Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (11 page)

It is possible this story is the
The Star Invaders
or a version of the same tale. That story is subject of a separate chapter in this book). Note that some kids “insisted on keeping their copies” of this story. Unlikely though it may seem, is it possible a copy will turn up one day when one of King’s ex-schoolmates cleans out an old box of keepsakes?
 

King had previously related the history of
The Pit and the Pendulum
in Douglas Winter’s
The Art of Darkness
:
²¹
 

One day I went to Brunswick to see the American International Film of
The Pit and the Pendulum
with Vincent Price, and I was very impressed by it – very, very scared. And when I went home, I got a bunch of stencils, and I wrote a novelization of the movie, with chapters and everything – although it was only twelve pages long. I bought a ream of typewriter paper, and I bought a stapler and some staples, and I printed, on Dave’s machine, about two hundred and fifty copies of this book. I slugged in a price of a dime on them, and when I took them to school, I was just flabbergasted. In three days, I sold something like seventy of these things. And all of a sudden, I was in the black – it was like a license to steal. That was my first experience with bestsellerdom. But they shut me down. They took me to the principal’s office and told me to stop, although there didn’t seem to be any real reason. My aunt
²²
taught in that school, and it was just not seemly; it wasn’t right. So I had to quit. 

According to Chris Chesley, there was another such story, although he doesn’t provide the title. Chesley told Beahm:
²³
 

In another story, King playfully wove fact and fiction, using the real names of fellow students in a fictional hostage situation. “It was all of twenty pages,” recalled Chesley, “and it was a story where he used real kids who had taken over the grammar school. Of course, the people that were in the story read the story; because of things like that, King was lionized. He could take real people and set them into this setting where we were heroes. In this story, we died fighting the National Guard. The kids he liked best ‘died’ last; so naturally, we were all wondering when we were going to ‘die’.” 

Poltergeist
was a screenplay by King, written for Stephen Spielberg, who apparently turned down each draft as excessively scary. It is not known whether any copies exist. The movie was produced using a script written by Spielberg and two others.  

In his introduction to
The Old Dude’s Ticker
, King mentions he wrote two pastiches
²⁴
about 1971-1972. “The first was a modern day revision of Nikolai Gogol’s story, ‘The Ring’ (my version was called ‘The Spear,’ I think).” That one is lost. The other story was, of course,
The Old Dude’s Ticker
, which is the subject of a chapter of this book. 

The Street Kid’s Genesis
is the title King gave a “vernacular version of the Book of Genesis” from the Bible. King wrote this piece and sent it to Steve Gould. The date and length are unknown.
 

Training Exercises
is an unproduced film treatment. According to the
Castle Rock
newsletter for May 1986:  

Training Exercises
is a treatment developed by Stephen King. It concerns a number of elderly WWII and Korean warhorses who own their own Pacific Island and trick young kids into coming each year to participate in a harmless “training exercise.” The hero is a kid of 18 or so, a down-and-out and would-be actor from L.A., who answers an ad and becomes part of this year’s Training Exercise. Except it all turns out to be real, with blood, bullets and death. These old guys have been slaughtering people for years. 

Interestingly, King plugged
Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami in his
Entertainment Weekly
column for 12 August 2005. King’s short take on the novel:  

Forty-two Japanese high school kids who think they’re going on a class trip are instead dropped on an island, issued weapons ranging from machine guns to kitchen forks, and forced to fight it out until only one is left alive.
Royale
bears some resemblance to Richard Bachman’s
The Long Walk
. 

In
Stephen King Collectibles: An Illustrated Price Guide
²⁵
author George Beahm writes of an
Untitled
work not referenced anywhere else in published King research: “…I know of an unpublished story in short manuscript form, inscribed to the mother of one of King’s childhood friends from Durham ….” It is unclear whether this is an otherwise unknown story, or a simply a manuscript of an unpublished short story noted elsewhere in this chapter. 

