King on King
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: 1,153 pages
It: 1,138 pages
Under the Dome: 1,072 pages
Insomnia: 787 pages
Desperation: 690 pages
Needful Things: 690 pages
Dreamcatcher: 620 pages
Duma Key: 607 pages
The Tommyknockers: 558 pages
Bag of Bones: 529 pages
The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition
In 1990, King rereleased his epic tale of a superflu that wipes out 99.9% of the world’s population. The new version of the book (1,153 pages) is some 400 pages longer than the original, published in 1978.
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!”
