Read an Excerpt
The Stephen King Companion
Forty Years of Fear from the Master of Horror
By George Beahm, Michael Whelan, Glenn Chadbourne St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 George Beahm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5668-4
CHAPTER 1
Family Roots
Donald Edwin Pollock
At his winter home in Florida, Stephen King sat down with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for an appearance on the PBS television show Finding Your Roots. Combing genealogical and military records, Gates's research team turned up a wealth of information about King's father, Donald.
The compiled information, assembled scrapbook-style for King's perusal, was an eye-opener for King, who understandably wanted to know more about the father who abandoned his family in 1949, when Stephen was two years old. According to what he remembers his mom said, his dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned.
Leafing through the leather-bound scrapbook, Stephen King turned the page and saw a black-and-white photograph of a six- foot-tall man with glasses.
Gates asks, "Now you know who that is."
Stephen King replies, "Not right offhand." He pauses. "Is that my dad?" In a shock of late recognition, Stephen exclaims, "He looks like me! ... a little bit." He shakes his head, and has a wistful expression on his face.
"No kidding," says Gates.
It was Stephen King's father. But his birth name isn't Donald Edwin King. As Gates pointed out, a record of birth and military records show that his name was Donald Edwin Pollock.
Twenty-five at the time of his marriage to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, Donald listed his occupation as "seaman" in the merchant marine. On David King's birth record, his father's occupation is listed as "master mariner." And on Stephen King's birth certificate, he's listed as "captain, merchant marine."
From there, Gates takes Stephen King on a genealogical trip into the past, showing that his roots go all the way back to Ireland on his father's side.
Despite the considerable passage of time, there are still unresolved issues and anger that fester in Stephen King, who is upset at the circumstances and consequences of his dad's unexplained departure.
Stephen King tells Gates, "I can remember as a kid, thinking of myself, well, if I ever meet my dad, I'm going to sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother. And as I got older, I would think, well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I'll sock him."
King and Gates have a good laugh over that, but the question that's haunted Stephen King for all those years will forever remain unanswered: Who was Donald E. Pollock?
Stephen King's father died at age sixty-six in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, but as to which cemetery, I couldn't determine. The largest, though, is Fairview Cemetery, near a town called ... Bangor.
As to his public records, they show that he remarried, and genealogical records online indicate five children by that marriage.
As to what he left behind in the wreckage of his first marriage: What we do know is that Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King picked up the shattered pieces of her family's lives and heroically moved on. Scrambling to make ends meet in her new, and unexpected, role as the family's breadwinner, survival became an extended family affair, with her four sisters helping out.
David King recalls moving all over the map, until they finally dropped anchor and settled in for the long haul in Durham. Aided financially by her siblings, Nellie Ruth was a single mother who not only raised two young boys but also her aging parents in a small, two-story house in Durham, Maine, that lacked a shower. It'd be difficult enough to be a caregiver even with a spouse to share the burden, but to do it essentially alone was an act of quiet courage and iron resolve: She was not going to abandon her family as her husband did.
A Child's Worst Nightmare
The emotions of fear and horror are inextricable in King's fiction, and justifiably so. There was, as Chesley pointed out, no respite for Stephen King's powerful imagination, which conjured up awful possibilities.
But the fear began early on in King's life when he was abandoned by his father — a small child's worst nightmare. Parents, after all, are supposed to be a bedrock, a solid platform on which children build their lives. But when one parent leaves for whatever reasons, children often blame themselves ("Was it something I did?"); they endlessly torture themselves asking a question that can't be answered: "Why?"
Conjecture is no replacement for knowledge, and understandably the fear of abandonment prefigures largely in King's early fiction: Carietta White (Carrie), whose mother is a fundamentalist Christian, raising her alone; Danny Torrance (The Shining), whose dysfunctional father is slowly spiraling out of control; Charlene "Charlie" McGee (Firestarter), whose mother dies at the hands of the nefarious federal agents at "The Shop"; and others. The repercussions of parental abandonment reverberate in King's fiction, as they clearly do for Stephen King himself, who was never able to take out his long-simmering anger on his dad and punch him out. He can only live with the knowledge that, as Dick Hallorann tells Danny Torrance in the epilogue to The Shining,
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. ... But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
With his mother as his shining example, Stephen King went on to do just that: He went on.
