Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks review – the writing secrets of Stephen King

A deep dive into the horror novelist’s archives reveals pedantry, penny-pinching, and a total redraft of Carrie

When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager she had scared herself silly with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that crept under her skin and refused to budge – but now she found herself in the odd position of being Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine. King had endowed the chair at his alma mater in 2016 for the study of literature, and Dr Bicks was a Harvard-trained Shakespeare specialist. What, beyond a name, would they really have in common?

At the time of her appointment, Bicks’s employers had told her not to initiate contact with the famous author in any way. But four years into the job she got a phone call from “Steve” who turned out to be a teddy bear: “I couldn’t believe it. The man responsible for terrifying generations of readers – including me – was so … nice.” Not quite a meet-cute, but promising.

This book is Bicks’s account of what happened when King gave her permission to spend a year in his archive, poring over the drafts of five of his most popular novels, including Pet Sematary, The Shining and Carrie. Bicks’s particular aim is to spot what she calls King’s “biblio‑magic” in action. She wants to identify how he chooses and places words with the intention of producing material effects on the reader’s body. How, exactly, does he make hearts beat faster, stomachs lurch and palms prickle with sweat? In On Writing, his classic how-to text of 2000, King calls what he does “telepathy in action” and Bicks wants to catch him in that act.

There is no shortage of raw material for her to chew through. King’s archive is attached to the house in Bangor, Maine, which he bought with his wife, Tabitha, in 1980. Two professional archivists care for his working papers, which are catalogued and kept in a climate-controlled environment. King started writing long before the days of traceless computer editing, so the bulk of the archive consists of multiple typewritten drafts pecked out on his wife’s portable Olivetti. The huge advantage here is that these early manuscripts have gathered to themselves extra richness in the form of handwritten marginalia, in-text edits, back and forth exchanges with copy-editors, all before you get to final proofs. The result is exactly the kind of textual mulch to gladden any literary scholar’s heart.

Bicks quickly spots what she is after in the editorial interventions on Pet Sematary, King’s novel of 1983 which many fans think is the scariest, certainly the bleakest, he ever wrote. There’s a moment early in the book where a tangle of fallen tree branches turns into a pile of moving bones. In an early draft, King writes “fingerbones clittered”, which the copy-editor circles and asks “Word OK?” King in turn replies “Word OK. A clitter is a very soft, ghostly clatter.” And there you have it. Clitter – softly insinuating – is so much scarier than a crash-bang clatter.

In the same manuscript, Bicks also finds the novelist resisting the copy editor’s attempts to replace the word “rattly” which King has used to describe the laboured breathing of the novel’s dying two-year-old protagonist, Gage Creed. The copy editor suggests “congested” would be better. But King knows that rattly contains within itself a whole ghastly set of subliminal associations including scavenging vermin and unquiet ghosts with their infernal chains. Congested is something a coroner would write.

This is the kind of close reading usually associated with academic lit crit, so it can feel odd to find it in a book aimed at King’s ardent fanbase. But Bicks deftly interweaves textual analysis with more general biographical data, gleaned from her conversations with King, both in person and via email. When she queries why the margins on the drafts of his early novels are so narrow, he explains that it was to save on the cost of paper. In the early 1970s King and his wife were broke. He was working as a high school instructor and putting in extra shifts in the launderette while Tabitha did nights at Dunkin’ Donuts. Paper was a luxury, especially at the rate King got through it (a lot ended up in the bin).

These frugal habits lasted even once success arrived. King tells Bicks about the time that his only copy of the final draft of The Dead Zone (1979) accidentally got picked up at the airport by a woman who had mistaken his bag for hers. Only after a cross-country rescue mission was the manuscript safely retrieved. But if ever there was a case for splashing out on a photocopier, or at least some carbon paper, this was surely it.

King’s thriftiness endured because his 1974 breakthrough with Carrie felt like it might be a fluke. By now he had been publishing short stories for eight years and had completed three novels without success. When Carrie was finally accepted (the news came by telegram because the phone had been cut off) the Kings were able to swap their trailer for a flat. The paperback rights soon sold for $400,000, enough for King’s mother, Ruth, who had raised him singlehandedly, to leave her low-paid job. Within a year Carrie had sold a million copies, but Ruth King was dead from cancer.

It is in Bicks’s close reading of Carrie that we most clearly see her interests converging with King’s. One of her academic books, Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World, concerns the interior lives of characters such as Juliet and Ophelia, who are on the verge of puberty. Bicks argues that, far from being regarded by Shakespeare as passive or pathological, these girls’ developing adolescent brains are catalysts for some of the plays’ most vital discussions about body and soul, faith and salvation. And it is through this lens of what she calls “brainwork” that Bicks approaches Carrie, a novel that famously hinges on a schoolgirl whose first period unleashes a sudden and violent expansion of her telekinetic abilities.

Of particular interest to Bicks is the change between King’s two main drafts. In an earlier version, Carrie, brutally bullied for not realising her period had arrived, finds her body becoming devilish. Horns begin to sprout on her forehead while her skull elongates so that, in the end, she resembles a monstrous lizard. Her revenge is nothing less than an Armageddon as she flies through her small-town community dispensing carnage, even managing to down a passenger plane. (King tells Bicks that he had modelled this first draft on a schlocky film from 1957 called The Brain from Planet Arous.) The second draft is closer to the finished text. Now it is Carrie’s consciousness that becomes the story’s “centre of gravity – a site of dynamic mental exchanges with the other main characters”.

Some of King’s “constant readers” may find themselves skipping these passages to get to the next bit of biographical revelation (his early drinking problem, say, or the fact that he thought Jack Nicholson was woefully miscast in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining). But for those with the patience to follow Bicks’s more erudite detours into Stephen King’s monstrosity, there is much to relish in this highly original book.

• Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear With Stephen King by Caroline Bicks is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£24.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.