Landing on nightstands everywhere this fall with a monstrous thwack, the 1,000-plus page Under the Dome is Stephen King's third longest novel. In an interview with TIME, the prolific author reflects on his new book and nine of its fellow doorstops.
Author Stephen King has a reputation for the big book. Not big as in Tom Wolfe-esque, "the way we live now" big, but big as in "this book is literally, physically huge." It's a reputation that doesn't seem to bother him. King's latest, Under the Dome, is his third longest novel ever.
King talked to TIME about his top 10 biggest books, reflecting on the circumstances under which they were written and the critical reception that they received. The list of books and their page counts was supplied by King's office and refers to the American hardcover editions. It does not include books co-written with other authors or any of the seven parts of King's Dark Tower series, which he typically considers one long book, à la The Lord of the Rings.
The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition, 1990
King: It sort of nagged me a lot that those pages had been cut. [My publisher] Doubleday had a physically limiting factor in those days because they used a glue binding instead of a cloth binding, and the way it was explained to me was that they had so much of a thickness they could do before the glue just fell apart. And that meant issuing a book in two volumes, and they didn't want to do that. So my editor came to me and said, "We have to cut this book by 400 pages. And that's the reason why. It doesn't have anything to do with quality.
I [later] showed those cut pages to an editor and he said, "You know, we could redo this book, we could reissue it as the uncut Stand. And I actually sat down and wrote the book again. I had the manuscript on one side of an IBM Selectric typewriter and I had the pages of a book that I had torn out of the binding on the other side. And I started at the beginning and I updated the dates and wrote new material. But when I think about it, I think to myself, "Jesus, that was a lot of work."
When Robert Bloch died, the only thing that anybody really remembered about him was that he wrote Psycho, which became the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie. And whenever I'm introduced, I'm the guy that wrote The Stand. When my name comes up in the blogs these days, it's usually in relation to H1N1: "He was the guy who thought about the flu!"
It, 1986
The tale of an ancient child-killing creature who lives in the sewers under the haunted town of Derry, It (1,138 pages) is King's kitchen-sink book. Evil clowns, giant spiders, walking eyeballs — the works.
King: I remember reading a lot of reviews at that time, and a lot of stuff about my work, [talking] about how I was a horror novelist and a horror writer. I would be asked, "What happened in your childhood that makes you want to write those terrible things?" I couldn't think of any real answer to that. And I thought to myself, "Why don't you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put 'em all in there. And I thought, "How are you going to do that?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to do it like a fairy tale. I'm going to make up a town where these things happen and everybody ignores them."
There came a time when I said to [my wife] Tabby, "I want to write this book, but we live in the country, and I want to write about a city, a whole haunted city, so we ought to move to either Portland or Bangor." And we looked at both, and I knew right away that Bangor, if Tabby agreed, would be the right place to go, because it was this hard town that had a real history. So I went around town for one whole fall, and I asked people what they knew about various places that I wanted to incorporate into the book. And I would listen to the stories.
I didn't care what the truth was, you see. I cared about what people believed. I cared about the stories that they handed down from generation to generation. And what I remember most clearly about that fall was walking through the two cemeteries in Bangor that are very picturesque, but you walk down the hill and you see all the rotten flowers that have swept down into the ditches. And they're like three, four, five feet deep. The stink is awful. And I thought, "Yeah, I want to put this into the book too."
Under the Dome, 2009
King first tried to write Under the Dome (1,072 pages) in 1976. The book, about a town that suddenly discovers itself trapped underneath a translucent, impenetrable dome, draws its political undertones from King's frustration with the latest Bush Administration.
King: I was angry about incompetency. Obviously I'm on the left of center. I didn't believe there was justification for going into the war in Iraq. And it just seemed at the time, that in the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration was like this angry kid walking down the street who couldn't find whoever sucker punched him, and so turned around and punched the first likely suspect. Sometimes the sublimely wrong people can be in power at a time when you really need the right people.
