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Scholars, journalists and fans have always yearned to know what drives a given author’s creative process — how they shape nebulous ideas into best-selling books and what can be learned from them. 

These questions serve as the inspiration behind the latest book from Caroline Bicks, professor of English at the 91����, which delves into the creative methodology of 91����’s most famous literary alumnus, Stephen King, by leveraging unprecedented access to his archives.

“Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King” is an exploration of King’s process through an examination of five of his earliest works: “Carrie,” “Salem’s Lot,” “The Shining,” “Pet Sematary” and “Night Shift.” The public launch party for “Monsters in the Archives” will take place at 6:30 p.m. today  at Orono Brewing Company and will feature a conversation between Bicks and Justin Soderberg.

Through close readings of early drafts and comparisons to the final products, Bicks shows us how editorial choices and changes, whether large or small, can impact the flashlight-illuminated pages under the bedcovers that we ultimately experience.

But the book is also a story about Bicks’s own relationship with King’s work, from her discovery of the author’s work at a local library as a teenager through her 2017 appointment as the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at 91���� and the writing of this book. The result is a blend of the personal and professional that is simultaneously scholarly and eminently readable.

Four years into her time at 91����, she received an unexpected phone call from King.

“I was pretty flabbergasted; it turned out he just thought it was time we meet,” said Bicks. “I invited him to come talk to the students on campus about ‘Lisey’s Story’ and ‘On Writing,’ and he said yes, and it was just this magical first meeting I had with him. Seeing how passionate he was about talking to the students, how much he wanted to come back, and how much pleasure he took from it. It was really just a lovely way to meet him.”

Bicks was a longtime fan of King’s work, having read it since discovering and falling in love with it in the Castine Public Library when she was 12 years old (coming to the author’s work perhaps a touch early, as so many of us do). And while the old adage might say “never meet your heroes,” Bicks had the opposite experience. In fact, his generosity and kindness were a big reason why, when her year-long sabbatical approached, she reached out about this project.

“I felt comfortable enough to ask him and Tabitha,” she said. “I knew that they had just collected his manuscripts, a lot of them for the first time, and put them in a climate-controlled space attached to their home in Bangor, but that they hadn’t opened it up yet to people. I thought, ‘Well, this is opportunity knocking.’ An amazing opportunity if they say yes.”

It’s worth noting that Bicks wasn’t certain what this book was going to be when she made the ask. In essence, she had an idea to write about the books that scared her the most as a teenager and to try and understand how he crafted them.

“How did he craft these moments that are so iconic, that have stuck in the heads of so many people?,” Bicks said. “Fifty years after the fact, I can still talk to people my age who vividly remember Danny Glick at the window in ‘Salem’s Lot.’ And not just because of the movie. They actually remember the phrases that he wrote.

The question surrounding how he wrote these memorable moments was the seed that would eventually grow into “Monsters in the Archives.” Bicks narrowed her focus to the five aforementioned King works, the ones that hit her hardest and scared her the most when she first read them as a teenager.

“As a scholar, you’re taught not to bring your personal feelings into your work,” she said. “And I see the value in that to a point. But at the same time, I study gender and Shakespeare because I care about issues of gender. I really felt liberated to go in and say, ‘I’m just going to look at these because they’re the ones that scared me the most.’ I’m going to go revisit these stories. I’m going to reread them. I’m going to look at them with the eyes of a literature scholar.

“I’m bringing that view that I have that I didn’t have when I was a teenager,” she continued. “But I’m not going to lose my childhood reactions to it. I don’t want to lose what makes these such compelling stories, which is that they connect to our deepest fears. And everyone reacts differently. Everyone has a different story that scared them the most. At the same time, certain ones have staying power because they connect to issues we all face and fears we all have.

When Bicks finally ventured into the archives, the materials, particularly those that had yet to be examined, were “beyond my wildest dreams,” she said. 

What followed was months of research, with Bicks making the trip to visit the archives for at least a couple of eight-hour days per week, focusing on one of the five works at a time. 

Among the many joys Bicks derived from the process was the discovery of just how many different versions of these stories existed. Just as one example, there were three complete versions of “Pet Sematary,” all of which she worked her way through. Bicks — a self-professed slow reader — took something like three weeks to work her way through those three versions of “Pet Sematary.” After that? Right back into it.

“My days were filled with close reading, just going through these different versions,” she said. “First off, I just have to read and take notes and see what’s what. You can’t take photographs, so a lot of notes.”

One such change in “Pet Sematary” really captured Bicks’s imagination, as a slight alteration turned a good line into an iconic one, among the most memorable in the book.

“‘Dead is better,’ which is almost the hallmark of that book,” said Bicks. “It started as ‘Death is better.’ ‘Death is better’ is so different from ‘Dead is better.’  It still gives me chills. It is so much better and it’s one little change, right?

“And you can see why it became ‘Dead is better.’ It echoes, right? I was so pleased to find out that he still considers that the line that is the one that sticks with him the most from that novel,” she said.

Not every deep dive played out in the same way, however. For some, like “Night Shift,” the process involved following the collection’s various short stories through their publication histories. King was a working writer, selling stories to whatever outlets would take them, including a number of men’s magazines, which were once quite prolific publishers of short fiction. For others, like “Carrie,” Bicks would see a first draft that was significantly different from the book as it would ultimately be published.

But while some aspects of the editorial process varied somewhat from book to book, Bicks would discover that the writing process itself stayed largely the same. That included some surprising discoveries about the physical act of writing and the logistical and financial realities of such, including learning that King made a conscious effort to use as much of each sheet of paper as possible.

“He’s fitting it in as few pieces of paper as he can, because he had to,” she said. “I don’t think people today fully understand that. Paper costs money; he had to consider the materials needed in the creation of a book. The act itself had financial issues tied to it. You couldn’t just store it on a computer or in the cloud.”

That physical necessity also meant that there would occasionally be issues. Pages could get misplaced or ruined. There are a couple of incidents recounted in the book that feel genuinely harrowing, particularly to a fan of King’s work, tales of one book’s ending or another entire draft lost due to circumstance. The analog nature of it all is easy to forget until we’re confronted with the idea that a beloved horror classic might have simply disappeared because a briefcase got left in a cab or on a plane.

This book couldn’t have happened without the approval of the Kings. Bicks considers herself fortunate to have been given the opportunity — she’s the first scholar to be granted this kind of long-term ongoing access to the archive, something that simply would not have been possible without trust and transparency.

“I think he and Tabitha understood what I was trying to do,” she said. “I said to them, ‘I’m not interested in exposing your family secrets or psychoanalyzing deep, dark things.’ I’m coming at this as a literary scholar and as a fan. I really just wanted to look at these five works. I was very clear about my parameters. I wasn’t going in there to just paw through boxes.”

The end result of this lengthy literary odyssey is a very special book. It’s a work of thoughtful and compelling scholarship that is also reflective of one person’s personal journey with a beloved author. It is bibliographic and biographical all in one. “I’d like to think I did him proud,” said Bicks. “I know he likes the book. He read it and he said it’s ‘like a breath of fresh air,’ so that makes me feel really good. Like I got it right.”

Contact: Allen Adams, allen.adams@maine.edu