Stephen King
is
Richard Bachman
By Michael R. Collings
Smashwords Edition
Overlook Connection Press
2011
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Stephen King is Richard Bachman © 2008 Michael C. Collings
Cover © 2008 Erik Wilson
This digital edition © 2011 Overlook Connection Press
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Contents
Chapter I: A History for Richard Bachman 3
Chapter II: Genre, Theme, and Image in Richard Bachman 10
Chapter VI: The Running Man 55
Chapter VIII: Regulators…and Desperation 80
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Foreword
The present volume represents both a revision and an extension of Stephen King as Richard Bachman, first published in 1985 by Ted Dikty’s Starmont House. It was then, and remains, the only book-length study devoted exclusively to King’s pseudonymous novels; the original edition, of course, discussing only the first five: Rage, The Long Walk, Road Work, The Running Man, and Thinner.
The appearance of The Regulators and Desperation just over a decade later immediately dated the original edition. Much that King attempted in those two volumes echoed back to the earlier Bachman books; but in choosing to publish two hardcovers, through two published, using two names, King also appeared to announce his intention to comment on the uses of pseudonyms. The results seem equally compounded of serious exploration into the nature of fiction and story-telling and jeu de esprit, playing the game for the sake of playing it.
In either case, Richard Bachman’s The Regulators and Stephen King’s Desperation fairly cried for comparison. And, after almost six years of procrastination, I am now trying to answer that cry. Bachman/King in Overdrive: Stephen King and the Bachman Novels suggests a few significant points of similarity and dissimilarity; it is, in effect, the Story I choose to tell about the stories King/Bachman chose to tell. It makes no claim to being either conclusive or definitive, hoping instead to suggest directions for further thought, study, criticism, and—most importantly—enjoyment, while placing these two novels in the context of the earlier Bachman books.
Michael R. Collings
Thousand Oaks and Malibu CA
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Chapter I: A History for Richard Bachman
Almost two decades ago, on February 9, 1985, Stephen King publicly revealed that since 1977 he had published five novels under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’, the most recent of which, Thinner, was already making a significant move toward best-seller status.
For some collectors, the announcement came as no great surprise; several had suspected a connection between the increasingly popular (increasingly expensive, increasingly discussed, and possibly even, at times, nearly notorious) novels of Stephen King and the rather unprepossessing paperback editions published under the Bachman name. Others became even more firmly convinced during the previous year, with the publication of Bachman’s first hardcover book, Thinner. Bob and Phyllis Weinberg asserted in catalogues prepared as early as November 1984, that Bachman was a pseudonym for King. Lloyd Currey’s catalogue carried a similar comment (Fantasy Mongers 5; Collins 15).
The ensuing interest—soon to escalate to a fandom furor—developed in spite of King’s explicit denials. In a letter dating from May 1981, King wrote that “the rumor has gotten around that I am Richard Bachman, but it’s not true. I know him and I believe he lives in Connecticut—as I recall, he was a surly fellow.” A little over a year later, in August 1982, King similarly explained, “I’m not Richard Bachman, but I know who he is, and I can’t tell. Professional ethics, and all that!”
As Thinner attracted a wider and more meticulous readership, however, not even King’s explicit denials could scotch the persistent rumors. A review of Thinner in Fantasy Mongers commented:
I don’t know who the guy in the author’s picture is but I do know Stephen King when I read him, and this novel is pure King in style, syntax, character development, dialog, plot structure, humor, gross outs, and even in technical mistakes. (5)
The reviewer continued by noting that because Thinner did not bear King’s name on the cover, the book ran the appreciable risk of getting lost among the spate of horror novels published in 1984, particularly since it would perforce have to compete against novels by F. Paul Wilson and Stephen King himself. By the end of his discussion, the reviewer refers simply and familiarly to King as the author: “As Steve has said so many times, if he can’t scare you, then he’ll gross you out, and he manages to do both equally well in Thinner” (5).
