Stephen’s Lot (or a Whole Lotta Stephens)

Flashback: Dateline June 21, 1999
Horrormeister Stephen King is run down by a mini-van and barely survives… or does he?

It was June and yours truly was just returning from a week-long stay in the Himalayans, where the famous Mountain Yeti had just won his fourth straight bowling league championship, when I heard the news. Stephen King, renowned for his tales of horror and keeping Maine’s returnable beer can and bottle law jumping during the 1980s, had been critically injured in a traffic accident. At first, reports were as sketchy as the screenplay for Maximum Overdrive, but it was finally revealed that King had made a full recovery.

Or had he?

If there are two things that I’ve learned during my journalistic endeavours, it’s this: nothing is ever what it seems. Unable to locate any documents charting King’s release from hospital, I became convinced something was afoot and possibly even afoul. King had taken a stand against a blue mini-van, but what had really been the outcome? Had the gnashing teeth of the publishing industry chewed up the truth? Did the minions at Scribner and Doubleday want to hide the fact that Stephen King had slipped into a dead zone of his own?

With my daring photographer and intrepid editor by my side, I set out to prove, once and for all, that Stephen King perished that day on a rural Maine roadside. But even he wouldn’t let that interfere with his writing!

I scoured the hospital for evidence, but came up with nothing. It was almost as if the hospital was Stephen’s own personal kingdom! I was thwarted at every turn, from my interview with the Bangor police (“Would you get off the steps, you crackpot?” Sergeant Ace R. Lois requested respectfully) to my request for some local news footage from OWE-1 TV. It seemed as if my investigation, like my 1975 Dodge Dart, had stalled.

Not so…

Fast-Forward: Dateline October 2000
Sultan of Scares Stephen King publishes On Writing to critical acknowledgement.

I, Manny Fatback, have always been a fan of Stephen King’s stories of unflinching horror—Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption brought chills!—but nothing terrified me more than what I found inside the cover of King’s aptly titled tome, On Writing: CAN$37.00 for a book barely over 250 pages? Without pictures? Still, I slapped down my hard-earned cash (the receipt submitted for reimbursement was for $52.95—ed.) and began reading. What I discovered both shocked and galvanized me! There, in black and white, was the piece of evidence I had been seeking!

A lengthy 255 pages into his book, King writes that the man who hit him (a man who conveniently died a short time later!) noticed that King’s ”spectacles [were] lying on the front seat of his van.“ I found this to be very interesting indeed because Stephen King doesn’t wear spectacles! At best, he wears glasses—though to be fair, anything with lenses that thick should be called goggles! I immediately investigated this information and was politely told that any number of photographs show King wearing spectacles. Doctored photographs, I thought. I allowed our panel of Case Closed experts to examine said photographs and asked if they had been doctored. Our experts say … maybe!

So … if this one bit of evidence had been fabricated, what else had been made up?

Deciding I had to find out, I packed a bag, grabbed my dog-eared copy of On Writing, and headed out the door …

… After unsuccessfully returning On Writing to the book store for a full refund, I drove straight to Bangor, Maine, the hometown of Stephen King, Monsignor of the Morbid. A stop at Bangor’s Acadia Hospital brought me the next piece in the puzzle—King had never been admitted, nor had he been discharged from the facility! And if this was the case for Acadia Hospital, I knew I could make the assumption that I’d discover the same information at Bangor’s remaining hospitals.

It seemed clear to me then—as clear as the reason for the demise of King’s Golden Years—that he had, in fact, died after being struck by that van! But why? For what nefarious means? I returned to my room at the local Bangor Hojo to gather my thoughts. Little did I know that, thanks to free satellite TV, A&E, and pay-per-view adult movies, I would find satisfaction before the night was out …

… While my intrepid photographer took snaps of the local scenery and my editor finished himself off in the shower (sans Viagra!—ed), I became immersed in an A&E biography of Stephen King. Ironically, it wasn’t the program that broke the Stephen King conspiracy wide open—it was a commercial for King’s novel, The Dreamcatcher. I was only half-paying-attention as King, who narrated the advertisement, stepped into centre screen and declared, “I should know. I wrote it. I’m a Stephen King.”

I sat up, grabbed the remote and punched rewind. Upon remembering that I didn’t have a VCR, I replayed the scene in my head.

King … walking to the centre of the screen. He’s wearing flood pants that expose his white socks. His face is thin. He looks into the camera and says, “I should know. I wrote it. I’m a Stephen King.” (No, really, he says this—ed.)

I’m a Stephen King?

At last it all came crashing down around me. The doctored photographs … the errors in On Writing … the lack of hospital paperwork… it all pointed in one direction.

Stephen King had been cloned!

By the following morning many of the startling revelations had become foggy (thanks to a bite from a Wild Turkey), so I reviewed the list of compelling “evidence” (I’ve grudgingly used quotation marks on the advice of our paralegal’s janitor). I worked my way through the proof, starting with King’s “spectacles” and ending with his TV ad. The conclusions were everywhere as long as you were looking for them!

Still, I knew there had to be more. A quick cell phone call to Case Closed™ headquarters and I was able to speak to our Cloneatician, Dr. Fantastic. Searching the bowels of his wisdom, Dr. Fantastic informed me of several well-known facts about clones. They include:

1. Clones love organized sports… KING LOVES BASEBALL!
2. Clones hate cold weather… KING WINTERS IN FLORIDA!
3. Clones are indecisive… KING HAS REPEATEDLY UN-RETIRED!

He provided me with many other Truths™, but by then my mind was made up. However, to assure that my assertion would stand up under the close scrutiny of the Kings’s lawyers, I decided to analyze King’s writing for more clues.

I returned to the book store, where I was informed that King’s novels weren’t available in Cliff’s Notes—“They only do those for real writers,” explained the moon-faced clerk. With a resigned sigh, I selected a few of King’s novels to explore. The Carrie and The Cell seemed like good starting points.

I was dumbfounded®! In King’s pivotal work The Carrie (a touching story about Vinnie Barbarino and the prom), his writing was concise, brief and to the point. The novel comes in at under 250 pages! With The Cell, however, the work of a clone was evident. The novel (a heartfelt story about girls, cinderblocks, and head injuries) is a meandering tale at best; a wandering story at worst. It became quite clear that, unlike King’s books, his clones weren’t improving after a number of drafts.

The biggest sign of Clone-ism appeared in King’s The Colorado Kid. Not only did it lack an ending (a sure sign of a clone’s declining mental faculties), but in the afterword, he writes, “all I can do is summarize from memory, a notoriously unreliable reference source” (p. 181). Especially for a clone!

Gathering up my evidence, I left Maine behind and headed home.

Dateline: May 24, 2006 (The Present)
The very idea that King, the Earl of Eerie, has cloned himself—perhaps dozens of times—leaves me exhilarated and terrified. This seems like something out of one of King’s horror novels! However, the evidence rarely lies. Our own Case Closed™ panel of experts, when asked if my theory could be true, had to respond with a resounding, “Why not?”

So… could a thousand Stephen Kings on a thousand typewriters complete a novel (before retiring) that came in under 800 pages? It seems possible. So, the next time you pick up a King novel at your local bookerorium, ask yourself one simple question: is this worth $42.95, and are you a Stephen King?
CASE CLOSED™

Note: why was the recent TV movie called “Stephen King’s Desperation”? Is this a clue that the real King (unable to rest thanks to all these clones?) is desperate? Or are they trying to assure us that the real King is still alive?
CASE CLOSED…AGAIN™