Ruminations on the Works of Stephen King - Page 3

He at least seems to let Frank Darabont do his thang. Though the loyalty & devotion to Mick Garris is puzzling & perhaps detrimental to his reputation and even legacy.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that Mick Garris is a lap dog who does everything the way King thinks it should be done.

One of the biggest problems with the film of PET SEMATARY is King's script.

Jeff Boam (?) who wrote the script for Cronenberg's THE DEAD ZONE, says that when Cronenberg brought him on board, King had already written a script, but Cronenberg didn't like it. Boam's description of King's script was "He had turned the story into a Friday the 13th-like thriller, with teenagers in peril".

The thing about the Bachman books is that they were what the protagonist in BAG OF BONES calls "trunked novels". He'd written them early in his career and they had never sold. I guess Clive Barker gave him the courage to bring them out and sell them.

Ah, I did not know that.

I don't know if anybody's familiar with the nitty gritty of the situation, but did the publisher know who they were really dealing with? I would assume they did.

I was one of the few who had read The Long Walk and The Running Man long before the revelation. I just picked them both up at the local Bookmobile in the early 80's and thought they were great.

I think the idea of THE DARK HALF is interesting, post coming out. I've only seen Romero's flick though. Can anyone recommend the book?

The Dark Half movie is a fairly watchable and accurate adaptation of the book. But, and this must be empahsized, it is truly nothing special. Rooker plays Alan Pangborn!

Here's my problem with recommending any of King's works; I read most of them when I was 12-14 yrs. old and LOVED every one of them. I read the shit out of the Dark Half back then, and it was one of my favorites, but if I picked it up and read it today.....well, I just don't know. I guess I'd recommend it?

Oh, shit. I misread yor post. The book is exactly like the movie, except much more violent and a bit darker. It's definately improved by you being 14, as Brasky said.

Okay, SERIOUS nerd alert here...

My memory is a little hazy, but in THE DARK HALF, the protagonist mentions that his wife has a miscarriage after being pushed down an escalator in a mall. When asked if they thought it was intentional or an accident, Thad says that he "doesn't like to think of a man who pushes people down for fun" or some such thing.

Is this a Jack Mort (from Drawing of the Three) cameo? I always thought so, but I never saw it mentioned anywhere else, so I assumed I must be wrong.

I don't remember that per se, but King always does that, and I think Drawing of the Three was about two or three years ahead of Dark Half, so I would say it probably was.

That was another thing that began to turn me off, really. King books started to feel like the Marvel Universe; if you didn't read all the titles, you wouldn't get the crossovers.

And hopefully the Liz Beaumont in my mind will end up being easier on the eyes than Amy Madigan. She's got like 10 years on Hutton and looks every bit of it.

* Apologies.

I can and can't. It's one of those King books that starts off fantastically, full of poetic imagery, psychological ambiguity and resonance, and then derails. It's like INSOMNIA, in a way, so I'd describe it as one of King's self-described "busted novels", where he got stuck, didn't' know where to go, and then forced it by just adding in something ridiculous and continuing from there. I forgot about Dark Half. It's one that I dropped at a certain point when I knew King was lying to me, and I was no longer reading the real story, but a grafted on filler continuation.

I think it's significant that King wrote what he called another way of telling the story of the Dark Half, after he'd written The Dark Half "Secret Window, Secret Garden" in the "Four Past Midnight" collection. It's a little bit long winded for a novella, but it goes where I thought Dark Half was going, and ends properly and logically. But while I was glad to see the story finally told, I am still a little pissed the King would publish a novel without believing it had been properly told. Seems like a lie, you know? Guess King would have lumped me in with Annie from MISERY on this.

I've actually seen his GRAVEYARD SHIFT movie (10 years ago). The scene with that rat on the dinner platter was so...errgh.

I totally agree that King works best in short form, and that given the right writer/director, his work can in many ways be enhanced (SHAWSHANK and THE MSIT come to mind not only for what remained true, but what was brought out from under the surface).

While I'm not claiming to be in Darabont's league, I wrote a fantastic adaptation of one of my favorite King shorts, SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN. I was a senior in film school and needed to do my big final film, and took King's grisly little story and brought out some of the subtext and managed to make it grislier in a lot of ways, both thematically and visually, in a tidy thirteen pages. In and out, the way a King story works best.

