Stephen King's inspiration

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People often ask writers where they get the ideas for the stories they tell, and, like many other writers, Stephen King sometimes replies that he doesn’t know. When asked 'Where do you get your ideas?' King often answers with a facetious reply such as "I get mine in Utica."^[1] or "Well, there's a great little bookstore on 42nd Street in New York called Used Ideas. I go there when I run dry."^[2] or "I get them at 239 Center Street in Bangor, just around the corner from the Frati Brothers Pawnshop."^[3] Over the years, however, King has revealed certain key inspirations that led to his works. Like many other authors, Stephen King’s inspiration comes from his own personal experiences, dreams, and interests; from his loved ones and their interests; and from the works of others.

Contents 1 Carrie 2 ’Salem's Lot 3 The Shining 4 The Stand 5 The Long Walk 6 Cujo 7 Pet Sematary 8 "Word Processor of the Gods" 9 It 10 Misery 11 The Eyes of the Dragon 12 The Dark Half 13 "The Langoliers" 14 Needful Things 15 The Green Mile 16 Desperation 17 The Regulators 18 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 19 The Storm of the Century 20 Dreamcatcher 21 From a Buick 8 22 Rose Red 23 Kingdom Hospital 24 The Dark Tower (series) 25 References

[edit] Carrie

Main article: Carrie (novel)

King's first published book started as a short story originally intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first five pages of his work-in-progress in the garbage. Of King's published short stories at the time, he recalls "Some woman said, 'You write all those macho things, but you can't write about women.' I said, 'I'm not scared of women. I could write about them if I wanted to.' So I got an idea for a story about this incident in a girls' shower room, and the girl would be telekinetic. The other girls would pelt her with sanitary napkins when she got her period. The period would release the right hormones and she would rain down destruction on them... I did the shower scene, but I hated it and threw it away."^[4]

His wife, Tabitha King, fished the pages out of the garbage and encouraged him to finish the story. He followed his wife's advice and expanded it into a novel.^[5] King says "I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas... My considered opinion was that I had written the world's all-time loser."^[6]

The character of Carietta (Carrie) White was based on a combination of two girls in King's past; one of them went to school with him, the other was a student of his. The young girl King went to school with lived down the street from him when he lived in Durham, Maine. King recalls, in an interview with Charles L. Grant for Twilight Zone Magazine (Apr 1981), "She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her mother wasn't a religious nut like the mother in Carrie; she was a game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who entered contests . . . The girl had one change of clothes for the entire school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd changed the black skirt and white blouse--which was all anybody had every seen her in--for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold."

King told biographer George Beahm that she later "married a man who was as odd as her, had kids and eventually killed herself."^[7] According to the audio commentary for the 1976 Brian DePalma film version of Carrie, Carrie is based on a composite of two girls who were bullied and abused at school, one of whom had a religious fanatic for a mother. King says he wondered what it would have been like to have been reared by such a mother. He based the story itself on a reversal of the Cinderella fairy tale. Carrie’s telekinetic powers resulted from King’s earlier reading about this topic.

King also did a short stint as a high school English teacher at Hampden Academy, a job he eventually quit after receiving the payment for the paperback publishing sale of Carrie. It is presumed that he drew inspiration from his time as a teacher while he was writing the book.^[7]

[edit] ’Salem's Lot

Main article: ’Salem's Lot

On his official web site, King tells how he came up with the idea for ’Salem's Lot (1975):

"One of my high school classes was Fantasy and Science Fiction, and one of the novels I taught was Dracula. I was surprised at how vital it had remained over the years; the kids liked it, and I liked it, too. One night over supper I wondered aloud what would happen if Dracula came back in the twentieth century, to America. 'He'd probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed,' my wife said. That closed the discussion, but in the following days, my mind kept returning to the idea. It occurred to me that my wife was probably right — if the legendary Count came to New York, that was. But if he were to show up in a sleepy little country town, what then? I decided I wanted to find out, so I wrote 'Salem's Lot, which was originally titled Second Coming".^[8]

King expands on this thought in his essay for Adeline Magazine "On Becoming a Brand Name" (Feb 1980): "I began to turn the idea over in my mind, and it began to coalesce into a possible novel. I thought it would make a good one, if I could create a fictional town with enough prosaic reality about it to offset the comic-book menace of a bunch of vampires.

