BOOK OF THE DAY: DECLAN BURKEreviews Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen Kingby Lisa Rogak JR Books 289pp, £16.99
STEPHEN KING – known to family and friends as Steve – made his name and fortune in the 1970s writing horror novels such as Carrie, The Shiningand Salem's Lot, and went on to establish himself as one of the best-selling authors of all time.
Film adaptations of his work – including The Shining, Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemptionand The Green Mile –are among some of the most popular movies of the last 30 years.
Sales have declined as he has begun to produce more self- consciously literary works in the latter part of his career, during which King has triumphed over addiction and also survived a near- fatal car accident. The man himself though is well, mellow and living happily ever after.
The problem with Lisa Rogak’s rather short biography (not counting notes and index, it amounts to 243 pages) is that the broad strokes of his life are known to even the most casual of Stephen King observers.
Given that the author was hugely prolific for most of his career, in some years publishing anything between four and six titles, not counting paperback and assorted editions, there are many times when Rogak finds herself simply outlining a list of his achievements for a particular period, in the process skimming along the surface of King’s story.
The biography is unauthorised, an issue that Rogak makes light of in her introduction, claiming that an authorised biography is a good cure for insomnia.
That may well be true if an unauthorised biography has something controversial to say about its subject, but Rogak’s cut- and-paste account of King’s life borders on hagiography and depends very heavily on secondary sources. Few of them have anything penetrating to say, even though Rogak assures us that King has given his friends permission to speak to her.
Rogak has in the past edited (the back-flap bio claims she "co-authored") Barack Obama: In His Own Wordsand written The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown, but it's hard to believe that they were as sloppily put together as Haunted Heart.
On page 132, for example, Rogak announces that a mini- series adapted from the novel It appeared in the autumn of 1984, this despite the fact that the novel wasn't published until September 1986, as Rogak tells us on page 145. Later still, on page 163, this time correctly, Rogak again announces that the mini-series of Itis imminent, in November 1990.
On page 158, she writes: “He was deathly afraid his writing ability would shrivel up and blow away.” On page 159, she writes: “He had imagined that . . . his ability to write would simply shrivel up and blow away.”
The text is littered with such mistakes and repetitions, despite Rogak complaining in her introduction about how frustrating she found fact-checking dates in King’s life, due to the deterioration in his own memory from abusing alcohol and cocaine.
Haunted Heartisn't quite a scholarly offering, then, although it is a briskly paced introduction to a complex man and writer that should prove easily digestible to anyone who isn't already a fan. Its lack of depth is a serious flaw, however.
On page 35, for example, Rogak notes that King’s high school experience as a part-time sports reporter for the local newspaper left him wistfully wishing he was playing the games rather than reporting on them.
What you won't discover in Haunted Heartis that, according to King himself, his appreciation of being professionally edited for the first time was an epiphany that firmly set him along the road to becoming an author.
Sometimes authorised biographies offer a little more than a cure for insomnia.
Declan Burke is a freelance writer and author. He is the editor of Crime Always Pays, an online resource that supports Irish crime writing