Everything you ever wanted to know about Stephen King

If you are a fan of Stephen King and are fortunate enough to stop by Bangor, Maine, you should know that you can get on a bus and tour, for three hours, the main settings of some of his novels. But not only his novels. Because in the same way that the route passes next to the statue of Paul Bunyan – the enormous lumberjack owned by the clown Pennywise in the novel Item—, he does it next to the laundry where the writer worked after college, when things were still going really badly and he and Tabitha, his wife, already had two children. In the king of terror – and now also of not to go supernatural—life and work are the same strange and exciting thing, as demonstrated by the exhaustive work of Bev Vincent, the most illustrious fan of King, author since 2001 of a column in which he x-rays the writer called Stephen King: News from the Dead Zone. In 2022, coinciding with King's 75th birthday, Vincent also published an illustrated book that reviews his career and which the Cúpula publishing house has just published in Spanish.

Its title, Stephen King. A great celebration of the life and work of the great master of horrorcould be replaced by the simpler Here's everything you ever wanted to know about King, a collection of pieces that explore the figure of King, always somewhat elusive in the press. It includes photographs in which little King is seen clinging to a bottle, or smiling, with his brother, in a garden with a house in the background, at six years old. There are also some never seen before, like the one that places him in Stratford, Connecticut, with a handful of friends who could pass for his friends. The bodythe story on which the film was based Count on me (1986), by Rob Reiner. The book details, somewhat succinctly, his early years—how his father left home when he was two and his adopted brother was one, and how his mother raised them alone, sometimes going back and forth—, but above all it immerses the reader in his work and how intimately it is related to his always unshowy, small, life.

“You could say I'm the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries,” Vincent says King once said and has probably never regretted anything more. After that, Harold Bloom, the critic and instigator of the “Western canon,” a personal list of affiliations that was considered universal, openly despised him, ensuring that there was nothing “dignifiedly aesthetic” in his writing and that he would be remembered “ as a sociological phenomenon. And being even more cruel, he propped up “an image of the death of the literary reader.” Bloom bristled at the first of King's blatantly “literate” honors—the National Book Foundation medal in 2003—and more would follow—the National Medal of Arts in 2011 and the PEN American Literary Service. in 2018—in the present hyper-revolutionary and revolutionized stage of his career—he continues to produce a huge number of pages per year, at a rate of at least ten a day, which he writes between nine and one in the afternoon.

Vincent covers that career chronologically in his encyclopedic volume, stopping at each novel and even in the book he dedicated to the 2004 season of the Red Sox team; Yes, King is a big baseball fan and it's not a bad idea to stop by the field on game day if you want to end up with a signed copy of his books. The book lets King himself do the talking, something unusual because the writer does not usually give interviews. His fame is such that if he did it, he says, he wouldn't do anything else. It's not like he talked to Vincent about his books either. Like a character of King himself—like a not-terrible Annie Wilkes, the fanatical protagonist of Misery, whose origin, by the way, is told, in which there is a mix of Dostoevsky, Evelyn Waugh and a nightmare on an airplane—Vincent compiles and orders statements and vanishing points, composing a totemic cabinet of curiosities. His typewritten poems are there, among them, the poem from which his recurring villain Randall Flagg emerged. Also his handwritten pages, because he often writes by hand, especially after the accident that almost cost him his life.

Narrative enthusiasm

The volume also gives an account of the muscle of his narrative enthusiasm: all those accumulated manuscripts, how his brain decrypts reality in a terrifying key, or what happened when he went to pick up the car from the mechanic and decided that the noise made by the bridge he crossed walking had been done by a creepy creature (Pennywise), or when he simply wondered what would happen if his car's odometer started going backwards (Christine). But it also highlights his influence on popular culture. Those who know about King from his tweets — his battle against guns, Trump or transphobia, or the generosity with which he changes the lives of any debut writer he reads if he likes it — may have no idea how much of a driving force he is. has meant for the publishing sector. Not only did it come forward with the audiobook and the ebook or tried to resurrect the serial novel with The green Mile; is that he was the first to share an unpublished story on the internet, opening a then unthinkable new door to reading.

He started a band with Amy Tan and other writers, The Rock Bottom Remainders – which toured small towns -, he bought a local station so that rock – with which he tends to write – would never leave the airwaves and also to make programs with his wife, whom he never stops thanking for always being there, even in the moments when he could write 400-page novels without remembering having done so because he drank and took drugs too much; She weighed 107 kilos and smoked so much that the doctor assured her that he was in “heart attack territory” and, in response, he wrote Hex. He created his own imprint, Philtrum Press—designed by a college classmate—and it is rumored that his house in Bangor—the one with the wrought-iron gate and bats, which opened on Halloween, which made him, he says, “ the Santa Claus of Halloween”—could become a writers' residency sooner or later.

The feast of Vincent's monument book is endless in this type of unexpected and unknown details, as has been, from the beginning, the enthusiasm with which King returns to the world everything that reading gave him as a child, when the life he I imagined was infinitely superior to the real thing. A magnanimous enthusiasm that will end when it itself ends. “I will know when the time has come: either I will collapse on my table or I will run out of ideas. What you don't want is to embarrass yourself. As long as I believe that I continue doing a good job, I don't see myself stopping,” said the writer, who if he holds some type of record for film adaptations it is also because, until a month ago, and from the beginning, he was selling the rights to his stories. for a dollar to promising young people, students and aspiring filmmakers who, like Bev Vincent himself, end up one day convincing him that they are worthy, in terms of passion for what they do, of his Dollar Baby Program. Passion, always.

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