I put a lot of that into the book. But when I started I said, "I want to use the Bush-Cheney dynamic for the people who are the leaders of this town." As a result, you have Big Jim Rennie, the villain of the piece. I got to like the other guy, Andy Sanders. He wasn't actively evil, he was just incompetent — which is how I always felt about George W. Bush.
Insomnia, 1994
Following the publication of Insomnia (787 pages) — about an old man who, suffering from sleeplessness, starts to see little men with scissors running around town — King hopped on a Harley motorcycle and drove across the country on a 10-city tour. The trip was meant to help prop up independent bookshops following a wave of discounting at chain stores like Barnes & Noble.
King: It's worrying because what's happening now with Walmart and Amazon and Target cutting their prices is that they've turned the chain stores into indies. And independent bookstores are really clinging on by the skin of their teeth. When you hear Borders saying things like, "Well, we're not worried about the price-cutting because it's important to us to provide the complete bookstore experience," I go, "Oh my God, this sounds like Johnson talking about winning in Vietnam." I don't think the American consumer cares that much about the whole bookstore experience. They care about getting the Michael Connelly book that they want, or the Sarah Palin book — if they're, you know, into that. I thought James Patterson, who I ordinarily don't have a lot of respect for, said it best. He said they're devaluing the crown jewels, and who knows what's going to happen next?
TIME: You once wrote about plotted novels versus unplotted novels, and you wrote that Insomnia was unplotted and that, in retrospect, you found the results "particularly uninspiring."
King: When you plot a novel, particularly when you try to make a novel work to fit a foregone conclusion, you know how a book is going to end. And if you sense that a book wants to go in a different direction, you steer it back to that predetermined course at your peril. It's better to let the book be the boss. I remember the sensation of saying, "I'm twisting this for my own purposes." It was a book that had one bad guy that really wanted to go off the reservation, and I wouldn't let him. I made him do what I wanted. And as a result, it was tough for me to believe it. And if I can't believe some of these things, I can't expect readers to believe them because, let's face it, they're pretty out there anyway.
Desperation, 1996
In the same year that his successful six-part serial novel The Green Mile came out, King released two additional novels on the same day in September — The Regulators (under the name of King's long-retired pseudonym, Richard Bachman) and Desperation (690 pages), about an ancient evil that takes over a secluded Nevada town. The two books were distorted mirror images of each other, featuring the same cast of characters in different situations. Desperation grapples with the idea of an absent, and sometimes cruel, God.
King: I was raised in a religious household, and I really wanted to give God his due in this book. So often, in novels of the supernatural, God is a sort of kryptonite substance, or like holy water to a vampire. You just bring on God, and you say "in his name," and the evil thing disappears. But God as a real force in human lives is a lot more complex than that. And I wanted to say that in Desperation. God doesn't always let the good guys win.
I always wanted to say that you can still reconcile the idea that things are not necessarily going to go well without falling back on platitudes like "God has a plan" and "This is for the greater good." It's possible to be in pain and still believe that there is some force for good in the universe. That certainly doesn't mean to say that everybody should go out and join the First United Church of My God Is Bigger Than Your God. That's half the trouble with the world. Maybe more.
Needful Things, 1991
King had already set several of his novels (The Dead Zone, Cujo, The Dark Half) in the town of Castle Rock, Maine, by the time Needful Things (690 pages) came around. In this novel, he wipes the town off the map after a man who may or may not be the devil opens up a shop that offers the residents of Castle Rock anything their heart desires — for a price.
King: Of all the books I've written that have gotten lousy reviews — and there have been some that have — I would say I'm most disappointed in this one just sort of missing the mark critically. The idea for that book came all at once. I thought, "What if somebody came to this town and forced all these people to do nasty things like pranks [to each other] to get things that they really wanted.
