The first Stephen King book I read was The Shining. It was a gift from one of my seventh grade Spanish students. He dropped by my apartment one afternoon and just handed me the book. “Ms. Trish, you gotta read this.”
None of my students could remember, much less pronounce, my maiden name – Janeshutz – so to them I was Ms. Trish. This kid’s name was Brian. He was a huge troublemaker in my Spanish class, one of those teacher nightmares you hear about. But on Fridays, when we did our paranormal experiments (it was a private school, you could get away with stuff like this) he was a model student, intuitive, maybe downright psychic. So I figured if it was that Brian who was offering me this book, I’d better read it.
I devoured The Shining that weekend. I barely ate, barely slept, and when I did sleep, I was in the Overlook Hotel. After that, I read Carrie and Salem’s Lot. This guy King was writing about the stuff I wanted to write about, but he was doing it with a master storyteller’s gift – pacing, characters so deep and perplexing, some of them so evil, that I couldn’t turn the pages quickly enough. Since then – and that was a long time ago, King and I are the same age – I’ve bought just about everything he has written. I studied his novels, broke them down into scenes, absorbed them.
In one of my astrology books, I dissect King’s birth chart, that creative drive that kept him writing even after he had made zillions. He’s a Virgo with that sun in the third house of communication. This guy MUST write. His moon is in Sagittarius, in the fifth house of creativity. He writes from the deepest part of his psyche, he can’t help himself. Before he writes the first word, he has the big picture – maybe not consciously, but the ending is there, somewhere in his head. His rising is Cancer, so his family and roots are vital to his stability, to his foundations as a writer. Saturn and Pluto in his first house – of self, early childhood – points to deprivation, an absent father figure. There’s a lot more in his chart, but this isn’t an astro post. It’s about King and a book called Haunted Heart, The Life and Times of Stephen King.
I picked it up the night of Jeff Lindsay’s signing for his new Dexter book. It was just sitting there on a shelf, screaming at me. It’s an unauthorized biography, and that word unauthorized, is an attempt to demean it. Once I started reading it, I wanted to savor it, make it last. The author, Lisa Rogan, sees King through the lens of his absent father, his numerous and profound fears, his addictions, his marriage, his muse. I think it’s exactly the book I needed to read because of what’s going on with my own writing at the moment. The insights into the publishing business are as true now as they were then and not much has changed. I needed to know that.
I scanned the index and found a wonderful section about the ghost that inhabited the first house King and his wife bought after the paperback rights for Carrie sold for $400,000, after DePalma bought the movie rights. Sometimes at night when King was writing and the family was asleep, he could feel the ghost nearby. His wife sometimes smelled tobacco smoke as she walked through the house. Figures there would be a ghost. King is a guy who lives with one foot plated here – and another planted there.
Reviewers were not kind to this book. Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine, said no new ground was covered, ho-hum. Some readers disliked the fact that Rogan never interviewed King, only spoke to his assistant. But for me, outsiders often have insights that the authorized biographers miss. Much of this book rings true, especially the parts about writing, the publishing industry, and King’s compulsion to write. Stephen King has managed to change our collective take on all things paranormal. He reached that tipping point long ago.
As he gets older, as I age along with him, it’s fascinating to see where he goes with his stories, where his muse leads him. Even when his latest books are uneven, he’s still an unmatched master of his craft. This biography captures that.
But as it is with all individuals who impact our lives in some way, what can any of us really know about the landscape of that person’s heart? No biography can capture that.
