The Roots of Stephen King

Cafe Society
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Lots of writers have taken things from previous stories. Shakespeare did it all the time. L. Sprague de Camp, I’ve heard, was dissatisfied with Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder” and turned it into “A Gun for Dinosaur”. Heck, I’ve done it. I have no problem with that sort of borrowing, because every writer makes the idea his own.

In the case of Stephen King, though, he borrows some highly unusual situations, and it seems clear where he got them from. It seems odd in his case, because the stories are so idiosyncratic to begin with, and he’s such a high-profile author.

I’m not talking about things like The Shining is a “Haunted Hotel” novel, which has been done before, or “Salem’s Lot” has a lot of “Dracula” in it (which King has admitted. Or that Carrie is a horror novel about telekinesis. King’s works are very different from others of the general sort. I mean these:

1.)The Running Man – I could see the similarity to Robert Sheckley’s 1950s SF story “The Prize of Peril”. More to the point, so could Sheckley. Harlan Ellison wrote a column (In Fantasy and Science Fiction, IIRC) about Sheckley calling Ellison up after he read the story and asking if Ellison saw the similarities, and what he ought to do about it. (For the record, both stories are about future TCV shows in which the hero, driven in part by poverty, signs up on what we now call a “reality show” and fins himself in a series of life-threatening situations that are far worse than he’d expected. Both were made into movies – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084540/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/ – where the similarities become obvious. See the comments on the IMDB) They ultimately gave King the benefit of the doubt and figured that he must’ve read the story, but consciously forgotten it while retaining the memories subconsciously.

2.) Thinner – When I read the novel (published under the Bachmann pseudonym) I immediately saw the similarity to an old story from a comic book. Back in Journey into Mystery #62 (pre-Thor), Steve Ditko drew a story based on a script by Stan Lee or Larry Lieber entitled “I Must Find Korumbu!” (It was reprinted in Fear #3 in 1971. I lost the first one, but I still have the second. http://www.comics.org/details.lasso?id=24099 ) In it, a very fat and arrogant man forces gypsies off the land and endangers them. In response, a gypsy magician curses him so that he starts to lose weight, and finds that he keeps losing it at a disastrous rate. at the end, rail-thin despite constant eating, he searches for the Magician Korumbu (hence the title). The comic story ends with the search. The novel, of course, fills all this out and provides an ending (although not necessarily a satisfying one.)

3.) The Ten o’clock People – This King sghort story about how “bat people” aliens from somewhere are taking over all positions of authority, but can only be seen by smokers (who they thus pursue to keep their control secret) is a wonderful paranoid fantasy, butb it strongly resembles Ray Nelson’s story “Eight o’clock in the morning”, right down to the title with the time in it. King obviously isn’t trying to hide anything, and there must be some kind of story there. I wouldn’t know about the Nelson story at all, were it not for the fact that John Carpenter filmed it as They Live! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/ .
Are there more of these? Why does King, who has written so many unique and original stories, go and occasionally follow so closely the works of others?

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Oh, yeah, and one other one I forgot:
4.) The Mist – A storm breaks and is either the result of or causes an accident at a secret government research project, causing an opening into another world populated by giant bug-like monsters, who crawl into our world and wreak havoc. But that’s the plot of the film The Strange World of Planet X, released in the US as The Cosmic Monsters http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051020/ , one of those low-budget 1950s British SF films starring Forrest Tucker.

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To be honest, saying that the movie version of The Running Man is an accurate representation of the book’s contents is like saying that Fox News is an unbiased, accurate source of information. ‘Tis just not so. While the elements of the story are there, the book is vastly different from the movie. As for your argument, it sounds plausable, tho’ I haven’t read Sheckley’s story, so I can’t comment there.

King does use the “coming of the white” theme quite frequently, and refers to Samwise and Frodo often enough that it’s clear who he’s borrowed these ideas from. He also takes a lot from Lovecraft, as well.

However, some themes/story ideas are just universal. Have the thousands of storytellers that have some variation on the “biological agent breaks out and destroys humanity” plagarized from King, or has he plagarized from them? Or is it just a really common framework on which to hang your story? Should Crichton be excoriated for rewriting Beowulf (well actually, yes, but that’s beside the point)?