"I wrote Salem's Lot during the period when the Ervin committee was sitting. That was also the period when we first learned of the Ellsberg break-in, the White House tapes, the shadowy, ominous connection between the CIA and Gordon Liddy, the news of enemies' lists, of tax audits on antiwar protestors and other fearful intelligence. During the spring, summer and fall of 1973, it seemed that the Federal Government had been involved in so much subterfuge and so many covert operations that, like the bodies of the faceless wetbacks that Juan Corona was convicted of slaughtering in California, the horror would never end . . . Every novel is to some extent an indavertant psychological portrait of the novelist, and I think that the unspeakable obscenity in Salem's Lot has to do with my own disillusionment and consequent fear for the future. The secret room in Salem's Lot is paranoia, the prevaling spirit of those years. It is a book about vampires, it is also a book about all those silent houses, all those drawn shades, all the people who are no longer what they seem. In a way, it is more closely related to Invasion of the Body Snatchers than it is to Dracula. The fear behind Salem's Lot seems to be that the Government has invaded everybody."^[9]

King first wrote of Jerusalem's Lot in a short story, of that same title, penned in college (but published years later for the first time in the anthology collection Night Shift).

In Danse Macabre (book), King writes: "The most vivid dream I can recall came to me when I was eight. In this dream I saw the body of a hanged man dangling from the arm of a scaffold on a hill... This corpse bore a sign: ROBERT BURNS. But when the wind caused the corpse to turn in the air, I saw that it was my face - rotted and picked by birds, but obviously mine. And then the corpse opened its eyes and looked at me. I woke up screaming, sure that a dead face would be leaning over me in the dark. Sixteen years later, I was able to use the dream as one of the central images in my novel Salem's Lot. I just changed the name of the corpse to Hubie Marsten."

In a 1969 installment of The Garbage Truck, a column King wrote for the University of Maine at Orono's campus newspaper, King forshadowed the coming of 'Salem's Lot: "In the early 1800s a whole sect of Shakers, a rather strange, religious persuasion at best, disappeared from their village (Jeremiah's Lot) in Vermont. The town remains uninhabited to this day."^[10]

In addition to Dracula, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Grace Metalious' Peyton Place are often cited as inspirations for 'Salem's Lot.

[edit] The Shining

Main article: The Shining (novel)

After writing Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, both of which are set in small towns in King's home state of Maine, the author was looking for a change of pace for the next book. "I wanted to spend a year away from Maine so that my next novel would have a different sort of background."^[10] King opened a US atlas on the kitchen table and randomly pointed to a location, which turned out to be Boulder, Colorado.^[11] So in early 1974, King packed up his wife, Tabitha, and their two children (Naomi and Joe) and moved across the country to Colorado.

Around Halloween, Tabitha decided that the adult Kings needed a mini-vacation and, on the advice of locals, they decided to try out a resort hotel adjacent to Estes Park, Colorado (nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountain National Park) called the Stanley Hotel. On October 30, 1974,^[12] Stephen and Tabitha checked into the Stanley. They almost weren't able to check in as the hotel was closing for the off season the next day and the credit card slips had already been packed away.

Stephen and Tabitha were the only two guests in the hotel that night. "When we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors . . ."^[10]

They checked in to room 217.

Ten years prior, King had read Ray Bradbury's The Veldt and was inspired to someday write a story about a person whose dreams would become real. In 1972 King started a novel entitled Darkshine, which was to be about a psychic boy in a psychic amusement park, but the idea never came to fruition and King abandonded the book. During the night at the Stanley, this story came back to him.^[13]

Tabitha and Stephen had dinner that evening in the grand dining room, totally alone. They were offered one choice for dinner, the only meal still available. Taped orchestral music played in the room and theirs was the only table set for dining. "Except for our table all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and, I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind".^[14]

After dinner, Tabitha decided to turn in, but Stephen took a walk around the empty hotel. He ended up in the bar and was served drinks by a bartender named Grady.^[12]

"That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a firehose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind."^[11]

Originally conceived as a five-act tragedy play, the story evolved into a five-act novel that also included a lot of King's own personal demons.

