Lisa Rogak - Haunted Heart

Nevertheless, one day Steve decided to go exploring and got the biggest surprise of his life so far. His mother had stowed away most of the artifacts from her ill-fated marriage to Steve’s father in the attic years earlier after it was clear that Don had gone AWOL for good. Steve discovered that his long-gone father had a penchant for the same kinds of pulp paperbacks—mysteries and horror—that he devoured.

What was even more shocking was that in another box, young Steve found a stack of rejection slips from magazines with hastily scribbled notes of encouragement asking Don to try again.

His father had been an aspiring writer too!

Steve continued to dig through the other boxes, but didn’t find any of his father’s manuscripts or published stories. He ran downstairs to confront his mother, accusing her of hiding the truth about his father from him. Ruth calmed him down and explained.

“My mother told me that he wrote lots of really good stories, that he sent them off to magazines, and he got letters back saying, ‘Please send us more.’ But he was kind of lazy about it and never really did very much,” Steve said.

Then she delivered the one-two punch that would remain with Steve all his life. “Steve,” she said, kind of laughing, “your father didn’t have any persistence. That’s why he left the marriage.”

Steve saw what his father’s laziness had done to his mother and his family, and he swore he would never be like that.

But he was also intrigued by what he shared with his father. Maybe writing—and getting published, Steve’s dream—would be a way to connect with the father he’d never known.

Steve thanked his mother for telling him the truth and excused himself from the room. He made a beeline for the attic back at their old, ramshackle farmhouse with the peeling paint, sat down at the desk under the alcove in the attic, and slipped a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter.

In the spring of 1962, Steve graduated from eighth grade at the top of his class. He would later wryly say it was because “there were only three of us in the class, and one of them was retarded.”

In the fall, King entered the freshman class at Lisbon High School in Lisbon Falls, eight miles away from West Durham.

Lisbon High had approximately five hundred students in grades nine through twelve, many of them, like Steve, coming from surrounding towns that had no high school. Two of Steve’s classmates from elementary school entered in the same freshman class: Lew Purinton and Pete Higgins, whose dad was the principal at Lisbon High. The school had three official academic tracks: the A group, for students who planned to go on to college; the B track, for business-oriented students; and the C track, called the commercial track, where all the other students ended up, similar to the vocational/technical high school programs offered today. Occasionally a student would move from one track to another, most often downward from A to B, or B to C, when he started to fall behind. Steve, Pete, and Lew were in the college track, and so they were in all of the same classes, including algebra, English, and French.

Other unofficial tracks at the school were hammered out according to social strata: the athletes, the hoods, the nerds, and everybody else.

Though he always had his nose stuck in a book and never tried to hide his intelligence, Steve didn’t fall into the nerd group because he liked people and was a bit of a ham in school. He excelled in English and easily earned straight A’s in his classes, but his grades were lower in his science classes: C’s in chemistry and B-minuses in physics. “I was never a geek, but on the other hand, I saw a lot of movies in the fifties like The Thing and Them! ” he said. “I know that radiation causes monsters, and most important of all I know that if we mess around too much with the unknown, something awful will happen.”

He obviously wasn’t the James Dean type for the same reason he didn’t fall into the athlete category. “I wasn’t too cool,” he said. “I wasn’t the kind of kid who would get elected to student council, but neither did I lurk around the lockers looking like I was just waiting for somebody to haul off on me.”

According to Pete Higgins, Steve fell into the catchall group of everybody else, but he traveled freely between the three other groups primarily because of his quick wit and offbeat sense of humor.

“He was a little bit different because he was taller than most of the kids,” said Higgins. “He also wore those dark black glasses, and judging from his appearance, it was obvious he didn’t come from a lot of money. But he was always ready to add something to a class discussion that would make the kids or the teacher laugh.”

Steve also learned how to disarm those students who would otherwise have felt inclined to pick on him. “He gained a certain amount of confidence in high school,” said Lew Purinton. “Kids accepted him more once they realized that he was intelligent and he could do a lot of things. And he was a genuinely nice guy.”

Despite his efforts to make classmates feel comfortable, some students and teachers still misunderstood him. Prudence Grant, who taught at Lisbon High School when Steve was a student there, remembered that he was often teased by a few of the older boys on his way home from school. “He was the butt of a lot of pranks,” she said. “They’d hide in a hollow, and as Stephen came down over the hill, they would jump out at him or scare him.” Later on, when she read Carrie, she immediately recognized that he had based several characters in the novel on teachers at the school.

“I know that Carrie was heavily based on Lisbon High down to several faculty members,” Grant said. “We had a bumbling assistant principal, and he’s portrayed in the book as the guy who closes the file-drawer door and slams his thumb in there. There were other teachers who were portrayed in the book, but I didn’t make the story, which is fine by me.”

Peter Higgins remembered one kid in particular who was a thorn in Steve’s side who fell into the James Dean–wannabe category. “In study halls, he’d bug Steve and call him Mickey Mouse because he said that’s what Steve looked like.” Higgins added that the other kid would tease Steve under his breath so the teachers wouldn’t hear, and that the other students were well aware of what was going on. “But no one stepped in to stop it because they were afraid that the guy would turn to them next,” said Higgins.

“I hated school,” said Steve. “I always felt I was wearing the wrong clothes, or like I had too many spots on my face. I don’t trust people who look back on high school with fondness; too many of them were part of the overclass, those who were taunters instead of tauntees.”

Steve got through his freshman year and spent the summer upstairs in the attic of the old, creaky farmhouse, banging away on the typewriter without an M . He dutifully continued to send out stories, receiving a steady stream of rejection slips. He collected so many that he drove a nail into the wall above his desk and stabbed the slips on it. Most notices came back with no personal comments, but occasionally he’d get one with a hand-scribbled note that said, Terrible story, shows some talent. “At least I knew it wasn’t just robots reading my work,” he said.

On September 12, 1963, Steve had just started his sophomore year in high school when he came home from school one day and checked on his grandmother as usual. Her room was eerily still. He called her name, but she didn’t respond. He froze for a moment, then recalled a couple of movies where a character held a pocket mirror up to a person’s mouth to see if it fogged up. He tiptoed over to her dresser and grabbed a compact and held it up to her mouth. It stayed clear. Nothing. He sat down in a chair across the room and stared at his grandmother’s body. He’d seen corpses before, but only for fleeting moments or from across the room at the wakes at his friends’ homes.