The increasing speculation and the refusal of the rumor to die in the face of denials finally culminated with Steve Brown’s researches at the Library of Congress, which led in turn to a discussion with King, and from there to King’s subsequent interview with the Bangor Daily News and its now historic announcement: Stephen King is Richard Bachman, a fact previously known for certain only by Robert DiForio, Chairman and chief executive officer at the New American Library (NAL); Elaine Koster, NAL’s executive vice-president and publisher; and the NAL contract lawyer responsible for the paperwork (“Bachman Revealed” 43). There had been some quasi-official hints, of course. The Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono and the Bangor Public Library had each at one time listed the Bachman books under King’s name; in 1984, King requested that they not so file his books but did not acknowledge the pseudonym.
Now the news was official.
Readers already infatuated with King’s masterful storytelling and always eager for more reacted immediately. Within hours, they deluged booksellers and dealers with requests for Bachman novels, only to discover that three of the first four were already out-of-print: Rage, partially written while King was still in high school and thus of particular interest as a pre-Carrie milestone; Roadwork; and The Running Man. Only the fourth, Signet’s The Long Walk, completed during King’s freshman year in college (and thus a second pre-Carrie novel) was still in print with NAL.
And, of course, Thinner.
By February 14, however, a telephone call to New American Library in New York revealed that on the previous Monday, a nationwide chain had purchased all of the publisher’s remaining copies of The Long Walk. For all practical purposes, that novel too was now out-of-print. Some copies of the British editions remained available through New English Library, but locating them became more and more difficult. In a sense, a free-for-all auction had begun, with supply desperately struggling to balance voracious demand. At a fan conference in April, 1984, a first-edition Signet paperback of The Long Walk was offered at $40.00; by May, book dealer with paperback first editions for sale could demand up to $100.00.
Shortly after King’s interview, NAL announced a forthcoming trade paperback omnibus edition of Rage, The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Roadwork, to be published with an introduction by King, all under the Plume imprint. This meant that in several months, presumably in the fall of 1985, King’s readers could revel in not one but four essentially new novels, and those to follow closely on the heels of the long-awaited and widely advertised Stephen King/Peter Straub collaboration, The Talisman, and Skeleton Crew, King’s third collection of short fiction, scheduled for publication in the summer of 1985.
In the meantime, however, several questions persisted. Why had King resorted to a pseudonym? And why one so completely developed that he had invented a persona to fit Bachman’s name, so pervasive that NAL could include a dust jacket photograph of ‘Bachman’—actually Richard A. Manuel, a Minnesota real estate agent and friend of King’s agent, Kirby McCauley (“Bachman Revealed” 43); in addition, why the apparent need to create an additional personal to receive credit for the photograph, ‘Claudia Bachman’, presumably the same ‘Claudia Inez Bachman’ to whom the novel is dedicated.
The answer to all of these questions, King asserted, was simple. As he told the Bangor Daily News, “It’s been a chronic problem not wanting to over publish.” According to Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter, he had been encouraged to limit publication under the name ‘Stephen King’ to one or two novels a year (#3, 1). In retrospect, his reaction to such arbitrary limits seems justified, especially in view of his dedication to writing—what some have referred to as his compulsion to write. As Douglas Winter notes in Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, King began writing seriously at the age of seven or eight, submitting stories to science fiction magazines within two or three years. By the age of twenty, he had sold his first short story, completed one novel-length manuscript, and garnered his first rejection of a “true novel” (xv-xvii).
By the time Carrie was published in 1974, King had completed at least four novels, including what would later appear as Rage and The Long Walk.
In the next ten years, he published an astonishing eleven more book-length volumes: ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981), Christine (1983), Cycle of the Werewolf (1983), Pet Sematary (1983), The Talisman (1984: with Peter Straub), and The Eyes of the Dragon (1984). In addition, he published an equally remarkable four volumes of stories:
Night Shift (1978), a conventionally formatted volume of previously uncollected tales, many of which had appeared in college literary magazines and various men’s magazines and thus represented some of King’s earliest commercial storytelling;
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982), a compilation of linked tales originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1978 and 1982 and now widely recognized as the seminal impulse behind the monumental Dark Tower Epic-Quest series (approaching completion) that has grown to incorporate not only those stories and the subsequent ones explicitly related to them, but also, through intriguing and tantalizing cross-linkages, a number of his major novels as well;
Creepshow (1982), a comic-book adaptation of five stories exploring the possibilities of blending the verbal and the visual in homage to a distinctly 1950’s style of horror; and
Different Seasons (1982), a hallmark collection of four novellas that in themselves demonstrated King’s extraordinary facility at cross-genre writing, from horror to mainstream … and his equally extraordinary ability to place hardcover collections of short fiction on bestsellers lists.
