Stephen King's House

October 25, 2007 — During the spring of 1991, a man broke into Stephen King’s house, making a news item of himself for the benefit of us and a danger of himself to the detriment of the horror author. Based solely on the sheer number of them out there, odds are the intruder was a fan. Judging by his homemade bomb of calculator parts and cardboard, he was also quite possibly deranged. I can totally say with a clear conscience that it wasn’t me. I’d never been to Stephen King’s house until this month. Nor am I a fan.

So I’ll go ahead and ask the question for you. If I’m not a fan, what was I doing outside this man’s house at all? Have I slunk so low in my intentions for this site that I’ll jump on any idea just to have an article to throw up on O.T.I.S. (those last four words were carefully chosen)? Nope. At least, not yet. I don’t plan on that happening for another two more months when I force myself to do the article on the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory in Vermont. Until then, I’m slinking high.

There’s only one reason why I wanted to visit his house. Despite the conflicted feelings toward his work that I will soon elucidate, he’s still a modern icon of horror, a genre of which I’ve been an appreciator long enough and to a degree that it often makes me doubt my place in civilized society. For that mere reason, I do have an interest in him. Mark me, interest and appreciation can be—and are in this case—on the opposite brims of a very wide punch bowl. As to why I’m doing this article in addition to visiting his house, also only one reason. It requires zero research. You know Stephen King. You know what he does. You might not have known he had such a cool house, but I’m sure your life is no different now from knowing. Oh, and I guess that makes two reasons why I wanted to visit the place where he keeps his remote control and favorite pair of jeans. If it was just a stucco ranch house with a sprinkler and an election placard on the front lawn or an ostentatious modern atrocity of the Beverly Hills type, I doubt my interest would’ve been piqued at all. Oh, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m using the word “visit” so loosely it almost doesn’t stick to the computer screen.

Now for a bit of full disclosure (of which normally I am no proponent). Of King’s heft of work, I’ve read Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, Rage, the first half of Danse Macabre, The Mist, and one other short-story anthology that I can’t seem to remember the title of, in addition to numerous random essays and articles. Geez. That was way more than I thought I’d read, actually. Even though that experience slants mostly to his earlier work and is such a small percentage of his libratic oeuvre, I believe that’s still enough to develop some communicable idea on his work. Besides, most of my ideas about anything usually lack anything approximating an appropriate scope. I’m okay with that. It just means that I’m often wrong. And who did that ever stop. Think that should have been a question mark after that rhetorical? Oh, and I’ve seen just about every movie and miniseries based on his work, purely out of cinematic addiction. Obviously, that has no real bearing on my opinion of him as a writer or storyteller, but it does give me insight into the way he likes to check off horror clichés as book ideas in his mind.

Here’s the thing about King and I. I’ve never not been entertained by a Stephen King book. And while that’s a great standard for judging a dinner party, it’s not exactly a good standard for judging valuable literature. His style of writing is completely facile, and it’s suspiciously easy to get from sentence to sentence. He definitely keeps my attention, but so do a lot of demonstrably worthless things, so I can’t use that as any measurement of worth, either. He writes from a real place, his dialogue is natural, and his characters live, although when you bloat a novel like he does and end up spending so much time with them, they’d probably feel real inevitably. My big problem with King’s books, though, is that I always feel empty after finishing one. Granted, in general I’m a cavernous hollow that reverberates every idea, feeling, and memory into sad loops that bounce painfully off my insides like detached Pong pixels, but nevertheless I usually need to wrestle with literature, and I want it to beat me every time. I want it to change me. His work, though, seems to lack denseness, thorniness, complexity, originality. All the things about literature that make it make us better people. When you’re done with a Stephen King book, you’re done with it. That’s also how I describe Three’s Company episodes. Except that I do end up re-watching those. Come and knock on my door.

