Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

By Lisa Rogak

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press

$25.95

Stephen King is arguably one of the most popular (and prolific) authors of all time, a veritable industry of spine-chilling terror churned out at an astonishing pace. The man behind so much horror has been derided for his popular appeal and his lack of “serious” literary merit, but the man sells books at a time when the publishing industry is in a downward spiral. You might think that his life story would be as spooky as one of his books, but what’s interesting is how normal he really is.

“Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King” (St. Martin’s Press, $25.95) is a serious attempt to analyze King’s life and work and highlight the aspects of his life that might not be easily gleaned from his fiction. Lisa Rogak talks to friends and family and uses King’s words from past interviews to show that the “Master of Modern Horror” is a generous man, a family man and a prodigious writer whose demons have fueled some of his most memorable work. His hardscrabble background helped shape his later work, as his father abandoned his family and his mother had to work grueling, thankless jobs in order to provide for her children. King may be a millionaire many times over now, but he only knew poverty as a child. His work ethic came from the fear of not being able to provide for his own family, and it goes a long way towards explaining why so many books with his name are on bookshelves the world over.

The book is an unauthorized biography, but it’s not a tabloid; King’s struggles with alcoholism, drugs and his 1999 near-fatal accident are highlighted because they helped fuel some of his best-known work. King’s enormous output is made possible because of his boundless imagination, and even the lesser novels or stories bear the hallmarks of a careful and considered effort to make the work accessible. King’s popular appeal and its repercussions are dealt with; Rogak details not only how obsessed fans have threatened King’s security in the past, but also how the arbiters of “literature with a capital ‘L’” have dismissed him and not taken him seriously.

His books have been used by Hollywood for some films of varying quality (the most notable being Stanley Kubrick’s version of “The Shining,” which King hated), but his reputation as a horror writer hasn’t stopped him from writing other types of fiction. “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand by Me” are just two of the more notable examples of King’s versatility and range. And, as Rogak points out, King’s reputation with the critics has improved over the years; he even won several prestigious literary awards over the past decade.

What makes this biography essential, however, is the portrait of King as a relatively normal guy, albeit one with plenty of demons. His wife and children all have lives of their own outside of the reality of being related to “Stephen King,” but they have sometimes benefited from the notoriety it brings. At the end of the day, he’s still hard at work, pumping out more books per decade than a lot of the more esteemed writers of his era. Whether you like his particular brand of fiction (despite branching out, he’s still considered a horror writer), you have to admire his stamina and output.

“Haunted Heart” takes a look at the boogeyman who’s provided plenty of scary moments for his readers over the years and makes him shockingly human. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Stephen King’s work isn’t diminished by his exposure as an ordinary man; you’ll appreciate the darkness of his best work once you realize the real-life traumas from which it was born.