Add to that impressive record a number of uncollected stories; his non-fictional comprehensive study of horror as a contemporary American genre in Danse Macabre (1981); his scores of articles and interviews on an unusually wide range of subjects; the widely publicized film versions of six novels and one short story; plus increasing critical, scholarly, and academic attention, including Winter’s premier full-length study for Ted Dikty’s Starmont House, The Reader’s Guide to Stephen King (1982) ... and it becomes evident that King was not only prolific but threatened—at least in the eyes of his publishers, ever alert to the limits of what was then commonly believed to be what the market could bear—to become overly so.1
In spite of such fears, however, King proved to be an increasingly profitable phenomenon—indeed, almost a modern cottage industry. Responses to his fictions and to the mystique that had long since begun forming around his name (and even around the often comically pseudo-demonic photographs of him generated for his dust jackets) were two-fold.
First, readers seemed unable to get enough Stephen King.
Fans and collectors vied for first editions of his books; signed, numbered, limited first editions of some had already run as high as $450, and have subsequently demonstrated remarkably durability in maintaining and often substantially increasing their value through the end of the century. One of the twenty-six special limited editions (second issue) of Firestarter, for example, bound in asbestos and painted with aluminum paint (presumably in case Charlie McGee should turn her pyrotechnic abilities on the reader) cost a mere $1,800 in 1985; George Beahm’s Stephen King Collectibles: An Illustrated Price Guide (2000) lists the same state at $9,000-$11,000. King’s superb children’s novel, The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), was published in a limited run of 1250 at an initial price of $120.00. According to the Philtrum Publishing Company, King’s own publishing house, all orders for copies were placed in a lottery, the first 1000 names drawn to receive copies of the novel. To increase the intrinsic value of the book, Philtrum further stipulated that the novel would not be reprinted until 1987 (at the time, for King’s legions of fans, an almost unimaginably distant future). The implications were clear: If you wanted to read The Eyes of the Dragon, you must read it—and buy it—now. As of March 1985, copies of the novel—when available at all—were bringing prices up to $400; two months later, one dealer was asking $800, a price that held for the next fifteen years.
Other readers responded similarly, if on lower financial strata. Carrie, King’s first paperback sale, recently passed its sixty-eighth printing from Signet. The Talisman, perhaps the most eagerly awaited fantasy novel in publishing history, set records with its first hardcover printing of 600,000 copies, even priced at the then-steep figure of $18.95; almost immediately, a second printing was necessary. By mid-1985, there were at least 780,000 copies in circulation; a Newsweek review at the time placed the total at over 1,000,000. The book remains among King’s more popular titles, that interest more recently fuelled by the publication of its sequel, Black House (2001).
It also quickly became noticeable difficult to locate many earlier King stories and novels. “The Monkey” (1980) and “The Raft” (1982), for example, first appeared as pull-out booklets in Gallery. While trying to locate copies of the stories for the first edition of this study in 1985, I discovered that although the relevant magazine issues were readily available in many used-book stores (complete with their accustomed panoply exotic/erotic photographs), the King stories had been carefully removed. Apparently, King was already more popular than the centerfolds. Nor was it unusual to discover that in a book-store’s nearly full run of Heavy Metal, for instance, the only issue missing would be July 1981, which contained a revised version of King’s “The Blue Air Compressor.”
