Most were purchased by Nye Willden, the fiction editor at Cavalier. These stories were important
supplements to the meager income I was earning in my two day jobs, one as a high school English
teacher and the other as an employee of The New Franklin Laundry, where I washed motel sheets.
These were not good times for short horror fiction...but I sold an almost uninterrupted run of mine—
no mean feat for an unknown, unagented scribbler from Maine....’
‘Two of them, however, did not sell. Both were pastiches. The first was a modern day revision
of Nikolai Gogol’s story, “The Ring” (my version was called “The Spear”, I think). That one is lost.
The second was the one that follows, a crazed revisionist telling of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. I
thought the idea was a natural: crazed Vietnam vet kills elderly benefactor as a result of post-
traumatic stress syndrome. I’m not sure what Nye’s problem with it might have been; I loved it, but he
shot it back at me with a terse “not for us” note. I gave it a final sad look, then put it in a desk drawer
and went on to something else. It stayed in said drawer until rescued by Marsha DeFilippo, who
found it in a pile of old manuscripts consigned to a collection of my stuff in the Raymond H. Fogler
Library at the University of Maine. I was tempted to tinker with it—the seventies slang is pretty out of
date—but resisted the impulse, deciding to let it be what it was then: partly satire and partly
affectionate homage....’
The story is short, only six small pages in the Volume, and is headed ‘ The Old Dude’s Ticker
— Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe’. Typically of King in an environment where he feels very
comfortable with the ‘audience’ he signs the introduction ‘Steve King’. To access this piece readers
will need to track down one of the few copies of the NECON volume that appear for resale.
Alternatively, photocopies also circulate in the King community.
Introduction—Pet Sematary (2001)
This new Introduction (King had originally penned an Author’s Note, covered earlier in this
chapter) was written on September 20, 2000 and first appeared in the 2001 Pocket Books edition of
the novel. King retells the tale’s genesis, well known to fans, of his daughter’s cat being killed on a
busy road outside a house the family was renting, and his fear the same would happen to his youngest
son; along with the nearby ‘Pet Sematary’ for animals ‘used up’ by the road. He also tells us he wrote
the novel in ‘an empty room’ in a store across the road, as there was ‘no writing space in the
Orrington house’; and that he considers the ‘most resonant line’ in the novel to be that spoken by Jud
Crandall to the protagonist, Louis Creed: ‘Sometimes, Louis, dead is better.’
Author’s Note—Dreamcatcher (2001)
King relates here that he ‘was never so grateful’ to be writing as he was on this science-fiction
novel. This despite the discomfort of his rehabilitation from his near fatal 1999 accident although,
‘The reader will see that pieces of that physical discomfort followed me into the story.’ The majority
of the piece is dedicated to thanking those who helped with technical aspects of the story, and those
assisting with its publication. As to wife Tabitha, King says she ‘simply refused to call this novel by
its original title, which was Cancer. She considered it both ugly and an invitation to bad luck and
trouble. Eventually, I came around to her way of thinking, and she no longer refers to it as “that book”
or ‘the one about the shit-weasels’.’
Introduction—The Shining (2001)
This new Introduction, penned in New York City on February 8, 2001, first appeared in the
2001 Pocket Books edition of the novel. A philosophical dissertation on the nature of the horrors
humans perpetrate upon themselves and, in particular, upon their families (a theme recurrent in King’s
fiction), readers should seek out this important piece. King starts by saying he considers The Shining
his ‘crossroads’ novel—the one where he decided to ‘reach’, rather than simply continue to write the
way he had before—that choice dictated by his decision to describe the brutal but loving relationship
between Jack Torrance and his father (King feels this made Jack’s character ‘more realistic...and
therefore more frightening’). The And Now this Word from New Hampshire section of Before the
Play, the excised Prologue to The Shining makes this point even more clearly than the remaining
scenes in the novel.124
Explaining a basic view made very clear by a broad reading of King’s canon he says: ‘… aren’t
memories the true ghosts of our lives? Do they not drive us all to words and acts we regret from time
to time? / The decision I made to try and make Jack’s father a real person, one who was loved as
well as hated by his flawed son, took me a long way down the road to my current beliefs concerning
what is so blithely dismissed as “the horror novel.” I believe these stories exist because we
sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real
lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer
we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness,
they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible
brilliance, it seems to me, and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in
our own families. To look directly at such brilliance is to be blinded, and so we create any number of
filters. The ghost story, the horror story, the uncanny tale—all of these are such filters. The man or
woman who insists there are no ghosts is only ignoring the whispers of his or her own heart, and how
cruel that seems to me. Surely even the most malignant ghost is a lonely thing, left out in the dark,
desperate to be heard.’
