an eye on eBay), but as of this writing, the text was still available electronically at
http://www.edmcbain.com/.
Message From Stephen RegardingCell(March 24, 2006)
In this very brief post King makes a point about the ending to his most recent novel, Cell. As it
contains a major ‘spoiler’, readers should finish the novel first! It was posted on Stephen King’s
official web site on March 24, 2006. Older posts are no longer accessible online but copies circulate
in the King community.
This chapter, with scores of unrelated messages, essays, posts, tributes and articles is perhaps
the best way for us to end the section of this book covering King’s published non-fiction. It shows
again how broad are his interests, how compelling and consistent his opinions and how much he has
contributed to American culture.
KING’S UNPUBLISHED NON-FICTION
The point to make about my mother is that, enthusiastic American as she was, she was also a
New Englander, a Mainer to be more specific, and she recognized the fact that a young boy’s
course to manhood in America is lined and heaped with all the things that made Pinocchio’s nose
grow long.
— From Culch, an unpublished manuscript.
Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished207 covered over fifty of King’s unpublished fiction
pieces and nearly as many ‘uncollected’ works of fiction, those that have never been included in a
mainstream King volume such as Night Shift. These works include novels, short fiction, poems and
screenplays.
There are at least fifty-one unpublished works of King fiction in existence that may be accessed
by researchers, either in King’s papers held at his alma mater, the University of Maine in Orono, or
through other means. In addition, there are at least another two-dozen pieces of fiction King is known
to have written but which have never surfaced. These are also covered in detail in a chapter of
Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.
Here, we will concentrate on twenty-four pieces of unpublished non-fiction, from as early as the
1960s and King’s school days.
Why I Love the Beatles Essay
According to Brian Hall, a friend from King’s childhood in Durham, Maine King won a writing
contest and read his ‘Why I Love the Beetles (sic) Essay’ over the air on a Portland, Maine radio
station. 208 This almost certainly occurred while King was attending Lisbon High School in Lisbon
Falls, Maine (1962-1966).
Culch
This four-page, 2400-word piece was originally intended to appear in a collection of King’s
non-fiction essays, which was to have been dedicated to his mother, Ruth Pillsbury King. It is dated
January 28, 1975 (although a handwritten note across the top of the first page reads ‘Sept. 1975’).
The manuscript is held in Box 1010 of the Stephen Edwin King papers at the Special Collections
Department of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono. Written
permission is required to access this work. King kindly provided that permission to the authors,
allowing the compilation of the following review.
This endearing essay is part love letter to his mother, part reflection on his youth. It brings to
mind King stories such as The Body, It and Low Men in Yellow Coats, and his near-legendary ability
to put readers back into the mindset of their own childhood.
Hence King opens, ‘My mother, my brother, and I lived in the town of Stratford, Connecticut
from 1954 to 1958, the years I spent from six to ten. These are the years when a child makes his first
serious expeditions into his environment, the first leapings and climbings on the splintery yet
fascinating hurdle between childhood and something else.’ He argues, ‘… And if you are like me, you
will draw your own conclusions at eight, your teacher’s conclusions at eighteen, and your parents’
conclusions at twenty-eight. God help you if your parents’ conclusions are dreck—that’s most of the
trouble with the world today.’ King says he was ‘very lucky. My brother and I had only one parent,
but she was right at least sixty percent of the time. And that’s twenty percent better than the rest of the
human race, I figure. When I say “right”, I don’t necessarily mean right about my brother or right
about me. Or about herself, for that matter—she was very dark on those subjects. / But she was right
about the world.’
To illustrate, King takes us to the Stratford F.W. Woolworths store in 1956 or ’57, where Ruth
King had taken her boys to buy new shoes. When they asked what a certain machine in the store was
she described it as ‘culch’. The X-Ray machine showed the bones of one’s foot inside a shoe,
supposedly indicating the fit was right but, considering it unsafe and no more than a gimmick ‘to draw
the know-nothing trade,’ Mrs. King refused to let the brothers use it.
Of course, boys will be boys, and Dave and Steve King slipped back one Saturday afternoon
(they were supposed to be at the movies showing at the Stratford Theater—‘We would go in, watch
sixteen Warner Brothers cartoons, and come out with our eyes dripping Technicolor and those
talismanic words, “That’s All, Folks!” ringing in our benighted ears. After a Saturday Kiddy Matinee,
the whole world looked like B-movie black-and-white for at least two hours.’ They used the machine
but were left with a sense of ‘unease’ (the machines were indeed unsafe and ‘hustled out of the shoe
stores’ at the end of the decade).
