October 2023 is Spooky StORIES MOnth
at the POrPOR BOOKS BLOG !Book Review: 'The Stephen King Companion' edited by George Beahm
‘The Stephen King Companion’ first edition (365 pp.) was issued in 1989 as a trade paperback by Andrews McMeel Publishing. Followup editions were issued in 1995 and 2015 (with the page count necessarily expanded to 624 pp.).
By 1989 it was quite clear that King had become a pop culture and economic phenomenon unique in America’s literary history. Whether published under his own name, or the pseudonym 'Richard Bachman', King’s works were immensely popular. So much so, that a sector of the publishing industry was thriving by issuing both popular, and scholarly, studies of King’s output. Thus, ‘The Stephen King Companion’.
The 'Companion' is a grab-bag of King ephemera, with pieces of varying length covering his books, audiobooks, and films since the publication of his first short story, ‘Graveyard Shift’, in Cavalier magazine in 1970. The text has black-and-white photographs sprinkled throughout.
The content ranges far and wide, and includes reprints of newspaper articles about King, his works, and his Maine roots. There are pieces by critics and editors, and an overview of illustrators (Berni Wrightson and Michael Whelan) associated with King properties. Along with synopses of the books, there are reprints of features about King that first saw print in the national media. Of most interest here likely is King’s 1983 interview with Playboy magazine.
There are two features with Harlan Ellison. One is a 1989 interview where Ellison tells us why King is so popular, and tells us about those works of his that Harlan thinks are worthy of greatest merit. Then there is an essay published in 1984 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which Harlan fulminates about the film treatments of King’s novels. Here, Harlan uses obscure words like ‘agora’, ‘scansion’, ‘tenebrous’, ‘dialectic’, and ‘sui generis’ (twice) to remind us how very, very smart he is................
For me, reading ‘The Companion’ revives 1980s pop culture in strange and somewhat jolting ways. For example, there is a review of the 1984 movie Firestarter by none other than Joe Bob Briggs - !
Briggs was a prominent figure in the 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to his well-crafted persona as a down-to-earth Good Ole Boy who wrote folksy, ‘redneck’ reviews about movies and TV and suchlike. In reality, Briggs was a nice Jewish boy named John Irving Bloom who grew up in Little Rock. As the 1990s dissolved into the 2000s, Briggs persevered as an author and television host; his 2016 nonfiction book 'Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story', garnered considerable critical praise.
‘The Companion’ contains all manner of interesting little factoids and tidbits that I was not familiar with, such as King’s ownership (from 1983 – 1990) of the Bangor oldies radio station WZON. King apparently purchased the station after renting a car that had only AM radio in the dash, and discovering that the AM band was devoid of rock-and-roll programming.
Summing up, if - like me - you think King's most meritorious works were those published between 'Carrie' and 1974, to 'The Dark Half' and 1989, then this book is well worth reading.