I pursued the whole Dollar Baby route, and corresponded regularly with King's literary executor, who all but gave me the rights -- and then abruptly pulled the plug when the NIGHTMARES & DRAMSCAPES show went into production. Because SUFFER was from the NIGHTMARES & DREAMSCAPES collection, the rights were in the possession of TNT, and I couldn't get the sign-off despite TNT having no plans to do SUFFER. I went around with King's people for months, and finally gave in -- and then the fucking show was cancelled (no surprise there). Man, that was a great script.

Seriously. I mean, it started out like it was heading for some overambitious multiple viewpoint think like IT, examining everybody's relationship with Duddits, and then ... King got fed up with it, and blew things up, but early enough to restart the story without so much baggage. When he restarted the story it roared along.

Oh, believe me, I'm as disgusted and contemptuous of the "shitweasels" as everyone else is. It's just that, once King got that out of his system, what was left was a fun ride for me, happily lacking that ludicrous excess.

I was thinking about this, and your essay at the beginning, and I do believe you are right about King's use of ordinary people. King grew up POOR. Really poor. He knows poor people, he rose to middle class but with the fear of poverty still chasing him, so could relate to real people of the middle class who fear falling into poverty. He had children, so could relate to parents. He basically took every scrap of his experience as a human being and tossed into his work as flavor enhancement, and his stories LIVED. I think that a lot of his more recent work is harder to relate to. Protagonists who are bored, but relatively secure and successful, whose children have grown. His novels were distillations of his own life, and they still are.

But one thing has puzzled me. I wonder how accessible he would have been had it not been for his first editor, Bill Thompson. Now, the following might have to be taken with a grain of salt, as Bill may have been blowing his own trumpet, but I read a collection of essays about King, and Bill Thompson's described how he (Bill) suggested to King a rewrite of Carrie in order to make the characters more sympathetic, so that the horror would work better, since we would care about the characters more, a suggestion that King implemented. This really surprised me, because this quality of King's writing was one I assumed came from King naturally, not something he needed to be suggested to him. It made me wonder if this quality in his writing was one King dutifully applied because he trusted his first editor, and one he slowly began to abandon after he parted with his editor and first publisher (after THE STAND).

The thing that really made me wonder was the UNCUT version of THE STAND. I assumed that much of the new material, and the differences in tone, were newly added to the "Uncut" version, not just restorations of the original tone. The changes seemed to go in a more sneering, unsympathetic, character-hating direction. I sincerely with all my heart believed King had simply changed and become more bitter by the time he revised THE STAND for the "Uncut" version, but now I'm beginning to wonder if King was ALWAYS that way, except that he had Bill Thompson as a conscience, insisting that he edit OUT his worst tendencies, insisting that he write IN concern for his characters. It's still a puzzle to me, but I can't forget that little anecdote of Bill Thompson's about CARRIE.

Nobody has mentioned King's "retirement.' We all knew the man wouldn't be able to stop writing (he himself declares that a writer can stop even if he or she wants to), but Jesus, a year later, he was churning out the shittiest product of his career.

Twice I trried to read LISEY'S STORY, and twice I stopped twenty pages in. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too self-indulgent.

The first time King announced his "retirement" was while he was still writing IT. I think it was a Playboy interview. "I considered myself retired by THE STAND, and IT is the one I'll go out on." That was quite a while ago. I wonder how many times he's announced his retirement.

Three times, that I remember. This most recent one was pretty funny, all told, because virtually no one took it seriously, even King. I think he even said he wasn't going to stop writing, just stop publishing.

Thank you Greg David! I wanted to make a few random comments about The Dark Tower series, and thought I'd compare it to DC comics actually.

Massive Spoilers for The Dark Tower ahead...

As it's been pointed out, there's a distinct dividing line made by Wizard and Glass in the series. The first three to four books deal mostly in metaphor, with Roland's travels through Mid-World seeming to represent his own consciousness, or a kind of collective consciousness. Jake being his childhood, Eddie as his friends (Cuthbert, specifically), and Susannah as his lost mother/lover.

Where it goes off the rails for me is with the Wizard of Oz ending to Wizard and Glass. The book is grounded in reality, with the flashbacks, before then, and suddenly Randall Flag shows up twirling his mustache. This should have been the final confrontation between Roland and Flagg, as Flagg's eventual death (by Mordred) felt cheap. Like Mordred didn't earn it, Roland was cheated but didn't even care.

