Subtitled “My Year of Fear with Stephen King”, this is not a memoir about being kidnapped by a world-famous author and kept in his cellar—nor, Misery-wise, the other way round—but the result of spending time perusing King’s archive of early drafts to learn about his writing process. In 2017 Caroline Bicks became the first Stephen E King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine (not an electric chair, presumably), though not because her own work had any particular relevance to King’s. A Shakespeare scholar, she had, for instance, written about how the workings of adolescent girls’ minds are presented in Shakespeare’s plays. She was initially told not to contact King, but out of the blue he contacted her, agreed to speak to her students, and later invited Bicks to make use of his archive. She took the opportunity to revisit some of King’s works (which she’d read, and been duly terrified by, in her younger years), then to trace the evolution of certain key (usually horrific) scenes via their earlier drafts. The works she looks at (which she does in reverse chronological order) are Pet Sematary (published 1983, written 1979), The Shining (1977), Night Shift (published 1978, collecting stories that appeared from 1968), Salem’s Lot (1975) and Carrie (1974).
Coming from a discipline which demands a close examination of the use of language, Bicks is well-placed to pay attention to an aspect of King’s work which hasn’t, I’d guess, been examined quite so closely before. As King said—or quoted Amy Tan as saying—in On Writing, “No one asks about the language.” Here, Bicks does.
For instance, looking at the sound of a certain group of words King uses in Pet Sematary, in a scene where the protagonist is disinterring a corpse:
When he revised the line, placing “grating” next to “full of dirt,” he created a word-cluster that echoes the book’s signature soundtrack to all of its awful acts of digging and burying: dirt/grit/gritting/grating/grave/gravel.
One thing I was interested to read is that the tendency, in King’s horror scenes, was for him to strip back the language and pare away the more egregious details, to focus the terror on certain key images. In some cases—The Shining, for instance—this involved removing the explicit appearance of the supernatural to leave as much room for a psychological interpretation as possible. This was particularly interesting to me, as I’ve always preferred King’s subtler horrors to his more overblown excesses of the supernatural (Duma Key really put me off, but re-reading It most highlighted the difference). If I thought about it at all, I’d have assumed the excess details came from tinkering with a scene once it was written, trying to milk it for terror, but it seems the opposite happens: King lets it all out on the page, then sorts through and refines the resultant splattery mess. (I can’t help thinking, at this point, of Pinhead searching through the remains of a recently-torn-apart Uncle Frank in Hellraiser, and re-assembling the recognisable pieces.)
Another, subtler, example of this is Salem’s Lot, where Bicks detects a slight but significant shift in the locus of the horror. In earlier drafts, a cosy small town is explicitly invaded by a foreign evil; subsequent drafts refine this to promote the feeling of the small town as having an evil potential of its own, which is brought to the fore by the vampire infestation:
All of these edits make the town an agent of its own destruction rather than a victim of an outsider’s malevolence. As King recrafts this series of scenes, he turns a more magnified, critical eye to the homegrown nature of small-town horrors.
Thus the town of Salem’s Lot becomes one of King’s many “bad places”, alongside the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and Derry in It, and the book itself picks up a little more thematic depth.
The most surprising change, for me, was in Carrie, where the burgeoning of Carrie’s psychic powers was at first accompanied by an increasingly grotesque physical transformation. In the earliest draft, as Carrie starts to consciously develop her powers, she feels bumps sprouting at her temples and her whole skull becoming soft. By the end of that version of the novel, she’s sprouted a full pair of demonic horns, her body has atrophied and her head become a transparent covering over a massively swollen brain. (King tells Bicks he was inspired by the 1957 film The Brain From Planet Arous.) Subsequent drafts removed this way-over-the-top image, thus pulling the whole novel back from what would, I’m sure, have made Brian De Palma’s adaptation more laughable than frightening (and, I’d guess, made King’s novel not as successful). It also has the effect of keeping Carrie empathetically human, rather than making her a literal demon.
The Brain from Planet Arous, or how Carrie might have looked at the end of the first draft…
Another evolution Bicks notes—and one that plays to her strengths as someone who’s studied Shakespeare’s presentation of adolescent “brainwork”, as she terms it—is how the character of Ben in Salem’s Lot ages from draft to draft, raising him from a five-year-old in the first to a nine-year-old in the last:
This maturation matters, because it allows King to sharpen his focus on what kids can do with their brains once they’ve made it past the most vulnerable years of childhood but haven’t yet become myopically rational (and possibly amoral) grown-ups.
King has always been drawn to capable kids as protagonists (It being the obvious example, The Institute a particular favourite of mind), and it seems this evolution of Salem’s Lot’s Ben was part of his finding the perfect age for these child heroes:
Only a kid of a certain age, King suggests, could combine the expansive imagination of a child (this monster is real) with the emerging rational abilities of an adult (and this is what you need to do to save yourself from it).
Bicks got to ask King some questions directly—via email mostly, which allowed him sometimes not to answer, but also via a video interview at the end of it all—and in one of his emails he highlighted another aspect of his work I’ve long noticed. I think of it as his use of catchphrases. Often not explicitly related to the action, they acquire, through repetition, a multiplicity of meanings or implications. Asked about it, King said, “I like repetition. Repetition = resonance.”
There are a few snippets of trivia about the books here, too. Carrie, for instance, was initially set in Massachusetts, not Maine. (A subtlety lost on me, as I know neither, and they don’t seem that far apart.) And the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot, was initially called Sarlinov—a more foreign-sounding, even Cold-War-evoking, name. (I can’t help wondering if the final name was taken from Lovecraft’s friend Robert H Barlow.)
It’s an interesting book, looking at King from an angle I haven’t read about before (not that I read a lot of King criticism, but I would like to read more). A perhaps more instructive approach might have been to look at works spread across the decades of King’s prolific output, to see if his methods changed; but, on the other hand, there’s something about these early works that seem that little bit more the essence of Stephen King, and this isn’t an academic study (nor a writing manual). There’s something of a fan’s self-indulgence about it, and I’m happy to go with that.
I’m sure there’s more to be uncovered in the King archive. Anyone writing a full critical biography has, I’d say, at least one lifetime’s work ahead of them. Perhaps, then, we’d better leave that task to Count Sarlinov…