It’s pretty obvious that King’s familiar with these charges (see Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Dark Half), so you know it’s something he doesn’t take lightly. Perhaps his treatment differs markedly - although I don’t know because while I’ve read an embarrassing amount of King, I haven’t yet read anything that mirrors his work closely (or that his work mirrors closely, either way).

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Nope. I made the point that some ideas are, indeed, prettyy common. And very obvious rewrites, where the famous source ought to be obvious, are one things. I liked Eaters of the Dead’s take on Beowulf. Silverberg rewrote Gilgamesh. Maguire rewrote the Wizard of Oz into Wicked!
But taking the extremely specific plot of a non-famous work and rewriting it as your own is something else. Knowinmg the originals, it’s impossible to read the King stories and say – “Why is he doing this” I can’t help thinking of the other one." And, although he may expand on them (Thinner is to Korumbu as a Raot Lichtenstein painting is to the 1950s comic he rippec it off from), it’s not as if he’s doing that “let’s look at this in a different way” thing that absolbves such lifting.

And the borrowings are so specific. Tell me another story about a fat guy who throws gypsies off their land and gets cursed with perpetual and fatal weight loss in return. This is beyond the “movie with Kate Capshaw in which the bad guy rips out a guy’s heart” stuff I wrote abiout in another thread. Those were coincidences. I can’t believe the King examples I give here were coincidence.

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:eek: You liked the fact that Crichton pulled Antonio Banderas out of his ass, (Or if you don’t like this phrase, then he pulled him out of his hat) to use him as the lead, instead of Beowulf? :eek:

Also, as I recall King read Lovecraft’s non-fiction book, Supernatural Horror in Literature, wrote an essay I can’t seem to find on Lovecraft, and flat-out set some of his stories in the same universe.

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Pfffhhht. A LOT of people did that. Still do.

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:confused: Stone Girl, what’s with the “Pfffhhht.”? I don’t get it. I am praising him for this, and stating it shows his roots. I guess I wasn’t clear enough.

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Oh, okay, I misunderstood you then. Please accept my apology.

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Thanks, Stone Girl.

P.>S. Note to self: In the future, do not put something you hate (Crichton, and literary adaptations which insultingly “try to make the story entertaining” by changing the entire nature of the story, rather then retelling it from a diffrent perspective) with something I like (Any mention of Lovecraft in the modern world)

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I recall reading about the Scheckley incident - apparently Harlan went to bat for Stephen and when Ellison notified King about Scheckley’s concern, King, too, was upset about it. It was resolved, though I don’t know how (possibly a credit or dedication, possibly financial compensation, possibly both.)

I don’t think in any of your examples there is anything malicious about it. King is amazingly prolific, so much so that stories that he wrote years ago are still waiting publication. For example, I was reading Danse Macarbe the other day where King describes a story he wrote about a man on the desert island who has to resort to eating parts of himself. King says the story was written “years” ago and that he suspects that the story will never see the light of day. Surprise! It showed up 5 years later in Skeleton Crew.

So it is quite likely that he wrote the stories as an hommage, pastiche, “hey let’s see if I can write in this style” or “hey, lets see if I could improve on this idea”… and in the intervening decade forget the original motivation for writing the story.

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Well, to be semi-fair, Thinner doesn’t have a fat guy throwing gypsies off their land. A moderately obese man hits a gypsy girl with his car, and an older gypsy relative curses him. (I think – it’s been a looong time since I read it.) The curse is the same, though. In Thinner, I think the protagonist was found not guilty of any crime by the courts or something, because the girl ran out in front of him. Or maybe he just said she ran out in front of him because he wasn’t watching closely – can’t remember. Anyway, he did no throwing off of the land.

So, it boils down to “protagonist does something to gypsies and gets cursed.” Granted, the curses are exactly the same, but I think there’s enough leeway there to show King isn’t just rewriting the original story.