Why didn't Roland care? The Man in Black dies at the end of The Gunslinger, and has a side adventure in The Stand only to appear again later for no apparent reason, hides in the shadows for four books and then gets killed by a new character? Which brings me to the biggest point I'm trying to make, which is the lack of a central villain in the series. The first four books work very well as stand alone novels, highlighting the conflicting aspects of Roland's character. The fifth book, however, makes the mistake of trying to ground the story.

Whereas the first three have the characters walking through an endless wasteland of myth/fable/archetype, suddenly they arrive in a real, tangible place, the Calla Bryn Sturgis. Essentially the events of Roland's flashback are replayed, but Roland as an adult with a different lover and different friends. Here's where the series becomes too obsessed with its own continuity, around the time King realized he had to introduce a quantifiable destination for the Dark Tower rather than an abstract concept.

I couldn't help but think of the Crisis on Infinite Earths while reading The Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower. Suddenly instead of Mid-World being an atrophied reflection of our own world, it's one of many infinite parallel earths. King even realizes how he's veered into comic book territory by comparing the Wolves to Doctor Doom, with their robot bodies and green cloaks.

For all the silliness with Father Callahan and King himself showing up, at least they are written well. At that point, the last three books worked for me because I had invested so much time in the characters and story and had a lot of good will for them...until the aforementioned ending of VII. Flagg is killed off when he really should have been the main villain. Mordred, who has been set up since Susannah's demon rape in The Drawing of the Three, is introduced only to die a pathetic death. So we're left with The Crimson King.

A being that has been referenced several times throughout the series, but does not make an appearance until the finale, and what a disappointing finale. A raving lunatic throwing grenades at Roland from a balcony (not even the top of the tower)? The last minute introduction of Patrick Danville really bugged me, as I had not read Insomnia. Why did King use that book to develop the big bad of his epic series? Shouldn't Roland be the key to defeating the CK, not some deus ex machina? All that being said, I did like the time loop introduced at the very end, especially since Roland has his horn next time around and maybe that will make a difference.

Wooo! Sorry, long winded. One last thing, though. Was Dandello, the psychic vampire holding Patrick Danville, supposed to be Pennywise the Clown? Not only does he morph into a clown as he's dying, but Patrick was from Derry, Maine, and I know (from wikipedia) that the Crimson King is connected to the Deadlights. Another unfortunate aspect of a shared universe, however, is that in IT, Pennywise is set up as the antithesis of the Turtle. If, however, he is Dandello, he's just a thug of the Crimson King.

Meh.

I don't think Dandello was It, though he could have been an aspect of It or some bullshit like that. Dark Tower worked really well as episodes, it just couldn't support the epic storytelling that got imposed on it, especially in the last bunch of books.

I still haven't read the last book. I had re-read the entirety of the series thus far as book 6 came out, and after that one, I was so bored that I couldn't continue. I even kind of liked the much-maligned Wolves of the Calla, but Song of Susannah just killed my momentum.

Song of Susannah was pretty terrible. But I must admit that I took way too much enjoyment out of repeatedly saying skolpadda in a very bad Swedish accent after reading it.

I think the real problem wit V-VII is that he was looking over his shoulder for the reaper, and didn't want to leave it unfinished. Hell, it's a plot point in 6 and 7 (which was a really bad idea, by the way). It would explain why there are enough good ideas in those three books for one incredibly kick ass Vol. V, where you can actually take time to set up the endgame. Maybe you dump Call Bryn Sturgis, or combine it into the Breakers compound from 7, and make those sequences one, let Mordred's birth end the book, and probably do away with all the meta shit. Keep Callahan, or don't. Then, in Book VII, all new adventures with Mordred, Flagg and the Crimson King getting the plotting and development they deserve. Maybe even make it a "villains" book primarily. And Book VII, can be just about anything. Just spitballing here.

Christ, yes.

"Chud, this Chud, stand, be brave, be true, stand for your brother, your friends: believe, believe in all the things you have believed in... believe that courage is possible and words will come smoothly every time; no more losers... believe in yourself, believe in the heat of that desire." - The Turtle, Chapter 22, IT.