But on to ‘culch’: ‘Culch (pronounced cul-tch) was my mother’s word for junk. This is an exact
translation, but like any translation of slang into straight language, it is flavorless. Culch and junk are
synonymous, but culch has certain overtones—undertones too, for that matter.’ He believes the word
is specific to his family, as fellow Mainer Tabitha King was not familiar with it, nor could he find it
in a dictionary of slang terms. Another such term was ‘… push, which as children was our word for
the evacuation of the bowels—the result of said evacuation was known as pushings.’
He provides a lengthy list of items that are culch, from penny candy through discarded cans on
the side of the road and on to the Johnny Carson Show, reruns of certain sitcoms, the ‘movies of
Raquel Welch’, ‘the pardon of Richard Nixon’, ‘Richard Nixon’ and re-heated pizza.
He believes that of all the things his mother gave him the word ‘culch’ has proved to be ‘one of
the most enduring and most useful.’ King declaims that, despite the fact his mother was a Republican
who ‘believed in America and the American system’ (‘so do I’), he had become a Democrat, at least
partly on the basis that ‘most of the things the Republicans stand for are culch. On the other hand, only
half the things the Democrats stand for are culch.’
‘The point to make about my mother is that, enthusiastic American as she was, she was also a
New Englander, a Mainer to be more specific, and she recognized the fact that a young boy’s course
to manhood in America is lined and heaped with all the things that made Pinocchio’s nose grow long.
In order to grow up satisfactorily while in such a culture (culch-ure?), some yardstick word was
necessary. Shoes were necessary. Futuristic X-ray machines, however, were not.’ King says Ruth
Pillsbury King understood ‘the attraction of culch, its necessity even.’ While she ‘damned’
Halloween candy she allowed her sons to collect it; she thought most movies were culch, especially
the violent ones, ‘but she allowed me to go and see such things...because she sensed somehow that for
me it was necessary.’
It is a shame the proposed book of essays was never completed, as this was King’s closing
paragraph: ‘So this book of essays, if it is ever completed, is lovingly dedicated to my mother, who
died of cancer some fourteen months ago. I think much of it would have amused her. More important
to me, I think she would have agreed with much of the substance, if not always with the inelegant
mode of expression. So this is for you, mom. At least sixty percent of it.’
Culch is a valuable, well-written, almost elegiac piece and it is to be hoped that one day King
might allow its publication.
Your Kind of Place
This four-page, 2200-word piece was also intended to appear in the collection of King’s non-
fiction essays that was to be dedicated to his mother. A handwritten note across the top of the first
page reads ‘1975’. The manuscript is held in Box 1010 of the Stephen Edwin King papers at the
Special Collections Department of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine at
Orono. Written permission is required to access this work. King kindly provided that permission to
the authors, allowing the compilation of the following review.
Without once using the word ‘culch’ (see above for our review of King’s essay, Culch) King
describes the history of Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s fast-food chain and his own family’s passion for
their product (‘God help me, I love it.’)
After a review of both the founding of the McDonald’s brand by Richard and Maurice
McDonald and Ray Kroc’s initial success (in the milkshake mixer business) King relates the
fortuitous discovery by Kroc of the McDonald’s system and his purchase of franchise rights. Although
the brothers finally sold out to Kroc they retained the original San Bernardino, California store, so:
‘Kroc opened his own McDonald’s right across the street. Since he had bought their name, the
McDonald brothers were forced to rename their own restaurant. They called it Mac’s Place. Kroc ran
them out of business, and the McDonalds, Richard and Maurice, retired to Bedford, New Hampshire.’
King continues to describe the massive success of the corporation (with a number of side and snide
remarks about the varying US Presidents over the period described) and poses this ironic question:
‘If there had been a McDonald’s in Mei Lai, would those dead villagers be alive today? Would
Lieutenant Calley and his men have grinned, lowered their weapons, and decided that these particular
villagers deserved a break that day?’
King describes his family’s love affair with the brand and its fare: ‘I love McDonald’s; I am
hopeless. My children love it. Even my wife, who is cynical about many things, will not withhold
McDonald’s from her children...One morning not long ago, my wife had a painful wisdom tooth
extraction. The tooth’s roots were curved, the nerve was impacted, it was an all-round bitch. Ten
shots of novocaine (sic). No, she couldn’t eat. She couldn’t even talk. Her poor face looked as if Joe
Frazier had taken a swing at it. I took the kids to McDonald’s, of course. She came along to have a
milkshake and ended up picking a double cheeseburger apart piecemeal. She ate it all, too. And said
it tasted wonderful. The shake just wasn’t enough.’
