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 roadruns past the housewhere 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’sname 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.
Source: Drudge Report
