The Stephen King Companion is an authoritative look at horror author King's personal life and professional career, from Carrie to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. King expert George Beahm, who has published extensively about Maine's main author, is your seasoned guide to the imaginative world of Stephen King, covering his varied and prodigious output: juvenalia, short fiction, limited edition books, bestselling novels, and film adaptations. The book is also profusely illustrated with nearly 200 photos, color illustrations by celebrated "Dark Tower" artist Michael Whelan, and black-and-white drawings by Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne. Supplemented with interviews with friends, colleagues, and mentors who knew King well, this book looks at his formative years in Durham, when he began writing fiction as a young teen, his college years in the turbulent sixties, his struggles with early poverty, working full-time as an English teacher while writing part-time, the long road to the publication of his first novel, Carrie, and the dozens of bestselling books and major screen adaptations that followed. For fans old and new, The Stephen King Companion is a comprehensive look at America's best-loved bogeyman.

Not a reference book, but a pretty good fan book. Covers King's career, criticism, synopses, transcriptions to film and audio. Illustrated with pictures of King, covers, movie sets. Public libraries will need gobs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Though often disparaged by literary critics, Stephen King's work has influenced a generation of horror and science fiction writers. Acting as a study guide, this book features the important critical interpretations of the horror master's work.

The myriad worlds and universes King has created are, in reality, one world, one universe. Here is the guide to that universe. The Complete Stephen King Universe is the only definitive reference work that examines all of Stephen King's novels, short stories, motion pictures, miniseries, and teleplays, and deciphers the threads that exist in all of his work. This ultimate resource includes in-depth story analyses, character breakdowns, little-known facts, and startling revelations on how the plots, themes, characters, and conflicts intertwine. After discovering The Complete Stephen King Universe, you will never read Stephen King the same way again.

The Functions of Unnatural Death in Stephen King: Murder, Sickness, and Plots examines over thirty of King’s works and looks at the character deaths within them, placing them first within the chronology of the plot and then assigning them a function. Death is horrific and perhaps the only universal horror because it comes to us all. Stephen King, known as the Master of Horror, rarely writes without including death in his works. However, he keeps death from being repetitious or fully expected because of the ways in which he plays with the subject, maintaining what he himself has called a childlike approach to death. Although character deaths are a constant, the narrative function of those deaths changes depending on their placement within the plot. By separating out the purposes of early deaths from those that come during the rising action or during the climax, this book examines the myriad ways character deaths in King can affect surviving characters and therefore the plot. Even though character deaths are frequent and hardly ever occur only once in a book, King’s varying approaches to, and uses of, these deaths show how he continues to play with both the subject and its facets of horror throughout his work.

Now known worldwide for his horror creations in best-selling books and popular film adaptations, Stephen King spent years in obscurity trying to find his voice and his audience. For much of his career he chose to remain in the small-town Maine of his youth, far from glittering publishing and film centers, yet few American writers can now equal his hold on audiences worldwide. This biography traces King's evolution from would-be pulp magazine writer to master of his craft, whose work both epitomizes and transcends the horror genre.

Contains hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries that provide information about various aspects of the life and work of popular novelist Stephen King.

A sprawling epic that encompasses many worlds, parallel and alternate timelines, and the echoes between these disconnects, Stephen King's Dark Tower series spans the entirety of King's career, from The Gunslinger (limited edition 1982; revised in 2003) to The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). The series has two distinctive characteristics: its genre hybridity and its interconnection with the larger canon of King's work. The Dark Tower series engages with a number of distinct and at times dissonant genre traditions, including those of Arthurian legend, fairy tales, the fantasy epic, the Western, and horror. The Dark Tower series is also significant in its cross-references to King's other works, ranging from overt connections like characters or places to more subtle allusions, like the sigil of the Dark Tower's Crimson King appearing in the graffiti of other realities. This book examines these connections and genre influences to consider how King negotiates and transforms these elements, why they matter, and the impact they have on one another and on King's work as a whole.

In this revised and expanded edition of "The Stephen King Phenomenon," Dr. Michael R. Collings re-examines the impact of Stephen King on popular culture.