ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 26, 1996 TAG: 9610280119
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CASTLE ROCK, MAINE
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
This is a sad, tired, tormented town that doesn't exist. Never has. And yet it is real in nearly every richly concocted detail - the product of one diabolically boundless imagination.
Cujo mauled here. George Stark, an author's unspeakable alter ego, wrought havoc here. Up northwest in Derry, a ghastly, murderous clown-thing taught seven childhood friends how to face their fears. Down the road some is Jerusalem's Lot, where vampires mingled with the townsfolk. And on Little Tall Island just off the coast, Dolores Claiborne's husband died on the day of the eclipse and things were never the same.
The good citizens of this unsettling region where fantasy and Yankee desolation intersect have suffered for three decades at the hands of their tormentor - Stephen King, the late 20th century's populist poet of American doom.
They are, of course, fictional people, fictional places. But something important makes Castle Rock and its eerie environs so unsettling: The imaginary palette of locations, lives and daily minutiae is superimposed upon a very real canvas - Maine.
And that is the key to Stephen King.
He takes his horrors - be they visceral, supernatural or those that haunt the innermost chambers of the mind and heart - and arranges them atop all-too-genuine American landscapes.
Americans are smitten: King has produced 31 novels, five short story collections, a nonfiction book about horror and eight screenplays. He's one of the best-selling authors in the history of the world, even though his output sometimes has become the source of jokes and wonder.
King's is not a world of remote Gothic mansions, British accents and strange moors. Instead, it is populated by unemployed Peterbilt drivers, soul-searching writers, divorced single mothers who feed their kids from KFC, beer-drinking Phillips 66 gas attendants and teen-agers driving beat-up Pintos who aren't sure what to make of life just yet.
His fans - and even his detractors, many of whom have sniffed and dismissed his work as schlock - agree that he can tell a heck of a tale.
King's tales deal with the malevolence of normalcy, often set in the alienated islands that are small towns. He's a sort of Bruce Springsteen of terror, telling epic stories through the eyes of the citizenry's foot soldiers, getting so close that readers are not just watching but right there - near enough to smell the cinnamon Certs covering the bad breath and see the little Ray-Ban logo on the corner of the dead guy's sunglasses.
King has, of course, received criticism about his work being too long, too bloated, too willing to play to the expected. And there will always be those who will say his work is too explicit and taps into themes better left untouched.
King has always insisted - and now it carries more weight - that he writes not for money, but because he has stories to tell and words to spend.
It wasn't always that way. King's first rejection letter came with a suggestion that he should try something besides writing. He didn't, and in 1974 produced the high-school thriller ``Carrie'' when he was a teacher struggling to feed his young family. It became a best-seller, and ``Salem's Lot'' came a year later, followed in short order by ``The Shining.''
By 1978, when he brought forth ``The Stand,'' his epic saga of doomsday, human excess and spiritual choices - a book whose fast-spreading ``Superflu'' presaged AIDS by four years - King was established as a leading horror writer.
Since then, he has used horror to explore such themes as governmental malevolence (``Firestarter''), the ethics of prescience (``The Dead Zone''), coming of age (``It'' and ``The Body,'' a novella that was made into the movie ``Stand by Me''), prison life (``Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption'') and the stress of losing a child (``Pet Sematary'').
He has turned inward in recent years, delving into more psychological themes. ``Dolores Claiborne'' was the first-person account of a Down East woman tormented by her husband, her employer and life. ``Gerald's Game'' followed a woman forced to confront her innermost fears while chained to a bed after her husband dies during S&M sex. And ``Insomnia'' - well, that's self-explanatory for anyone who's been there.
You'd think someone who wants to lead people down such dark paths would have many of his own. But aside from the odd traumas - his father left when Stephen was 2 to buy cigarettes and was never seen again - King seems a regular enough guy to be one of his own characters.
He takes his Maine nativity and residency quite seriously. He's involved in community projects. He put up a fence around his house only after break-ins. He's known to walk around Bangor, where he lives, with his shirt untucked, eating a slice of pizza and reading a book.
His themes - togetherness, overcoming modern odds, spirituality, occasionally even God - are, despite their menacing surroundings, elements of a very optimistic body of work. Even stories from Castle Rock usually end with a metaphoric dawn breaking.
Castle Rock itself is no more, really. King finished it off in 1991's ``Needful Things,'' an unsettling 685-page story about the darker side of American consumer desires.
And as long as such books as ``Salem's Lot,'' ``It'' and ``The Dark Half'' keep selling, King's creations - those in Castle Rock and elsewhere - will be psychologically tortured, slain and generally yanked through the wringer in perpetuity to teach us Americans about our fears, supernatural and real.
``I think he's going to be read well beyond this particular period. And I don't think we're going to be reading much of Michael Crichton or Robin Cook for very long,'' says James Farrelly, an English professor at the University of Dayton who teaches a course on King.
``Stephen King is of the Mark Twain ilk - looking at real people in real situations and trying to solve real problems and trying to understand the world that they're living in. And writers who do that - who probe into the human condition rather than just sell books - they're going to survive.''
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Stephen King has produced 31 novels, five short storyby CNBcollections, a nonfiction book about horror and eight screenplays.