June  ·  Why him  ·  Hearts in Atlantis  ·  The Green Mile  ·  The shelf, ranked

Today is Stephen King's fifty-second birthday. In June there were a few days when I wasn't sure he'd have one, so I'm going to say happy birthday first, before anything else on this page. Happy birthday. We're glad you're home.

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 19, he was out for his walk along Route 5 in Lovell, over in the western part of the state where he spends his summers, and a minivan coming over a rise hit him. He was thrown off the road. His right leg was broken in a great many places, his hip was broken, a lung collapsed, and he had a bad cut on his head. They flew him by helicopter to the hospital in Lewiston, and he was there for three weeks and had several operations.

I heard about it on the radio on my way home from the grocery store, and I pulled over in the IGA lot and sat there until the news was over. I'm not ashamed of that. I don't know him. I've never met him. But I've spent more evenings with him than with some of my own relations, and when you've read a man for twenty-five years you feel like you know something about him, even if all you really know is how he talks.

He has been home since early July. The papers say he's still in a lot of pain and getting better slowly, and that his wife Tabitha is with him, which is where she has always been. I hope the leg heals straight. I hope the pain lets up. I hope he writes again when he's ready and not one day sooner. Every Sunday since June 20 I've said a prayer for him at church, right after my mother and before the Red Sox. Les says that's the right order.

If you are a reader too, say one with me. Or whatever you do instead. He'll take it.

I'm Pam Yancy. I'm forty-three and I've lived in Augusta my whole life except for one year at the university in Orono. I work in medical records at a clinic here, which means I spend all day reading other people's files, and then I come home and read Stephen King. My husband Les says those are the same job.

I read Carrie the spring it came out. I was eighteen and finishing high school, and somebody passed the library's copy around the senior lounge, and I read it in one weekend and didn't sleep. I've bought every new one since, usually the day it comes out.

People who don't read him think it's all monsters. It isn't. It's Maine. It's the woman at the store, the man who plows your road, the kid who gets picked on, the town where everybody knows your business and nobody tells you theirs. The monsters are just what makes them show who they are. Nobody has ever written people like the people up here the way he has, and I live here, so I'd know.

And he's ours. He grew up partly in Maine, went to the university in Orono, and was teaching English at a high school and living in a trailer when he wrote Carrie. Tabitha is the one who pulled the first pages out of the wastebasket and told him to keep going, so we have her to thank for all of it. They still live in Bangor, in the big red house with the iron fence that has bats and spiders worked into it. My sister Rebecca and I drove past it in 1990. You don't stop. You just slow down a little, and look, and keep going, the way you would want people to do for you.

It came out last Tuesday, September 14. He wrote it before the accident, so don't go looking in it for June. I bought it on my lunch hour and I'm about halfway through.

It's five stories that hook together, starting in 1960 and running up to now, about kids who grew up in the sixties and what Vietnam did to them, whether they went or not. The first and longest is about a boy named Bobby in Connecticut and an old man named Ted who rents the room upstairs, and if you've read the Dark Tower books, keep your eyes open. The second one is set at the University of Maine in 1966, in a dormitory where the boys are all flunking out because they can't stop playing Hearts. I went to Orono in 1974 and I swear that dormitory hadn't changed a bit. Different card game. Same flunking.

No ranking yet. It wouldn't be fair. Ask me in a month.

The movie of The Green Mile comes out in December, with Tom Hanks as the guard on death row. It's directed by Frank Darabont, who made The Shawshank Redemption, which is the best movie anybody's made of a King story, so I have high hopes.

The book came out in 1996 in six thin paperbacks, one a month, like a story in the newspaper used to come. I bought every one at the drugstore the day it came in, and the girl at the register started setting them aside for me by the third month. Susan from work and I would read each one the night we got it and talk about it at break the next morning. You had to wait thirty days to find out what happened, and that was half the fun. When the movie comes out we're going together, Susan and me, and I am bringing a whole box of tissues.

Every Stephen King book I own, from Carrie to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, ranked from the one I'd save in a fire down to the one I'd let go, with a line about each. It took me three weekends and Les says I moved some of them four times. Go to the shelf.

Write to me: [email protected]
I answer everybody, eventually. I'm a slow typist and a fast reader.

Readers since April 1997:



Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 1999 · Augusta, Maine