In 1998, writer, Stephen King, became a part-time resident of the Florida Gulf Coast. Now he has set a novel there.
Duma Key is Stephen King’s first Deep South novel. A writer friend of mine said, “If you think he was prolific before, watch him now.” I reminded him that King had been in the South for years.
Why do people think if you move to the South, suddenly you’ll be winning Pulitzers?
Stephen King was capable of writing a novel about every six months when he lived in Maine full time. If he becomes more prolific after moving to the region where writers claim special privileges, then he’ll be releasing a new 600-page novel every Friday. Maybe it’s just me but I think writing has more to do with what is between your ears than what region you live in.
I know there have been a lot of great Southern writers. It’s become a cliché. King should, however, thrive down South, considering his penchant for odd characters. Flannery O’Conner said Southern writers have a soft spot for freaks because we know one when we see one.
Yes ma’am, Mr. King will be right at home.
If he wants to get into interesting character territory, Mr. King needs to gas up his car and drive north a bit, out of Sarasota and into Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. He needs to take a road trip to Louisiana and Arkansas and east Texas. There he will see the South that scarred the minds and fueled the imaginations of so many great Southern Gothic writers. There’s just something about brutal contradiction delivered under intense humidity that makes a person want to stack some sentences.
Stephen King knows the territory, he just needs a little more exposure to the locals in places where they don’t have bookstores, and the bestsellers are measured in calibers and fifths.
After a steady diet of fried food, country sausage, cathead biscuits, and redeye gravy, Stephen King just may write his great American novel. Some say he’s written a hundred of those already. Maybe. Then again, the Gulf Coast South he has moved to isn’t exactly the place that spawned William Faulkner, Eudory Welty, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, and Truman Capote. But King has sold ten times more books than all of those great writers combined. So even though he moved down to the Hurricane Coast in 1998, his new novel finally makes him a Southern Writer? Only in the press releases.
Granted, a few evenings with James Lee Burke on a po boy dock, smelling rotting shrimp in a 50-gallon drum, and watching the heat lightning dance over the Gulf might give Mr. King a deeper understanding of the place he now calls home. Then again, somehow, I think Mr. King knows about that already. He is pretty perceptive. Anyone who can write bestsellers as fast as he does has some talent and skills.
Here’s the truth. We want to believe that Southern writers are more special than other writers. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not.
I have often said that it’s less the talent of Southern writers that makes them who they are than it is the reality of the people around them. When you don’t have to make up your stories because they are right in front of you, it makes the job a whole lot easier.
That strange South is slipping away with each generation. The odd characters are being homogenized into the mainstream. I lived in New York for a while and I found more odd characters there to write about than in Alabama. I just grew up with the ones in Alabama, so I know them better. Same with Mr. King in Florida.
In the next thirty days, he’ll probably crank out three new novels that 100 years from now will be seen as Southern. There will be people who ask, “Stephen King lived in Maine?” So it will happen.
The South will rise again. Just not where and how and through whom anyone expects. And that contradiction is the most Southern part of the story.