He doesn’t seem to have that annoying internal editor that tells you that you’re talking too much or that an idea isn’t valid just because you have it. I know. I’m looking at the word count for this article. Pot. Kettle. Black. But while that makes it easier to kick out more than a book a year, it also makes it way hard to write that solid of a book. Unless you’re a genius. In the real sense of the word, and not the diluted-to-the-point-of-nonexistence way we use it so that it can apply to football coaches and businessmen. I’d also like to say that my official stance on his work has nothing to do with any habitual distaste for the popular, either. I do have that, certainly, but I like to fool myself into thinking I’m not ruled by it. I haven’t met a person who doesn’t find Scrubs funny, and I’ll admit to watching it to anybody. Which, I guess is what I just did. On the plus side (not that I’m organizing what I’ll call for a lack of a better term “points” in that way), King’s horror advocacy has always made me like him, although he usual defends the genre on pretty simplistic terms, as a healthy outlet for man’s unhealthy tendencies. Still, though, even though he kind of has to, he does defend the genre. In fact, I think he’s at his best in his nonfiction work, actually. His ability to compose clear, natural prose in an amiable manner is perfect for that kind of writing. The introductions to his books often interest me more than the books themselves.

I do kind of feel bad about the last few paragraphs, partly because I said a lot of vague negative things about his work without backing them up, and partly because I’m sure I’ve not said anything that hasn’t been said before by his critics, so let’s move on to his house, over which I will rave. Now, I’ve suffered the self-imposed embarrassment of standing in front of my share of famous houses for pictures (I hate calling what I’m doing “posing”...it’s more like just taking up space in a frame). Blackbeard’s, Lovecraft’s, Shakespeare’s, Lizzie Borden’s. This is the first time I’ve (sigh) posed in front of a living person’s house, though. Felt a bit like stalking, and I’ve hated myself for it since.

His house is located in the basically Canadian state of Maine, just outside of downtown Bangor at 47 West Broadway. The surrounding neighborhood is way more inviting than I would have thought. The houses are all large and expensive-looking, but they’re close to the street, which is itself wide and open, and a public sidewalk does what public sidewalks do directly in front of them. I totally see the appeal of living in the place. It’s highly accessible, and you can go there without feeling like the neighborhood watch is burning sideways 8’s into your back with binoculars. Stephen King’s house is red with white trim, old enough to look historic, and absolutely towers over you. Despite that last, it does look smaller than you’d think it would from the front, but it reaches back far enough that you can’t mistake it as anything but a mansion. It’s also in complete full view and not at all hidden behind the small wrought-iron gate that envelopes the place. Speaking of which, Robert Frost once wrote something about cool fences making cool neighbors, so based on just that, King must be a hit at the neighborhood yard sales. It’s also a big reason why this house’s appearance is so notable. Spiders, bat-winged creatures, and a three-headed reptile all decorate the black wrought-iron in natural and subtle ways. And by natural and subtle I mean not annoying. It’s exactly something you’d hope a nice guy steeped in horror stories would do to his house. Acknowledge who he is without megaphoning it around.

King wasn’t home. I know this because while I was sitting across the street in my car with its obvious out-of-state plates trying to screw up the courage to be mistaken for a Stephen King fan, a tour bus arrived, out of which jumped about five camera-handed people in raincoats (because it was raining), which definitely put me in perspective and made it even harder to get out of the car. I think I’ve heard somewhere that the tour bus is only allowed to stop by when King’s not home. Also, that night was game one of the MLB American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians. It was in Boston, and apparently Mr. King is Rain Man about attending Red Sox games. An anti-war sign was staked into the front lawn, illustrating for the millionth time for me over the past couple years that trendiness is annoying even on important issues. The front gate was closed, but a side driveway gate was open, down which was parked a champagne-colored Mercedez Benz.

I want to like Stephen King’s work in a defensible way. I want to back anybody that pushes the horror cause forward as much as he has. Plus I just like spooky tales. I can't, though. I definitely don’t hate him. Not in the way I hate most New York Times best-selling authors and certainly not to the point of bombs made of cardboard and calculator parts. But even though I still don’t really like his work, I do love his house. That’s some consolation for me.