Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks review – the writing secrets of Stephen King
Why it matters: Caroline Bicks's new book offers unprecedented insight into Stephen King's creative process by analyzing his personal archives.
- Caroline Bicks, a Harvard-trained Shakespeare specialist, was appointed the Stephen E King professor at the University of Maine in 2016, an endowed chair for the study of literature.
- Stephen King personally contacted Bicks four years into her tenure, granting her permission to spend a year examining the drafts of five of his most popular novels, including Pet Sematary, The Shining, and Carrie, housed in his climate-controlled archive.
- King's archive, located in Bangor, Maine, contains multiple typewritten drafts with handwritten marginalia and exchanges with copy-editors, offering rich material for Bicks to analyze his writing process.
- Bicks identified King's deliberate word choices, such as his insistence on "clitter" over "clatter" in Pet Sematary, as key to creating specific, unsettling effects on the reader, demonstrating his "biblio-magic."
- King himself described his writing as "telepathy in action" in his 2000 how-to text, On Writing, a concept Bicks seeks to observe directly through his editorial interventions.
Caroline Bicks, a Shakespeare specialist, initially feared meeting Stephen King despite holding an endowed chair in his name, but found him surprisingly kind. King granted her unique access to his extensive archive, allowing her to analyze his early drafts and handwritten edits to uncover the "biblio-magic" behind his terrifying prose. Bicks's research aims to pinpoint how King meticulously crafts words to elicit visceral physical reactions in readers, a process he himself describes as "telepathy in action."
