Stephen King Biography and List of Works

American novelist and short-story writer, whose enormously popular books revived the interest in horror fiction from the 1970s. King's place in modern horror fiction can be compared to that of J.R.R. Tolkien's who created the modern genre of fantasy. Like Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens or Balzac in his La Comédie Humaine, King has expressed the characteristic concerns of his era, and used the horror genre as his own branch of artistic expression. King has underlined, that even in the world of cynicism, despair, and cruelties, it remains possible for individuals to find love and discover unexpected resources in themselves and conquer their own problems and malevolent powers that would suppress or destroy them.

"I wish I could get away from horror for a while, and I do - or I think I do, and then suddenly I discover that I'm like the guy in the poem by Auden who runs and runs and finally end up in a cheap, one-night hotel. He goes down a hallway and opens a door, and there he meets himself sitting under a naked light bulb, writing."
(King in Faces of Fear by Douglas E. Winter (1990))

King was born in Portland, Maine. After his father, a merchant seaman, deserted the family in 1950, young Stephen and his brother were raised in Durham, Maine, by their mother who worked in odd jobs to support her children. King attended a grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, where he started to write short stories and played in an amateur rock band. In 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine. Next year he married Tabitha Spruce, who has also gained fame as a writer.

From 1971 to 1974 King was an instructor at the Hampden Academy. His first novel CARRIE (1974), which was a tale of a girl with telekinetic powers, had only moderate success and sold 13,000 copies in hardcover. However, after the film adaptation of the book in 1976 and the breakthrough novel SALEM'S LOT (1976), King established quickly his reputation as a horror writer.

For most of his writing career King has lived in Bangor, Maine. Many of his books are set in the imaginary town of Castle Rock, Maine, which is finally destroyed in NEEDFUL THINGS (1993).

In the late 1970s King published his first paperbacks under the name of Richard Bachman. THE TALISMAN (1984) was written with Peter Staub. King has also published non-fiction. In his collection of essays, DANCE MACABRE (1981), King described the writing process as a kind of "dance" in which the author searches out the private fears of each reader. In the textbook of macabre he goes through the horror genre, from film monsters to books, focusing mostly on the post-war era.

"It's not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third lever here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is a rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination - just one more pipeline to the infinite."
(from Dance Macabre)

A number of Kings' stories have been adapted into screen, among them Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1995), and The Green Mile (1999). His novels are richly textured with multitudinous references to films, television, rock music, literature, popular culture, and in his own books. Several of King's early novels explored the agonies of childhood, parental neglect and abuse (Carrie; FIRESTARTER, 1980). In the 1980s his perspective shifted into the various pains of adulthood and the loneliness of old age (IT, 1986; INSOMNIA, 1994). He has also provided fully rounded female lead characters in such novels as GERALD'S GAME (1992), DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1993) and ROSE MADDER (1995).

For further reading: Stephen King: The Fist Decade by Jospeh Reino (1988); The Stephen King Companion, ed. George W. Beahm (1989); Stephen King: Man and Artits by Carroll F. Terrell (1990); The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia (1991); Stephen King: The Second Decade by Tony Magistrale (1992); The Films of Stephen King by Ann Lloyd (1993); Stephen King's America by Jonathan P. Davis (1994); The Work of Stephen King: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide by Michael R. Collings (1996); Stephen King: A Critical Companion by Sharon A. Russell (1996); Speaking of Murder, ed. by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (1998)

Other famous modern horror writers: Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, John Farris, Stephen Gallagher, James Herbert, Peter James, Dean R. Koontz, Richard Laymon, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, Robert McCammon, Anne Rice, John Saul, Peter Straub, Whitley Strieber. - What is horror: "The main criterion is that it should be both frightening and repulsive, with elements of horror, fantasy and the supernatural", from Now Read On... by Mandy Hicken and Ray Prytherch (1994). See also: Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror (1997); The Penquin Encyclopædie of Horror and the Supernatural (1986)

BAG OF BONES (1998)

After writing The Pet Sematary King considered he don't deed to publish it. "It's the most wretched, awful thing". The story dealt with the grief process in an uncompromising way. In his latest novel, BAG OF BONES, King returns to the theme of loss of a family member, and adds into it the classical haunted house idea and familiar elements from his previous works: a small town where people know more than they tell, the collective guilt, and a hero who can't avoid confrontation with the evil powers. Old crimes, sins and secrets, hidden deep, are gradually revealed in an analysis of the conscious and unconscious like on Freud's sofa. Playing with fire, King plunges into the mind of Mike Noonan, an author who suffers from writer's block. Noonan's wife has died unexpectedly and he retreats to Sara Laughs, their happy home during summers. There he meets a young mother, Mattie, and her daughter, whom he helps in a custody struggle.

Mattie is one of the most lively characters in King's works. Her sudden death, a logical twist of the plot, comes like electric shock. In the last pages of the novel Noonan/King returns to it and states correctly that 'to think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.' Bag of Bones continues the series where King explorers the writing process and the work of an author. The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half and now Bag of Bones are among his most revealing and personal works.

King is not among those writers who claim that they don't have time to read. Bag of Bones offers a delightful analysis of Herman Melville's story Bartleby, and comments about books and authors. Among them is Thomas Hardy, who stopped writing novels at the peak of his career and changed into poetry. Hardy supposedly said, that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.

CARRIE, (1974)