Stephen Spignesi - Stephen King, American Master: A Creepy Corpus of Facts About Stephen King & His Work

Other Stephen King books by Stephen Spignesi

The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia

The Stephen King Quiz Book, Vols. 1 & 2

The Lost Work of Stephen King, Vols. 1 & 2

The Essential Stephen King

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-68261-606-2

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-607-9

Stephen King, American Master

A Creepy Corpus of Facts About Stephen King & His Work

2018 by Stephen Spignesi

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Dean Samed

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Select photos by Valerie Barnes 2017 unless otherwise indicated and used with permission. All book jackets are copyright their respective publishers and used under Fair Use. All excerpts from plot summaries are the promotional synopses from the books respective publishers and used under Fair Use. All essays are copyright their respective authors and used with permission. Gratitude to all.

Permuted Press, LLC

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Published in the United States of America

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always comes around

to where you started again.

Stephen King

Id say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror.
If you go back over the books from Carrie on up,
what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class
American life as its lived at the time that
particular book was written.

Stephen King

The Paris Review

Contents

Top 10 Lines from Stephen King Novels

10. Oh, theres nothing in the attic.

9. I know it sounds crazy but that Water Pik is after me!

8. Stop making fun of my ability to levitate butcher knivesor youll be sorry!

7. Ive got a feeling that that small green dot on your skin will be larger by Chapter 8.

6. This is a losing battle. Lets just paint the walls blood red.

5. This seems awfully large for just a turkey leg.

4. Ive bought a lot of suits in thrift shops beforebut this was the first one that ever tried to strangle me.

3. Since my wife died, our love life has been great.

2. The companys been sold. Youre working for General Electric now.

And the #1 line from Stephen King novels

1. Ive been a veterinarian for 30 years and Im telling youthats no ordinary poodle!

From Late Night with David Letterman , Thursday, April 27, 1989

Introduction:
Pulling Back the Sheet

Youve been here before. Sure you have.

Needful Things

G reetingsand Happy Horrors!

I have been writing about Stephen Kings work for quite some time now. In fact, I remember the day I officially began researching and writing about King: It was Tuesday, March 13, 1984. This was the day my first book, Mayberry, My Hometown , was published, and it was also the day my niece Jennifer was born.

It was on that day that I decided what my next book would be: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia . It would take me five years to complete it, while publishing two volumes of The Stephen King Quiz Book in the interim, based on the research I was doing for the Encyclopedia .

The limited-edition title of the Encyclopedia was The Shape Under the Sheet : The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia . That title came from a metaphor King used in his Introduction to Night Shift , in which he explained that the horror writer takes you in a room and shows you the shape under the sheet, and that that shape is your own dead body. Bingo! I thought, and commandeered it for my own book, since what I was doing was metaphorically showing King readers all the shapes under all the sheets in all of Kings work.

Ive been a Stephen King fan since spring 1977. That was when I came across a yellow paperback called The Shining . I consumed it in one large gulp. That was the beginning.

This book is a continuance of my interest in, reading of, and study of the work of Stephen King. Unlike my other books about King ( The Lost Work of Stephen King and The Essential Stephen King ) this book is more of a browsing book in that it can be flipped through, read cover to cover, or used to look up something specific.

I guess you could say that this book is a good-humored acknowledgment of the influence of that insane asylum called the internet. This is not a lists book, but its use of bullet points of fact does nod to similarly-designed features on too-many-to-count websites. There are in-depth entries when warranted, but mostly this is King info in an easily digestible form which I hope will ensorcell you. It makes an enchanting companion to my own denser works, as well as the works of many other King scholars, including the late, great Rocky Wood, Tony Magistrale, Bev Vincent, George Beahm, Robin Furth, Tyson Blue, Kevin Quigley, Andrew Rausch, Justin Brooks, Michael Collings, and many others. Long days and pleasant nights to them all.

A Note About Spoilers : You wont find any here, if I could avoid them in any way at all. And if I do reveal a conclusion or a plot twist, it will be prefaced by [ Spoiler Alert ] in bold. I add details as needed without intentionally giving away endings or key plot points.

Also : Some of the material in Stephen King, American Master appeared in different forms in my 1990 book The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia , my 1998 book The Lost Work of Stephen King , and my 2001 book The Essential Stephen King , all of which are now long out of print. I did a great deal of in-depth Stephen King research for those books and wanted to share some of it with Stephen King, American Master readers who may have never seen or even heard of my previous King books.

Stephen Spignesi

New Haven, Connecticut

Scare Stories:
Reassessing Americas Most Popular Writer

by Stephen Spignesi

Because of his immense popularity, King has earned the ire of literary elitists the world over. While popularity doesnt necessarily equal greatnessone of the many wonders of democracy is that every once in a while, the masses get it right. Kings genius can be found in many places, particularly in his ability to take the metaphorical and make it literal. Its a literary device that, in our time, only Franz Kafka and Dr. Seuss managed to pull off so well....Just this once, the Academy [awarding the Nobel prize] should bestow the award upon someone people actually read.

Andrew Ervin

Nobel Oblige

He was a major writer for me as a kid, and as an adolescent. I was thrilled every time a Stephen King book came out. Id spend pocket money on hardbacks. Man, they were the first hardbacks that I demanded my parents get for me. I remember buying IT and thinking it was the most epic horror novelthat it was the Ulysses of horror.

Bret Easton Ellis

Author, American Psycho

Time continues to prove that his books are far more than pop-cultural phenomenonshe is increasingly and deservedly respected as one of the greatest authors this country will ever produce.