"I was able to invest a lot of my unhappy aggressive impulses in Jack Torrance, and it was safe."^[11]

"Sometimes you confess. You always hide what you're confessing to. That's one of the reasons why you make up the story. When I wrote The Shining, for instance, the protagonist of The Shining is a man who has broken his son's arms, who has a history of child beating, who is beaten himself. And as a young father with two children, I was horrified by my occasional feelings of real antagonism toward my children. Won't you ever stop? Won't you ever go to bed? And time has given me the idea that probably there are a lot of young fathers and young mothers both who feel very angry, who have angry feelings toward their children. But as somebody who has been raised with the idea that father knows best and Ward Cleaver on 'Leave It To Beaver,' and all this stuff, I would think to myself, Oh, if he doesn't shut up, if he doesn't shut up. . . . So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them. Well, my kids are older now. Naomi is fifteen and Joey is thirteen and Owen is eight, and they're all super kids, and I don't think I've laid a hand on one of my kids in probably seven years, but there was a time . . . ."^[10]

According to "Guests and Ghosts", an Internet article, the Stanley, which was built by Freelan Oscar ("F. O.") Stanley based on the designs of his wife, Flora, opened in 1903 and was "once a luxury hotel for the well-heeled Edwardian-era tourist." The hotel boasts having had such guests as not only King but also Theodore Roosevelt, Bob Dylan, Billy Graham, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, and John Philip Sousa.^[14]

The Shining was also heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House,^[15] Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death^[13] and Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings.^[11]

[edit] The Stand

Main article: The Stand

On his official web site, King explains the origin of his 1978 novel The Stand:

"For a long time — ten years, at least — I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting. I just couldn't figure out how to do it. Then . . . after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, 'If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City.' This incident later served as the basis of a movie called Rage, starring George C. Scott, but before it was released, I was deep into The Stand, finally writing my American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA. Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a roothless [sic] drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor ('where the shadows lie,' according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas".^[16]

[edit] The Long Walk

Main article: The Long Walk

Written under the pen name Richard Bachman, The Long Walk (1979) was inspired, King says, by the "50-mile hikes" that the radio and television media sponsored. On his official web site, he confides:

"In the early '60s radio and TV stations throughout the country organized 50-mile hikes. King says: 'I had that in mind. I didn't have a car when I wrote that book. I was hitchhiking everywhere. I didn't finish my 50-mile hike, though. I fell out after 20 miles.'"

[edit] Cujo

Main article: Cujo

In 1977, King took his motorcycle to a mechanic who lived outside of Bridgton, Maine, "in the middle of nowhere."

King's explanation of his inspiration for Cujo (1981) appears on his official web site:

"I took the bike out there, and I just barely made it. And this huge Saint Bernard came out of the barn, growling. Then this guy came out and, I mean, he was Joe Camber--he looked almost like one of those guys out of Deliverance. And I was retreating, and wishing that I was not on my motorcycle, when the guy said, 'Don't worry. He don't bite.' And so I reached out to pet him, and the dog started to go for me. And the guy walked over and said, 'Down Gonzo,' or whatever the dog's name was and gave him this huge whack on the rump, and the dog yelped and sat down. The guy said, 'Gonzo never done that before. I guess he don't like your face.' And that became the central situation of the book, mixed with those old 'Movies of the Week,' the made-for-television movies that they used to have on ABC. I thought to myself, what if you could have a situation that was an extension of one scene. It would be the ultimate TV movie. There would be one set, there would be one room. You'd never even have to change the camera angle. So there was one very small place, and it became Donna's Pinto-and everything just flowed from that situation--the big dog and the Pinto."

