Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (19 page)

The History Of The Overlook Hotel 

Before the Play
adds an enormous amount to the history of the Overlook Hotel, as provided in
The Shining
. From these sources, along with the mini-series screenplay, the unproduced movie screenplay,
Misery
and
The Regulators
it is possible to glean the following information about the Hotel, its history and owners. 

It was built by Bob T. Watson between 1907 and 1909 to be the grandest resort hotel in America and, at nearly 12,000ft above sea level, the highest. During the building Watson’s son, Boyd was killed in a riding accident. The Hotel is forty miles west of Sidewinder. The first season was 1910, with the opening ceremony held on 1 June. A Congressman choked to death at the celebration dinner. 

By September 1914 Watson was bankrupt and in 1915 the Overlook was sold to James T. Parris, who died in 1922, after which it was sold to Clyde and Cecil Brandywine. In 1922 Woodrow Wilson stayed in the Presidential Suite. The Hotel was resold in 1929 and 1936; Horace Derwent purchased it in 1945. Derwent sold out in 1952 and the Hotel had a number of other owners before being bought in 1970 by Al Shockley and his associates, who refurbished it that year.  

On 2 December 1977 the Overlook was destroyed when its boiler exploded while Jack Torrance was the caretaker (
note: according to the mini-series version this occurred in 1996 or 1997
). During the Overlook’s history there were many violent deaths and murders and a number of suicides. It seems the Hotel was at least haunted, and possibly possessed. 

The full list of owners: 1907-1915 Bob T. Watson, 1915-1922 James T. Parris; 1922-1929 Clyde and Cecil Brandywine, 1929-1936 Unknown, 1936-1945 Unknown, 1945-52 Horace M. Derwent, 1952-1953/4 Charles Grondin and a group of investors, 1953/4-1957 Mountainview Resorts, 10 April 1963-1967 High Country Investments, 1967-68 Sylvia Hunter, 1970-77 Albert Shockley and Associates. (
Note: according to the mini-series version a company called the Sidewinder Corporation owned the Overlook at the time of its destruction in 1996 or 1997
). 

³⁷
The Lost Work of Stephen King
, Stephen J. Spignesi
,
p.163-165
 

The Blue Air Compressor (1971, 1981) 

One of King’s stranger stories and far from his best,
The Blue Air Compressor
was originally published in
Onan
, a student literary magazine published at the University of Maine at Orono (UMO), for January 1971, shortly after King graduated. He allowed republication in
Heavy Metal
, an “adult illustrated fantasy magazine” in July 1981. King made numerous changes for that publication, although all were minor in nature, the removal or changing of words and the deletion of one sentence being the most severe. 

It is virtually impossible to find an original
Onan
copy, except at very high price through a specialist King bookseller.
Heavy Metal
is generally available from the same sources. Those visiting the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library of the University of Maine at Orono may request a photocopy of the
Onan
version. There are no links from this story to King’s other fiction. 

Early in the story King introduces
himself
as the author. It is a rarity for King to mention himself in his fiction and in this case it is very deliberate and self-conscious. It’s interesting that he chose not to remove or rework these interjections when the story was republished. They have an air of pretension that is most unlike King and while in the original publication (which also carried a King poem,
In the Key-Chords of Dawn …
) this may have been appropriate; it fails completely in
Heavy Metal
. Other critics are kinder toward the story
³⁸
. King’s first interjection reads in part: 

My own name, of course, is Steve King, and you’ll pardon my intrusion on your mind – or I hope you will. I could argue that drawing aside the curtain of presumption between reader and author is permissible because I am the writer; ie, since it’s
my
story I’ll do any goddam thing I please with it – but since that leaves the reader out of it completely, that is not valid. Rule One for all writers is that the teller is not worth a tin tinker’s fart when compared to the listener. Let us drop the matter, if we may. I am intruding for the same reason that the Pope defecates: we both have to … You should know Gerald Nately was never brought to the dock … I invented him first during a moment of eight o’clock boredom in a class taught by Carroll F. Terrell of the University of Maine English faculty … It is desperately important that the reader be made cognizant of these facts  

(
this last was removed entirely from the
Heavy Metal
version
). 

