Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (18 page)

³¹
On The Shining and Other Perpetrations
, in
Whispers
#17/18, August 1982, page 16 

³²
The Seventeenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories
, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. London: Fontana/Collins, 1981;
Great Ghost Stories: Tales of Madness and Mystery
, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones. Baltimore: Cemetery Dance Publications, 2004; and
Great Ghost Stories
, selected by R. Chetwynd-Hayes and Stephen Jones. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004 

³³
The first independent reprint of the original text appears in
Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead
, edited by John Skipp. New York, NY: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009. 

American Vampire (2010) 

American Vampire
is a comic book series launched by Vertigo (an imprint of DC Comics) in May 2010. It represents King’s first original comic script. Each of the five issues in the first “arc” (a comic book term for an extended or continuing storyline) will have one story by King and one by series creator, Scott Snyder. After the first arc King will have no further involvement. 

According to publicity material
³⁴
:  

The series twists the well-trod vampire legend by allowing the creatures to evolve into a distinctly American creature and will follow the adventures of Skinner Sweet, a sociopathic outlaw in the Wild West who becomes the first American vampire. Unlike European vamps, Skinner is powered by the sun and, true to his native environment, has rattlesnake fangs. Each cycle, consisting of five individual comic issues, will take place in a different period of time in American history, tracing Skinner’s descendants, with Skinner himself as a recurring character. 

Snyder originally sold his idea for “a uniquely American take on vampires” to DC Comics then approached King for a blurb. The author enjoyed the tale so much he suggested he’d be willing to contribute to future issues. Naturally enough, this excited Snyder and the editors at Vertigo, who agreed. King then penned five stories relating to Skinner’s origins in the American West. Again, according to publicity material:  

King’s arc will trace the origins of the first American vampire, Skinner Sweet, as he goes fang-to-fang with even nastier vamps, a group out to get rich by damming up a river to create a new town. “It’s really the vampire as American capitalist gone totally wild.” (King said) 

Only the King stories in the first five issues are “canon,” or officially by King. King’s story in Issue One is
Bad Blood
. Set in Sidewinder, Colorado in 1880, this first tale is narrated by Will Bunting, who “only wrote one novel in my life –
Bad Blood
.” Sidewinder is an imaginary town from King’s America Under Siege Reality – it first appeared in
The Shining
as the town closest to the Overlook Hotel, and has since appeared in
Before the Play
,
Misery
and
The Talisman
, along with both of King’s adaptations of
The Shining
. It is notable that he chose to make this link. 

Bunting says most of his “novel” (later revealed as
Bad Blood, or The Monster Outlaw – A Terrifying Tale of the Old West
by William Bunting) is actually true. His story opens with Skinner Sweet, “notorious murderer and bank-thief” in the custody of the Pinkerton Agency, operating on behalf of “Percy,” a wealthy banker. As the train carrying Sweet and his captors proceeds from Sidewinder towards New Mexico Sweet’s crew prepare to derail the train, intent on freeing Sweet and killing all the passengers – “No Witnesses!” 

Meanwhile, Sweet regales a Pinkerton agent with the tale of his gang’s robbery of a bank in Bakersville, Colorado six months earlier. While his men were raping the women (and one man!) a loan officer began a shoot out, in which a number of people including a three year old child were killed. The gang retreated to a nearby mine to hole-up.  

Just before the train is derailed Sweet unlocks his handcuffs, using a peppermint stick. Bunting watched the aftermath of the derailment, “What I saw next was surely colored by my imagination a swell as by the dying hues of that terrible day’s sunset … but what I saw is more real than any
dream
or
memory
.” Sweet and his gang are confronted by “Old Man Percy” who amazingly says, “I think I’ve had enough of your shit, Mr.
Sweet
.” The gang shoots Percy dead but he immediately rises and
bites
Sweet in the neck, baring lengthy fangs. Sweet shoots Percy again and again before being shot dead himself. His gang flees and Percy and the survivors leave Sweet’s body by the side of the railroad. Percy (we now realize he is a vampire) is furious! Bunting closes this first tale, declaring, “I started writing that very night, and I think I knew two things even then: that what I wrote could only be published as fiction … and Skinner Sweet’s story wasn’t over but
just beginning
.” 

Percy has “very fair skin” and avoids direct sunlight as much as possible (he is seen carrying an unfurled umbrella), so unlike the traditional vampire he can go out in daylight (in fact he is suffering a mild sunburn). This begins our understanding that these peculiarly American vampires are actually powered by the sun. 

