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King on writing
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As an author, King not only focuses on things that go bump in the night but he also throws in things that go bump in our psyches. Man and his dog? In a King novel, it's Cujo, a rabid beast who won't settle for a Milk Bone. Man and his car? Christine, a car with an unlimited warranty for evil. A fan's admiration for an artist? It's all Misery to King.
King started on the road to scary stories early, becoming something of a connoisseur of '50s horror films. His interest was first piqued by a collection of fantasy novels which had belonged to his father. (Daddy deserted the family when Stephen was a tot.)
King started writing when he was still a child, and as a teenager he sold a couple of short stories to a mystery magazine. But it wasn't all blood and guts; the young Stephen also played in a rock band and for his high school football team.
After completing his education, King briefly taught high school English. When Carrie pushed him into the big time, King was just 27 years old. His brand of storytelling captured the public imagination right away, and he proved he was no flash in the pan with his next two books, Salem's Lot, a modern vampire story, and The Shining, about the Queen Mother of haunted houses.
Besides living a quiet family life in Maine, King has resurrected his youth long enough to form a band, The Rock Bottom Remainders, with fellow authors Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening, and Ray Blount.
Stephen King's latest literary deal calls for him to be paid $35 million for 4 books, a solid
financial testament to his popularity. As his novels are quickly snapped up by producers
for feature films and TV movies, King shares the wealth: He spent $1 million to build a
baseball stadium for the teenagers of Bangor, Maine.
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books:
a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists.
The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a
misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by
poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier
than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction.
This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee.
"I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean
and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash."
But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial,
and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber."
As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by
his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up,
but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl
milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young,
he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work.
The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers,
and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and
booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes).
"There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly
killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft.
He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments,
a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character,
the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models.
He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's
leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity,
Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great
story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could
be the antidote.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher.
(Tim Appelo)
Richard Bachman was created to keep the book market from being oversaturated with Stephen King titles. But King himself has said: "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer's imagination so frequently do. I began to imagine his life as a dairy farmer; his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman..."
Bachman's true identity remained a secret for many years, until a bookstore clerk did a little research and discovered who Bachman really was.
Bachman's official biography:
Born in New York, Richard Bachman's early years are a mystery. As a young man,
Bachman served a four-year stint in the Coast Guard, which he then followed with 10
years in the merchant marine. Bachman finally settled down in rural central New
Hampshire, where he ran a medium-sized dairy farm. He did his writing at night (he
suffered from chronic insomnia) after the cows came home. Bachman and his wife, Claudia
Inez Bachman, had one child, a boy, who died in an unfortunate, Stephen King-ish type
accident at the age of 6. He apparently fell through a well and drowned. In 1982, a brain
tumor was discovered near the base of Bachman's brain; tricky surgery removed it.
Bachman however, didn't live long after that, dying suddenly in late 1985 of cancer of the
pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.
The Green Mile (1999)
(Region 1 encoding, US and Canada)
"The book was better" has been the complaint of many a reader since the invention of movies.
Frank Darabont's second adaptation of a Stephen King prison drama (The Shawshank
Redemption was the first) is a very faithful adaptation of King's serial novel. In the middle of the
Depression, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) runs death row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary. Into this
dreary world walks a mammoth prisoner, John Coffey (Michael Duncan) who, very slowly, reveals
a special gift that will change the men working and dying (in the electric chair, masterfully and
grippingly staged) on the mile . As with King's book, Darabont takes plenty of time to show us
Edgecomb's world before delving into John Coffey's mystery. With Darabont's superior storytelling
abilities, his touch for perfect casting, and a leisurely 188-minute running time, his movie brings to life
nearly every character and scene from the novel. Darabont even improves the novel's two endings,
creating a more emotionally satisfying experience. The running time may try patience, but those who
want a story, as opposed to quick-fix entertainment, will be rewarded by this finely tailored tale.
(Doug Thomas)
Roland Deschain and his ka-tet are bearing southeast through the forests of Mid-World, the almost timeless landscape that seems to
stretch from the wreckage of civility that defined Roland's youth to the crimson chaos that seems the future's only promise. Readers of
Stephen King's epic series know Roland well, or as well as this enigmatic hero can be known. They also know the companions who have
been drawn to his quest for the Dark Tower: Eddie Dean and his wife, Susannah; Jake Chambers, the boy who has come twice through
the doorway of death into Roland's world; and Oy, the Billy-Bumbler.
In this long-awaited fifth novel in the saga, their path takes them to the outskirts of Calla Bryn Sturgis, a tranquil valley community of farmers and ranchers on Mid-World's borderlands. Beyond the town, the rocky ground rises toward the hulking darkness of Thunderclap, the source of a terrible affliction that is slowly stealing the community's soul. One of the town's residents is Pere Callahan, a ruined priest who, like Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, passed through one of the portals that lead both into and out of Roland's world.
As Father Callahan tells the ka-tet the astonishing story of what happened following his shamed departure from Maine in 1977, his connection to the Dark Tower becomes clear, as does the danger facing a single red rose in a vacant lot off Second Avenue in midtown Manhattan. For Calla Bryn Sturgis, danger gathers in the east like a storm cloud. The Wolves of Thunderclap and their unspeakable depredation are coming. To resist them is to risk all, but these are odds the gunslingers are used to, and they can give the Calla-folken both courage and cunning. Their guns, however, will not be enough.
The first collection of stories Stephen King has published since Nightmares & Dreamscapes nine years ago,
Everything's Eventual includes one O. Henry Prize winner, two other award winners, four stories published
by The New Yorker, and "Riding the Bullet," King's original e-book, which attracted over half a million
online readers and became the most famous short story of the decade.
"Riding the Bullet," published here on paper for the first time, is the story of Alan Parker, who's hitchhiking to see his dying mother but takes the wrong ride, farther than he ever intended. In "Lunch at the Gotham Café," a sparring couple's contentious lunch turns very, very bloody when the maître d' gets out of sorts. "1408," the audio story in print for the first time, is about a successful writer whose specialty is "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards" or "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," and though Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel doesn't kill him, he won't be writing about ghosts anymore. And in "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French," terror is déjà vu at 16,000 feet.
Whether writing about encounters with the dead, the near dead, or about the mundane dreads of life,
from quitting smoking to yard sales, Stephen King is at the top of his form in the fourteen dark
tales assembled in Everything's Eventual.
Intense, eerie, and instantly com-pelling, they announce the stunningly fertile imagination of
perhaps the greatest storyteller of our time.
In the seemingly paradisal Wisconsin town of French Landing, small distortions disturb the
beauty: a talking crow, an old man obeying strange internal marching orders, a house
that is both there and not quite there. And roaming the town is a terrible fiend nicknamed
the Fisherman, who is abducting and murdering small children and eating their flesh. The
sheriff desperately wants the help of a retired Los Angeles cop, who once collared
another serial killer in a neighboring town.
Of course, this is no ordinary policeman, but Jack Sawyer, hero of Stephen King and Peter
Straub's 1984 fantasy The Talisman. At the end of that book, the 13-year-old Jack had
completed a grueling journey through an alternate realm called the Territories, found a
mysterious talisman, killed a terrible enemy, and saved the life of his mother and her
counterpart in the Territories. Now in his 30s, Jack remembers nothing of the Talisman,
but he also hasn't entirely forgotten.
Stephen King fans, rejoice!
The bodysnatching-aliens tale Dreamcatcher is his first book in years
that slakes our hunger for horror the way he used to. A throwback to It,
The Stand, and The Tommyknockers.
Dreamcatcher is also an interesting new wrinkle in his fiction.
More information about Kings books you will find here:
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