When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager he was obsessed with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that got under his skin and refused to budge – but then he found himself in the unusual position of being the Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine. King had endowed a chair at his alma mater in 2016 for the study of literature, and Dr Bicks was a Harvard-trained Shakespeare scholar. What could they have in common besides the name?
At the time of his appointment, Bicks’ employers had told him not to have any contact with the famous writer. But four years into the job he received a phone call from “Steve” who turned into a teddy bear: “I couldn’t believe it. The man responsible for scaring generations of readers – including me – was so good.” It’s not great, but it’s promising.
This book is Bicks’ account of what happened when the King gave him permission to spend a year in his archives, reviewing the books of five of his most famous books, including Pet Sematary, The Shining and Carrie. Bicks’ particular goal is to see what he calls King’s “biblio-magic” in action. He wants to find out how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing tangible things in the reader’s body. After all, how do you make hearts beat faster, stomachs rumble and palms sweat? In On Writing, his classic 2000 essay on writing, King calls what he does “telepathy in act” and Bicks wants to catch him in the act.
There is no shortage of raw materials for him to chew on. King’s tablet is attached to the house in Bangor, Maine, that he bought with his wife, Tabitha, in 1980. Two archivists are looking after his working papers, which are cataloged and stored in a climate-controlled environment. King began writing long before the days of computer editing, so much of the archive consists of many articles transcribed from his wife’s portable Olivetti. The big advantage here is that these early manuscripts have accumulated additional wealth in the form of handwritten notes, text changes, back and forth exchanges with copy editors, all before you receive the final proof. The result is the kind of ash writing to delight any literary connoisseur’s heart.
Bicks quickly finds what he’s looking for in editorial content in Pet Sematary, King’s 1983 novel that many fans consider the scariest, darkest, book he ever wrote. There is a moment early in the book where a pile of fallen tree branches turns into a pile of walking bones. In the first draft, King writes “closed knuckles”, which the copy editor circles and asks “Is the word okay?” King responds by saying, “The voice is fine. And there you have it. Clitter – which speaks slowly – is more frightening than crash-bang clatter.
In the same manuscript, Bicks also found the author resisting the editor’s attempts to change the word “rattly” that King used to describe the heavy breathing of the novel’s two-year-old protagonist, Gage Creed. The copy editor suggests that “congestion” would be better. But King knows that within it there are terrible associations that include parasites and ghosts that are unshakable in their chains. Congested is something the reviewer can write.
This is the kind of close reading often associated with academic crit, so it may seem odd to find it in a book aimed at ardent King fans. But Bicks cleverly combines textual analysis with general health data, gleaned from his interviews with King, both in person and by email. When asked why the written parts of his first books were so small, he explains that it was to save on paper costs. By the early 1970s, King and his wife had broken up. He worked as a high school teacher and worked extra shifts at a laundromat while Tabitha worked nights at Dunkin’ Donuts. The paper was fancy, especially with the speed at which King went through it (a lot of it ended up in the bin).
These austerities lasted even once prosperity arrived. King tells Bicks about the time his only copy of the final draft of The Dead Zone (1979) was mistakenly taken at the airport by a woman who had mistaken his bag for hers. It was only after a nationwide rescue campaign that the manuscript was found safe. But if ever there was a case for spraying a photocopier, or at least carbon paper, this was it.
King’s frugality lasted because her 1974 success with Carrie sounded like a bleak affair. He had now been publishing short stories for eight years and had completed three books without success. When Carrie was finally accepted (the news came by telegram because the line had been cut) the Kings were able to exchange their trailer for an apartment. The rights to the paper were quickly sold for $400,000, which was enough for King’s mother, Ruth, who had raised him alone, to quit her low-paying job. Within a year Carrie had sold a million copies, but Ruth King had died of cancer.
It is in Bicks’ close reading of Carrie that we clearly see her interests intersect with King’s. One of her textbooks, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World, is about the inner lives of people like Juliet and Ophelia, who are about to enter puberty or womanhood. Bicks argues that, rather than Shakespeare being seen as indifferent or disturbing, these girls’ developing minds are what drive the play’s most important conversations about body and soul, faith and salvation. And it is through this lens of what he calls “brainwork” that Bicks approaches Carrie, a novel about a schoolgirl whose first period results in a sudden and violent expansion of her telekinetic abilities.
Of particular interest to Bicks is the transition between King’s two main articles. In an earlier version, Carrie, who is brutally persecuted for not realizing that her time has come, finds her body transformed into that of the devil. Horns begin to grow on his forehead as his skull lengthens so that in the end he looks like a terrible lizard. His revenge is Armageddon as he flies through his hometown killing people, even managing to shoot down a passenger plane. (King tells Bicks that he did this first draft of a schlocky movie from 1957 called The Brain from Planet Arous.) The second draft is close to a finished script. Now it is Carrie’s mind that becomes the “center of gravity” in the story – a place for intense psychological conversations with other main characters.
Some of King’s “regular readers” may find themselves skipping these passages to the next chapter of life’s revelations (his early drinking problem, say, or the fact that he thought Jack Nicholson was strangely mistaken for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). But for those who have the patience to follow Bicks’ gentle ways into Stephen King’s wickedness, there is much to enjoy in this original novel.
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