Scary Monsters and Superfreaks: The World of Stephen King, A to Z

J: JFK
A few of King’s favorite references from Sixties culture and politics: Nixon. ‘Nam. The Beatles. JFK. That last one was the crux of an 849-pager King published in 2011 called 11/22/63, after the date Kennedy was assassinated. The novel is a time-traveler’s investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald, and whether he indeed had any help. Jake Epping, a modern day English teacher from Maine, is the one who takes on the Marty McFly–ish task of journeying back to the late Fifties, through the pantry of a local diner. (Just go with it.) The door to the past always dumps the traveler out in 1958, so Jake spends five fascinating years making his his way from Maine to Texas, fastidiously tracking Oswald. If everything goes right, Jake plans to save not only Jack Kennedy but maybe, through the right ripples, Bobby, too, or Martin Luther King — or even America itself, from Vietnam. And yes, there is a time-travel love story. An awesome one.

K: Kids
King and his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, have three children. They’re all middle-aged now, and two are authors — but they came of age during the early part of Stephen’s career, and his parental concerns and musings on childhood show up all over the place. King’s first three books — Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining — all feature kids with visions and/or telekinesis and/or a surplus of gumption. Children and teenagers remained a constant in King’s work through the end of the Nineties, whether as supporting characters (Cujo, Desperation) or protagonists (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Wizard and Glass). And it’s no coincidence that one of the greatest King adaptations put to film, Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, came from “The Body,” a novella that seems effortless in its rendering of young friendships and teenage curiosity. (On the flip side of “The Body,” also collected in Different Seasons, is “Apt Pupil,” where 13-year-old Todd Bowden makes an ex-Nazi tell him Holocaust stories until they both start doing heinous things.)

L: Lisey’s Story
You can break King’s work down into decades or you can separate it into “pre-accident” and “post-accident” eras. In 1999, King was struck by a minivan and suffered a variety of serious injuries. 2006’s Lisey’s Story is a sort of alternate universe version of that story, one where the famous author dies and his wife is left behind with grief, an office of old papers, and a few crazed fans. The King substitute is author Scott Landon, and his wife of 25 years is Lisey (rhymes with CeeCee), a remarkable woman who comes in contact with the unearthly realm from which her husband got his stories. After publishing Lisey‘s Story, King told BookPage “it’s going to be a long time, if ever, before I write anything this good again.” He echoed the sentiment this fall, telling Rolling Stone he considers Lisey’s his best book. “That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I’d never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there’s still things that we don’t know about each other.”

M: Mr. Mercedes
King has always loved a good mystery, but he somehow went 40 years without publishing an all-out detective novel. (He has, however, written a couple mystery paperbacks — The Colorado Kid and Joyland — for Hard Case Crime.) He rectified that situation this June with Mr. Mercedes, where a suicidal retired detective hunts down a maniac who recently plowed a car into a crowd for kicks. King gives his leading man some sidekicks and lends his perp a disturbing backstory, in addition to throwing a mass-murder plot into the mix. Detective Bill Hodges and his buddies will now star in a trilogy, with the second book, Finders Keepers, coming in 2015.

N: Night Shift
Before hitting it big, King worked in laundromats and taught high school English. On the side, he published short stories in magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, a UMaine literary magazine called Ubris, even Cosmopolitan and Redbook. After Carrie, King published three more novels and then dropped a story collection, Night Shift. It contained brief pseudo-prequels to ‘Salem’s Lot and The Stand, which King would publish later that year; a few of the entries — “Children of the Corn,” “The Lawnmower Man,” “Sometimes They Come Back” — later spawned films and sequels. So far, King has published five batches of short stories and three novella collections. Next fall he’ll publish The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which he says will contain 20 brief-ish works and “should be a pretty fat book.” (For comparison, 1993’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes held 24 stories and clocked in at 816 pages.)