In an important aside King writes, ‘My single conversation with the late Stanley Kubrick, about
six months before he began filming his version of The Shining....’ This effectively contradicts claims
made by others elsewhere of extended, late-night telephone conversations between the director and
King during the filming of the movie.
Jack’s Back: Stephen King’s Thoughts on the Sequel (2001)
This is a very rare piece of King’s non-fiction about his own work. As it is revelatory it is to be
hoped it might be reprinted in a more widely circulated version, perhaps a future edition of Black
House. To date it has only been circulated in the promotional press kit for Black House sent out in the
US in September, 2001; published on the official Black House web site in the UK that month (as
Jack’s Back); and in the e-book of Black House released by Random House.
The piece explains how King and Peter Straub came to write ‘not just one but two books about
Jack Sawyer and his travels to another world called the Territories’; and explains how they managed
the ‘collaboration’, originally intended to begin in the summer of 1999 but, interrupted by King’s
accident, finally started in the winter of 2000.
For those fans of this particular ficton125 this sentence will be of great interest: ‘Peter at one
point wrote four spectacular single-spaced pages about the absurd, successful, and unhappy life of
Richard Sloat. Very little of it ever made its way into the finished novel, but it’s there if and when
needed.’ And for those fans of the Dark Tower ficton, King relates that the novel has ‘… some
interesting connections to the Dark Tower novels (and that, Constant Reader, was actually Peter’s
idea).’ This may explain the jarring problem that the Big Combination does not seem to quite gel with
the ‘established’ Dark Tower mythology (particularly that contained in the latter three novels).
On Dreamcatcher (2001)
On Dreamcatcher is a short piece that first appeared in the science-fiction Book Club edition of
the novel, in April 2002. It was reprinted in The Stephen King Desk Calendar 2006, a Doubleday
Book Club publication only made available to subscribers of Book-of-the-Month Club’s The Stephen
King Library. The science-fiction Book Club edition is extremely difficult to find (most who offer it
for sale at such venues as eBay do not even know they have that particular edition), but the Calendar
is regularly offered at eBay and should be available from specialist King dealers.
King says Dreamcatcher ‘is my attempt to simultaneously pay homage to The War of the Worlds
and give the Wells concept of invasion from space a millennial twist. It is also an attempt to write
about how men—ordinary ones, not heroes—behave when they are under stress...Last of all,
Dreamcatcher is really about dreams’. He says that in his non-writing life he finds it hard to believe
that we are monitored by aliens ‘in ways that seem so frankly Freudian’ and would not be surprised if
real aliens left humanity to itself: ‘We are the dogs that bite’; but that, as a writer, ‘I believe it all.’
Untitled—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
This one paragraph note on the ‘Contents’ page explains how King chose to order the fourteen
tales in his most recent short story collection—by selecting fourteen playing cards, shuffling and
dealing them. ‘Next collection: selected by Tarot.’ He also says there is ‘an explanatory note before
or after each story’. The ‘note’ for The Little Sisters of Eluria is actually a slightly revised version
of the Author’s Note to the novella’s original publication in Legends and was covered earlier in this
chapter.
Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
This piece is something of a dissertation on the act of writing and the surviving markets for
writers’ work. King starts with ‘a confession: I also take an amateur’s slightly crazed pleasure in the
business side of what I do...a little media cross-pollination and envelope-pushing. I’ve tried doing
visual novels...serial novels...and serial novels on the Internet...It’s not about making more money or
even precisely about creating new markets; it’s about trying to see the art, act, and craft of writing in
different ways, thereby refreshing the process and keeping the resulting artifacts—the stories, in other
words—as bright as possible.’
King paints a broad picture of the literary art form at the beginning of a new century—the radio
play (dead); plays in blank verse (dead); poetry (more alive than most think); the short story (closer
to death than most realize); and creating new ways to market the written word (using Riding the
Bullet in lengthy and interesting example). He also baldly states he will continue to write short
stories even if there remains no market, or readers: ‘... I refuse to let a year go by without writing at
least one or two of them. Not for money, not even precisely for love, but as a kind of dues-paying.’
