(7 of 10)
Oddly enough, King's unsettling plots rarely work on film, perhaps because occult scenarios are best played in the Skull Cinema. On a real screen his lethally gifted children often turn out to be amateurish performers; the floodlighted hotel is about as frightening as the set of a Fred Astaire musical; and the rabid Saint Bernard seems only a benign cartoon of the Hound of the Baskervilles. King professes to be satisfied with many of the movie adaptations, except for The Shining ("Stanley Kubrick's stated purpose was to make a horror picture, and I don't think he understood the genre") and the summer's Maximum Overdrive ("a stiff"), which King directed. But privately he derives consolation from a James M. Cain anecdote. An interviewer commiserated with the author of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice because Hollywood had ruined all his books. "Cain looked over at his shelf and said, 'No, they are all still right there.' " Besides, King's work has inspired a bona fide hit in 1986: Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, an adaptation of The Body, a 1982 novella that focuses on a group of twelve-year-olds searching for the body of a boy who was struck by a train.
It is easy to understand King's fondness for clothbound versions. After all, it is paper more than celluloid that allows him to live in the style of a Down East grand seigneur. The family occupies a 23-room, 129-year-old house ! surrounded by a black iron fence with interwoven designs of bats and spider webs, installed in an excess of whimsy by the owners. The place is within a mile of the down-at-the-heels section of town where the Kings began their odyssey. It has an eccentric charm appropriate to the tenants: one cupola is conical, the other square. Tabitha, 37, works in a spacious front room of the main house; there she has written three published novels. Each book explored a different genre. One book was, in her view, a "political romance," another concerned a Maine woman attacked by ruffians, and the third was an old- fashioned love story. King's sun-washed study, set in a remodeled stable loft, has a hidden stairway leading down to a toy-cluttered indoor swimming pool with a vaulted gothic-style ceiling. Tabitha calls it the Church of the Poisoned Mind. The children drift in and out frequently. Naomi, 16, comes by dressed in a Mickey Mouse T shirt and shorts, a departure from the standard King uniform of work shirt and jeans. She complains that the boys were hogging the pool. Joe, 14, prowls through the study shelves in search of the videocassette of Day of the Dead, but his father suggests the boy screen some Alfred Hitchcock thrillers. "Watch the Hitcher," King advises. "He's scary." When Joe wanders off with Capricorn One instead, King digs out one of the unsolicited horror films he constantly receives by fourth-class mail. The cassette is still wrapped in cellophane. "I can't bear to throw them away," he admits. "But I won't let the kids watch them." Meantime, Owen, 9, is down in the kitchen with a group of friends, hunched over a consumer magazine for children. The King children earn their allowances by taping books for Dad to hear while he drives. For the going steno rate of $9.10 an hour, Owen records detective novels. Naomi is currently reading the stories of John Steinbeck into a microphone.