King’s final four tales had not been published at the time of writing. Copies of the comic books are easily purchased either new from specialist stores, or on the secondary market. It is also likely
American Vampire
will be collected in one or more graphic novels (the first volume of which would contain all King’s material). It is most unlikely King’s material from the series will ever appear in one of his collections. 

³⁴
www.thedailybeast.com
25 October 2009 and 14 March 2010
 

An Evening at God’s (1990) 

An Evening at God’s
is a “one-minute play” that King wrote for a benefit evening. The manuscript was auctioned on 23 April 1990 at the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training. While it has never been published the text circulates freely in the King community. 

According to Stephen J. Spignesi
³⁵
other authors who contributed to the benefit included Art Buchwald, J. K. Galbraith, Larry Gelbart, David Mamet and John Updike. He reports an interview with Gail Caldwell of the
Boston Globe
³⁶
in which King summarizes the play as:  

God sitting at home and drinking a few beers and St. Peter comes in with papers to pass, and God’s watching a sitcom on TV. And the earth is sort of hanging in the way of the TV, and he keeps trying to look around it to see the television. So I sat down and wrote it. And it may have been a critical comment: The typewriter broke down while I was working on this, and I had to redo it. 

When God crushes the Earth, St. Peter is somewhat rueful and points out that some of God’s favorite comedians
–
Alan Alda, Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, all
used
to live on Earth. Initially disappointed, God remembers he has all the videotapes. 

Typically of King a lot of fun and action are crammed into the “one minute” in which this play should be performed. At the beginning there are signs that God has been drinking a lot of beer and, on finding he had destroyed the world on which his favorite comedians live he says, “Shit. Maybe I better cut down on my drinking.” In addition to a drinking problem God also has a problem with certain foods, telling St Peter, “I should know better than to eat those chili peppers. They burn me at both ends.” 

This amusing little piece includes a line from God reminiscent of that uttered by Jake Chambers as Roland let him fall to his second death, “Go then. There are other worlds than these.” St. Peter says, “I actually sort of liked that one, God – Earth, I mean,” and God replies, “It wasn’t bad, but there’s more where that came from.”  

A papier-mached globe represents Earth, hanging between the TV and God. As it interferes with His viewing God smashes it out of the way, killing us all. In fact, God’s housekeeper gets at least some of the blame. St. Peter remarks before God lashes out at our planet, “So Earth’s still there, Huh? After all these years”, God replies, “Yes, the housekeeper is the most forgetful bitch in the universe.” 

Perhaps the most interesting exchange occurs when God mutters, “My son got back, didn’t he?” St. Peter: “Yessir, some time ago.” At the beginning of the play God is described as “a big guy with a white beard” reading a book –
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
. Concluding the script is an Author’s Note, “God’s Voice should be as loud as possible.” 

While no timeline for the events is given we know that Alan Alda, Richard Pryor and Robin Williams were all popular comedians. In Earth time the story is
probably
set in the 1980s. Due to this, and the Earth’s demise,
An Evening at God’s
is categorized as a New Worlds tale. 

There are no links from this Work to any other King story. 

³⁵
The Lost Work of Stephen King
, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.242-244 

³⁶
Stephen King: Bogeyman as Family Man
, 15 April 1990
 

Before the Play (1982, 1997) 

Before the Play
is the prologue to
The Shining
, cut from that novel in the editing process to help secure a lower cover price for the hardback! It is effectively a collection of five stories, loosely connected by the Overlook Hotel. Four are set at the Hotel and the remaining one during Jack Torrance’s childhood. Not only do the “scenes” provide fascinating background about the Overlook Torrance’s motivations are more clearly explained, perhaps dictating his adult behavior. 

The first appearance was in the magazine
Whispers
(Number 17/18) for August 1982. Copies can be purchased through the various King booksellers, although that particular edition is becoming scarcer as collectors permanently retain copies.  

As part of the promotion for the mini-series version of
The Shining
King allowed an abridged version to be published in the 26 April to 2 May 1997 edition of
TV Guide
. The cuts were partly a matter of self-censorship to suit the sensibilities of that magazine. However, Spignesi cogently argues King felt there were weaknesses in the deleted scenes, stating as he does in his
TV Guide
introduction, “I’m glad to see the best of it restored to print here.”
³⁷
 

Copies of the
TV Guide
version, which Bernie Wrightson illustrated, are relatively easy to secure through King booksellers and other sources. 