[edit] Pet Sematary

Main article: Pet Sematary

When working as a writer in residence at the University of Maine, King and his family rented a home in Orrington which was dangerously close to a busy road. Neigbouring this road was a burial ground created by children, who's animals had been killed in the road. The cemetary enterance was of course mispelt as "Pet Sematary". Subsequently King's daughter Naomi lost her cat Smucky in the road and her grief is depicted word for word in the novel. Perhaps the greatest and surely the most emotional and potentially horrific inspiration for the novel came when King's son Owen, nearly ran into the road as a large tanker truck happened by. Thankfully King managed to grab him before it was too late, but the incident none the less inspired grim and terrible possibilities in King's mind. King apparently formed the basic outline of the novel, while walking down the road one afternoon following the incident involving his son. A major literary inspiration for the novel came from W.W Jacob's classic horror story The Monkey's Paw, in which a magic but cursed talisman to wish back his son (who suffered in a similarily horrific accident much like Gage Creed) from the dead. The protagonist of the story is granted three wishes from the paw, much like Louis is granted three resurrections from the Micmac Ground (his cat, his son and finally his wife).

.^[17]

[edit] "Word Processor of the Gods"

One of the short stories in King's anthology Skeleton Crew (1985) is "Word Processor of the Gods." In the anthology's "Introduction", King explains how he came to write this story. He'd just bought a Wang word processor and was experimenting with the program's features, including the INSERT and DELETE fucntions. Catching a bad cold, he went to bed at 9:00 pm and slept until 2:00 pm. Unable to go back to sleep, he lay in bed, daydreaming, as it were, about the INSERT and DELETE functions, asking himself, "Wouldn't it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and, then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?" Kings adds that most of his stories begin with his asking, "Wouldn't it be funny if--?" As he thought more about this situation, he says, he began to see images in his mind, and the character whom he imagined deleting objects from the world also began to insert them, using the word processor's INSERT key: "Then I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into the world."

[edit] It

Main article: It (novel)

King provides this anecdote in explanation as to the inspiration of It (1986):

"In 1978 my family was living in Boulder, Colorado. One day on our way back from lunch at a pizza emporium, our brand-new AMC Matador dropped its transmission--literally. The damn thing fell out on Pearl Street. True embarrassment is standing in the middle of a busy downtown street, grinning idiotically while people examine your marooned car and the large greasy black thing lying under it. Two days later the dealership called at about five in the afternoon. Everything was jake--I could pick up the car any time. The dealership was three miles away. I thought about calling a cab but decided that the walk would be good for me. The AMC dealership was in an industrial park set off by itself on a patch of otherwise deserted land a mile from the strip of fast-food joints and gas stations that mark the eastern edge of Boulder. A narrow unlit road led to this outpost. By the time I got to the road it was twilight-in the mountains the end of day comes in a hurry--and I was aware of how alone I was. About a quarter of a mile along this road was a wooden bridge, humped and oddly quaint, spanning a stream. I walked across it. I was wearing cowboy boots with rundown heels, and I was very aware of the sound they made on the boards; they sounded like a hollow clock. I thought of the fairy tale called Three Billy Goats Gruff and wondered what I would do if a troll called out from beneath me, 'Who is trip-trapping upon my bridge?' All of a sudden I wanted to write a novel about a real troll under a real bridge. I stopped, thinking of a line by Marianne Moore, something about 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' only it came out 'real trolls in imaginary gardens.' A good idea is like a yo-yo--it may go to the end of its string, but it doesn't die there; it only sleeps. Eventually it rolls back up into your palm. I forgot about the bridge and the troll in the business of picking up my car and signing the papers, but it came back to me off and on over the next two years. I decided that the bridge could be some sort of symbol--a point of passing. I started thinking of Bangor, where I had lived, with its strange canal bisecting the city, and decided that the bridge could be the city, if there was something under it. What's under a city? Tunnels. Sewers. Ah! What a good place for a troll! Trolls should live in sewers! A year passed. The yo-yo stayed down at the end of its string, sleeping, and then it came back up. I started to remember Stratford, Connecticut, where I had lived for a time as a kid. In Stratford there was a library where the adult section and the children's section was connected by a short corridor. I decided that the corridor was also a bridge, one across which every goat of a child must risk trip-trapping to become an adult. About six months later I thought of how such a story might be cast; how it might be possible to create a ricochet effect, interweaving the stories of children and the adults they become. Sometime in the summer of 1981 I realized that I had to write about the troll under the bridge or leave him--IT--forever" [1].

