- Caroline Bicks, Stephen E. King Chair, got unprecedented access to Stephen King’s archives.
- Her new book reveals King’s meticulous crafting of fear, like in “Pet Sematary,” and his inspirations.
- King revealed “The Shining” was shaped by a Shakespearean tragedy, but it wasn’t “Macbeth.”
Every morning during her sabbatical year serving as the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, Caroline Bicks drove Route 15 through rural Maine to reach Stephen King’s archive.
The road runs past the house where King lived in 1978, when he was a visiting writer at the school’s Orono campus. It’s the same road where 2-year-old Gage Creed dies in the author’s “Pet Sematary” — and the same stretch where King himself nearly lost his own toddler son Owen to a speeding truck, an incident so traumatic that he wrote it almost verbatim into the novel and then locked the finished manuscript in a drawer because he found it too horrifying to publish.
“Even Stephen King needs to hide from his books sometimes,” Bicks writes in “Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King” (Hogarth), out April 21. “Now we had something else in common.”
Bicks was driving this route daily because King and Tabitha, his wife of 55 years, had given her something no one outside their family had ever received: a full year inside their personal archive, a climate-controlled space built into the back of the couple’s Victorian mansion in Bangor containing the manuscripts, typescripts and galley proofs of nearly everything King had ever written.
(The Kings’ housekeeper’s name is Carrie, Bicks notes, because “of course it is.”)
Getting there had taken years. In 2017, Bicks was named the inaugural King Chair, a position endowed in the horror author’s honor by the Harold Alfond Foundation. King gave permission for his name to be used but rarely came to campus, and university officials instructed Bicks never to initiate contact with him.
She spent four years delivering what she calls “witty soliloquies to the air inside my Subaru” during her commute, imagining conversations that never happened. Then in 2021, King called her out of the blue. She invited him to speak to students, he came for two days, and when she proposed spending her sabbatical inside his manuscripts, he and Tabitha agreed.
The night before Bicks’ first trip to the archive, she reached for a copy of “Pet Sematary” she’d just bought at a local used bookstore, the same edition she’d consumed 40 years earlier. As she reread the opening pages, “it dawned on me how uncannily similar my recent history was to Louis Creed’s [the novel’s lead character],” she told The Post in an exclusive interview. “Like me, he’d moved his family of four from a city to rural Maine to start a job at the University of Maine.”
It was enough to unsettle her. “I put the book face down, so it couldn’t hurt me,” she remembered, “and turned out the light.”
Bicks has been afraid of “Pet Sematary” since she first read it as a teenager, and she went into the archive hoping that understanding how King built his horror might finally loosen its grip on her. What she found there upended the way most readers think about how horror works.
King didn’t just engineer plot twists and jump scares of the 1983 novel. He built fear word by word, tuning the sound of each sentence until it does physical things to the reader.
“When I rewrite I have to be aware of word reps and unintentional rhymes,” King told Bicks, “anything that will clang on the reader’s ear.”
The manuscript evidence for this is startling, and nowhere more so than in the final lines of “Pet Sematary.” After burying his son Gage in the cursed ground that brings the dead back in monstrous form, Louis Creed buries his wife Rachel there too, and then waits alone at home for whatever comes back through the door.
In the earliest draft, Louis Creed’s colleague waits with him through the night and they hear one “grating step” on the kitchen floor. In the published version, the colleague is gone, Louis plays solitaire alone, and King builds what’s coming entirely from sound.
“The one ‘grating step’ becomes a set of ‘gritting footsteps,’ ” Bicks explained. “Then King moves the ‘grating’ into her throat: ‘Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt. Darling, it said.’ That line has haunted me since 1983. Now I can appreciate how King created it and why I’ll never be able to get it out of my head.”
Bicks’ book moves across five of King’s early works, each built around archival discoveries that reframe a familiar story.
Working through the drafts of “Salem’s Lot,” King’s 1975 vampire novel, Bicks found a loose-leaf, hand-drawn map of the town tucked between the pages of an early draft. The town was originally called Momson, and when she showed the map to King, he immediately recognized the handwriting as that of his childhood best friend, Chris.