In a later and more interesting, if still heavy-handed, interjection: 

Most horror stories are sexual in nature. I’m sorry to break in with this information, but I feel I must in order to make the way clear for the grisly conclusion of this piece, which is (at least psychologically) a clear metaphor for fears of sexual impotence on my part … In the works of Edgar A. Poe, Stephen King, Gerald Nately, and others who practice this particular literary form, we are apt to find locked rooms, dungeons, empty mansions (all symbols of the womb); scenes of living burial (sexual impotence); the dead returned from the grave (necrophilia); grotesque monsters or human beings (externalized fear of the sexual act itself); torture and/or murder (a viable alternative to the sexual act). These possibilities are not always valid, but the post-Freud reader and writer must take them into consideration when attempting the genre. Abnormal psychology has become part of the human experience. 

And, again: 

Part of the inspiration for this story came from an old E.C. horror comic book, which I bought in a Lisbon Falls drugstore. In one particular story, a husband and wife murdered each other simultaneously in mutually ironic (and brilliant) fashion … He shoved the hose of an air compressor down her throat and blew her up to dirigible size … In a horror story, it is imperative that the grotesque be elevated to the status of the abnormal. 

It seems very unlikely that this story will appear in a mainstream King collection. It is not of high quality, pretentious (even the tool-shed is described “…after the manner of Zola”), self-admittedly derivative and quite unrepresentative of King’s style (even for the time it was written). 

In the actual story a writer rents a seaside cottage in Maine from a deceased friend’s wife. When Gerald Nately arrived at Mrs. Leighton’s nearby house, he found her to be a very large woman. He became obsessed with her weight and wrote a story about her,
The Hog
. 

Nately showed signs of mental instability in the two or three months he lived in the cottage and debated with himself whether to let Mrs. Leighton read the story. He had actually decided to do so but found her reading it without his permission. He snapped when Mrs. Leighton laughed at him:  

“Oh Gerald … This is such a bad story. I don’t blame you for using a pen name, it’s … it’s
abominable
! … You haven’t made me
big
enough, Gerald. That’s the trouble. I’m too big for you. Perhaps Poe, or Dostoyevsky, or Melville ... but not you, Gerald. Not
you
. Not
you
.” 

Nately hit her with a gun and then forced the hose of the blue air compressor down her throat and turned it on, causing her to explode. He then cut the body up, buried it under the floor (Poe’s
The Tell-Tale Heart
is mentioned) and called the police to report her missing. 

The majority of the story takes place in either Mrs. Leighton’s home or in the cottage, with the murder taking place in the cottage’s tool shed, where
The Hog
had been hidden. Conveniently for the plot, this is also where the blue air compressor was kept. 

Leaving the scene of the murder, Nately rewrote
The Hog
in Bombay and gave it the new title,
The Blue Air Compressor
, then traveled to Kowloon some time before buying an ivory-figured guillotine, which he then used to cut off his own head! This last is perhaps the most interesting and apparently original part of the story.  

No year is given for the story but Nately lived in the cottage from September to early December. It is unclear how much later Nately’s death in Kowloon occurred but it was probably after quite some time, as Nately had time to write “…four twisted, monumental, misunderstood novels.” (“Misunderstood” was edited out of the
Heavy Metal
version, presumably on the basis the author realized the novels had most probably not been read by anyone else). 

Interestingly King had this to say in a
Danse Macabre
footnote (first published the year the second version of this tale was released):  

My all time favorite [of “bad end” tales]: A crazed husband stuffs the hose of an air compressor down his skinny wife’s throat and blows her up like a balloon until she bursts. “Fat at last,” he tells her happily just moments before the pop. But later on the husband, who is roughly the size of Jackie Gleason, trips a booby-trap she has set for him and is squashed to a shadow when a huge safe falls on him. This ingenious reworking of the old story of Jack Sprat and his wife is not only gruesomely funny; it offers us a delicious example of the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye theory.  

Readers will note there is
no
mention of
King’s
reworking of the tale. 

³⁸
See, for instance,
The Shorter Works of Stephen King
, Michael Collings and David Engebretson, Starmont.
 

But Only Darkness Loves Me and I Hate Mondays (Undated) 

These stories were first rediscovered by Rocky Wood in King’s papers at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono, during a 17-day research trip in 2002.  

