FEATURE
50 Years of Stephen King
by Anthony Aycock
I arrived at my daughter’s band competition having slept in my clothes. In my car in my clothes. Blitzed on caffeine, McDonald’s wrappers surrounding my feet like an asteroid belt, I had driven through the night, minus a nap at a rest stop, from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to the South Carolina high school where my daughter would be performing. The things we do for our kids, right?
You may wonder why I left my daughter’s mother to drive her from our North Carolina home to the competition while I journeyed alone from the opposite direction. The answer is simple: I was meeting Stephen King. My favorite author in middle school, he became my favorite author in high school, then college, then adulthood. I’m not alone. King has sold more than 350 million books, making him the 22nd bestselling fiction writer in human history. He doesn’t have readers—he has fans “the way rock stars have fans,” according to one Washington Post journalist. Now he was going to be at George Mason, a mere 5 hours from my house in North Carolina. I had to be there. Had to.
Fifty years ago this month, King’s first novel, Carrie, was published, beginning his transformation from downtrodden high school teacher typing up weird stories in the laundry room of his rickety trailer for extra money (when he sold “The Raft” in 1969, the $250 payment was the precise amount he needed to pay a court fine for getting drunk and stealing traffic cones) to Famous and Beloved Multimillionaire Writer. There are many books, websites, and other resources devoted to this literary icon. Which ones are the best?
OFFICIAL AND FAN SITES
stephenking.com
King’s official author site is chock-full of news about upcoming projects, appearances, interviews, giveaways, and other goodies. The FAQ page is a treat and a great place to start for people who have only a passing familiarity with the writer. (My favorite Q&A combo: “Are you dead?” “Nope.”) King is often in the vanguard of literary technologies, and in 2000, he released his novel The Plant on his website as an ebook. You can still get it there.
Lilja’s Library
Created in 1996 by King superfan Hans-Ake Lilja, Lilja’s Library is a Stephen King encyclopedia, linking to reviews, articles, other fan sites, King’s two radio stations, quizzes, and curiosities. Especially interesting are the 40 or so video clips of interviews with King, some dating back to the early 1980s.
r/stephenking
With more than 253,000 members, the King subreddit fulfills the promise of its tagline: “The No.1 Subreddit for Stephen King’s Avid Fans!” As with any subreddit, you’ll find serious discussions (a third season of the King-inspired show Castle Rock?) mixed with whimsy (a Muppet version of Misery with Miss Piggy as Annie Wilkes and Kermit as Paul Sheldon). Many of the photos are people’s shoutouts to their own Stephen King collections, and I can’t say I disapprove.
TheDarkTower.org
TheDarkTower.org is a discussion board that, unlike r/stephenking, is less focused on pop culture and memorabilia, devoting itself to readers and book collectors. Being a collector myself, I spend quite a bit of time reading about others’ acquisitions. Immensely useful is the collection of digital images of Stephen King’s signature at different points in his career, making it easier to spot forgeries.
The Collector
Another site devoted to bibliophiles, The Collector lists the identifying criteria of every Stephen King first edition (U.S. and U.K.) as well as limited editions of King books. This comes in handy when you go to bookstores, thrift stores, flea markets, and other places in search of an overlooked treasure. (I once found a true first edition of King’s third novel, The Shining, in a used bookstore. I paid $19 for the book and sold it for $350.)
LITERARY CRITICISM
‘All 75 Stephen King Books, Ranked’
Lists like “All 75 Stephen King Books, Ranked” by Neil McRobert come out every few years, and given King’s startling fecundity, each one is obsolete as soon as it appears. This one is too, as it doesn’t include his 2023 novel Holly. Still, any ranking of 75 books is a herculean task, and therefore impressive. Plus, being published by Esquire, it’s more entertaining and insightful than most listicles.
Great Stephen King Reread
Great Stephen King Reread, on Reactor, is not a ranking but a series of essays by Grady Hendrix (author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and other novels) on what was, at the time, every Stephen King book. Hendrix is a fantastic critic and a fount of King insider info, such as the story of how he trashed the first few pages of Carrie but his wife rescued them and insisted he finish the book. It’s a story that is told in a million other places online, but Hendrix tells it as only Hendrix can.
‘An Annotated Bibliography of Stephen King Criticism’
“An Annotated Bibliography of Stephen King Criticism” is a 2008 article by Tyler Cobabe from the Brigham Young University ScholarsArchive that describes more than 20 academic books and articles about Stephen King, some of which—like David Kingsley’s “It Came From Four-Colour Fiction: The Effect of Cold War Comic Books on the Fiction of Stephen King”—manage to find little-explored areas of King’s oeuvre.