Written on 11 December 2001 the piece closes with King’s thanks to various people who assist
in bringing his books to market (by now almost ‘the usual suspects’); some of those who bought and
published his short stories over the years (Bill Buford at The New Yorker; Ed Ferman of The
Magazine of Fantasy & science-fiction, Nye Willden at Cavalier and Robert A. W. Lowndes, the
first man to pay to publish King’s fiction); and Tabitha King, ‘who remains my favorite Constant
Reader.’
Untitled, to Autopsy Room Four—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
King credits an Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV episode as inspiration for this story and notes his
more ‘ modern?—method of communicating liveliness’ than the original’s single tear; along with his
joy in being able to use a snake breed—the ‘boomslang’, from one of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple
tales (as an aside, the African version is not fictional).
Untitled, to The Man in the Black Suit—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
The Man in the Black Suit is King’s most awarded short story, securing the prestigious O.
Henry Award (the best short story written by a North American and published in a North American
magazine) for 1996. He writes the tale is his hommage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman
Brown, ‘I think it’s one of the best stories ever written by an American.’ The tale sprung from one of
King’s friends who told him his Granpa truly believed he’d once met the Devil in the woods. King
found the result of his own retelling ‘humdrum’ and was surprised by both critical and reader
reaction: ‘This story is proof that writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.’
Untitled, to All That You Love Will Be Carried Away—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
King reveals this story sprung from his own habit of collecting rest stop graffiti. ‘I cared very
much for the lonely man at its center and really hope things turned out okay for him. In the first draft
things did, but Bill Buford of The New Yorker suggested a more ambiguous ending.’
Untitled, to The Death of Jack Hamilton—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
In one paragraph King tells us this story was inspired by his childhood fascination with
Depression-era outlaws and facts from John Toland’s history of those times, The Dillinger Days.
Using real-life characters and Homer Van Meter’s ‘ability’ to rope flies, he created a tale of ‘pure
imagination...or myth, if you like that word better; I do.’
Untitled, to In the Deathroom—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
In another single paragraph King says he wanted to write one of those ‘Kafka-esque’ stories of
South American interrogations, but one for which there was ‘a happier ending, however unreal that
might be. And here it is.’
Untitled, to Everything’s Eventual—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
The image that inspired this tale was of ‘a young man pouring change into a sewer grating
outside of the small suburban house in which he lived.’ The story ‘came out smoothly and without a
single hesitation, supporting my idea that stories are artifacts: not really made things which we
create...but pre-existing objects which we dig up.’
Untitled, to L.T.’s Theory of Pets—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
One of the longer of these notes at nearly a page King declares this story his favorite of the
collection. ‘The origin of the story so far as I can remember was a “Dear Abby” column where Abby
opined that a pet is just about the worst sort of present one can give anyone.’ He says he had ‘a
marvelous time working on it, and whenever I’m called to read a story out loud, this is the one I
choose...It makes people laugh, and I like that.’
Untitled, to The Road Virus Heads North—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
The author reveals he actually has the picture described in The Road Virus Heads North, given
to him as a present by wife Tabitha, who thought he might like, ‘or at least react to it’. When he hung
it in his office their children claimed the eyes followed them as they crossed the room.
Untitled, to Lunch at the Gotham Café—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
This story was inspired by a New York maître d’, who tipped King ‘the most cynical wink in the
universe’ while seating an arguing couple. He says this story is powered not by Guy, the crazed
maître d’, but by ‘the spooky relationship between the divorcing couple. In their own way, they’re
crazier than he is. By far.’
Untitled, to That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French—Everything’s Eventual
(2002)
This somewhat derivative tale, written in strong literary tones, is not a favorite with King’s
broader fan base, but has assisted in bringing some critics to reconsider the worth of King’s canon. In
this very short note King says the story is about Hell, ‘A version of it where you are condemned to do
the same thing over and over again...My idea is that [Hell] might be repetition.’ Roland Deschain
certainly, and briefly, felt that way.
Untitled, to 1408—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
‘As well as the ever-popular premature burial, every writer of shock/suspense tales should
write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn. This is my version of that story. The only
unusual thing about it is that I never intended to finish it. I wrote the first three or four pages as part of
an appendix for my On Writing book, wanting to show readers how a story evolves from first draft to
second...But something nice happened: the story seduced me and I ended up writing all of it.’ King
declares the story ‘scared me while I was working on it’ and that he found its original appearance on
the Blood and Smoke audiobook ‘scared me even more’.
