Shakespeare and Stephen King, with Caroline Bicks

Imagine being able to dig through Shakespeare’s manuscripts and ask him about his writing process. Did King Lear survive in the first draft? What if Hamlet originally said, “To live or not to live?”

While we can only dream about that opportunity, scholar and Everyday Shakespeare host Caroline Bicks experienced something close to it when she gained unprecedented access to the archives of another famous author: Stephen King.

The Bard of Avon and the King of Horror have more in common than you might think. Both are popular and prolific authors who have been praised and derided for writing for the masses. But both also pay close attention to the sounds of words, the flow of names, and the rhythms of sentences. And sometimes, King’s work even takes inspiration from Shakespeare himself.

In this episode, Bicks draws fascinating parallels between Shakespeare and King and shares how she became the first scholar permitted to explore King’s personal papers. Her book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King recounts her chance to live every scholar’s dream—while surrounded by the stuff of nightmares.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 28, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Caroline Bicks is an internationally-recognized Shakespeare scholar who has published widely on early modern drama, gender, and the history of science. She studied Renaissance poetry at Harvard University as an undergraduate and received her PhD in English Literature from Stanford University. She was tenured at Boston College in 2008, the same year that she began summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English. In 2017, she became the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. The position also allowed her to develop a working relationship with Stephen King that led to him granting her access to his personal papers and to her writing a book about what she discovered, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King.

The uniquely public-facing nature of her position as King Chair complements the creative nonfiction pieces she has delivered to popular audiences over the years across various media platforms, including the Modern Love column for the New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered,” and the showAfterbirth, which she performed in alongside Andrew McCarthy, Andrea Martin, and other stars. Bicks’s award-winning blog, Everyday Shakespeare, was the inspiration for her humorous book, Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas, co-authored with Michelle Ephraim. In April 2023, they launched their Webby-Award honored Everyday Shakespeare podcast, where they use their talents as educators and entertainers to deliver fresh, funny insights into how Shakespeare’s world connects to ours.

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Shakespeare’s Margaret, with Charles O’Malley and Scott W. Stern

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger Director.

Here’s a good setup for a horror novel: a Shakespeare scholar takes a teaching job in Maine. Once there, she meets a world-famous author.

She invites herself over to his Victorian mansion to dig through his archives. She wants to discover the secret of how his terrifying stories burrowed their way into her imagination.

That’s more or less what really happened to today’s guest. The famous author in question is Stephen King, and the scholar is Caroline Bicks, a professor of early modern literature at the University of Maine and the co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast.

With her co-host Michelle Ephraim, Bicks also wrote Shakespeare, Not Stirred, a cocktail recipe book illustrated with images from the Folger collection.

Bicks’ latest book is a bit of a departure. With privileged access to King’s archives, she broke down the writing process for five of his most famous early books: Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, and Night Shift.

Bicks’ book is called Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Here is Caroline Bicks in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, Caroline, what a coup for a scholar to gain such access to an author, first of all, and his papers. Wow. How did that happen?

CAROLINE BICKS: Well, I never would’ve anticipated it was going to happen when I took this position of the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature in 2017.

And when I took the job, they said, you know, “Do not contact Stephen King. He has nothing to do with this.” It was funded by the Harold Alfond Foundation, not by the Kings.

BOGAEV: So, verboten.

BICKS: Verboten. They just said, “You know, just don’t reach out to him. Don’t contact him.” And I was like, “That’s fine. You know, this is an amazing job. I’m happy to take it.”

I was a little disappointed because I was a lifelong Stephen King fan, and I thought, “Wow, that would be so cool to meet him,” but I had made my peace with it. And then it was four years into the job when I got a call from him at home.

BOGAEV: Out of the blue?

BICKS: Out of the blue. Like, “Hey, it’s Steve King.” I was like, “Oh. Oh, hi, Steve.”

BOGAEV: Didn’t you think it was a prank call?

