by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Give me what I want and I’ll leave.
Storm of the Century in the screenplay for the late 90s miniseries of the same name in book form. Maybe only fools like me who buy everything Stephen King writes would buy and read a screenplay of a TV miniseries. Who knows? If it works, it works. They’ve got my money and a read it. That was the deal we struck and all the terms have been met fair. This was written in 96 and 97 and the book was published in 1999.
In the introduction, King tells us TV people want to make shows and movie people want to make lunch reservations. King talks about his relationship in ABC at that time. I wonder how that compares with Hulu and his resurgence in adaptations of his work with Hulu and streaming services more broadly. The introduction was written before the miniseries aired. I wonder if the book of the screenplay was published before airing. We learn that King’s daughter owned a restaurant before going to study to be a minister. I find that interesting.
I had to adjust my thinking to pick up the dialogue from stage direction. I’ve been tearing through his novels one after the other, so had gotten into a flow that required me to readjust for this. It was a more difficult transition than I expected, but that’s on me and my own cognitive struggles medically induced and otherwise.
King has more description of asides, backstory, and character’s thoughts than any other screenplay writer I’ve read. I believe he does that on purpose with readers like me in mind. He mentions in the stage direction that My Little Puppy was once Danny Torrence’s favorite book.
There are a couple omit cuts in the screenplay, so I wonder if we are seeing a later shooting script instead of original drafts.
Little Tall Island is back again. Dolores Claiborne is mentioned a couple times because that is the last time the island got murdery. We have crossed The Reach once more.
“Hell is about repetition” our villain tells us.
King references children being killed in Scotland. I guess that sort of thing has happened too often over the last twenty years for that reference to stand out in my mind anymore.
The characters are interesting and the pace of the action is pretty good. The losses pile up and King finds his path to being creepy within the confines of network television sensibility in the late 90s.
I’m not sure how the characters translated to the screen. With a few notable exceptions, King’s TV miniseries tend to be a little clunky in the execution. The story is stronger than what gets translated.
It’s a heartbreaking ending in a way I did not start to figure out until pretty late in the work. One of his stronger endings to a work in any format, I think. The complicit nature of the island folk broken down to cooperation with the ending makes it all the worse and more painful as a reader identifying with the characters.
“Now I know how easy it is to get yanked out of the world.”
My next post in this series will be Before On Writing which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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