Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A spooky stroll through the haunted hallways of Stephen King’s mind. Trained as a Shakespearean scholar, Bicks was hired, a decade ago, to hold a chair at the University of Maine endowed in Stephen King’s name. It happened that she was a huge fan of King’s work, a teenager when “a whole posse of King’s creatures danced their way into my imagination and made themselves at home.” A request for a classroom visit led to friendship, and along with it, Bicks’ layering of King’s work onto a template dominated by the likes ofMacbeth andHamlet. The great Kingly lesson, to which the Bard would surely assent: “The world is never going to be 100 percent safe: The Boogeyman never goes away—-although your mother will.” Bicks is a smart and inventive reader of King, to be sure, and it’s an interesting exercise to think of the bloody conclusion ofCarrie as something that wouldn’t be out of place in Birnam Wood, as well as to ponder the connection of Jack Torrance ofThe Shining to poor mind-beset Prince Hamlet. But of greater interest, to die-hard King fans, is Bicks’ tour through the archives of the title, as she works her way through draft after draft of King’s novels and stories to discover how the master of horror shaped his work. One way, she finds, is through clusters of words that appear and reappear in various forms in any given text—inPet Sematary, for instance, the words “dirt/grit/gritting/grating/grave/gravel.” There’s good gossip along with the scholarly insights (and the scholarship is lightly worn and not for a moment pedantic), one highlight being the real reason why King didn’t like Stanley Kubrick’s version ofThe Shining. And rest assured, after reading this book you’ll know the good and true reasons to keep your closet door closed tight. An enlightening, reader-friendly exercise in literary scholarship. Boo! Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

It was a brand-new position, the first Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. This opened up a whole new world for Bicks, who was given access to King’s archives—the first scholar given this opportunity—still located right in King's own home. Bicks spent a year exploring the archives, concentrating on five early books—Carrie, Pet Sematary, 'Salem’s Lot, The Night Shift, and The Shining. By comparing various manuscript drafts and King’s hand-written notes, she was able to chart the creation of these books, from initial conception to final draft, including how themes were expanded, characters added or deleted, tone and language fine-tuned through successive iterations. She also brings in interviews she had with King along the way, providing further insights. Part literary analysis and part autobiography, this book is not only a gift to King’s fans but also a remarkable journey inside the creative process of a master storyteller.