Of interest is that King closes with an environmentally conscious plea, noting the massive
amount of packaging thrown away (or sometimes recycled) from each McDonald’s meal. Times have
changed and the company has significantly reduced packaging and decreased its environmental impact
but this point still has resonance: ‘The beer can beside the road, America’s symbol of litter for many
years, now has a partner: the blowing yellow hamburger wrapper, branded with the golden arches,
which you see lying in the weeds or fluttering on the soft shoulder of the highway.’
Unfortunately this piece is now dated (in 1975 the McDonald’s background story was little
known, but the bestselling McDonald’s: Behind The Arches by John F Love and Grinding It Out:
The Making Of McDonald’s by Kroc himself, along with myriad business magazine articles have
solved that issue) and certain critics might like to make fun of both King and his family’s simple joy
in consuming McDonald’s products. It is therefore very unlikely this essay will ever be published.
That Stuff
The manuscript for this six-page, double-spaced essay is held in Box 2702 of the Stephen Edwin
King papers at the Special Collections Department of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the
University of Maine at Orono. The public can therefore read it by attending the Library and requesting
the Box, which is not restricted. It was almost certainly written in 1979209; and is headed ‘C/O Kirby
McCauley Literary Agency’ (Kirby McCauley was King’s agent from 1977 to 1988).
King describes ‘That Stuff’ as ‘the constant questioning’ of authors about why they write their
genre material: ‘Just lately, I find myself asked That Stuff more and more...And then there are all the
questions of social taste, of moral taste, and of course, that morbid curiosity about what’s going down
the public gullet and why.’
He is willing to talk about That Stuff—an interviewer once asked if his writing was ‘a moral
way of living’, given that he’d agreed he was ‘feeding off the fears of all the people who read my
books.’ King’s answer is that his work serves a need: ‘the idea of catharsis is as new as the
psychiatrist’s couch and as old as the idea of drama...itself, and for a very good reason—if you deny
the existence of such a thing, it seems to me you deny the morality of all dramatic fiction, from The
Iliad to James Joyce’s Ulysses.’ He even argues the ‘denial of the cathartic idea pulls the entire
foundation from beneath the idea of fiction....’
According to King this ‘works for writer’ as well as reader: ‘I never met a horror writer that
was not tormented by fears or at least partially enslaved by his or her own peculiarities and
fantasies’—only poets beat horror writers for ‘downright weirdness’; the writer ‘begins with That
Stuff in an effort to save his own sanity.’ In the end, King’s aim as an author is to ‘get the reader. I
want to lay hands upon him...I want you to burn your husband’s supper because you gotta find out
what happens next...My goals are humble yet ambitious; basically I want to scare the living Jesus out
of you.’
Refusing to make the case for the morality of horror fiction, he says he ‘will speak briefly about
honor’: ‘at its most fundamental level, all of That Stuff is an honorable wager between Constant
Reader and Constant Writer...,” with the Reader wanting to be scared, and the Writer trying to
deliver.
In closing, King argues that ‘the history of the great American novel has been (with the exception
of a few cases which may or may not prove the rule) the suspense novel’, with The Scarlet Letter,
Moby-Dick and An American Tragedy as examples; and more modern efforts, such as Catch-22
(‘will Yossarian actually survive World War II intact?’), The Catcher in the Rye (‘will Holden
Caulfield survive New York City intact?’) and The World According to Garp (‘can Garp actually get
out of this crazyhouse alive? It turns out he can’t’). He contends that ‘the horror novel...is the
suspense novel stripped of its Dead Weight’, constantly groping for the Reader’s ‘emotional pressure
points and atavistic loopholes’.
An interesting yet somehow disengaged essay, That Stuff is now dated and would require
rework before King might consider publication. The themes contained are well-expressed elsewhere
in his non-fiction canon, so there seems little chance it will appear in print.
Why I Blurb Books
The manuscript for this nine-page double-spaced essay is held in Box 2702 of the Stephen
Edwin King papers at the Special Collections Department of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the
University of Maine at Orono. The public can therefore read it by attending the Library and requesting
the Box, which is not restricted. It is unclear when the piece was written, although it seems most
likely to be about 1981. It is headed ‘C/O Kirby McCauley Literary Agency’.
King had been warned about blurbing by a friend in a University English Department and another
in the publishing business: ‘ “Quit it, Steve,” he said. “You’re getting a name.” / What sort of name? I
asked. “Slut,” he said.”’ A reporter insultingly asked him if he’d ‘really read all the books I had
blurbed’, implying King was ‘accepting bribes’.
