Eneh Akpan Writes: Stephen King: MORE Stories Behind His Stories

Updated: June.16.2015

"I'm a confrontational writer. I want to be in your face. I want to get into your space. I want to get within kissing distance, hugging distance, choking distance, punching distance. Call it whatever you want. But I want your attention." - Stephen King

This article comes special delivery by popular request. A reader requested I do a second part thing to a previous article, StephenKing: The Story Behind His Stories, and I promised I was going to. So, here it is. King still has his bag of tricks, you see.

DREAMCATCHER (2001)

Nobody is as defenseless as they are in the bathroom, with their pants down.

Stephen King made this statement during an interview.

Have you ever been inspired to write an 800 page-turner, by your bathroom? Well, that's exactly what happened to Stephen King that led to the writing of this book, Dreamcatcher.

It did occur to me that I've never really read a story that revolved around bathroom functions. - Stephen King

This book was inspired by these thoughts but also, because, as King said he wasn't sleeping well at that time because he was constantly in a lot of pain (it's been two years after he was hit by a truck).

The novel centers on something terrible happening and revolving around bathroom functions. King was inspired to write the book because as he said, so much of the really terrible news we get in our lives, we get in the bathroom.

Think of the times you discovered blood in your stool; the time you felt the lump in your whatever . . . Do I need to draw you a picture.

A story of aliens invading the human body and mind. And influencing the human bodily functions (the alien invasion ravaged bodies and got the tummies swelling with alien babies).

This book features my most dreaded anti-hero (Stephen King character or otherwise), the alien Mr. Gray. It's also the first King book I ever read.

THE STAND (1978/1990)

King said he had always wanted to write a Tolkien-like epic but one that would have an American instead of a British setting .

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. - Stephen King.

After moving with his family to Colorado, he watched a gruesome film that had lab rats convulsing and dying in just twenty seconds in reaction to chemical-biological weapon testing. The scene brought to mind a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep.

The idea for his American fantasy epic, set in a plague-decimated USA had finally arrived. Only instead of a Hobbit, his hero was Texan and the Land of Mordor became Las Vegas.

The book has given King another name, The Guy Who Thought About The Flu. King reinstated about 400 pages previously cut from the original version and reissued the book in 1990 as The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition

A poll taken in 2008 lists The Stand as one of 10 books that people read over and over again.

The Stand is typically, the book that Stephen King fans consider to be his best. The book is an extended version of a short story Night Surf, published in the collection Night Shift.

RIDING THE BULLET (2000)

This novella marked King's debut on the WWW and is the world's first mass-market eBook.

So, what's the story behind the story?

Well, this is another one of the stories King cooked up while recuperating from his accident. He wanted to write sort of a campfire ghost story-a tale about “The Hitchhiker Who Got Picked Up By A Dead Man.”

But, the more important inspiration was this one; King wanted to retell (he had done this previously with a story, The Woman in the Room as part of a short story collection called Night Shift) how his mother's approaching death (she died of cancer) had affected him as a young man who recently had his book, Carrie accepted for publication and getting paid enough money to give up his job and take up writing as a full time career.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1978)

While working at a mill, King had a conversation with one of his colleagues who wanted to know if King had come in on a specific shift. After King replied in the negative, he told him a story about how the workers were made to go down into the basement and clean it out. The basement in question has not been touched for decades; it was in a mess. This guy told King that the basement was home to rats the size of kittens, really big rats.

The idea for this short story came from this real life story. King asked himself. “What if the rats were not just as big as kittens, what if they were as big as puppies, what if they were as big as people?” The story features a young drifter named Hall who works at a textile mill.

The rats in the story had undergone a kind of hideous mutation involving some of the rats developing pterodactyl-like abilities.

DUMA KEY (2008)

This is probably one of my favorite King novels following closely on the heels of Bag of Bones. This is one other book that was inspired by Stephen King's accident. But unlike the others this one is on the bright side. King said he was feeling a lot better when he wrote Duma Key.

A novel set in a fictional key in Florida, King said Duma Key is the bright side of Desperation. Stating that the latter is full of pain and unhappiness but that this one is a book where there is hope. Duma Key is a reflection on the better days of King's recovery from his accident. But don't be fooled by that idea and think the book is all lovey-dovey cause it's not. The plot talks about a man who loses his right arm in a construction accident and moves to Florida to recuperate (King has a summerhouse in Florida). The novel also deals with how the power imbued in art can utterly transform a man's life for the better and help him conquer his personal demons (mind the demon word cause the evil in the book is real and deadly).

That's five stories behind five Stephen King stories and that brings the whole drama to about ten stories in all. I hope you enjoyed reading this like I enjoyed putting it together.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan