The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Stephen King ‘authority’ says he’s not just a horror writer
Stephen King ‘authority’ says the writer is more Dickens than Koontz
When I came upon Stephen Spignesi, he was poised on the edge of East Lawn Cemetery next to the East Haven Green, scouting out locations for suitable sites related to the writer Stephen King.
Spignesi, who recently produced the book “Stephen King, American Master: A Creepy Corpus of Facts About Stephen King and His Work” (Permuted Press), figured the cemetery would be an appropriate place for him to pose for a photo in light of King’s sometimes macabre subject matter. And yet, throughout our talk at the nearby Hagaman Memorial Library last Monday after the photo session, Spignesi maintained: “There’s a major misconception about Stephen King. He isn’t just a horror writer.”
Spignesi considers King “an important American literary figure. His work is akin to (Mark) Twain, (Edgar Allan) Poe and (Charles) Dickens.”
“Horror writers don’t win the National Book Award,” Spignesi added. (King did so in 2003). “Horror writers aren’t given the National Medal of Arts (2015). Horror writers don’t win the O. Henry Award for short stories (1994). Horror writers aren’t published in literary journals.” (King had a one-act play in “Ploughshares.”)
Spignesi said King got “pigeonholed” as a horror writer because his early books were of that genre, and popular movies have been made of those books: “Carrie,” “The Shining” and many more.
“Entertainment Weekly” has called Spignesi “the world’s leading authority on Stephen King,” and this new book is the sixth he has written about his favorite writer. But when I asked him if he is obsessed with or fixated on King, Spignesi quickly replied, “No, not really. I’ve also written three books on The Beatles and two on the Titanic. I’m not obsessed with those topics either. It’s more a matter of — he’s the most enjoyable American storyteller I’ve ever read.”
He got his first taste of King in the spring of 1977, when he came across a yellowing paperback edition of “The Shining,” King’s third novel. In the introduction to “American Master,” Spignesi wrote: “I consumed it in one large gulp. That was the beginning.”
Spignesi told me, “I had skipped ‘Carrie’ (published in 1974) and ‘Salem’s Lot.’ What blew me away was that he was in his 20s when he wrote ‘The Shining.’”
Then Spignesi showed his encyclopedic knowledge of all things King by telling me: “He threw away his manuscript to ‘Carrie,’ but his wife pulled it out of the trash. She said, ‘You’ve got
“Horror writers don’t win the National Book Award. Horror writers aren’t given the National Medal of Arts.”
Stephen Spignesi, author of “Stephen King, American Master”
to finish this!’”
In his introduction, Spignesi sought to show King is “not just a horror writer” by quoting this phrase from “The Regulators”: “Surrounding everything like an auditory edging of lace, the soothing, silky hiss of lawn sprinklers.”
Thus, Spignesi added, King often demonstrates writing that is “evocative and well crafted.”
In addition to being “a master storyteller,” Spignesi wrote of King, “he also has keen insight into the human psyche, the ‘monsters within,’ as he’s described it.”
Spignesi told me his book is intended for either browsing or close reading. Its 421 pages include interviews, essays on King by experts and other writers, film journalist Andrew Rausch’s list of the 10 best King film adaptations (including “The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption”) and another list of unpublished short stories and other works.
“My book is for the Stephen King fan, be they casual, serious or fanatic,” Spignesi told me.
One of the King “superfans” Spignesi interviewed in the book is his girlfriend, Valerie Barnes. “She’s a huge King collector,” Spignesi said during our talk. “She sold three limited-edition King books and bought a new car, a Kia. We have a lot in common. We met through our love of King.”
Barnes once met King during a “Reading Stephen King” conference at the University of Maine. She got up the nerve to interrupt his dinner in order to finally meet him and make sure he had received a jacket she had made for him. She said in the interview with Spignesi that he was polite and gracious. He thanked her for the jacket even though she had intruded on his mouthful of salad.
But when I asked Spignesi what time he has spent with King, he surprised me by saying: “I’ve never met him.”
“I talked to him over the phone once many years ago,” Spignesi recalled. He said he called King’s office about King sanctioning Spignesi’s “The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia”’ (1990).
“He answered the phone and I said, ‘Hi Steve, is Shirley there?’ Shirley was his personal secretary. He said, “Yeah, hang on’ and switched me over to her.”
Spignesi said he has never tried to interview King. “I don’t want to bother him. A guy like that, everybody wants something every day.”
One time during the 1980s, before King got so popular that he couldn’t do public appearances without getting mobbed, Spignesi tried to meet him or at least listen to him at a book expo in New York. “I hired a car. But I got carsick, violently ill! I’m prone to motion sickness.”
Although Spignesi has not met King, he said from everything he has heard, “He’s a really nice guy. He doesn’t have that hubris and arrogance that a lot of writers do. I won’t name any.”
And yet Spignesi characterizes King as America’s most popular writer. He notes King has sold more than 350 million books.
He asserts King’s talent and productivity are akin to Paul McCartney. “We also take Paul McCartney for granted because he’s an artist who’s constantly creating, like King.” Spignesi believes that 100 years from now, people will still be listening to the music of The Beatles and McCartney’s solo work, and they will still be reading the best of King’s books.
For anybody who thinks Spignesi is too preoccupied with King, Spignesi noted: “I hadn’t written a book about him in 17 years. I felt the time was right. He’s still very creative, very prolific.”
Spignesi pointed out that King, now 71, recently had published “Elevation,” a short novel about a man who looks as if he weighs 240 pounds but the scale keeps getting lower and lower. Spignesi said, “It’s one of King’s most spiritually sophisticated works since ‘The Green Mile.’ ”
Because there are assorted lists in Spignesi’s compilation volume, I asked him to list the “top 10 King books you would bring to a desert island.” He did so in an email, putting “IT” at the top, followed by “The Shining,” “The Stand,” “Misery,” “11/22/63,” “The Dead Zone,” “Elevation,” “Bazaar of Bad Dreams,” “On Writing” and “The Dark Tower” series.
Spignesi, who lives in the Bella Vista complex at New Haven, taught a course titled “The New Gothic Horror of Stephen King” when he was a practitioner in residence at the University of New Haven. He retired from teaching in 2016 and now works full-time writing books. He estimates he has published 75.
Spignesi, like King, remains productive: “I currently have in the works four or five more books.” On deck for next spring: “The Big Book of UFO Facts, Figures & Truth.”