He provides a definition of the blurb: ‘...a piece of advertising copy for a book written for free
by another writer.’ Describing how blurbs are solicited he also puts the arguments for and against
their effectiveness. Analyzing why authors provide blurbs at all, he says he can only speak for
himself, arguing that ‘a good novel is something to shout about...There just aren’t many of them
around’ (according to his count he’d blurbed only 27 of the 400 or so he’d been sent over the years—
and four of those were by one author—Peter Straub210); and states, ‘I like books’, so much so he’s
willing to give most some sort of a chance and will read fifty pages of ‘even the worst’.
King says the book he was sent to blurb that most gave him ‘that feeling of having my socks
blown off’ was Straub’s Ghost Story, the opening of which Tabitha King read aloud during a car trip:
‘My wife and I spent the rest of the day raping that manuscript, wallowing in it.’
Overall the piece is a little disappointing, written without King’s normal clarity. While his
position is clear (after all this is an opinion piece) some of the arguments need work. In the unlikely
event King decided to publish the essay he would likely undertake a significant, if not total, rewrite.
The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale
This is a very obscure piece, apparently written in 1983211. Almost all that is known about it
comes from Douglas Winter’s early King biography, Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. The
following quotes are from the 1986 ‘Revised and Expanded’ version.
Winter quotes from the manuscript in Chapter Two of his book: ‘I... packed all my worldly
possessions into a pair of shopping bags, moved into a sleazy Orono, Maine apartment and started
what I hoped would be a very long fantasy novel called The Dark Tower. I had recently seen a
bigger-than-life Sergio Leone western, and it had gotten me wondering what would happen if you
brought two very distinct genres together: heroic fantasy and the Western...’ 212 Also, footnote 44 to
Chapter Two reads: ‘ “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale”, unpublished manuscript, p1.’213
Footnote 29 to Chapter Six reads: ‘ The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (West Kingston, RI:
Donald M. Grant, 1982). The original printing of this book was limited to a ten-thousand-copy first
edition, plus a small deluxe, signed and slipcased edition; it went quietly and quickly out of print.
When the book was listed along with Stephen King’s other works in the front matter of Pet Sematary,
Donald M. Grant, King, and all of King’s publishers were besieged with letters and calls from
readers attempting to obtain copies. The demand was so great that a special edition was printed in
1984; it is now also out of print. King has written about the experience in the as-yet unpublished
essay “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale”. 214
It may well be that this essay was a precursor to King’s The Politics of Limited Editions,
published in Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter for June and July 1985.
Title Unknown
George Beahm, in his seminal work, The Stephen King Story215, tells of an unpublished speech
in these terms: ‘[A book about King] Dr Seuss and the Two Facesof Fantasy...has been cancelled. It
would have reprinted the speech King gave at the Fifth Annual Swanncon in 1984 along with the
transcript of a speech he intended to give, with commentary by Carroll F. Terrell.’ Terrell, one of
King’s professors at the University of Maine and author of Stephen King: Man and Artist216, stated
the speech would appear in another, ‘as yet untitled book’, but it never has.
A speech King did deliver, to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, on March
24, 1984 in Boca Raton, Florida, was published, also as Dr. Seuss and the Two Faces of Fantasy, in
Fantasy Review for June 1984 (see our Miscellany chapter).
Foreword (toGlory Days)
This piece was intended to be used in Dave Marsh’s217 Glory Days, a biography of Bruce
Springsteen, but was submitted too late for publication (although a revised edition of the book
appeared nearly a decade later there was still no sign of King’s piece). A King collector owns the
original two-page handwritten manuscript, on which a handwritten note appears indicating it was
written in New York City on April 14, 1987.
King is effusive about both Dave Marsh (‘… rock’s best writer...just happened to be on
board...to serve as Springsteen’s Boswell’); and Springsteen (‘...a cultural phenomenon of the
’80s...Springsteen is a genuine artist, one who has kept rock and roll alive, who has changed the
music for the better, and who may be its last great voice as the generation that created it moves
inexorably towards Social Security.’)
He concludes the book ‘is the remarkable and remarkably entertaining chronicle of a remarkable
man—a man who may epitomize all that Americans were and could yet be. It works on every level.
Good golly, Miss Molly, what a book.’
Lists That Matter
Lists That Matter was a series of five-minute radio spots recorded for King’s Bangor, Maine
radio station, WZON in 1985218. King’s sister-in-law and editor of Castle Rock: The Stephen King
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