‘What Stephen King Isn’t’
After being derided for much of his career as a penny-a-word hack writer, King is now an elder statesman of popular fiction, and critics are starting to ask: Is he better than we all thought? “What Stephen King Isn’t,” a New Yorker essay by Joshua Rothman, is a good assessment, especially his conclusion: “There are lots of writers who tell it like it is, but only a few who, with such commitment and intensity, tell it like it isn’t. King takes the weird and gives it weight. And yet, at the same time, his novels retain a lightness, a playfulness. They show us horrible things, but they also glow, I think, with King’s joy—with his pleasure and exhilaration in imagining.”
INTERVIEWS
The Paris Review: ‘Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189’
Established in 1953, The Paris Review has published interviews with some of history’s greatest writers, including Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov, and Pablo Neruda. The interview with Stephen King took place over two sessions, and like all Paris Review interviews, it is both deep and wide-ranging. King is open about the pitfalls of writing, the frustrations of the editorial and publishing processes, and his own demons. For instance, he explains something I have not read in other interviews: During his days of drug and alcohol abuse, he would write new material during the day, when he was merely hungover, and work on revisions at night, when he was “looped.”
Toronto Star: ‘Horror Writer Stephen King Is Afraid There’s Something Awful Under His Bed’
The Oct. 5, 1980, interview with the Toronto Star is one of the earliest Stephen King interviews on the internet. At the time, his novel Firestarter was the bestselling hardcover book in America, and he had not yet written classics like Pet Sematary, IT, and The Gunslinger. “It’s natural that he should try to appear a little weird, like his books,” writes interviewer Michael Hanlon, “but in fact he’s very plain and very jolly, an affectionate husband, doting father and friendly fellow who likes to … sit around and chat.”
C-SPAN: Mason Award Presentation to Stephen King
C-SPAN doesn’t offer an interview per se. Rather, it’s the video of his Sept. 23, 2011, appearance at George Mason University that I attended. The tickets were distributed via a lottery, and I was dejected when I didn’t win one. Then I thought, “Wait a minute. There must be someone who got one of these tickets who can’t go and would be willing to sell it to me.” So I went online, found such a person, and worked a deal. The ticket included the chance to get one book signed. The book I chose was a first print of the 1990 re-release of The Stand, with illustrations by the comic book artist Bernie Wrightson. I had met Wrightson, who passed away in 2017, a few weeks before, and his signature is on the book as well.
The New York Times Magazine: ‘Stephen King’s Family Business’
Stephen King has been interviewed a lot in his career. Some of those interviews have included his wife Tabitha, also a writer. Others have included his writer son Joe or his son Owen, who is yet another writer. To my knowledge, the interview in The New York Times’ Sunday insert is the only one that features the whole family, including Owen’s wife Kelly, who is—wait for it—a writer. King’s daughter Naomi? A minister. (Let’s hope she wasn’t the model for Reverend Charles Jacobs in King’s novel Revival, who does some pretty bad stuff.) Speaking of King’s family …
FAMILY
Joe Hill
King’s elder son was born Joseph Hillström King. He dropped the famous surname to strike out on his own. Hill has written several New York Times bestsellers, three of which—Horns, NOS4A2, and the short story “The Black Phone”—have been made into movies or TV shows. He also wrote the Eisner Award-winning comic book series Locke & Key, which was adapted for Netflix.
Owen King
Younger son Owen has published three novels and a collection of stories and has edited another collection. One of his novels, Sleeping Beauties, was a collaboration with his dad. It was not the first time they had worked together. Growing up, Owen was Stephen’s “narrator,” which is just as it sounds: His father paid him to read books (other writers’, not his own) into a tape recorder, which King could then listen to while he traveled. Owen wrote about this experience for The New Yorker in 2018.
Kelly Braffet
Braffet’s first three novels were psychological thrillers. Her fourth book, The Unwilling, turned toward fantasy, and it seems she’ll stay there for a while. Her website bio mentions her husband, Owen, but is silent on the rest of the famous family. Nor does she mention her father-in-law in most of the interviews I’ve read—including the one for LitPark she did with Owen before their marriage.
Tabitha King
Married to Stephen since 1971, Tabby, as many people call her, used to have a website, but it has been discontinued. She has published eight novels, some short stories, and—she seems to be the only one in the family with this credential—a number of poems. A good 2006 interview with her by the famed critic Bev Vincent is available on Vincent’s website, Onyx. There’s no denying that part of Tabby’s life’s work has been helping her husband manage his literary empire. But don’t reduce her to the label “Stephen King’s wife.” Just don’t. Trust me.
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