King had moved to Durham, Maine, the town on which “Salem’s Lot” is based, when he was 11, and told Bicks he had hated it at first before coming to love its people, its cemetery, its rocky landscape and the real-life abandoned Victorian that inspired the novel’s ominous Marsten House.
“As I tracked how the drafts progressed, I could see the town becoming a main character, an agent of its own destruction,” Bicks said. “Chris’s map was literally embedded in his story of an adult novelist coming home in search of his childhood. I realized that, at its heart, this wasn’t a menacing vampire story. It was a love letter from King to his hometown.”
Examining drafts of “The Shining,” Bicks found that King had originally divided the manuscript into acts and scenes delineated by Roman numerals, imagining the 1977 novel as a Shakespearean tragedy. Two references to the witches from “Macbeth” that didn’t survive into the published version convinced Bicks she’d identified the source play. She was wrong.
“When I finally asked King if I’d solved this literary mystery, he revealed that it was actually another Shakespearean tragedy that had shaped ‘The Shining,’ ” she told The Post. She won’t identify it in our interview, preferring to save the revelation for readers of the book, but said the play “is powered by the same theme of intergenerational trauma that haunts his novel, making it so much more than just a supernatural horror story.”
As King himself writes in 1981’s “Danse Macabre,” “The past is a ghost.”
Digging into King’s first novel, from 1974, Bicks uncovered an early draft of “Carrie” in which the teen heroine physically sprouts horns and her skull visibly elongates.
The character “seems to relish in the horrifying changes her body and mind are undergoing,” Bicks writes, “and she thinks only of the freedom they will give her. She’s nothing like the sad, angry, relatable Carrie that I, along with generations of readers, have come to know and connect with.”
Turning to “Night Shift,” King’s 1978 short story collection, Bicks tracked down his student newspaper columns from the late 1960s, in which a 21-year-old King described getting punched in the gut at a campus peace march and wrote, “I want to hit somebody. I want to weep. I wonder what is happening to me.”
Bicks argues that the Vietnam-era rage in those columns flows directly into the monsters King was imagining at the same time.
Throughout all of it, Bicks keeps catching herself in the grip of the very fear she is trying to analyze. When she reaches the Room 217 bathtub scene in King’s first draft of “The Shining,” she feels something physically burst in her head, stops cold, closes the folder and goes home.
King, she notes, had experienced something similar writing the scene decades earlier. “On the rewrite as I got closer to that point,” he once said in an interview, “I would say to myself, eight days to the tub, and then six days to the tub. And then one day it was the tub today. When I went down to the typewriter that day I felt frightened and my heart was beating too fast.”
Nearly 50 years later, Bicks sat down to read it and her body staged the same protest. By that point in her sabbatical, she had begun to wonder whether King’s manuscripts could “pass on dark energy along with dark stories.”
The book ends on a Zoom call from December, with King in Florida and Bicks in Maine watching darkness fall at 4 in the afternoon. She finally asks him the question she had been holding all year, about why “The Wizard of Oz” became the guiding motif of “Pet Sematary.”
“I like the idea that Oz the Great and Terrible was just a little tiny man behind a curtain with a great big voice,” he told her. “And I’ve always thought that death is like that. Oz the Great and Terrible is really just a
faker.”
She pushed back, but he held firm. “I think that when we get there,” King went on, “we’re all going to say, is that what it was? Is that all?”
Near the end of the call, Bicks mentioned the final scene of “Carrie,” between remorseful Sue Snell and the dying Carrie, and how it echoes the bleakness of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from “MacBeth.” King jumped in and finished the line. Then he held up a T-shirt with “Birnam Wood” printed across the front.
In Shakespeare’s play, Birnam Wood is the enchanted forest whose trees soldiers cut down and carry as camouflage while closing in on Macbeth’s castle, fulfilling a prophecy he’d convinced himself could never come true. For King, whose monsters are ultimately about the past catching up with the present, the image clearly resonates.
Bicks asked if he’d ever been to Birnam Wood. He looked at her and cracked a half-smile. “Only in my mind,” he said.
She describes the moment as magic, and after 300 pages of watching her chase that feeling through drafts and margin notes and a year of mornings on Route 15, you believe her.
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