Perhaps more indicative of his growing popularity was the scarcity of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction containing the stories collected in The Dark Tower. By 1985, second editions of the collection demanded as much as $90.00; first editions were out of the reach of any but the most dedicated collectors. Interest in the stories was compounded by King’s steadfast refusal (at that time, at least) to reprint the collection or re-release it in either mass-market or trade-paperback formats, largely through his sense that since the sequence was clearly incomplete, and since it represented a radical departure from the kind of storytelling the majority of his fans anticipated, wider publication might lead to disappointment. In spite of his fears—or perhaps because of them—demand for the Dark Tower saga spiraled over the years … and so did the cost of The Dark Tower. Readers hoping to beat those prices by locating the stories in individual magazine issues, however, confronted almost immediate disappointment as those particular numbers disappeared from bookstore shelves.
Even copies of the first-edition hardcover of Thinner, which were readily visible through early February at Daltons and Waldenbooks in Los Angeles, to name but one location, had largely disappeared by February 22, to be replaced in March by a second print run and later by third and fourth printings.
Unlike his fans, however, who could not find enough by Stephen King and enthusiastically embraced the sudden and stunning possibilities of five new titles, many critics reacted quite differently to the ‘Bachman’ revelations. Instead of welcoming new King novels, some became increasingly hostile, viewing King as little more than a glorified hack, churning out what Leslie Fiedler called eroticized Dark Fantasy. King, Fiedler states, “has indeed finally become—in his own words—a ‘brand name’ like Vaseline or Coca Cola” or, to use Fiedler’s own words, the “master of horror schlock” (7-9). Similarly, in spite of commercial success of King’s Christine and Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon, King felt compelled to state, concerning The Talisman,
I don’t know what the critics are going to make of it. When we started the project, I thought that, critically, we would be destroyed. I don’t know if that’s true any longer, because I think the book is strong. But one bellwether is that, in their “Best and Worst of the Year” article, People magazine put Christine and Floating Dragon in the same little review in their “Worst” section and said, “Watch out for these guys, they have written two of the worst novels of 1983 on their own, and in 1984, they are teaming up to do a book together.” (Winter, “Quest” 68)
King’s fears were in part justified. There was a general sense within the media that The Talisman, for example, was but another “King-of-the-Month” novel, and obviously someone who so facilely produced so many (and such long) novels must lie outside the purview of true literature. Other critics simply refused to mention King’s name in other than menacing undertones; what good, they implied, could come from a writer who had written so many novels and earned so much money.
With critical attitudes as bleak as these, it seems small wonder that King elected to publish his five additional novels as he did, under another name, thus avoiding the immediate and inevitable charges that would be laid against them. His tactics, while frustrating to the fan, produced results. While the first four novels remained largely in the background, Thinner steadily moved upward in sales in spite of the notorious recalcitrance of Richard Bachman to speak about his novels or even to be seen.
In essence King demonstrated that his works could succeed with or without the dubious magic of his “brand name” on the spines. And he avoided the censure of those who believe that his acknowledged output represented a supererogation of authorial privilege; in the best of all possible worlds, no one should be as prolific as King, or as successful.
Such attitudes, of course, ignored two important points about King. The first was that although a relatively young man in the early 1980s, he had nevertheless completed a rigorous apprenticeship to his craft, with his first public attempts at storytelling occurring some two decades earlier. As King notes in Night Shift, he had discovered that he possessed a marketable obsession; he writes essentially for himself, while touching chords of fear and terror in his readers as well (xiii). But his success did not come easily or, in spite of apparent youth, early.
The second point is that even after undeniable initial commercial success, King continued to work and to write. Although he has said in interviews that he writes slowly, 1800 to 2200 words per day (Modderno), Winter noted in his groundbreaking bio-critical study, The Art of Darkness, that King made it a habit to write “every day except for his birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July” (13). This dedication to craft, coupled with an intensely visual and visceral imagination and a popular, lucid style, has resulted in novel after novel, story after story.
