Stephen King – Interesting Literature

Danse Macabre: Stephen King’s Dance of Death

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Stephen King’s early non-fiction book about horror

In 1999, the prolific author Stephen King had his own dance with death. One afternoon, he was walking on the shoulder of a road near his home in the US state of Maine, when a van collided with King, badly injuring him. As he lay recovering from his brush with mortality, King penned a book that has gone on to become one of the most popular non-fiction books about the craft of writing. The paradox of Stephen King has always been that he made writing fiction look like something anyone could do, which is not something any writer could have done. As the old sports commentator’s line has it, his talent lies in making it look effortless – easy, even.

The Forgotten Bachman Book: Stephen King’s Roadwork

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Richard Bachman’s lesser-known novel, Roadwork

Stephen King isn’t your run-of-the-mill horror writer. Indeed, he resists the generic label – ‘generic’ both because it identifies him with one genre but also because it is blandly general and nondescript – and might be better seen as a ‘writer’ full-stop. Or rather, as a storyteller, for at his best he uses good old-fashioned character-driven storytelling to explore dark themes and ideas. And nowhere do we see this more clearly, perhaps, than in Stephen King’s ‘non-Stephen-King’ novels – that is, his Bachman books.

Literary Film Review: The Running Man

Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) analyses The Running Man, the 1980s dystopian action movie based, and yet also not based, on a Stephen King novel

In J. W. Eagan’s sage words, ‘Never judge a book by its movie.’ The following is part of this new monthly ‘literary film review’ segment on this blog, and as such it’s a review of the film of The Running Man (dir. Paul Michael Glaser – yes, Starsky from Starsky and Hutch – 1987), but it’s important to go back to the – very different – source material for The Running Man: that is, the novel called The Running Man, by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King.

Stephen King’s Real First Novel: The Long Walk

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews The Long Walk, the first novel Stephen King wrote

It’s well-known that Carrie was Stephen King’s first novel. Published in 1974, it tapped into an international appetite for tales of demonic possession: it was just one year since The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s terrifying adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, had been a smash hit in cinemas. King sold the paperback rights for Carrie for $400,000 and, more or less overnight, went from writer on the breadline to hot property. And according to King himself, it was all down to his wife, Tabitha, who retrieved the early drafts for the novel from the bin and urged King to continue with the novel.

But Carrie, although it was King’s first published novel, wasn’t the first one he wrote. Stephen King actually completed his first novel back in the mid-1960s, when he was still a teenager.

Five Fascinating Facts about Stephen King

Five fun Stephen King facts – including phobias, pseudonyms, and mistaken identities

1. Stephen King threw away early drafts of the manuscript of his first novel, Carrie. His wife retrieved it, encouraged him, and it was later published. King’s fiction has repeatedly centred on the loner, the figure who is bullied at school, who fails to ‘fit in’. His first novel, Carrie (1974) – about a girl who has telekinetic powers which she uses to exact revenge on her school bullies – perfectly exemplifies this. But King had doubts about the first few pages of the novel’s draft, and abandoned it; it was only down to his wife’s faith in the idea that he persevered with it. Indeed, Tabitha, King’s wife and a novelist in her own right, has come to the rescue in King’s career a number of times. For instance,