A significant number of stories of which there was no record in published King research came to light. Research undertaken with the help of King’s office determined which of the manuscripts were genuine and which had been written by others (the most likely “suspects” being his wife, Tabitha and the King children). Among those manuscripts eliminated by King himself during this process are
Imaginary Places
(an intriguing poem),
Loon Call
(a bittersweet short story),
History Lesson
and
The Shepherd and His Flock
(suspiciously un-King in tone). 

But Only Darkness Loves Me
and
I Hate Mondays
were two of the ten stories rediscovered and announced to the world in early 2003. Each of these stories are collaborations with one of his sons and they form two of the few occasions King is known to have jointly written prose with another writer. 

But Only Darkness Loves Me 

This two page story fragment is headed “By Stephen and Joseph King.” Part One is
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
but only part of Chapter One, Section One survives. Of the two pages the first is typed and the second handwritten. The two pages are to be found in Box 1012 of the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono. This story can be accessed by any member of the public attending the Library, as it is not held in a Restricted Box. 

Joseph Hillstrom King is Tabitha and Stephen’s oldest son and one of three children, the others being Naomi Rachel and their brother Owen Phillip. Joseph King is now a successful writer
³⁹
using the pseudonym Joe Hill. King and Joe Hill co-authored
Throttle
(2009)
⁴⁰
, a riff on the Richard Matheson story
Duel
, adapted under the same title by Stephen Spielberg. 

In the few words from this story left to us a boy is talking to a beautiful girl in a bar in Ledge Cove, Maine. She is too beautiful to look at directly, except in quick glances. She invites him back to her hotel but he only agrees to go to the lobby, not her room. To the reader the few words are mysterious and contain a
Nona
-like quality. 

There is no indication when this piece was written and no dates for the action contained in it are provided. In such a short fragment there is little to report. The “boogie band” at The Ledge Cove Bar in Ledge Cove, Maine (this town is not mentioned in any other King story) play Mellencamp’s
The Authority Song
. Due to its Maine setting it is classified as a Maine Street Horror tale. There are no direct links from this story to any other King fiction. 

I Hate Mondays 

This complete five page story is headed “By Stephen and Owen King.” The manuscript is held in Box 1010 at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono. Written permission from Stephen King is required to access this story. Owen Phillip King, now also a published author
⁴¹
, is Tabitha and Stephen’s youngest son. 

I Hate Mondays
is written in a very immature manner and was probably no more than a bit of fun for Stephen and Owen. It is very unlikely that it will ever be published in any form. It is unclear when this piece was written and no dates for the action contained in it are provided. 

In the story goons attack a man. Spike’s wife has been kidnapped and is being held because she holds the combination to a bank’s safe. The goons capture Spike by telling him they are holding her. Spike and Rita escape, killing most of the bad guys but in the process Rita is also killed. Finally, Spike kills the ringleader: “And that was that.” 

Readers learn a little about the characters during the story. Spike was wounded while escaping (and seemed to have little real remorse over his wife’s death, despite having originally gone to her rescue). Rita worked at the National City Bank and was captured by the goons, as she was one of only three people with the combination to the bank’s big safe. She was shot in the head and killed while she and Spike were escaping the goons. Spike and Rita had kids and Spike wondered what would happen to them now that Rita was dead. 

Spike had some interesting habits, for instance he kept a razor blade under his shirt collar. Rita used it to free them. Later he used a pocket knife to deflect a bullet! Then again, one of Rita’s earrings also deflected a bullet, which might otherwise have killed her! While attempting to escape Spike and Rita ducked into a barber shop, run by Tom. The goons shot up the shop, killing a customer. 

The chief goon was nicknamed “Dr. Mindbender” as he looked like the Dr. Mindbender of the cartoons. When Spike killed him he “flew back and spiked himself against a cross. And that was that.” All the other goons were killed, mostly by gunfire, although Spike did for one by throwing a hand-carved knife into his eye. 

The town or city in which the story is set is unclear, leaving it to be classified as an America Under Siege tale. There are no direct links from this story to any other King fiction. 

³⁹
His first collection,
20th Century Ghosts
(William Morrow, 2007) won the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Collection; and his first novel,
Heart-Shaped Box
(William Morrow, 2007) appeared on
The New York Times
best-seller list and won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. He also writes the
Locke & Key
graphic novel series. 

⁴⁰
First published in
He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson
, edited by Christopher Conlon (Gauntlet Press) 

⁴¹
We’re All in this Together: A Novella and Stories
(Bloomsbury, 2005)