As a result of his concentrated effort, by the early 1980s, King had indeed become a “brand name,” a household word for horror; and that may in fact be among the most important reasons why the Bachman novels did not initially appear under his name. Again in The Art of Darkness, Winter writes that King’s first use of a pseudonym, “John Swithen,” resulted from Cavalier’s insistence that the name Stephen King be associated explicitly with horror as genre; the Swithen story, “The Fifth Quarter” (Cavalier, April 1972) is essentially a crime story. Similarly, with the exception of Thinner, the published Bachman novels relate only tangentially to the supernatural horror King’s readers expect and demand: haunted houses, haunted cars, haunted dogs, ghosts and ghouls and things fresh from the grave. The Bachman novels may suggest such elements but rarely allow them to surface fully. Even in Thinner, much of the narrative unfolds before Billy Halleck accepts the horror-oriented, “supernatural” explanation for what is happening to him—that he is the victim of a legitimate gypsy curse. As strong as the Bachman novels may be, they are demonstrably not “typical” Stephen King stories; his publishing them pseudonymously retained the marketable sense of “King” as “brand name” for horror.
Nor was this the end of the readers’ quest. Since he had acknowledged writing under two pseudonyms, rumors of other “unknown” King novels immediately surfaced. Some years earlier, for instance, King was supposed to have revealed that he wrote two novels, one science fiction and one occult-horror. The first, the story continues, was submitted to DAW books and rejected; the second was published. Another rumor had it that King wrote two series of not one but five novels each, one science fiction and one mystery-suspense, and that all ten novels were published under false names—a supposition that, through the superior hindsight of years and subsequent revelations of pen-names by other authors, sounds as if some enthusiast might have inadvertently confused King’s pseudonymous career for Koontz’s.
Shortly after King’s official recognition of the Bachman name, a review in the April 1985 issue of Fantasy Review raised the specter of ‘John Wilson’ as a King-pseudonym used before the publication of Carrie in conjunction with five erotic novels originally published by Beeline. One of the novels, Love Lessons, was supposed to have been reprinted by Pinetree Press. The reviewer of record, Helen Purcell, asserted that she had “no doubt that King actually did write this book,” noting that to that date he had not yet denied writing the novels (31). Later information, and a rather combustive exchange of letters between King’s representatives and the editors of Fantasy Review, revealed, however that the title, the author, the publisher, and the reviewer were all fabrications, and that the review was a hoax designed to take advantage of the authentic furor aroused by the Bachman revelations, and to employ an age-old tradition of hoax-reviews, primarily to test the acuity of the magazine’s readership. As another monarch generations earlier, King was not amused.
These and other even less likely suppositions remained at the level of rumor, of course, some more solidly supported than others, but rumors nonetheless. The existence of such rumors was—and remains—significant and important. Some critics may decry King’s accomplishments, just as they disparage the accomplishments of other prolific writers, but readers clearly do not. In spite of critical presuppositions about King and both the nature and the quality of his prose, the fact remains that he answers a need in millions of readers. There is something in his writing, in his imagination, in his approaches to reality and illusion that touches responsive chords. With the addition of five acknowledged novels to his canon, he had given us new opportunities to discover and define precisely what that something might be.
Then, in late 1985, the literary world was stunned by … (oh, sorry, I got carried away there) … King’s readers were bemused and amused by confirmed reports of Richard Bachman’s death—from cancer of the pseudonym. King officially recognized Bachman’s former usefulness. His published books had been acknowledge by their true author, the secrets of his shadow life exposed, and all that remained was to assign his photograph and his signature to the dust.
Richard Bachman had fulfilled the purpose of his creation.
Resquiat in pacem.
For a decade, at least. Until an enterprising New York editor named Charles Verrill (perhaps one of Jordy’s sophisticated city-slicker cousins) came into contact with Richard Bachman’s widow, who produced the completed manuscript of one more Bachman novel, confirmed as authentic by Douglas Winter, a “Bachman scholar” of wide repute, and published by Dutton in late 1996 under the title The Regulators. It might conceivably have been coincidence—but decidedly wasn’t—that Viking published a novel by Stephen King, Desperation, at precisely the same time … and that the King novel shared the same cast of characters, or at least the came list of names for characters, as the Bachman book.
