Stephen King's career unfolds like one of his own novels, full of demons overcome and periods of deceptive calm ended by devastating crises. How it started belongs among the great literary breakthrough stories, as resonant as JK Rowling thinking up Harry Potter on a delayed train or later writing in cafes as a single parent on benefits.
In 1972, King was a high-school teacher sharing a trailer with his wife and daughter and writing at night. Dissatisfied with his latest story, about a troubled teenager with supernatural powers, he threw it in the bin; but his wife, Tabitha, rescued it, read it, and told him "you should go on with this".
Carrie became his first published novel, paperback rights went for $400,000, and Brian De Palma's film led to a series of adaptations including The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption.
Tabitha was his saviour again in 1987, after years of phenomenal productivity fuelled by beer and cocaine. She combed his office for cans, bottles, powder and drug paraphernalia, put them all in a garbage can, summoned their children and friends, and then (in Lisa Rogak's account) "upended the loaded can onto the floor in front of her husband". He kicked his drink and drugs habits two years later.
King's fear was that giving up booze would mean losing the ability to write, and he faced the same prospect in 1999 after a van (veering from side to side as the driver tried to control his rottweiler) hit him when he was walking near his home in Maine. The writer suffered severe injuries to his spine, ribs, face and right hip and knee, and would subsequently joke he was "nearly killed by one of my own characters". Yet he began writing again five weeks after the accident, and entered a more literary phase in which novels such as Lisey's Story have received critical plaudits while alienating hardcore horror-lovers.
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Why has King been so successful? His aw-shucks explanation is that "America needs Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Ronald McDonald, but it needs a bogeyman too - Alfred Hitchcock's dead, so I got the job for a while"; and it's true that his timing was fortunate, as his debut appeared smack in the middle of the era of The Towering Inferno, The Exorcist and Jaws. But his view of why Carrie worked - because he empathised with both the weird outcast girl and her teachers - points to a duality that energises all his best thrillers. His sudden metamorphosis from misfit to affluent author has left him angry and amiable, blue-collar and bookish, outsider and insider, selfish and civic-minded, able to identify not just with the hero protecting the community but also with the monster out to destroy it. Important, too, is the peculiar naked candour required to centre novels on an alcoholic writer (The Shining) or the authorial nightmare of being kidnapped by a fan (Misery).
King grew up poor because his salesman father walked out when he was two, forcing his mother to rely on relatives, move regularly and sometimes hold down two jobs. When he was four, a friend was killed by a train as they played by a railway line and he came home in shock; when 15, he discovered his grandmother's dead body on returning from school.
Lonely, sickly and multi-phobic, he found he could forget such experiences and the family's troubles either by scribbling stories, starting when he was six, or by reading (he first read Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, both significant influences, as a teenager). The phobias and fears have never gone away, though: according to Haunted Heart, "the dark, snakes, rats, spiders, squishy things, psychotherapy, deformity, closed-in spaces, death, being unable to write, flying and the number 13 or multiples of 13" all still terrify him.
Rogak follows other King-watchers in seeing his father's absence as crucial in shaping his fiction, and the author has acknowledged that as plausible: "Maybe in some sort of imaginative way I'm searching for him or maybe that's just a lot of horseshit. There does seem to be a target that this stuff pours towards." As well as being unconsciously addressed to the absentee father, the novels punish him by depicting dads as at best inept and at worst abusive or monstrous.
This second-hand theory is the closest thing to an argument in a book otherwise confined to chatty chronicling. While it's not authorised, Rogak says, "Steve" (as she tellingly calls him) was aware of it and "told his friends they could talk with me"; their recollections are sprinkled through a narrative largely derived from printed interviews and his book On Writing. The result is a biography that frustratingly falls between two stools, neither benefiting from the advantages (first-hand interviews, access to papers) being authorised would have brought, nor seizing the freedom being unauthorised affords - plenty of tough questions about King's career. They go unasked by a biographer who treats him as reverently as if she were his official Boswell.
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Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak
JR Books £16.99 pp304