Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King is very much my jam! “His Works” appears first in the title of my book Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Works, Life, and Influences for a reason. I’m fascinated by process, and this new book takes a deep dive into some of King’s earliest novels, revealing previously unknown facts and details about Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary.
Caroline Bicks is the first faculty member at the University of Maine at Orono to become the Stephen E King Chair in Literature. Her expertise is in Shakespeare, but she is also a fan of King’s work, having started reading his books at the age of 12. She referenced Carrie in the public lecture she gave about the developing brains of adolescent girls in Shakespeare’s time and works as part of her interview process at UMO.
When Bicks accepted the position, she was counseled against trying to contact King, which led her to believe there might be some awkwardness between the author and his alma mater. However, King eventually called her and agreed to come to the university to speak with her classes.
When it came time for her first sabbatical, she had to choose between writing more about Shakespeare or focusing her literary skills on King’s work. Thus, she became the first researcher granted access to King’s archives in their new location—in the basement of the famous Bangor home. The centerpiece of the archives is a climate-controlled, fireproof locked vault, built in a part of the house that used to be the swimming pool. Bicks was a guinea pig for the computerized search system that allows researchers to identify documents of interest. She also developed a friendship with King during the course of her work, asking him questions about some of her discoveries.
The resulting book is a combination of many things. On one level, it is a deep dive into King’s creative process while drafting, redrafting, and receiving editorial feedback on these five early novels. Bicks also presents some interesting literary analysis of elements of these books, identifying and probing metaphors (intended by King or not!), and provides historical context about how elements of King’s life inspired certain works. It is also somewhat of a memoir, especially concerning her relationship with the horror King’s work imbued in her as a girl. And it is a bit of a travelogue, as Bicks visits locations like Estes Park, CO, and Durham, ME, that inspired the novels she explores.
Before diving into the available drafts for a particular novel, Bicks tracked down a copy of the exact edition that she first read some forty years earlier and reread the novel. Once at the archives, she requested access to the available drafts of that novel, comparing them side by side. Many of these original typescripts contained King’s handwritten notes and changes, marginalia, copyeditor annotations and questions, and editorial feedback. Some of the changes from draft to draft were dramatic while others were granular.
One of her discoveries was the importance King put on the spelling—and therefore the sound—of particular words. In Pet Sematary, for example, he insisted that Gage would say “flyne” instead of the copy editor’s suggested “flyin’.” When someone stutters, he uses “shuh-shuh-shuh-shouting” instead of “sh-sh-sh-shouting.” “Say it aloud, you’ll see,” he responds to the copy editor. (To learn about the importance of changing Jack’s weapon from a croquet mallet to a roque mallet in The Shining, check out Bicks’s essay here).
The original manuscript of The Shining uses act/scene/page notation instead of page numbers. King structured the novel like a five-act Shakespearean tragedy, which had Bicks wondering which play was the model, Macbeth or Hamlet. While she could find hints of the former, King confirmed that he was thinking of Hamlet, and intended for everyone to die. In the first draft, Jack murders Wendy (then called Jenny, which he later decided was too “jingle jangly”) in the bathtub, an interesting resonance with the woman in Room 217. He never could make himself write a scene where Jack kills Danny, though.
Bicks also reveals the contents of “After the Play,” which was removed from the book during editing (along with “Before the Play”) and was, for many years, considered lost.
On the first draft manuscript, King writes a note to Bill Thompson in which he asks his editor to be careful with it because it was the only copy in existence. Despite the huge advances he’d received for his previous two books, he was only receiving $50,000 per year from Doubleday’s author investment program, so he was being frugal with things like photocopying.
King also told Bicks that he considered it bad luck to copy a first draft. This superstition almost led to the loss of The Dead Zone. While traveling home from a family vacation, the bag containing the manuscript was mixed up with someone else’s. The one King picked up contained an avocado. Fortunately, the airline was able to track down the other person and they swapped bags.
Bicks took advantage of the Fogler Library’s collection of Maine Campus issues to read the King’s Garbage Truck essays he wrote while a student but also, to put them in context, read the entire newspaper. This led her to Night Shift, which was the first King book she’d read. Bicks identified significant changes in several of the stories. Some had been previously published in university literary journals and were revised before King submitted them to the glossy magazines that became a major source of income for a while, and changed again before appearing in the collection. Several of the stories had different titles originally. “Jerusalem’s Lot” was, for a while, “Jeremiah’s Lot,” and Thompson suggested calling it “The Shunned Town.” A running header on “Children of the Corn” refers to the story as “Nebraska Death Trip,” and the original version, “The Children,” is substantially different in tone and political message.
She made an interesting discovery in an early draft of ‘Salem’s Lot. Between pages she found two hand-drawn maps of the town, originally called Momson (one of the maps is reproduced in her book). When she showed them to King, he recognized the handwriting as that of his childhood friend, Chris Chesley. Armed with this information, Bicks identified extensive feedback in the margins of the manuscript as originating from the same source, some of it very critical, although she could not detect any places where King acted on his critique.
As part of her exploration of ‘Salem’s Lot, Bicks writes about how changes from draft to draft demonstrate how King shifts the focus of the nature of evil from an outside force to the town itself and its residents. The kinds of people who—like those in Derry—turn a blind eye to bad things happening in town. Among the other changes Bicks writes about are the fact that Barlow was originally named Sarlinov, and Father Callaghan suffered a vastly different fate in earlier drafts.
By the time Bicks started working on Carrie, Robin Furth had been hired as co-director of the archives. Bicks is astonished to learn that the novel was originally set in Chamberlain, MA, instead of Maine. This persisted until very late in the publication cycle. Thompson was working with King on ‘Salem’s Lot by that point and recommended that he “bring it home,” because King “wasn’t really a Boston boy.”
It has long been known that Thompson asked King to rewrite the last fifty pages of the novel, where Carrie turns into a monstrous entity who walks through town destroying things. In fact, she turned into a kind of anti-Christ capable of unleashing Armageddon. What’s interesting to learn is that King originally had Carrie gradually becoming something alien quite early in the book, as she exercises her newfound powers. Bicks explores how unsympathetic Carrie was after the prom scene in the original draft (she blows up a passing 747!) and how King refined her character to make her less of a monster and more of a victim.
This is a fascinating, accessible book that King readers are sure to enjoy. It contains nearly two dozen reproductions of early draft manuscript pages, many of them annotated by King or others. It is a welcome exploration of these five novels that we all know so well—books that could very well have been quite different without King’s intentional changes and the feedback of his editors.
Signed copies of Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences are available from Village Books in The Woodlands. Be sure to specify if you’d like a dedication and/or inscription on the order form. A new edition, Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition), came out last September, which you can also order from Village Books, along with any of my other books.
