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!”
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Stephen King on His Longest Novels: The Stand
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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.”
