King and his subject reign at local bookstores> ‘Stephen King Country’ author is a fan’s fan

STEPHEN KING COUNTRY, by George Beahm, Running Press, Philadelphia, Pa., 1999, 144 pages, hardcover, $14.95.

Saying that George Beahm digs Stephen King is like claiming Martha Stewart likes to hang curtains. The Virginia raconteur is devoted to Bangor’s gazillion-selling author, having chronicled his writings since 1989 in “The Stephen King Companion” and other books. He also keeps his own King Web site (www.gbbooks.com) and edits the fan magazine, Phantasmagoria.

Beahm’s sixth book on the 51-year-old horror meister — his last will be a price guide of King collectibles — may add misery to King’s life since it’s unauthorized and, some would argue, exploits his celebrity. Readers can decide for themselves whether photographing King’s mansion from a chartered airplane is going too far.

But Beahm reveres King’s many gifts, especially his philanthropy. Some of the pet projects mentioned are the Shawn Trevor Mansfield Baseball Complex ($1.2 million), the Bangor Public Library renovation ($2.5 million in matching funds), the less publicized $29,000 King handed over to the Pine Tree Chapter of the American Red Cross and the $40,000 to UMaine’s National Poetry Foundation.

Beahm’s book will appeal most to devotees of King’s many novels and film adaptations (a few worthy, most truly horrid), but it’s a friendly road map for anyone else who ever wondered if Salem’s Lot is a real place (King’s hometown of Durham may have been the novel’s inspiration); if Pet Sematary ever existed (it was located in Orrington, where the Kings rented a home); or whether there really is a gleaming white water tower in Derry (the Thomas Hill Standpipe in Bangor looms large in the opus “It”).

While the book is fun, the text is cobbled together from too many news clippings; whatever other sources Beahm uses are known only to himself. Many ancedotes are well-worn, such as the one about King’s wife, Tabitha, fishing her husband’s manuscript out of the trash and fostering its publication as the debut novel “Carrie.” There’s also the tale, retold with a typical lack of attribution, of how King cut a deal with the late Stanley Kubrick, who directed the Hollywood version of King’s blockbuster “The Shining,” and, along with his studio, owned the screenplay’s rights. Stop dissing my movie, Kubrick reportedly told King, and you’re free to make your own TV version.

Black and white photos, many taken by the Bangor Daily News, show numerous Maine haunts as well as King as a high school senior, a high school teacher, and a smiling, newly published author. He is more hairy and certainly more relaxed than in later pictures. One chapter pictures Western locales, including the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo., which inspired “The Shining”; and mentions Gatlin, Neb., whose desolate corn fields suggested the 1978 short story “Children of the Corn.”

The best pictures show people, such as childhood friend and influence Chris Chesley. Another treasure is the BDN photo of a tuxedoed King kneeling by a doll-like Drew Barrymore before a 1984 screening of the movie “Firestarter,” but many of the landscape shots are duds, like the bland snapshot of railroad tracks in Lisbon Falls “similar to” the ones on which the four boys in the movie “Stand By Me,” based on a King story, walked. Also forgettable are views of the laundry where King toiled before striking gold, and the front gate of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where he “no doubt drew inspiration.” Who said? Stephen King?

Given that Beahm rushed his book into print, there are remarkably few errors. Two gaffes: A caption under an old photo points out the wrong house as the Kings’, and the late civic leader Norbert X. Dowd is misidentified as Norbert K. Dowd (a community achievement award bearing his name was presented to the Kings in 1992).

Still, Beahm’s affection for an all-around good guy is infectious. I’m happy he credits Tabitha’s inspiration in nearly every chapter, and that he dedicates his book to Penney and Stuart Tinker, proprietors of Bangor’s Betts Bookstore, where fans can peruse rare King editions. The modern master of horror lives on in his own books, and in others’, too. If that’s misery for King, it’s a shining accomplishment for his legion of fans.