On September 22nd of this year, one of the strangest stories in modern literary history came to a suitably dark end. The body of Bryan Smith, a 43-year-old disabled man, was discovered in his trailer in western Maine by his brother, Everett, an Oxford County sheriff's deputy. An empty bottle of pills was found nearby.
Fifteen months earlier, on June 19th, 1999, a blue 1985 Dodge camper van driven by Smith had struck the writer Stephen King as he was walking near his vacation home in Lovell, Maine. Smith had been distracted by his dog, which was nosing in his cooler. The impact with the van broke the writer's left leg in nine places, gave him two fractures to the hip, broke four ribs, chipped his spine in eight places, lacerated his scalp and stripped all the skin from his collarbone.
"Smith sees I'm awake and tells me help is on the way," King recalls in his latest book, On Writing. "His look, as he sits on his rock with his cane drawn across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: `Ain't the two of us just had the shittiest luck?' it says." Perhaps Smith had a point. Maine is a sparsely populated state, with barely 1.2 million people living in an area of over 33,000 square miles, yet somehow he had just managed to hit its most famous inhabitant with his beat-up van. Late last month, Smith's luck finally ran out for good, but the most peculiar twist of all had been saved until the very end. For Bryan Smith died on Stephen King's 52nd birthday.
King is one of the world's most popular and most prolific writers. Since his debut with Carrie in 1974, he has published 28 novels as Stephen King (29, including the six-part serial novel, The Green Mile), six novels as Richard Bachman, six books of short stories, one non-fiction study of horror in the media, an audio-only collection of smoking-related stories and a variety of lesser-known novellas, screenplays and limited edition volumes. In 1987 alone, when he was in the combined grip of alcoholism and a cocaine addiction, he published The Eyes of the Dragon, Misery, The Drawing of the Three and The Tommyknockers, which he wrote with cotton wool up his nostrils to stem the cocaine bleeding. In 2001 he will publish Dreamcatcher, his first novel to be written following the accident, and will follow it with From a Buick Eight in 2002. In addition, he also plans to release, in the same period, the fifth part of his Dark Tower series and a sequel to The Talisman, the 1984 fantasy novel he co-authored with Peter Straub.
The latest development in King's career is electronic publishing. His first experiment in e-publishing, Riding the Bullet, was conducted in association with his print publisher, Scribner, but the encryption software (to prevent the work being downloaded and copied) led to system crashes. Despite that, 500,000 people managed to download the work. His newest venture is The Plant, an old piece of fiction which is now being released in parts through his website, and without the involvement of a conventional publishing house. Instead King is trusting his readers to pay $1 per part. So far, just over 75 per cent of the 150,000 people who have downloaded The Plant have paid up, enough to convince King to continue releasing sections of the book.
King earned an estimated $50 million last year, and his tax dollars over the past 25 years have funded a considerable portion of Maine's public works. In addition, he has ploughed his own money into Lovell's town park and baseball diamond (King is addicted to softball and baseball), funded the public library in Bangor, provided scholarships for high school students, and donated generously to local and national charities, particularly the American Cancer Society. Mainers are fiercely protective of King, and it is a testament to the affection in which he is held that Central Maine Hospital was inundated with offers of blood donations from ordinary people after his accident. This, then, was the man Bryan Smith managed to knock 14 feet into the air and almost killed.
King survived the encounter, narrowly avoiding quadraplegia but still in constant pain. Bryan Smith did not survive, although his death was, in its way, as drawn out as King's ongoing recovery. According to the Maine Medical Examiner's Office, the results of the toxicology report on Smith's body have not yet come back but the possibility of suicide cannot be ruled out. Smith's death coincided with the publication of On Writing, of which the first and last thirds - respectively, a pre-accident memoir and a short description of the accident and the events that followed - are the most interesting. The writing section is largely inconsequential. If you want to write like Stephen King and be as successful as him, it helps if you're six-four, were born in Maine and are called Stephen King. Getting hit by a camper van is to be avoided.
But On Writing contains at least one comment about Smith that, in the aftermath of his death, seems unfortunate at best. Smith explained that, at the time of the accident, he was on his way to buy "some of those Marzes-bars they have up at the store". According to King, "when I hear this little detail . . . it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. It's almost funny."
Almost. The "Marzes-bars" detail, combined with the facts that he owned two rottweilers named Pistol and Bullet, had a string of driving offences behind him (he narrowly avoided a charge for driving while under the influence of drugs in 1998), and was driving a 15-year-old camper van to the store meant that Smith was now destined to be immortalised as the redneck that almost killed Stephen King.
"They don't care if I breathe tomorrow or die the next day," Smith told the press, ignoring the fact that, prior to the accident, they hadn't cared much either. People came to take pictures of him outside his trailer and tossed casual insults at him as they passed him on the road. (Rightly deprived of his driving licence for six months as a result of the incident, he was forced to hitch rides, supporting himself on crutches due to bad health just as King was now required to do.) King bought Smith's van for $1,500 in order to beat on it with a sledgehammer but also, it was implied, because Smith might sell off the parts as souvenirs. Smith was a sad case. A former construction worker, he was disabled with a serious back injury in 1979 and, shortly before his death, had learned that he might have to use a wheelchair. He had carpal tunnel syndrome, which affected the use of his hands, and suffered from depression. There were also intimations of alcoholism. But while King described Smith as having "the IQ of an empty soup can", there were also those who spoke of his small kindnesses, his sharp sense of humour, his willingness to help friends out with odd jobs.
In January 2000, the Oxford County District Attorney accepted a plea bargain from Smith's attorney, in which he surrendered his driving licence for a further six months and received a suspended six-month sentence, but avoided a felony charge of aggravated assault that might have led to prison time. King was incensed, and it is easy to sympathise with his feelings. "What he took from me, my time, my peace of mind and my ease of body, are simply gone and no court can take it back," said the statement from King that was read in court. He described the plea bargain as "irresponsible public business".
`STEPHEN King is really huge here," says Carrie Jacobson, bureau-chief of the Lewiston Sun-Journal, the area's local paper. "The fact that he is from Maine and has lived here during some of the most desperate times in his life means that people feel a real ownership of him. People here were incensed that this guy, who probably shouldn't have been on the roads anyway, hit their hero and almost killed him. There were a lot of people who would like to have seen the guy punished but, in a sense, life had punished him as well."
But there may also be more to King's anger at the perceived failure of the courts to punish Smith than a need for some form of judicially-sanctioned vengeance, just as there may be more to his prolific output than discipline or a desire to please his fans. During his visit to Britain in 1998, King admitted that his eyesight was failing, and that it might soon deteriorate to the point where it could leave him unable to write. If this is true, then the loss of time spent recuperating, unable to write for more than an hour each day, is certain to have been especially painful for him.
Smith's death renders the matter of his punishment largely immaterial. (King, clearly shocked, released a statement expressing his sorrow at Smith's passing.) Now, with the publication of On Writing, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy has occurred. Smith has, in fact, become a character in one of King's books, a male version of the nurse Annie Wilkes who cripples the writer Paul Sheldon in Misery. King's books have always contained aspects of his own life, but none more so than this one.
Meanwhile, what emerges most strongly from On Writing is the strength of the familial bond between King, his wife Tabitha and their three children. Without these ties, it is unlikely that the writer would have made the recovery that he has made, and it leaves the reader with an enhanced respect for King and his family. Unfortunately, that support was the very thing that Bryan Smith lacked. The consequence, it now seems, is that his life buckled fatally under the strain.
On Writing is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99 in the UK)
John Connolly's novel Dark Hollow has just been published in paperback by Coronet (£5.99 in the UK)