Ayuh...Laws, yes.

Chapter 22? Now, was that before or after the bizarre kiddie porn gang bang in the sewers? Seriously (and not to take away from the Dark Tower conversation (with which I wholeheartedly agree)), but what a ham-fisted storytelling device. What was King's thought process there?

Okay, so the Losers have defeated Pennywise. I need something... something to symbolize that they've grown up. Hmmmm *snorts line of coke with a $1,000,000 bill* I've GOT it!!! I'll have them all bang Bev in the sewers. Sex is super adult! Brilliant!

Now "It" is probably my favorite King novel and I've read it more times than I'd like to admit, but that scene never fails to ring false. Perhaps that's just me.


And... end rant now.

I agree. I first read It when I was 15, and even then (before I became...um, sophisticated), it didn't make any sense.

It still doesn't. I must have blocked it from my memory, because when I reread it this year, I was flabbergasted. Bev uses it as a way to get the other kids to focus, so they can find their way out... She couldn't snap her fingers? I thought Eds had the mad navigation skills.

Right. The Losers, post battle, are beginning to regress back to simple children. Bev uses her body as the means to re-focus their energies and unite them. It's just bloody (no pun intended) awful, makes little sense in the same deus ex machina methodology that riddles many of King's works, and is a god-awful metaphor for the Losers' transition into adulthood. Man, it's just so, so bad.

As prudish as American culture is about young sex, I'm surprised that book didn't cause more of an uproar. I certainly don't remember anyone howling for his blood back in the day. Then again, most Americans don't read, so maybe nobody noticed.

Yeah, pretty much the people that would be most up in arms are the folks that wouldn't come within 10 feet of a Stephen King book in the first place.

Those type of people had already been up in arms for most of the decade. Most of his books were banned from public school libraries in the south. Along with Judy Blume, public enemy no. 1. I went to an extremely conservative private school, and he was almost synonymous with pornography.

I think it's just another example of King's inability to reject an idea. He's apparently never come up with an idea that he thought wouldn't work. Just the sheer rate at which he pumps out books suggests that he goes with every idea that occurs to him. He has no internal censor. And for every great moment this has given him (I still think that Survivor Type is one of the most brilliantly transgressive things he's ever written), there are ten examples of times when he just shouldn't have gone there.

Such as his streak of something like 5-6 books in a row that all dealt with child molestation and/or spouse abuse. It really started to skeeve me out a little.

We watched IT my senior year in high school in a film studies class. During the sewer scene, when they're kids, I blurted out how a big gang bang took place during this part in the book. No one, including the teacher, believed me and I was pretty much villified by the whole class. Being the stubborn bastard I am, I skimmed the last 300 pages or so that night just so I could find the exact pages and had my teacher read it the next day. Sweet.

Just watched The Mist yesterday. Brilliant movie, although the ending still doesn't sit right.

Spoilers ahead!

Don't want to derail this thread or anything, because I know this discussion polarizes people, but I can't help but feel that the ending could have maintained the irony if Jane had died and then the tanks had rolled up. I felt like the movie was punishing Jane's character. Meh, still works for me. Loved the Dark Tower references, the poster at the beginning and "My Life for yours."

Talisman, Bag of Bones, Dreamcatcher and Pet Semetary are waiting on my shelf to be read. Watching The Mist may be what lights a fire under my ass.

Before I say more I'll say that Stephen King is what I wanted to read when I was in the 3rd grade. I saw Tobe Hooper's Salem's Lot on TV, and commercial's for Kubrick's The Shining, and they scared the hell out of me. So when "bad" teachers, relatives, librarians encouraged me to read King. King was very popular and I think you can't discount the effect he's had on the horror genre such as it is. BUT

I agree that he's written some downright horrible shit, which I never would have thought he could do up until the disappointment of Tommyknockers following up IT. Yes I thought the sex thing at the end of It was ridiculous, but as is typical, other than the ending it was a great EC Comic effort.

I still re-read IT, Salem's Lot, The Shining, Dead Zone, Bachman stuff, his short stories sometimes. I dig Creepshow and Maximum Overdrive. I like his schlocky stuff. Desperation and Dreamcatcher I thought were relatively OK, compared to most of his later crap. Even his short stories haven't been so great in recent years. I still read all of his crap though, just so I can hate on it.