Untitled, to Riding the Bullet—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
Having detailed almost as much as he wanted to about Riding the Bullet in the collection’s
Introduction, King says ‘… like an earlier story of mine (“The Woman in the Room”), it’s an attempt
to talk about how my own mother’s approaching death made me feel.’ And: ‘This is probably the
single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery [death] that can be understood
only with the aid of a hopeful imagination.’
Untitled, to Luckey Quarter—Everything’s Eventual (2002)
King wrote this story ‘longhand, on hotel stationery’ in a Nevada hotel while on a Harley-
Davidson motorcycle trip across America, promoting his novel Insomnia. The inspiration was a two-
dollar slot chip and a note left by the turndown maid.
Author’s Note—From a Buick 8 (2002)
In this piece King details the genesis of the novel (he slipped on a steep slope near a rural gas
station in Pennsylvania, narrowly avoiding tumbling into a stream; and began to wonder how long the
attendant would have waited before noticing that King’s vehicle was missing its driver). Within a few
hours the story was set in King’s mind. ‘This story became...a meditation on the essentially
indecipherable quality of life’s events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them.’
After completing the first draft King was nearly killed when hit by a vehicle while walking in rural
Maine: ‘The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before
suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I’ve tried not to make too much of it.’ He also thanks
members of the Pennsylvania State Police, who assisted with research but not (very unusually) either
wife Tabitha, or publishing industry colleagues.
One interesting note about this piece is that it varies from edition to edition. The last two
paragraphs of the Scribner US hardback and Pocket Book US paperback editions read:
‘Susan Moldow and Nan Graham, the Dynamic Duo at Scribner, would not let me close this note
without pointing out that certain—ahem!—liberties have been taken with the Buick on the book
jacket. GM-ophiles will likely notice that the Eight’s cover-girl (sic) is several years younger than
the Buick in the story. I was asked if this little cheat bothered me, and I said absolutely not. What
bothers me, especially when it’s late and I can’t sleep, is that sneermouth grille. Looks almost ready
to gobble someone up, doesn’t it? Maybe me. Or maybe you, my dear Constant Reader.
‘Maybe you. / Stephen King / May 29, 2002’.
When published as a UK hardback by Hodder & Stoughton the first line opened, ‘Hodder &
Stoughton would not let me close this note....’ Cemetery Dance Publications also released a Lettered,
Limited and Gift Edition of this book—in those both paragraphs are missing in their entirety. 126
Introduction: On Being Nineteen (and a Few Other Things)—The Dark Tower: The
Gunslinger(Revised Edition) (2003)
This is one of the most important pieces about his own work in King’s canon. Here, we learn of
the motivations and inspirations for the series King considers his master work—the Dark Tower
Cycle. The piece is in three parts—a dissertation on what it was like to be nineteen; his desire to
write the longest popular novel in history, inspired by The Lord of the Rings and The Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly; and the pressure to complete Roland’s tale.
The piece, written on 25 January 2003, first appeared in the Revised and Expanded edition of
the first Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger and was reprinted in rereleases of volumes II-IV of the
series, which were the only other books in the Cycle at the time (it is of passing interest that they have
yet to be included in any printing of the later three volumes); and with Roont, an excerpt from Wolves
of the Calla, in a promotional booklet, The Dark Tower: Introduction & Extract from Wolves of the
Calla, given away in Fall 2003 with press kits in the United Kingdom.
King says in his Author’s Note to The Dark Tower that this piece was originally intended to be
the afterword to The Dark Tower and explains why he had made the change (we explain later this
chapter).
In the first section King says he read The Lord of the Rings books in 1966 and 1967 and states
that the Dark Tower books (like other long fantasy tales written by others of his generation) were
‘born out of Tolkien’s.’ Despite King’s emotional response to ‘the sweep of Tolkien’s imagination’
he held off writing what would have been another hackneyed copy of that master’s work, wanting
instead to ‘write my own kind of story....’ King’s 19 th birthday fell on September 21, 1966 and, like
most 19 year olds, he was arrogant ‘enough to feel I could wait a little while on my muse and my
masterpiece (as I was sure it would be).’