King also wrote
After the Play
but that merged into the closing sections of the novel during the editing process and the author says that the original text has been lost. 

In this loose set of stories, which King terms “scenes,” we learn something of the history of the Overlook Hotel and the Torrance family. Scene I is
The Third Floor of a Resort Hotel Fallen Upon Hard Times.
It deals with the construction of the Overlook, from 1907, by Bob T. Watson. In 1908 his eldest son, Boyd, died on the grounds in a riding accident and the Grand Opening in 1909 was marred when a Congressman choked to death. After ploughing huge amounts of money into the Hotel Watson was forced to sell, receiving in return the promise of maintenance jobs for life for himself and his remaining son. In August 1922 the new owner, James Parris, died of a heart attack – in the hotel’s topiary, a fact that probably does not surprise readers of
The Shining
. Shortly after that death, Bob T. Watson imagined he heard his dead son riding on the grounds. (This entire scene was deleted from the
TV Guide
version). 

In the second section,
A Bedroom in the Wee Hours of the Morning
, Lottie Kilgallon Pillsbury honeymooned at the Overlook in August of 1929 (Pillsbury was King’s mother’s maiden name). Lottie suffered a number of disturbing dreams, including one in which the hotel was on fire and, in another, she saw the topiary move.  

Topping it all off, while Lottie smoked in bed, “She reached down to get the ashtray and the thought burst on her like a revelation:
It does creep, the whole place – like it was alive!
And that was when the hand reached out unseen from under the bed and gripped her wrist firmly … almost lecherously.” Not surprisingly, Lottie insisted upon returning home immediately. After years of dwelling on the events at the Overlook she committed suicide in a Yonkers hotel room in 1949, “It had been twenty years and the hand that had gripped her wrist when she reached down to get her cigarettes had never really let go.” This is perhaps the most memorable (and scariest) of any King scene in an uncollected short story. 

In the third section,
On the Night of the Grand Masquerade
, Lewis Toner, head accountant and former lover of Overlook owner Horace Derwent, committed suicide by overdosing in a bathtub on the night of the 1946 Grand Masquerade Ball. Derwent bought off the coroner and other authorities to avoid a scandal. (This scene was deleted from the
TV Guide
version, almost certainly as a form of self-censorship due to its heavy sexual nature). 

The fourth scene,
And Now this Word from New Hampshire
, reverts to the summer of 1953. When Jacky Torrance was six, his father came home drunk and broke the boy’s arm in a rage. This, of course, presages Jack’s breaking of
his
son Danny’s arm twenty-two years later. One scene alone serves to show yet again how well King can position the reader in the mind of a child, in this case Jacky:  

His father was like God, like Nature, sometimes lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be. Jacky’s mother feared and served him. His brothers hated him. Only Jacky of all of them still loved him in spite of the fear and the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out:
I love you daddy! Go away! Hug me! I’ll kill you! I’m so afraid of you! I need you!
 

And, just before the senior Torrance kicked Jacky in the belly, sending him flying from his treehouse to the ground, and a greenstick fracture, “‘Oh, Daddy,’ Jacky mourned for the both of them.” The scene ends as Jacky faints with, “
What you see is what you’ll be, what you see is what you’ll be, what you –
The break in his arm was cleanly healed in six months. The nightmares went on much longer. In a way, they never stopped.” 

The story concludes with Scene V,
The Overlook Hotel, Third Floor, 1958
, in which there is a mob hit, when three men kill two guards and an underworld figure in the Presidential Suite. The piece closes, “The Overlook Hotel was at home with the dead.” 

As it was King’s intention when writing
Before the Play
it would be the Prologue to
The Shining
,
it is clear this small collection of scenes is part of that particular storyline of the America Under Siege Reality. This being the case there are obviously a huge number of links to the novel and to King’s other fiction, as well as some anomalies or errors between this piece and the novel itself. 

Sidewinder, Colorado, 40 miles east of the Overlook and the nearest town also receives considerable mention in
Misery
and all versions of
The Shining
. It is also mentioned in
The Talisman
. The Overlook Hotel itself is, of course, the key location in all versions of
The Shining
and is mentioned in both
Misery
and
The Regulators
.
 

The following are some of the very extensive links to the novel version of
The Shining
. In both, Jack Torrance’s father was an orderly at the Berlin Community Hospital. 