After the controversy, even perhaps the furor that developed following King’s acknowledgment of the Bachman books, it seemed as if now, a decade later, King could sit back and simply have fun. The Regulators appeared in half a dozen states, excluding international additions, including one limited state that sported 30-30 cartridges embedded in the cover; and a second complete with ‘Richard Bachman’ signatures. The latter might have proven difficult to manage, since Bachman was officially dead; the solution to the problem: signed checks tipped in, each dated before Bachman’s death in 1985, each imprinted with Bachman’s address, each signed by Bachman, and each punning on King’s career through the name of the assignee. The limitation page reproduced in Beahm’s Stephen King Collectibles, for example, carries a check made out to ‘Jack Sawyer’ and a memo that the check is payment for a “book idea.”
In addition, lest anyone miss the implicit jokes, the trade edition of both The Regulators and Desperation appeared together in a glassine slipcase. Initially, the volumes were accompanied by a small paperbound chapter-excerpt from the forthcoming The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass. When supplies of the paperback disappeared, subsequent duos included a battery-powered reading light, presumably so readers could continue long into the night, caught up in the terror and excitement of the novels.
Publicity gags on one level, yes; but also confirmation of a more elemental and intriguing idea—that in these two books, King had chosen to explore consciously the interactions of imagination, authorship, and expectations, going beyond the fictional framework he had already used in writing-related stories such as Misery (1987), The Dark Half (1989) and “Secret Window, Secret Garden” (Four Past Midnight, 1990)—King’s so-called “Writer’s Trilogy.” Publishing simultaneously as Stephen King and as Richard Bachman, using at some levels parallel characters, landscapes that at times seem equally interchangeable, and an antagonist/villain shared by both, King manipulates and exploits his pseudonymous alter-ego as he defines essential differences between the two ‘authors’ and the stories they choose to tell.
Thus, Richard Bachman Lives.
Or, more precisely, Stephen King is Richard Bachman.
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Chapter II: Genre, Theme, and Image in Richard Bachman
In an article surveying the then-current state of horror fantasy, Douglas Winter noted that “As horror fiction entered the 1980s, Stephen King was the undisputed master of the field.” Winter’s assessment was based on King’s wide range of tones and touches, including his ability to write on “non-supernatural (but not necessarily non-horrific) themes” (“Art of Darkness” 3), as evidenced by three of the quartet of stories in Different Seasons.
Winter’s statement is helpful in any discussion of the pre-Thinner Bachman novels, since they too attain to the horrific without the supernatural elements readers associate with Stephen King. Only with Thinner does the novel incorporates any major plot developments that could be called supernatural, and even there, much of the treatment of character, setting, and action is grittily realistic. The Regulators, of course, represents a final departure from the non-horror mode of the earlier Bachman books; indeed, it not only embraces the supernatural, but it revels in it, providing an intriguing echo to the Monster inhabiting Desolation (both the town and the novel), and implicitly connecting with King’s epic-in-progress, the Dark Tower Series (not the least through the echoic tak in Black House, the King/Straub sequel to the Talisman and clear precursor to the final segments in Roland’s quest). To complete The Regulators, and then re-read Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man, is to understand the depth of King’s development.
In one sense, King’s decision, taken as early as in his career as 1977, to publish his four non-supernatural-horror novels under a pseudonym was consistent with a well-defined trend in horror fiction. Contemporary horror is a psychologically diluted phenomenon, in which internal, visceral responses, i.e., uncompromising horror and terror, may be overwhelmed by external, intellectualized, and intellectualizing responses to non-supernatural forces: fear of the bomb, of terrorism (especially in post-9/11 America), of pandemic disease, of a myriad of recurring political conditions beyond individual control. Charles Grant, a noted author, critic, and anthologist of horror fiction, argues that such fiction is based ultimately on fear of the unknown; but
The modern world is much too sophisticated for that … and so are we also far too educated to cringe at bumps in the night, creaking doors, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the wind that dances with dead leaves in the gutter…. If there is fear, it must be born in the real world—born of wars and murders, muggings and insidious carcinoma. It is literal nonsense to believe otherwise. The horror/fantasy story is the dark side of Romanticism, and there is no room in the practical world for a Romantic. (7)