In her article "The Turtle Can't Help Us: The Lovecraft Legacy in Stephen King's It", Margaret L. Carter identifies and explains the many references to H. P. Lovecraft's worldview and literary themes that inform King's 1981 novel and, indeed, many of King's other works as well.^[18]

[edit] Misery

Main article: Misery (novel)

In Danse Macabre (book) from 1981, King writes about having a nightmare which is similar to the basic idea of Misery (1987): "This is one which has recurred at times of stress over the last ten years: I am writing a novel in an old house where a homicidal madwoman is reputed to be on the prowl. I'm working in a third-floor room that's very hot. A door on the far side of the room communicates with the attic, and I know - I know - she's in there, and sooner or later the sound of my typewriter will cause her to come after me (perhaps she's a critic for the New York Times Book Review). At any rate, she finally comes through the door like a horrid jack from a child's box, all gray hair and crazed eyes, raving and wielding a meat-ax. And when I run, I discover that somehow the house has exploded outward - it's gotten ever so much bigger - and I'm totally lost. On awakening from this dream, I promptly scoot over to my wife's side of the bed."

In an interview, King explains that the direct idea for Misery occurred to him during another dream: "In fact, it happened when I was on [the] Concorde" super-sonic transport, or SST, "flying over here, to Brown's", a hotel in England. "I fell asleep on the plane and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer's skin. I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course, the plot changed quite a bit in the telling. But I wrote the first forty or fifty pages right on the landing here, between the ground floor and the first floor of the hotel".^[19]

[edit] The Eyes of the Dragon

Main article: The Eyes of the Dragon

King wrote The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) for his daughter, who was unimpressed with the monsters in his horror fiction. As he relates the novel's origin on his official web site:

"Although I had written thirteen novels by the time my daughter had attained an equal number of years, she hadn't read any of them. She'd made it very clear that she loved me, but had very little interest in my vampires, ghoulies, and slushy crawling things. I sat down one night in our western Maine house to start this story, then called "The Napkins." Eventually the tale was told and Naomi took hold of the finished manuscript with a marked lack of enthusiasm. That look gradually changed to one of rapt interest as the story kidnapped her. It was good to have her come to me later and give me a hug and tell me the only thing wrong with it was that she didn't want it to end."

[edit] The Dark Half

Main article: The Dark Half

Here is King's account of his inspiration for The Dark Half (1989):

"In The Dark Half I tried to answer the question 'Where do you get your ideas?' It seems to me that for most writers there really is another person hiding inside, although it isn't always dark and it's hardly ever as much as a half. I thought it would be fun to write a story about a novelist whose muse gets totally out of control. There was one problem: I didn't how how to end it. Then, one day while I was on the way to my office, I saw a huge flock of crows-huge enough to darken an appreciable part of the sky-all take wing at once. They made me think of a poem by H.P. Lovecraft called 'The Psychopomp,' about a bird who is an emissary of death, and a winged messenger between the land inhabited by mortals and that of the afterlife. In that instant, I knew exactly how to dispose of George Stark; all I had to do was go home and write it."

[edit] "The Langoliers"

Main article: The Langoliers

One of the four novellas in Four Past Midnight (1990), The “Langoliers” resulted from a persistent image that haunted King’s imagination for years. As the author recounts in “A Note on ‘The Langoliers,’” the “image was of a woman pressing her hand over a crack in the wall of a commercial jetliner.” This was one of the relatively few images that resulted in his writing a story, despite the fact that, as he says, he “knew very little about commercial aircraft.” So frequent was the appearance of this image that, King explains, “It got so I could even smell that woman’s perfume (it was L’Envoi), see her green eyes, and hear her rapid, frightened breathing.” As he lay abed one night, King declares, he “realized the woman was a ghost,” and, the next day, he began writing her story, which took a month to complete.

