The Art and Craft of Stephen King: The Story Behind Every Novel, Novella, and Short Story, by Guy Astic and Frank Lafond
Stephen King is probably the most prolific bestselling author alive today. The Art & Craft of Stephen King argues that he should be placed “alongside the great American writers of the mid twentieth century, such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Willim Carlos Williams.” King’s stories have been adapted for the screen at a velocity hard to track, complete with remakes of remakes.
The Art & Craft of Stephen King is a massive and heavily illustrated tome, weighing in at eight pounds with more than 600 pages. Authors Guy Astic and Frank Lafond are French academics writing in prose at once hyperliterate and free of academic cant. They delve into every short story, novel and adaptation, chronicling a career that began with fanzines in the ‘60s and continues unabated today with some 100 novels and story collections behind him.
King rocketed to prominence through his first film adaptation, director Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). Astic and Lafond point to the inspiration King drew from television and movies, and his stories have filled screens in turn. In the early years, King had no control over those cinematic interpretations but as his star rose, he gained a say in the scripts and even the casts and directors. Inevitably, a book cannot be filmed exactly as written. De Palma produced a more linear narrative than King’s Carrie, and budget constraints prevented the director from depicting the apocalyptic, psychokinetic destruction of Carrie’s hometown. The novel’s corpulent Carrie was replaced by razor skinny Sissy Spacek.
The biggest cinematic controversy among King fans and horror buffs swirled around Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 version of The Shining. Kubrick extensively rewrote the story, adding some of the most striking images in the horror canon—images absent from the book. Although Kubrick’s film only added to King’s pop culture luster, the author didn’t like it and neither did some of his readers.
The author finally had his way with the story in an 1997 ABC miniseries. Astic and Lafond agree with Kubrick’s vision, writing that the series “suffers from various unfortunate choices,” including cheap scares and prosaic visualization.
In truth, many King adaptations, despite or because of his intervention, seldom rise above B-. Astic and Lafond cite The Shining and Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) as classics, and while “many others are undeniable successes, partial or complete failures still account for the vast majority” of King’s adaptations.
Astic and Lafond identify the Brothers Grimm as one of King’s sources. Many of his stories are populated by 20thth century Hansels and Gretels, children wandering dangerous forests of depravity. King’s oeuvre bristles with serial killers, vengeance seekers, Protestant fundamentalists, vampires and demons in human or other form. And yet there are often figures of resistance to a theology of chaos, the dark webs encircling reality.
One mistake: Astic and Lafond refer to King’s “New England predecessors”: H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. ? Poe was a Southerner and probably never ventured north of Baltimore. Well, the authors are French and unfamiliar with American geography. Their important geographical point is how rooted King remained in his home state of Maine, its forests and harbor towns. And how he wrote as a man of his time, bringing the gothic out of the past and into the shopping mall.
The Art & Craft of Stephen King is published by Black Dog & Leventhal.
