Tag Archives: Bev Vincent

The Two Princes by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

By the age of thirteen, King’s daughter, Naomi, was an avid reader but hadn’t read any of his books[1], even though her younger brother, Joe, had already read two. Her mother pushed her to read some horror with the idea that it would be another way for her to know her father. However, she made it clear to him that she had “very little interest in my vampires, Ghoulies and slushy crawling things.” So, as he wrote in a letter for Viking Press[2], “I decided that if the mountain would not go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.”

The Eyes of the DragonHe asked her what she did like and she told him she liked dragons. He told Jo Fletcher, “I knew that she liked fantasy, she had read some of the Conan comic books and Piers Anthony and stuff like that and in the end I really got into it.” [3]

He started working on the story, originally called The Napkins, in their house in western Maine. He wrote on a yellow legal pad in front of a woodstove while a screaming northeaster blew snow across the frozen lake outside. King had recently been working on The Talisman with Peter Straub, so the fantasy land of the Territories was fresh in his mind. He wrote The Eyes of the Dragon at the same time as he was writing Misery, working on one in the morning and the other at night, completing the first draft in 1983.

Naomi, he admits, took hold of the manuscript with a marked lack of enthusiasm, but he was rewarded. The story kidnapped her and the only thing wrong with it, she told him later, was that she didn’t want it to end. » Read more

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A Man’s Heart Is Stonier by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

In 1978, Stephen King was invited to be writer in residence at the English department of his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono. He moved his family into a rented house on a major highway in Orrington. The heavy traffic included transports heading to and from a nearby chemical plant. A new neighbor warned the Kings to keep their pets and children away from this road, which had “used up a lot of animals.”[1] In support of this claim, the Kings discovered a burial ground not far from the house, with “Pets Sematary” written on a sign in a childish hand. Among its residents: dogs, cats, birds, and a goat.

Pet SemataryShortly after they moved in, daughter Naomi’s cat, Smucky, was found dead on the side of the road when they returned from a trip to town. King’s first impulse was to tell her that the cat had wandered away. Tabitha, however, believed this was an opportunity to teach a life lesson. They broke the news to their daughter and conducted a feline funeral, committing Smucky’s mortal remains to the pet cemetery. A few nights later, King discovered Naomi in the garage, jumping up and down on sheets of bubble wrap, indignant over the loss of her pet. “Let God have His own cat. I want my cat. I want my cat,” she was repeating.[2]

The road almost “used up” the Kings’ youngest son, too. Owen was about eighteen months old when he wandered dangerously close to the highway. To this day, King isn’t sure whether he knocked Owen down before he reached the highway as a tanker approached or if the boy tripped over his own feet. Owen had been born with an unusually large head, and the Kings had already agonized over the possibility of losing him to hydrocephalus. This near miss was an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of their children. » Read more

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By the Light of the Silvery Moon by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

Stephen King freely admits that one of the reasons he agreed to the project that became Cycle of the Werewolf was because he was drunk when a young Michigan publisher named Christopher Zavisa approached him at the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island in 1979.

King also believes Silver Bullet is the only motion picture developed from something that started out as a calendar concept.

Cycle of the WerewolfZavisa’s pitch intrigued King. The publisher, who had established Land of Enchantment Press initially to promote Wrightson’s works, wanted King to come up with a set of twelve vignettes that would each be accompanied by a Berni Wrightson painting and a calendar grid. There would be some kind of continuity among the segments, as if it were all a larger story.

The concept of a story calendar appealed to King, as did the idea of working with a small press. At that point in his career, King was feeling a little guilty about his immense success compared to many other writers, especially those he had idolized as a kid. He mentions[1] as an example the fact that Frank Belknap Long had come to the World Fantasy Convention on a bus because he couldn’t afford to travel by train, let alone by airplane. He fully expected to be snubbed as a young whippersnapper at the con, although he was in fact treated generously and kindly by people he was astonished to think of as his colleagues. » Read more

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Baby You Can Drive My Car by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

The roaring engine that became Christine rolled off the assembly line as a short story idea inspired by the old, decrepit red Cadillac Stephen King owned in 1978. “One night as I was turning into my driveway, I saw the odometer numbers on my car turn from 9999.9 to 10,000. I found myself wondering if there might not be a story in an odometer that ran backward.”