The Cell and Buick 8 were especially disappointing. I grew up in Western PA and was excited for that locale in Buick 8 but it could have been anywhere, the book offered no characterization of the place.

Colorado Kid sucked my balls too.

Dark Tower series I haven't finished reading cause it got so bad. All that Harry Potter type crap. Give me a break Steve.

Remember that SNL skit when the Weekend Update interviewed King and he had writers block... for about 8 seconds.

"The Lost Work of Stephen King" is worth a read as it delivers plot summary capsules of various early work... which, those "story ideas" come in a very EC Comic fashion and are probably just as good as the actual lost work

Has anyone ever done a comparison read of the original _The Stand_ and _The Stand: Complete and Uncut_ ? I tried to do it a while ago, going line by line.

What was weird was that every difference in the "Complete and Uncut" version seemed to make all the characters less likeable. I remember the part about Lloyd in jail had all this little stuff inserted (restored?) to make it a big joke on Lloyd that he was starving in jail (there was one bit that felt like a shoved in insert where he thinks, for no reason, that the food at this jail that he's just entering is better than at some other jail, just to make it funny when he starves later). And for some reason King decides to gratuitously have Lloyd masturbate to get to sleep when he's in his cell, thinking "It was as good a way to get to sleep as any". I thought that was a wierd "Uncut" addition, which seemed to be designed to distance the reader from Lloyd and feel less sympathy for him.

I remember little expansions, like that family back from Disneyworld who stop into a motel and end up infected and spreading the infection to everyone in the motel. In the original you just felt horrified that this nice family was infected and going to die. In the "Uncut" King adds (or restores) a long pointless bit about what a jerk the dad is, and how proud he is of his parenting, making it a stupid joke on him when his family gets infected (at least, that's the way it came off to me).

Then there was the section on the "Good Ole Boys" in jail, with the deaf and dumb kid guarding them. (what was his name?) In the original, it seemed like a moment of human forgiveness when he lets Mike go, and they are united in their humanity vs. the plague. In the "Uncut" King adds all this stuff to make Mike more immature and goofy seeming, and threatening (the kid makes sure to stay out of reach of his hands, for instance). And then the "Uncut" ends with this awful melodrama about how another "Good Ole Boy" comes back to try and gouge out Nick's eyes. (he's deaf , so how awful if he becomes blind as well!) It ruined that note of forgiveness feeling from the original, as Nick ends by kicking the guy's corpse after the struggle. Ugh. Also, that bit about people who survive the plague but are too stupid to survive, listing all the "Darwin's Award" moments. (I think King ripped that idea off from "Earth Abides", which didn't gleefully dwell on people's deaths after a plague the way King does).

And passages that seemed poetic and magical got ruined. The introduction of Flagg, in the original, was spare and poetic. In the "Uncut" King decides to make Flagg over-the-top-goofy-evil, and where in the original flagg read "tattered paperback novels", in the Uncut he reads "Mein Kampf, and "porno novels" and "Pamphlets from the Birch society". And then there is this long added bit where Flagg kills a gay man, after torturing him for a bit, by sitting on him to suffocate him (Haha, get it, he's gay, and he longed for young men's buttocks, and he was killed by being SAT on! And it has this retarded continuity problem where the guy, despite being almost dead from suffocation due to his throat being swollen shut, screams several times before his breathing passages get opened by a splash of cold water). On a positive note, there is this bit in the "Uncut" version that wasn't in the original, but seems like it belonged in the original, where Flagg visits a junkyard to retrieve a car, and makes jewels appear and disappear just for the fun of it. This seemed like original material that was restored, as opposed to the nutty stuff about sitting on a gay man, which seemed newly added in King's modern joky style (compare the original spooky Flagg to Flagg who looks like a "crazed Santa Claus from hell's shit impacted bowels".)

The original had that Military guy, who was in charge of Project Blue, decide to leave the compound and join humanity. He seemed to be wracked by guilt, and we felt bad for him. In the Uncut he becomes grotesque and insane, and walks around in his lab playing with corpses and pondering squeezing the boobs of one corpse, before blowing his brains out. It was grotesque and comical, and distanced me from the character, when, in the original, I had kinda felt bad for the character.