Untitled
: King told Douglas Winter this in an interview:  

I can remember the first real horror story that I wrote. I was about seven years old, and I had internalized the idea from the movies that, when everything looked blackest, the scientists would come up with some off-the-wall solution that would take care of things. I wrote about this big dinosaur that was really ripping ass all over everything, and finally one guy said, “Wait, I have a theory – the old dinosaurs used to be allergic to leather.” So they went out and threw leather boots and leather shoes and leather vests at it, and it went away.
²⁶
 

Untitled:
The
Lisbon Monthly
for November 1986 carried an article titled
Stephen King: “Lisbon High’s Most Celebrated Alumnus”
. In this article Ambra Watkins reports King “also wrote a successful script for Class Day about Batman and Robin.” More detail appears in the 1967 Lisbon High School Yearbook which reports:  

Two members of
The Drum
staff decided to write their own little skit for class night based on the television program, “Batman” … Danny Emond and Steve King began writing their comic tale … After finishing the script, the (senior class) committee approved the writing, made minor changes and began to put it together for the stage. Steve and Danny took the leading roles of Batman and Robin. The plot concerned a possible attack on Lisbon High which was to be prevented by the daring duo … When Batman and Robin were needed, the two appeared on a tricycle down the middle of the gymnasium.  

A photo from the yearbook shows King played Robin in the skit, performed on the evening of 7 June 1966. The class graduated the following day. 

Untitled:
In February 2007, author Stephen R. Donaldson reported on his official website:  

Incidentally (for you trivia buffs), he [King] and I once collaborated
–
with quite a few other writers
–
on what I think of as a “gag” story. It was so long ago that I’ve forgotten most of the details. But the purpose of the exercise was to raise money for a charity at an sf/f convention. Without any prior discussion, each writer in turn wrote for 30-45 minutes, then folded the paper so that only the last sentence was visible. With only that last sentence for “context,” the next writer attempted to continue the “story.” I had to go on from King’s last sentence. The result, as I recall, was hysterically surreal.  

Donaldson recalls this was around 1980. It seems likely that the finished result was later auctioned. 

Untitled
: King told
www.TIME.com
the following in November 2009
²⁷
:  

(
The Tommyknockers
) was another case of a book I tried to write a long time ago. I had the idea of the guy stumbling over the flying saucer when I was a senior in college. I had 15 or 20 pages and I just stopped. I don’t remember why. I think it was probably like
Under the Dome
. The canvas was just too big. And so I quit. The pages went God knows where. Years later the idea recurred and I just got swept up by the concept. 

Untitled
: King told the Associated Press this in 1979:  

For example, I’m working on a story now about a guy who goes to his small town’s restaurant every afternoon for coffee. One day he goes in and a different waitress takes his order. When he asks about the other waitress, the new one denies there ever was such as person. That’s a frightening situation. How does a person cope? 

This story has not been mentioned elsewhere.
²⁸
Verona Beach
was a piece of fiction King worked on in college. It apparently became the basis of
The Talisman
. 

Sometime in the school year of 1963-64 King edited a satirical take-off of the high school newspaper he later edited,
The Drum
(two stories from that newspaper,
Code Name: Mousetrap
and
The 43rd Dream
are subject of a separate chapter of this book). The satire was titled
The Village Vomit
, King tells its sordid story in section 19 of the “C.V.”
part of
On Writing
. In part he says:  

One night
–
sick to death of Class Reports, Cheerleading Updates, and some lamebrain’s efforts to write a school poem
–
I created a satiric high school newspaper of my own when I should have been captioning photographs for
The Drum.
What resulted was a four-sheet which I called
The Village Vomit.
The boxed motto in the upper lefthand corner was not “All the News That’s Fit to Print” but “All the Shit That Will Stick.” That piece of dimwit humor got me into the only real trouble of my high school career. 

No known copies of
The Village Vomit
, which included a number of articles, exist. 

Douglas Winter quotes King in
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness
²⁹
as saying, “I had a bad year in 1976 – it was a very depressing time. I started a book called
Welcome to Clearwater
, but it was busted.” 

What Tricks Your Eye
was King’s first attempt at the story that would become
The Green Mile
. He tells its story in the
Introduction
to the combined volume of that originally serialized novel. King developed the tale in 1992 or 1993. It has never been released in any form and it is now very unlikely that it will. The best we can hope for is that it will be deposited at the Fogler Library. In the story a man on death row develops an interest in magic tricks. Luke Coffey was a large black man awaiting his punishment at Evans Notch in 1932. As the date of his execution drew near he developed an interest in sleight-of-hand magic tricks and, as a result, was able to disappear from the prison. His story is told from the perspective of an old trusty who sold cigarettes and novelties from his cart. 

¹³
The Lost Work of Stephen King
, Stephen J. Spignesi, p.277-284 

¹⁴
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
, Michel Houellebecq, p.10-13 

¹⁵
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness
, Douglas E. Winter, page xvi