In
Before the Play
Lottie Kilgallon, while staying at the Overlook Hotel in August 1929, dreamed that there had been a fire, “Perhaps it had been the boiler. You had to keep an eye on the boiler, because if you didn’t, she would creep on you.” In Chapter 12 of
The Shining
Watson says, “Just stuck around to remind Mr. Torrance here about the boiler. Keep your good weather eye on her, fella, and she’ll be fine. Knock the press down a couple of times a day. She creeps.” Danny Torrance then thinks, “She creeps.” Of course, the boiler exploded at midnight on 2 December 1977, destroying the Overlook. In
Before the Play
, Lottie Kilgallon dreamed a fire hose held her so that a fire could get to her. In
The Shining
, Danny Torrance thought he saw the fire hose move and was scared it would catch him. 

In
Before the Play
, Jacky Torrance’s father broke his arm in a drunken rage one summer night in 1953. In
The Shining
, Jack Torrance broke his son Danny’s arm in 1975 while in a drunken temper. This critical piece of back-story is very useful to an understanding of how Jack Torrance came to be both an alcoholic and the cycle of violence he visited upon his son. The novel tempts us to believe the cycle has been broken and King pretty much confirms that with the graduation scene in the mini-series screenplay. 

Among characters that appear in both this piece and the novel are: Horace Derwent, Jack (“Jacky”) Torrance, his father Mark and Jacky’s mother. 

Grondin is the contractor who diddles Bob T. Watson of $70,000 in 1911 in
Before the Play
. In
The Shining
, Charles Grondin headed the group of investors who purchased the Overlook from Derwent in 1952, then later also headed High Country Investments, which purchased the Overlook in 1963. As Charles was born in 1911 he could not be the same Grondin, but perhaps he was a descendant? King continually creates these sorts of connections and it does not seem likely that the use of this surname is a coincidence. Ironically, in this piece a company Horace Derwent controlled and donated the Library in Sidewinder, Colorado. In the novel Jack Torrance used the very same Library to do research on the Overlook Hotel, and Derwent! 

One of Bob T. Watson’s friends said the opening night of the Overlook Hotel on 1 June 1910 reminded him of Poe’s story about the Red Death. In the Prelude to Chapter One of the novel there is a lengthy quote from Poe’s
The Masque of Red Death
and in Chapter 18 Jack Torrance was reminded of a line from the same story. 

In
Before the Play
in the summer of 1952 Jacky Torrance’s father smoke-drugged a colony of wasps and burnt their nest. In the novel, Mark Torrance smoked out a colony of wasps in his back yard. This is presumably the same event. Of course, Jack Torrance’s stinging by wasps while he is clearing the roof of the Overlook is a crucial event in the novel and carries more power in this context. 

There is a possible inconsistency in the Presidential Suite Killings. In
Before the Play
in 1958
three
men killed two guards and an underworld figure in the Presidential Suite. In the novel
two
men killed a mobster called Gienelli and two guards in the Presidential Suite in June 1966. Of course, it is also possible that these were separate killings. Either way if one’s name is, say, Tony Soprano, one should
not
stay in the Presidential Suite of the Overlook Hotel! 

There are some clear inconsistencies between the two stories. In
Before the Play
, the elevator at the Overlook Hotel was installed in 1927; in the novel and mini-series it was installed in 1926. In
Before the Play
Lewis Toner died in 1946 but in
The Shining
he died in 1945.  

In another probable error we read that in 1922 Woodrow Wilson was the only President (prior to October 7, 1922) to stay in the Presidential Suite. “When Wilson had come here he had been a sorry joke. There had been talk in the country that his wife was actually President of the United States.” In fact, Wilson finished his second and final Presidential term in March 1921. In 1922 Harding was President and it seems unlikely that people would have joked of the
previous
President’s wife actually being President. 

Frankly, it is surprising that King has not included this story (or more accurately, collection of scenes) in one of his collections.
Before the Play
is a tremendously valuable addition to the mythos of the Overlook Hotel and provides key motivation and background for one of the most towering and memorable characters in King’s body of work. Hope should not be lost that King may at some point give this story a wider readership. After all,
TV Guide
had one of the biggest circulations of any US magazine, so it is unlikely that King does not want this story in broad circulation. 

The other possibility would be its restoration in a future printing of the novel. King restored
The Stand
; allowed excerpts from the original manuscript of
‘Salem’s
Lot to be published; revised
The Gunslinger
;
and made minor alterations to
The Green Mile
when the six parts of that novel were collected in one volume. He has also updated a very large number of his short stories over the years. It may be that a “Restored” version of
The Shining
is not out of the question.