Accident fodder for King novel ‘Dreamcatcher’ character shares author’s thoughts

Well, Stephen King, your latest novel, “Dreamcatcher,” hits book-shelves today. What are you doing to celebrate?

“Tabitha’s arranged for me to get a haircut this afternoon,” explained the top-selling author recently from his winter base in Naples, Fla.

Today and Saturday, he plans to go see his beloved Boston Red Sox in exhibition baseball. Beyond that, it’s mornings full of writing and occasional afternoon interviews. Yes, Steve King’s living large on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Events along King’s recent timeline are divided into those that occurred before and after June 19, 1999. On that date, the author, walking along Route 5 in North Lovell, was plowed into by the 1985 Dodge Caravan driven by Bryan Smith. That accident has been much chronicled in these pages. Suffice it to say that its psychic and physical effects linger in King.

More on the physical effects later. The psychic effects show up in “Dreamcatcher,” written from November 1999 to May 2000. In the novel, four childhood friends, now in their 30s, return to a cabin in the Northern Maine woods for their annual hunting trip. Instead of bagging a buck, they, along with a fifth friend with Down syndrome, end up battling the invasion of an alien virus and parasite, with dire consequences for most of them.

In the novel, one of the friends, history professor Gary “Jonesy” Jones, has earlier been hit and badly injured by an elderly driver suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. He serves as King’s mouthpiece.

“Everything he thinks, I thought about [my accident],” King said. “The circumstances were different, but I too was hit by somebody who didn’t mean to hit me. I was left to cope with feelings, to integrate it into my philosophy of life, and to deal with the pain on some level. But this was a chance to exorcise some of my feelings.” Did King worry if he still had “it” in his first novel after his accident?

“I sure did,” he said. “I kind of crept up on it. I was working on a screenplay, ‘Rose Red,’ for ABC in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, I would sit down with a ledger and a fountain pen, and work with this idea I had that wouldn’t go away. I saw this guy coming out of the woods into a hunting camp, and just kind of went from there. If I’d just sat down to write a novel, I would have had stage fright.”

King wrote with a fountain pen and ledger book partly because it was more comfortable than sitting at a computer. But he had other, more esoteric, reasons as well.

“I thought it would refresh the process,” he said. “I wanted to make [writing] new again, exciting again, to try to escape the rut. It slowed me down. I’m a very fast writer, and facile, and have a tendency to skate over stuff, to fall back on old tricks. It gave me more time to think about [what he was writing].” Without giving away too much detail, humans end up the hosts for alien parasites. In a book that he wanted to call “Cancer,” King used this metaphor to explore what he considers the last taboo.

“There’s no taboos anymore,” he said. “Everything sexual has come out of the back room. But the taboo is part of human nature, so I asked what is it we don’t want to talk about. It’s what we do in the bathroom. Whether it’s a growth or a mark that wasn’t there before, or something that looks strange in the toilet bowl, we get a lot of our bad news in the bathroom. So that was the impetus for this.”

The alien invader is an archetype that goes back to H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” and is as recent as “The X-Files.” Yet King didn’t hesitate to provide his own twist to the mythos.

“I’ve always loved stories of aliens invading, flying saucers, abductions, probes,” he said. “These things have a lot to say about the human psyche. Part of the challenge is that the little gray men have been done so many times. I wanted to freshen it up, to reinvent it.”

As “Dreamcatcher” comes out, King is busy working on other projects. He’s now writing “From a Buick Eight,” the novel he was working on at the time of his accident. He calls it a bad-luck book, as his editor’s wife also was recently struck by a car, breaking her leg in three places. He hopes for it to come out at this time next year.

Next out is “Black House,” set to be released by Random House Sept. 15. Written with Peter Straub, it’s the long-awaited sequel to “The Talisman.” Curious as to what the lead character’s future held, Straub and King sat down together to sketch out an outline in April 1999, but were delayed by King’s accident until February 2000, when they started writing.

King is also working with John Mellencamp on a musical ghost story. He wrote a lengthy treatment last summer, and Mellencamp is working on the songs now. He also wrote his first screen adaptation of another’s work, in this case Patrick McGrath’s novel “Asylum.” It began as a bit of script doctoring for his North Lovell neighbor, director Jonathan Demme, but he ended up rewriting it practically from scratch. The film, to star Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, threatens to be delayed by potential screenwriters’ and actors’ strikes, as Demme is now filming a remake of “Charade” in Paris.

“I thought it would be neat to do it,” King said. “I had a real attraction to it. It was a terrific book, and I understood the problems with the existing script.”

King said he’s back to about 80 percent of how he was before the accident. He’s scheduled for more surgery in June, and figures to be on crutches again, hence the efforts to catch up on his writing and the Red Sox now.

“I’d love to have a little less chronic pain, but I’m happy to be alive,” he said.