For me, the worst example (and there's tons of others) was the chapter where Frannie buried her father. In the original it was poetic, to-the-point, and one really felt for Frannie. It had this incredible mental association linking, not explicitly pointed out, where Frannie's mind drifts from the sun shining on he father's knives, to the clinking of ice cubes in the fridge, to her final realization that her father needs burying. One really felt for her. In the "Uncut", the passage gets mutilated by her ditzily thinking about French Fries and McDonald's quarter pounders, a flashback to a bit about barricading the town, and her watching a show on TV that turns violent and stupidly thinking that it was just fiction. (it links to another Uncut addition about white and black soldiers killing eahother for comic effect). It makes her into a whiner, who whinily decides to bury her father, but isn't able to do it with love for her father until (get this!) his corpse FARTS at her, which somehow manages to shock her out of being whiny. Lots of morbid focus on flies on her father's corpse. I was horrified when I read this version in the "Uncut".

Overall, it just seemed that the "uncut" gave King the opportunity to graffiti all over his older work, and remove any pretensions of concern for poetry and beauty. I know I could have done without Trashcan Man getting a gun shoved up his anus.

Generally, comparing the two versions seems to prove that King has stopped caring about characters, in the way he seemed to when he was younger, and when I liked him better. I remember first really thinking this when I first tried to read "Needful Things" and I realized that King was out to get all his characters. (the only moment I truly remember as personal was a bit about that guy and his fishing rod, and his memories of his father).

Interesting.... I've never read the "uncut' version. I love the original published version and read it every year or so.

What your analysis tells me is that the King books published when Bill Thompson was his editor are the "Classic King" novels: Carrie up through Cujo (I think). Once King became the best selling novelist in history (has Rowling taken over that slot?) he could publish his novels on his terms, to ill effect. IMO

What is interesting is that "The Stand", as I understand it, was King's last novel with Bill Thompson. I also heard (but don't know where) that Bill Thompson was fired because King left, and they blamed it on Thompson.(I really don't know if this is true). I wonder if King left because he just didn't like the revisions he was asked to make. (I think he was already addicted to cocaine at that point).

I think his verbal diarrhea was increased, or caused, by his cocaine use. I think that it's been emphasized that the "Uncut" is not just a restoration, but had a lot of revisions, and even new additions. I can't believe that the Belching Corpse scene (I forget, was it farting or belching?) was originally intended to be in the chapter where Frannie buries her father. Since Pet Sematary was written AFTER The Stand (I think) and there was a deleted scene where a child's corpse farts/belches, which King says came out of research he had done for that book, I guess he imposed it on the Uncut, where it had never been before, because he was so saddened by having to lose it in Pet Sematary.

I believe recent editions of the "Uncut" have included the word "expanded" in the title. In "Four Past Midnight" on of King's notes mentioned that he had "revised" THE STAND, and he compares what he did to some other author's extensive revision of some work (I forget who).

Yeah, but if you are laughing at people, you are sympathizing with them less. So I missed that feeling of compassion. Maybe King never had it, and his editor(s) insisted he insert it.

Yeah, but it seems more like an insertion on revision, where the author decides to foreshadow the starvation and ADD humor to it. But one is still snickering at Lloyd's expectation of good food, instead of reacting to his horrible situation when he starves. It seems like a joke you can only appreciate if you've read it before, and know what's coming re: starvation. And I really, really, didn't like the dark humor of the Darwin Awards chapter.

As for the dead woman in the tent ... it's possible that she was written in to replace the Darwin Awards chapter, standing in for for all of them. And then King restored the Darwin Awards alongside it ? Who knows. I don't remember finding the dead woman in the tent having an undercurrent of humor in the original.

One of the things I noticed was a LOT of humorous references to sneezing and snot that were NOT in the original. I remember one dumb joke about some broadcast assuring everyone that everything would be fine, punctuated by a sneeze off camera. That kind of goofy humor really ruins the mood of a feeling of a real apocalypse occurring.

Vulture has celebrated the release of Stephen King's latest Dark Tower book by ranking all of his works--a Herculean feat!  My placements would be a little different, but I really liked this article.  Clearly the author, Gilbert Cruz, took the assignment seriously and has an appreciation of King's monumental body of work.  Recommend (if you're a King fan).

 

The Complete Works: Ranking All 62 Stephen King Books