Unpublished and uncollected works by Stephen King

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According to books by Tyson Blue (The Unseen King), [1] Stephen J. Spignesi (The Lost Work of Stephen King), [2] and Rocky Wood et al. (Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished), there are numerous unpublished works by Stephen King that have come to light throughout King's career. These include novels and short stories, most of which remain unfinished. Many of them were stored among Stephen King's papers in the special collections of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, but the papers were removed in 2020. [3] Additionally, there are a number of uncollected short stories, published throughout King's long career in various anthologies and periodicals, that have never been published in a King collection.

Contents

Unpublished works

(Partial list)

Short stories

  • "I'm Falling" (lost)
  • "The Dimension Warp" (lost)
  • "The Hotel at the End of the Road": Two gangsters, Tommy Riviera and Kelso Black, take refuge in an old hotel whose ominous proprietor does not want money. He wants the men themselves - as part of his private museum of the dead.
  • "I've Got to Get Away!": The narrator awakens, having no idea who he is. Shocked, he realizes that he is working at a conveyor belt and that he must get away. He attempts to escape, but is immediately captured by guards who reprogram him. The narrator is revealed to be a faulty robot who occasionally believes that it is a human. The story implies that the robot has experienced this consciousness many times before, only to forget it upon being reprogrammed.
  • "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well": A small boy enjoys torturing animals: he tears out the wings of flies, kills worms, and mistreats a dog with needles. One day, he is lured into a well by a strange voice. When his body is found, his arms are severed from the body and there are needles in his eyes.
  • "The Stranger": A thief and murderer are waylaid by the Grim Reaper.
  • "The Cursed Expedition": Two astronauts land on Venus, finding an Earth-like atmosphere: the temperature is perfect, and delicious fruit grows. The two astronauts believe they have discovered the Garden of Eden. But when one of the crew is found dead, the survivor is too late in realizing that the planet itself is alive and hungry. The survivor and his rocket are eaten by the planet.
  • "The Other Side of the Fog": A mysterious fog serves as a door between dimensions. Pete Jacobs involuntarily travels into the future (the year 2007), and eventually arrives in a world inhabited by dinosaurs. Helpless, he wanders from one dimension to the next, searching for his own kind.
  • "Never Look Behind You!": This short story, written together with a friend, tells about a mysterious woman killing in a peculiar way.

Novels

The Aftermath is a 50,000-word manuscript that describes life after a nuclear war, suggesting the Armageddon was August 14, 1967, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. King began the novel at the same time he was beginning Getting It On (the story that would later become Rage ).
Sword in the Darkness is the longest of King's unpublished works, at approximately 150,000 words. Upon its completion in April 1970, it was rejected by 12 publishers. King has said that he now considers it unpublishable and intends for it never to be released to the public. The book's plot includes a character dealing with the suicide of his pregnant sister and the death of his mother from a brain tumor, as well as another character, a black activist lawyer, who incites a riot after speaking at a local high school.
In 2006, a lengthy excerpt from the book was published in Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, by Rocky Wood et al. (Cemetery Dance Publications, March 2006). The excerpt related the backstory of one character, a teacher named Edie Rowsmith. It is effectively a stand-alone horror story in the style of the early Stephen King.
The House on Value Street is the title of an unpublished novel. In his 1981 treatise on the horror genre, Danse Macabre , King describes his attempts to write a fictionalized novel about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. King talks about attempting multiple drafts from various angles, before deciding he could not finish the novel to his satisfaction. King does not describe the plot in any detail, except that the fictionalized SLA's headquarters would be in the eponymous house on Value Street.
In Danse Macabre, King examines how the seeds of effective horror fiction may be found in the cultural climate and political current events. He also credits his failure to complete The House on Value Street as the genesis of his apocalyptic best-seller The Stand . As King tells it, he began free-associating on his SLA research, and typed the sentence "Donald DeFreeze is a dark man." This first evocation of his recurring villain Randall Flagg, and the societal malaise at the center of Value Street, gave King the core ideas he needed to begin The Stand.

Uncollected works

Short stories

(Partial list)

The following works may have been published in magazines, but not in collections:

Poems

References

  1. ↑ Blue, Tyson (1989). The Unseen King. Borgo Press. ISBN   1-55742-073-4.
  2. ↑
    • Spignesi, Stephen (1998). The Lost Work of Stephen King. Birch Lane Press. ISBN   1-55972-469-2.
  3. ↑ ""King (Stephen Edwin) Literary Papers, 1968- " by Special Collections, Raymond H. Fogler Library, University of Maine" . Retrieved 31 March 2025.
  4. ↑ Wood, Rocky (2012). Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished. Overlook Connection Press. p. 299. ISBN   978-1-892950-59-8.
  5. ↑ "Gradual Interview (February 2007)". stephenrdonaldson.com. February 13, 2007. Retrieved May 31, 2014.
  6. ↑ "Stephen King - Master of the Macabre (Full)". YouTube . 13 October 2022.
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