Flotsam and Jetsam
The expression around the King family was that "Daddy done gone," and what he left behind, the physical artifacts from his past, had been boxed and stored at a relative's house down the street. Aunt Ethelyn and her husband, Oren, kept the flotsam and jetsam of Donald King's life in their attic, where one day Stephen went to see what he could find, the only physical remains of what once was presumed to be a good marriage.
In Spignesi's The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, David King was asked, "What do you remember about your father?"
David King replied:
Nothing. I don't remember the man personally at all. I do remember that at one point — I guess when we got back to Durham, Maine — Stevie and I found a trunk up in Aunt Ethelyn's garage that contained a lot of books on seamanship and that sort of thing, and in fact, there was even one of his Merchant Marine uniforms in it.
We also had several still pictures of him and one sixteen- millimeter film that he had taken. One scene from that film that I can remember was of the ship he was on going through a storm. There were waves crashing over the bow and everything. And surprisingly (since this was the mid-1940s), there were also some shots on that reel in color — footage of both Stevie and I as little kids running around.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote that he found in their attic boxes of his father's past, now gathering dust and long abandoned: merchant marine manuals and scrapbooks of his travels worldwide, including an 8mm movie reel, sans sound, which he shared with David; they saw, for the first time, their father waving to them in absentia. From Danse Macabre:
He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now.
Their dad, as it turned out, left Maine permanently and headed to Pennsylvania, where he would settle down permanently. But the boys had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that their father had left.
One thing Donald did leave behind, a blessing in disguise, was a box of cheap paperbacks, science fiction and horror, which Ruth said were his main interests, the kind of fiction he enjoyed reading. An aspiring writer, Donald King had tried his hand at writing fiction, even submitting items for publications, collecting a few rejection slips.
In time, if Donald King had applied himself to the craft of writing fiction, he might have produced a salable manuscript. But that never happened, possibly because, as Stephen, in Danse Macabre, recalls Ruth explaining, "Your father didn't have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature."
That afternoon in the dusty attic was a defining moment for a young Stephen King, who in Danse Macabre recalls what happened afterward: "The compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north" when he found a "treasure trove" of horror novels published by Avon. It was his first fictional encounter with the bogeyman of Providence, Rhode Island, a tall, saturnine-looking man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, better known as H. P. Lovecraft.
A Lovecraft collection was, recalled King, "the pick of the litter." Lovecraft, "courtesy of my father ... opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them."
Had Stephen King not found the box of horror books, would he have eventually turned to horror fiction? Or would he had turned in another direction, perhaps the books he'd eventually write under the Richard Bachman pen name?
It's a moot point because King found himself comfortably at home with the horror writers, the fantasists, the dark dreamers. Stephen, as a fledgling writer, would ironically follow in his father's footsteps, but where his father ultimately failed, Stephen would eventually succeed, and brilliantly so, because unlike his father, Stephen had, as his mother termed it, a "stick-to-it" nature, which must have come from his mother.
CHAPTER 2
Durham, Maine
Stand by Me
The King family, particularly David and Stephen, bounced around like pinballs among relatives on both sides of the family all over the map. As David King recalled in an interview with Spignesi in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia:
When we were very small, I heard that we lived in Scarborough for a while, and then we lived in a place called Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That part is just hearsay, of course, because I really don't remember that. And then there was a period of time when Stevie stayed with Ethelyn, my mother's sister, and Oren Flaws, in Durham, and I stayed with Molly, another of her sisters, down in Malden, Massachusetts. Mother was working. I don't remember too much of that. I do remember one thing, though. Mom came to visit me at Molly's once, and I remember at breakfast time Molly always used to put wheat germ on our cereal, and I told my mother that my aunt was feeding us germs.
After that we went to live with my grandmother on my father's side in Chicago for a period. I was in kindergarten at the time. I can remember at one time seeing a picture of me in my kindergarten class. All of us in the class had made Easter bonnets out of paper and whatnot. I don't know if that picture is still in existence or not.
I can vaguely remember that we had a dog, and that the dog was kept in the front yard, and so you had to be very careful where you walked.
After Wisconsin, we then went to live with my father's sister Betty, and a lady she stayed with named Rudy. We have a picture of that somewhere, too — Stevie and I sitting on a lawn in front of a house. That was in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area. Aunt Betty was a schoolteacher, as was Rudy, and I skipped second grade because she thought that I should.