ChristineThe book was written in the late 70s (the same era during which the novel is set), before King spent time in the greater Pittsburgh area working on Creepshow, but its location is an homage to his friend, director George Romero, to whom the book is dedicated. King decided to use a 1958 Plymouth Fury because they were “the most mundane fifties car that I could remember,” he told Randy Lofficier.[1] He didn’t want to use a vehicle that had a legend already attached to it.[2]

He thought that the car (and perhaps the kid who owned it) would get younger. As he told Douglas E. Winter: “The kicker would be that, when the odometer returned to zero, the car, at the height of its beauty, would spontaneously fall into component parts. It would echo that Lewis Padgett story, ‘The Twonky’—really funny, but maybe a little sinister, too?” » Read more

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Stephen King crossed the desert and I followed

Guest Essays

For a lot of people, The Gunslinger has been a barrier to entering the Dark Tower series. Not so for me. When asked to name my favorite book in the series (and I’m very bad at picking favorites of anything), I usually fall back to this one. It was the first, and for a number of years it was the only.

The Dark Tower - The GunslingerI was like a lot of people in that I didn’t know anything about this book until I saw it listed at the front of Pet Sematary among King’s other works. I’d only been reading King for four years at this point, but I was hopelessly addicted. I had already written him a fan letter and received a bibliography from his office, which I kept folded in my wallet for any time I went to a used bookstore so I could track down uncollected stories, essays and interviews.

Once I began my quest for The Gunslinger, I must have driven those poor bookstore owners crazy. The guy who owned my favorite, Back Pages on Queen Street in Halifax, said he thought he might have heard of the book, but didn’t know how to get a copy. I pored over the Books in Print catalogs (remember those?) in other bookstores, hoping the book would magically appear from one week to the next. I tried to get the Halifax Public Library to track a copy down. No joy in H-ville.

Finally, I wrote King. Thanks to his response to my previous fan letter, I had his office address, so I wrote to him there, instead of via his publisher, which is probably where I sent my earlier missive. I don’t have any memory of the content of this letter, but knowing me it was probably brief and to the point. How could I get my hands on a copy? » Read more

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Five Easy Pieces by Bev Vincent

Historical Context Essays

When he was a student working in the University of Maine library, Stephen King inherited a ream (500 sheets) of oddly sized bright green paper, almost as thick as cardboard. (His future wife, Tabitha Spruce got one, too, except hers was robin’s egg blue.) This eccentric material seemed to invite him to write something special.

The Dark Tower - The GunslingerTwo years earlier, in a sophomore course on the romantic poets, he’d studied the Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” He wanted to write something long that embodied the feel of that poem, if not its exact sense. Seeing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (while flying high on mescaline, he told an audience at Yale in April 2003) made him wonder if he could blend two different genres. He wanted to capture Tolkien’s sense of quest and magical fantasy set against Sergio Leone’s “almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop.”

He started the book during his final year at university. In March 1970, he wrote the iconic first line and the rest of the sections ”The Gunslinger” and “The Way Station” while living alone in a cabin on the banks of the Stillwater River (his three roommates had flunked out one by one, a progression reminiscent of the novella “Hearts in Atlantis”). In that cabin, he experienced ghostly, unbroken silence that undoubtedly affected the mood of what he was writing—unbroken, that is, except for the music of Johnny Winter. He believed at the time he was embarking on the longest popular novel in history, something he estimated would approach 3000 pages[1]. » Read more

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New eBook: The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman & Bev Vincent

News & Updates

We’re pleased to announce Cemetery Dance’s most unique eBook to date, the Revised & Updated second edition of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman & Bev Vincent, is now available for immediate download.

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia BookThis special eBook edition allows you to test your trivia knowledge with a unique design using links between questions and hints and answers, and it works with any standard eReader. No apps or special programs are needed. If you have a Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or any of their related apps for other devices, this eBook should work for you!

About the Book:
This revised and updated second edition of The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book features all of the original questions from the first edition, along with more than one hundred new questions about Stephen King’s most recent releases!

Also included are ten brand new illustration-based questions from Cemetery Dance favorite artist Glenn Chadbourne, along with the 60 illustration-based questions from the original edition.

This new edition concludes with a brand new afterword by Kevin Quigley, founder of Charnel House, one of the oldest Stephen King fan sites on the web.

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book by Brian James Freeman and Bev Vincent is a must-have for any of Stephen King’s Constant Readers.

Purchase the eBook:
Amazon.com • Amazon.ca • Amazon.co.uk • Nook • Kobo

Purchase the Trade Paperback:
Amazon.com • Cemetery Dance • Barnes & Noble

The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book

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