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For the record, I don’t think there’s anything malicious, either, and in many cases it could be subconscious borrowing. But to the outside observer, the similarity is obvious and troubling (which is why I cited the Ellison article and noted the IMDB comments on The Prize of Peril).
I don’t think King ever set any of his stories in Lovecraft’s universe (with You-Sototh and Cthulhu and all that). Certainly he didn’t go as far as Robert E, Howard and Robert Bloch and August Derleth. But read his short story “Jerusalem’s Lot” (in the collection Night Shift) and you can tell that he’s imbibed heavily of Lovecraft and is deliberately imitating his style (and doing it pretty well, not just throwing in the occasional “batracian” of “squamous”.)

Hey, Crichton didn’t cast the movie, which does differ significantly from the book. (And, speaking of borrowing from Lovecraft, what else is naming an arab character “Abdul Alhazred”?) I usually don’t like Crichton – he always starts off good, then does something that really annoys me – but EotD kept my interest throughout. I liked it better than the SF Beowulf story that L. Sprague de Camp outlines in his Science Fiction Writers Handbook, and it stays closer to the source than The Legacy of Heorot.

Actually, I never said the movie was faithful. My comments were o the similarity between the stories by King and Sheckley. But the movie adaptations of both retainn enough similarity to show that the similarity was there. I haven’t seen the movie adaptation of Sheckley (although other adaptataions of his stuff strays very far from his work), but if the similarity of the movies is enough to raise the eyebrow of someone who only knows the similarity from the movies, I suspect the much closer similarities of the stories would raise both eyebrows.

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[quote]

Well, to be semi-fair, Thinner doesn’t have a fat guy throwing gypsies off their land. A moderately obese man hits a gypsy girl with his car, and an older gypsy relative curses him. (I think – it’s been a looong time since I read it.) The curse is the same, though. In Thinner, I think the protagonist was found not guilty of any crime by the courts or something, because the girl ran out in front of him. Or maybe he just said she ran out in front of him because he wasn’t watching closely – can’t remember. Anyway, he did no throwing off of the land.

[/quotes]

Yes, he did. Read the book again – not only did he hit the woman, but he was among the group responsible for pushing the gypsies out of town as undesirables.

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It’s been about 17 years since I’ve read Thinner but IIRC the protagonist was receiving BJ and was thus distracted. Disaster unsues and girl dies. I swear that 's how it went down and Og help me if I am confusing it with that scene from “Parenthood” when Mary Steenburgen goes down on Steve Martin in the car and they end up crashing.

Nonetheless I personally feel that the “borrowing” of plot is a natural course of creative energy. For one it is standing on the shoulders of those that crafted the original idea and then putting your own creative layer onto it. So King takes a storyline and rewrites it as his own. What we have then is a story now told by King but in HIS style of writing. It’s not unlike a musician recording someone else’s song.

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You’re right – I had forgotten that. A counterpoint, though: If you’ve got gypsies as a focal point of a story, doesn’t the story also usually entail the conflict between the gypsies and the local establishment? Arthur Conan Doyle touches on this in a few of his Sherlock Holmes stories. The gypsies are usually squatters, either on private land or land owned by a town/city/what-have-you.

I still maintain, though, that the reason for the curse in Thinner was because the protagonist killed the girl with his car, and wasn’t going to be punished by the law. It wasn’t due to his influence in getting the gypsies removed.

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That’s exactly how it happened–in the movie, at least. Not sure about the book.

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Come on, The Chao. If ever there was a sentence tailor-made for “penis ensues,” this is it!

King has set at least one short story in the Lovecraft universe: Crouch End. According to this site, there are a few others that are part of the Cthulhu Mythos:

.

He has discussed in some of his non-fiction writings how stories he read have come out in his own writings, mostly unconsciously. He is indeed a prolific writer and clearly a prolific reader, so it doesn’t surprise me that some ideas may simply stew around in his brain and wind up coming out in his own writing without him realizing the source.

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Woops, forgot the link for the quote above:
http://www.hyperbear.com/cthulhu/cthulhu-about.html

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Yet. No dispute there. But my point is that the guy being associated with the bunch kicking them off the land is very similar to the comic book story (and realisticaslly, you wouldn’t expect a BJ in a 1950s comic story. One feature of King’s writing is to throw domestic sexuality into the mix).

The Police Officer and the Judge get cursed, too. They were at fault for failing to convict the fat guiy, but they were also responsible for getting the gypsies tossed out.

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Didn’t one turn into a lizard? What happened to the other one?