[edit] Needful Things

Main article: Needful Things

Concerning his inspiration for Needful Things 1991), King declares:

"I guess I was one of the few people in the United States who thought the eighties were really funny. It was a decade in which people decided, for a while, at least, that greed was good and that hypocrisy was simply another tool for getting along. It was the last hurrah for cigarettes, unsafe sex, and all sorts of drugs. It was the final corruption of the Love and Peace Generation--The Big Cop-out--and I thought it was a case of having to laugh. It was either that, or cry. I was thinking about all this one night while driving home from a basketball game, and my thoughts centered on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, of the PTL Club. It occurred to me that in the eighties, everything had come with a price tag, that the decade quite literally was the sale of the century. The final items up on the block had been honor, integrity, self-respect, and innocence. By the time I got home that night, I had decided to turn the eighties into a small-town curio shop called Needful Things and see what happened. I told myself to keep it light and surreal; that if I just kept in mind the Bakkers' doghouse, which had been equipped with heaters and running water, I would be okay. And that's what I did. The book didn't review well. Either a lot of critics didn't get the joke or didn't appreciate it. The readers liked it, though, and that's what matters to me" [2].

[edit] The Green Mile

Main article: The Green Mile (book)

In 1993, King outlined a story in which a black inmate with magical powers was to be electrocuted. However, the inmate used his powers to escape the electric chair, disappearing from the prison before he could be executed. King changed his idea, and the result is The Green Mile (1996). He was inspired by Charles Dickens to release the novel in serial form, admitting that he had "always loved stories told in episodes ... a format I first encountered in the Saturday Evening Post".^[20]

[edit] Desperation

Main article: Desperation

King made two cross-country trips, driving, in part, along Interstate Highway 50 (U. S. Highway 50), which runs east and west through Nevada. On the first trip, in 1991, he was driving his daughter’s car (in the novel, Peter Jackson's sister's car). Driving through Ruth, Nevada, an all-but-deserted town, he supposed that all the residents must have been killed. When he then wondered who had murdered them, the thought occurred to him that the sheriff had done so. Three years later, on a motorcycle journey from coast to coast, King again passed Ruth. This time, he was told a local legend. According to this tale, Chinese laborers were trapped underground by the collapse of a mine. Rather than risk the additional losses of their would-be rescuers, the Chinese were abandoned to their fate. These two incidents sparked the idea for Desperation (1996), which was followed by a sequel, The Regulators, which contained many of the same key characters but took place in another time and town, far from Desperation, and featured a plot that had virtually nothing to do with Desperation.^[21]

[edit] The Regulators

Main article: The Regulators

On his official web site, King explains his inspiration for this unlikely sequel to Desperation:

"I had been toying with this idea called The Regulators because I had a sticker on my printer that said that. Then one day I pulled up in my driveway after going to the market and the Voice said, 'Do The Regulators and do it as a Bachman book and use the characters from Desperation but let them be who they're going to be in this story'" [3].

[edit] The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Main article: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

King was inspired to write The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) as a result of his attending a Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park in July, 1998, during which he watched relief pitcher Tom Gordon save one of the 44 games that he saved during this season.^[22]

[edit] The Storm of the Century

In his "Introduction" to The Storm of the Century, King explains that the 1999 screenplay "started with a jailhouse image; that of a man sitting on the bunk in his cell, heels drawn up, arms resting on his knees, eyes unblinking" who was "an extremely evil man. Maybe not a man at all."

From this initial mental images, King says, "the story started to spin out", as the prisoner sat "in Mike Anderson's home-welded cell, looking out, waiting . . . for . . . the storm of the century, which would be "big enough to cut Little Tall Island off from the mainland, to throw it entirely upon its own resources."