King has always been able to take us back to certain times in our lives (his ability to reflect our
memories of how we were as children is legendary) and he demonstrates this again here, revealing
what it was like (for him, for us) to feel nineteen. Do yourself a favor, if our book inspires you to
read but one piece of King’s non-fiction, this is it. Making his argument specific King reveals of
himself (italics ours, for emphasis):
‘I had a lot of reach, and I cared about that. I had a lot of ambition, and I cared about that. I
had a typewriter that I carried from one shithole apartment to the next, always with a deck of
smokes in my pocket and a smile on my face. The compromises of middle age were distant, the
insults of old age over the horizon. Like the protagonist in that Bob Seger song they now use to
sell the trucks, I felt endlessly powerful and endlessly optimistic; my pockets were empty but my
heart was full of stories I wanted to tell. Sounds corny now; felt wonderful then. Felt very cool.
More than anything else I wanted to get inside my reader’s defenses, wanted to rip them and
ravish them and change them forever with nothing but story. And I felt I could do those things. I
felt I had been made to do those things.’
King begins the second section opining that those who consider themselves serious/literary
novelists are bound to consider What would writing this sort of story mean to me? while those
‘whose destiny (or ka, if you like) is to include the writing of popular novels are apt to ask... What
would writing this sort of story mean to others? ’ Recognizing that The Lord of the Rings was the
second type of novel; that he ‘ loved’ the idea of the quest; and that he did not want to go down
Tolkien’s line of a ‘British band of pilgrims’ set against ‘bosky Scandinavian settings’, he waited.
Then, in 1970127, ‘...in an almost completely empty movie theater (the Bijou, in Bangor, Maine, if it
matters)128, I saw a film directed by Sergio Leone. It was called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,
and before the film was even half over, I realized that what I wanted to write was a novel that
contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic
Western backdrop.’ In fact, King was so inspired that ‘in my enthusiasm...I wanted to write not just a
long book, but the longest popular novel in history.’
The third and final section deals with King’s feeling of responsibility for finishing the Dark
Tower cycle, particularly after his near-death experience. He describes it as ‘the troubling idea that,
having built the Dark Tower in the collective imagination of a million readers, I might have a
responsibility to make it safe for as long as people wanted to read about it...Fantasy stories, the bad
as well as the good...seem to have long shelf lives. Roland’s way of protecting the Tower is to try to
remove the threat to the Beams that hold the Tower up. I would have to do it, I realized after my
accident, by finishing the gunslinger’s story.’
He also briefly mentions the pressure exerted by fans to complete Roland’s tale (including
letters from dying old ladies and condemned men requesting the final outcome to be given in secret to
them before they went to the clearing at the end of the path) but reminds everyone that he could not
know the outcome: ‘To know, I have to write.’ King, who rails against plot in On Writing, also says:
‘I once had an outline, but I lost it along the way. (It probably wasn’t worth a tin shit, anyway).’ And
now, a long, long way from the young man of nineteen, ‘Like it or hate it, the story of Roland is now
done. I hope you enjoy it. / As for me, I had the time of my life.’
Foreword—The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger(Revised Edition) (2003)
On February 6, 2003 King wrote a new Foreword for the Revised Edition of The Gunslinger,
explaining the reasons he revised the original published novel (after twenty-one years). He recalls the
furor when he published the revised and expanded edition of The Stand (in 1990), that novel being
the one his readers, to that time, had ‘loved the best (as far as the most passionate of the “Stand-fans”
are concerned, I could have died in 1980 without making the world a noticeably poorer place).’
King explains why reading this Foreword with his reasons for revising The Gunslinger should
be exempt from ‘King’s Bullshit Rule’ (in this case reading, ‘Most of what writers write about their
work is ill-informed bullshit’; this rule also appears in a different form in the Second Foreword to
On Writing).
In total some nine thousand words and ‘two or three totally new scenes’ were added in this
revision. The case he puts forward for the revisions is this: as he’d never read, or revised, the Cycle
as one entity a re-reading of The Gunslinger presented ‘three obvious truths’: that the novel ‘had
been written by a very young man and had all the problems of a very young man’s book’; ‘that it
contained a great many errors and false starts’ (in our view this issue can only have been
compounded by the fact that the novel was originally published as five separate episodes over a three
year period); and that it ‘did not even sound like the later books—it was, frankly, rather difficult to
read. All too often I heard myself apologizing for it, and telling people that if they persevered, they
would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three.’ We would still have to
agree on the last point—even in its revision The Gunslinger is a difficult entry point for the Cycle
and we recommend The Drawing of the Three as the best place to start. King, whose right it is to
present his work in any manner he chooses, arguing against an even fuller revision says, ‘… for all its
faults, it has its own special charms, it seems to me. To change it too completely would have been to
repudiate the person who first wrote of the gunslinger in the late spring and early summer of 1970,
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