What it turned out to be, I thought, was a satire of the whole Ronald Reagan ethos of "greed is good, consumerism is good." To me, it was a hilarious concept. And the way that it played out was funny, in a black-comedy way. It really satirized that American idea that it's good to have everything that you want. I don't think it is.
Dreamcatcher, 2001
In 1999, King was struck by a pickup truck while walking near his home in Maine and nearly killed. In 2001 he released Dreamcatcher (620 pages), his first novel after the accident and a story about four friends who meet for their yearly hunting trip and find themselves in the midst of an alien invasion. Many were disgusted by one of the book's creatures, which grows in its victim's stomach and then exits ... out the back end.
King: I was in pain all the time [while writing that book]. I couldn't keyboard that book at a computer or a typewriter. I was in a chair with pillows on both sides of me, particularly on my right where my hip just hurt all the time and my lower leg was on fire. I wasn't sleeping very well. I was taking a lot of painkillers that weren't helping very much. And at the same time, the book took me away when I had a chance to write it.
I'd never really read a story about something terrible happening revolving around bathroom functions, eliminatory functions. And I wanted to do that because it just occurred to me that so much of the really terrible news we get in our lives, we get in the bathroom. Either because we discover a lump or because there's blood in our stool or even when you look in the mirror and all at once you say, "S___ man, I'm going bald!" All those things happen in the bathroom. Half of really scaring people is getting them in a place that's undefended. Nobody's as defenseless as they are in the bathroom, with their pants down.
Duma Key, 2008
From The Shining to Misery and The Dark Half, writers have starred in many King novels. In Duma Key (607 pages), he looks at visual art's potential for the macabre. The novel stars Edgar Freemantle, a construction executive who loses his arm in an accident and discovers that he has gained the ability to affect reality through his paintings. Oh, and there are some creepy dead girls too.
King: I had to write Duma Key from the standpoint of somebody who can't draw a cat. I mean, I could draw you a cat, but you wouldn't know what it was unless I told you. So it really was a case of wish fulfillment.
If Desperation is a book that's full of pain and unhappiness, Duma Key is a book where there actually is hope, because I was feeling in a more hopeful place. The two books are really the polarities of my recovery from my accident. I was feeling a lot better by the time that I wrote Duma Key, and I think it shows in the book.
The Tommyknockers, 1987
King's third release of 1987, after The Eyes of the Dragon and Misery, The Tommyknockers (558 pages) is the author's first novel-length attempt at a straight-up aliens-invade-earth story. After a writer discovers a piece of metal sticking out of the ground in the woods behind her house, she starts to dig — and dig and dig.
King: That was another case of a book I tried to write a long time ago. I had the idea of the guy stumbling over the flying saucer when I was a senior in college. I had 15 or 20 pages and I just stopped. I don't remember why. I think it was probably like Under the Dome. The canvas was just too big. And so I quit. The pages went God knows where. Years later the idea recurred and I just got swept up by the concept.
I can remember going into that book thinking, "If I have these two people and they're able to get this flying saucer out of the ground and fly it, then they can decide they're going to become sheriffs for world peace and discover they do a really terrible job at it, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it turned out not to be that.
Bag of Bones, 1998
The story of a popular novelist suffering from writer's block following the death of his wife, Bag of Bones (529 pages) made news when King decided to leave his longtime publisher Viking for Scribner, once the imprint of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Bag of Bones, a ghost story that owes much to Daphne du Maurier's gothic romance novel Rebecca, is one of the first King books marketed as much as literature as it was a horror story.
King: I was squeezed out at Viking, because Phyllis Grann came from Putnam, and she brought with her Tom Clancy, who sold more books than I did. There was a feeling at Viking that they couldn't support two big money writers. And I was the one that went. In terms of profits and loss, that made sense, although Clancy's kind of dropped out of sight. But the people I still deal with at Scribner were people who were interested in the book rather than in the reputation of the writer, which was a penny-dreadful reputation at that point. I give them a lot of credit. To some degree, they rehabilitated my reputation.