After that we lived in an apartment of our own in Fort Wayne. I can remember some of that. We shared the apartment with a number of cockroaches. It was an apartment house, but I'm not sure if it was a single-family dwelling or if there were a couple of apartments in it.
They finally planted geographic roots in Durham, Maine, in 1958. For the next eight years, it would be the place they called home.
The Kings' small home was a stone's throw from Methodist's Corner (named after a local church). It housed Ruth, her two sons, and also her parents, then in their eighties, and in declining health.
Like most towns in Maine, Durham is rural. Chris Chesley, who was a young teenager living there in the late fifties, recalled that most people in town commuted to bigger, nearby towns to make a living. Chris's recollection was that they were all "poor." Or, at least, not well off.
In 1962, noted Stephen King in On Writing, Durham's population was approximately 900. Its population according to the 2000 census was only 1,496 households (3,381 people).
Unlike most writers who grew up in comfortable surroundings, whether in urban or suburban environments, Stephen King and his family had a hardscrabble life. There were no luxuries. Understandably, his early fiction reflected a desire to escape, and he did it through his rich imagination, which transported him away from the rural dreariness of Durham.
It was the only world he knew, though in later years he made more frequent trips to nearby Lisbon Falls, where he saw life unfold in small-town Maine. A working-class town, with the Worumbo Mill as its primary employer, it was surrounded by small-town stores, shops, and businesses. (The mill burned down in 1987.)
Durham is mostly open fields, farmland, inexpensive single-family homes strung out on remote roads, and churches that formed its social hub. Its principal landmark is a large lake called Runaround Pond.
In later years, Stephen King's references to himself as a "hick" can be seen as self-deprecation. Clearly, he was never a stereotyped Mainer, parodied in Creepshow, in which he played a hayseed farmer named Jordy Verrill.
Back then, in the late fifties and early sixties, Stephen King knew that financially his family wasn't well off, but he did not consider them poor. Grounded in the reality of living in rural Maine, King's early values — hard work, honoring the family, self-sustainment, and lack of pretense — would later be reflected in the naturalism of his fiction. King wasn't the literary equivalent of John Updike writing about the solidly middle-class folks who come "from away" (a Maine term for non-Mainers). King didn't write about the affluent tourists who come to Bar Harbor or other scenic destinations; instead, he wrote about the blue-collar working class because that was what he saw growing up in Durham.
Without the distractions of big-city life, or even small-city life on the scale of nearby Lisbon Falls, Durham was simple and unglamorous. His friends back then accepted him for who and what he was: a big, goofy kid who found self-worth in writing. He wore thick, black glasses and spent most of his time inside a cramped upstairs bedroom that he shared with his older brother David, who, along with an old, battered manual typewriter and his overactive imagination, were Stephen's constant companions.
King's life and times as a teenager were captured with fidelity in his story "The Body," set in rural Maine and fictionalized as Castle Rock (the film version was shot in Oregon). In "The Body," King wrote: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?"
Adapted by director Rob Reiner as Stand by Me, "The Body" perfectly encapsulates the life and times of a young Stephen King growing up in rural Maine: the first-person narrator, in fact, is King as Gordie LaChance, who finds validation in himself through his storytelling.
Gordie's great fear, even as a young teen, is that he, like many of the others, would be trapped in Castle Rock and never realize his dreams. At one point Gordie's best friend Chris asks him, "I'm never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?"
Gordie replies, "You can do anything you want, man."
In the end, it is not Gordie who becomes a permanent resident of Castle Rock: that would be John "Ace" Merrill, who bullied him when they were younger and has become a fixture in the small town. As an adult, Gordon sees Ace leaving work from his job at the local mill and heading into a bar called the Mellow Tiger; Ace is now a thirty-two-year-old man, no longer lean and mean as he was in his teens, but overweight and resigned to his mundane life. Gordie looks on and thinks, "So that's what Ace is now."
Their world has moved on, and when life's cards have been dealt, it's Ace who holds the losing hand: He's the joker. The winning hand is held by Gordie, who grew up, matured, and finally escaped the confines of rural Maine:
I'm a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right ... but it still freaks me out to put ... those words, "Freelance Writer," down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors' offices.
But time is a river, and like the rushing waters of the Androscoggin River that runs through Lisbon Falls, past the abandoned Worumbo Mill where Stephen King once worked, life, too, moves on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Stephen King Companion by George Beahm, Michael Whelan, Glenn Chadbourne. Copyright © 2015 George Beahm. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
