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The most horrible of Stephen King's horror tales is one taken from the author's own life: He was nearly killed when he was hit by a car in 1999. You'd expect a wealthy author to be kidnapped for ransom or something equally exotic. But King, true to the spirit of his fiction, was out for an afternoon walk near his home in Maine when a van struck him. The driver explained later that he was distracted as he tried to keep his pet Rottweiler from snitching meat out of a cooler in the back seat.
Sounds like fodder for one of King's book, doesn't it? In fact, the writer's account of the accident and his recovery, which was first published in The New Yorker and then as a postscript to the book On Writing two years ago, is already destined to become a classic. Here's how King describes the scene as he's lying in the grass afterward:
"There's another little break in my memory, and then I am very carefully wiping palmfuls of blood out of my eyes with my left hand. When my eyes are reasonably clear, I look around and see a man sitting on a nearby rock. He has a cane drawn across his lap. This is Bryan Smith, 46 years of age, the man who hit me with his van. Smith told friends later that he thought he'd hit 'a small deer' until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of Smith's way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write this."
I loved On Writing, so when King's latest book, Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales, came out, I was curious to see if his short stories have the same power. Right away, I noticed the similarities between the description of King's real-life accident and Autopsy Room Four, the first story in the collection.
It's about a man who is suddenly stricken on the golf course and wakes up on an autopsy table, unable to speak, move, or communicate that he's still alive. He listens as the medical personnel chat and joke about all sorts of mundane things -- including him and his resemblance to the pop singer Michael Bolton -- as they prepare to slice him open.
CREEPED OUT. What happens from there I won't say because I don't want to spoil the story. But it's eerie because the short story was written in 1996 -- three years before the accident -- yet the fictional character is in the same awful but almost comical state of helplessness that King found himself in as he was lying by the road talking with Smith about his fractured pelvis.
"Tell me it's only dislocated," King pleads in the book. Smith, his voice "cheery, only mildly interested," responds: "Naw. It's broken in five I'd say maybe six places." Later, King concludes that he had "nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels."
Therein lies King's genius. His imagination is so sensitive that he's perpetually creeped out by everyday life. He used to write drunk or high on cocaine. In On Writing, he states that he barely remembers writing Cujo. About 15 years ago, his wife, Tabitha, organized an intervention that convinced him to go into rehab. She started by pouring out a trash bag full of junk she had collected from his office.
Here's what it contained, according to King's account in On Writing: "Beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash." He worried that going clean would make him less creative, but if anything he seems to have gotten only more prolific. Even the accident barely slowed him down: His output now includes some 40 books.
POE, HITCHCOCK. He usually starts developing a story from some small, mundane real-life experience -- reading a Dear Abby column in the newspaper or contemplating a $40 garage-sale painting -- that would scarcely register with anyone else. He spins it out into a tale through a series of extrapolations and imaginings. In the new collection, he's at his best when he lets his imagination run wild. In some cases, this results in classic Edgar Allen Poe-style horror stories like Autopsy Room Four or The Man in the Black Suit, which is about a young boy who goes fishing one day and ends up encountering the devil in the woods.
He also excels in stories that are reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's movie classic The Birds, where the world seems to be off-kilter in some horrible and terrifying way. In The Road Virus Heads North, a garage-sale oil painting comes alive with potentially fatal consequences. Lunch at the Gotham Café -- which starts with an odd wink from a restaurant maître d'-- is about a man who goes to lunch in New York City with his estranged wife and her lawyer. As the three start discussing why she wants a divorce, the maître d' goes mad. It's a beautifully constructed evocation of a man's life falling apart that gradually turns into a raw, violent horror story.
Like most hugely prolific writers, King's work is uneven. For my money, he's at his worst in science-fiction stories like The Little Sisters of Eluria, where he strays too far from the real world. He also tends to use too much childishly vulgar language -- locutions like "eat a dirt sandwich" for dying -- and he relies too much on TV and movie references to do his work for him. He'll say someone "looks like George Hamilton" rather than describe the character himself.
IN AND OUT. All in all, though, this new collection is excellent vacation reading. You can dip into a short story, be horrified, and be done with it rather than have to wade through a 400-page novel that will keep you preoccupied for three or four days. And if you haven't read On Writing, which came out two years ago, put it on your summer reading list, too. It purports to be a writer's guide, but it's much more than that.
If you've always wondered how King comes up with his ideas, the keys are in On Writing. His stories come from real life -- weirdly reimagined and distorted. And in his case, life sometimes imitates his art.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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