As the island was isolated from the mainland, the prisoner, Andre Linoge would "do great damage . . . without ever leaving that bunk where he sat with his heels up and his arms on his knees." King says he felt the need to write this story soon "or lose" his "chance" to do so, as "a story that rises from a single image, one that exists mostly as potential, seems to be a much more perishable item." Thus, he came to write The Storm of the Century [4].

[edit] Dreamcatcher

Main article: Dreamcatcher (novel)

In Danse Macabre, King writes about the science fiction films of his 1950’s boyhood. Such movies as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he says, touched cultural "phobic pressure points" related to the Cold War. Dreamcatcher (2001) is an updated story along similar lines in which the subtext is identified by King’s original title for the novel — Cancer. King wrote Dreamcatcher as he was undergoing painful physical therapy after a driver struck him as he was walking alongside a country road in Maine in the summer of 1999. During his recuperation, he dreamed of " four guys in a cabin in the woods" and a "guy who staggers into camp saying, 'I don't feel well,' and he brings this awful hitchhiker with him." King's injuries prevented him from typing, so he penned the manuscript manually, a task which took six months [5].

In Dreamcatcher, his character Jonesy suffers similar injuries.^[23]

[edit] From a Buick 8

Main article: From a Buick 8

In From a Buick 8 (2002), King explains the inspiration for his novel:

"My wife and I spent the winter of 1999 on Longboat Key in Florida, where I tinkered at the final draft of a short novel (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and wrote little else of note. Nor did I have plans to write anything in the spring of that year. In late March, I drove back to Maine. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania. I needed gas and got off the turnpike at a rural exit. Near the ramp I found a Conoco station. There was an actual attendant who actually pumped the gas. I left him doing his thing and went to the restroom to do mine. Here I found a rather steep slope littered with auto parts and a sprawling stream at the foot. There was still a fair amount of snow on the ground, in dirty strips and runners. I walked a little way down the slope to get a better look at the water, and my feet went out from beneath me. I slid about ten feet before grabbing a rusty something-or-other and bringing myself to a stop. Had I missed it, I might well have gone into the water.

I paid the attendant and got back on the highway. I mused about my slip as I drove, wondering about what would have happened if I'd gone into the stream (which, with all that spring runoff, was at least temporarily a small river). How long would my truckload of Florida furnishings and our bright Florida clothes have stood at the pumps before the gas-jockey got nervous? Whom would he have called? How long before they'd have found me if I had drowned? This little incident happened around ten in the morning. By afternoon I was in New York. And by then I had the story pretty much set in my mind"

[edit] Rose Red

Main article: Rose Red (film)

Rose Red (2002) is a television miniseries written by King, according to whom sources of inspiration include Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House; the Ripley's Believe It or Not newspaper feature; Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick; and the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.^[24]

[edit] Kingdom Hospital

Main article: Kingdom Hospital

The inspiration for King’s ABC TV series Kingdom Hospital (2004) is the Danish miniseries Riget, written and directed by Lars von Trier, which King saw in 1997. Sony/Columbia owned the rights to Riget, but King convinced them to let him co-produce Kingdom Hospital in exchange for the rights to his novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, which has been adapted into Secret Window, starring Johnny Depp.

King wrote all but four episodes (15 hours) of Kingdom Hospital. Richard Dooling wrote the remaining ones. King's perspective concerning the hospital’s natural and supernatural features are based in part on his own tenure as an intensive care unit (ICU) patient. King describes the production as "ER crossed with The Shining".^[25]

Kingdom Hospital’s Peter Rickman, who entered the hospital after being struck by a van, is a King alter ego. However, King says of the character, “His injuries are much worse than mine ever were. He’s got head injuries and spinal injuries, because that makes the story work better.” According to MSNBC, “This choice also was inspired by the thought processes of the bed-bound patient at the heart of Dennis Potter’s 1986 black comedy The Singing Detective, which King believes is ‘The Citizen Kane of miniseries’”.^[26]

[edit] The Dark Tower (series)

Main article: The Dark Tower (series)

King identifies the 1855 Robert Browning poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which he was assigned to read in a sophomore college course, as the source of inspiration for this series, published intermittently from 1982 to 2004.

[edit] References