BICKS: You know, it was before the age of AI-generated voices that were so good. I would’ve been more suspicious. But I was like, I recognize his—he has such a distinctive voice. And we had a lovely chat, and he said, “It’s time we should meet.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” So, I invited him to come speak to our students at the University of Maine.

He’s an alum. He’s our most famous alum, as you can imagine. His wife, Tabitha, also a novelist in her own right, also an alum of the English department of UMaine, and they met there.

And I invited him to come speak to our students because I knew he cares about teaching and he cares about talking to students, and he was absolutely phenomenal. He came for two days in a row. It was such an act of generosity on his part to just, say, offer to come two days in a row.

This is a long answer to your question, but I think it’s important for people to understand, like, how these kinds of things can develop, you know, in not the ways you might expect.

BOGAEV: No, a tremendous amount of serendipity.

BICKS: Very serendipitous. But also, about us getting to know… I think because we got to know each other through teaching and through a respect for our students, he grew to trust me.

And I knew that the King family had just collected all the manuscripts and attached them to their iconic home in Bangor, Maine—which, if anyone’s ever seen it, it’s covered with the spiderwebs and the, you know… it’s a destination.

BOGAEV: It’s got a real haunted mansion vibe.

BICKS: Definitely. It is scary.

And they had finally put them into a climate-controlled space, safe, but no one had been allowed in yet. And I thought, “Well, this is serendipitous as well.”

So, I asked them, Steve and Tabitha, if they’d be okay with me spending my sabbatical year reading his manuscripts and exploring the five books that had scared me the most when I was a teenager.

So those are the five that I explore in the book. So that’s Carrie, The Shining, Night Shift, Salem’s Lot, and Pet Sematary. And they said yes.

BOGAEV: And you fell off your chair.

BICKS: It was an extraordinary. Yeah, it was just… I was so grateful to them to give me that opportunity.

And I didn’t know what I was going to find. I didn’t know that I’d write a book about it. But I knew I wanted to explore and see how he crafted these iconic moments.

I can’t do this with Shakespeare, right?

BOGAEV: Exactly.

BICKS: I can’t go dive into a trove of Shakespeare’s drafts and then talk to him and ask him, “Well, why did you change that word from this to…?”

BOGAEV: If only.

BICKS: If only, right?

BOGAEV: So, let’s roll back a little bit because the story of how you link Shakespeare and Stephen King happens actually before this, right when you were applying for the chair, for the Stephen E. King Chair. And so, tell us about that, because you were canny about it.

BICKS: Well, that was another… I like that you call it ‘canny.’ Who… yeah, I mean, whatever it is, it was something beyond me.

So, I was getting ready for my job talk. You know, I’d made it to the final round, and I was going to give a talk about my research, of course. I was in the final stages of finishing a book about cognition and adolescent girls in Shakespeare’s day that I’d been working on for a very long time.

And I thought, “You know, it’d be fun to bring in some Stephen King because it’s the Stephen King Chair. That’s not a requirement, but, you know, maybe that’ll set me apart, who knows?”

And I was like, you know, “I remember…” It’s been forty years since I read Carrie, but obviously she’s a teenage girl with very interesting things happening with her brain. She’s telekinetic, for people who don’t know.

And so, I pulled it off my shelf. I had it on my shelf, and it literally fell open to the page where Carrie’s coming back from school after that horrific, you know, first menstruation scene in the shower at school, and her “brain starts to flex.” That’s the description.

And then King describes it as “mental puberty.” And I thought, like, that, “I wish I had come up with that phrase because that’s brilliant.”

BOGAEV: Seriously.

BICKS: That’s what I’m thinking because that’s my whole argument for my book, is, you know—which is now out—is about how girls experience a kind of a mental puberty. And their brains become actually, at least the belief at the time, during Shakespeare’s time, was my argument, was that girls become actually quite gifted in what they’re able to do in a very unusual way.

BOGAEV: What did that mean to the early modern English, that girls’ brains become kind of—or the girls become kind of gifted? Obviously differently than adolescent boys?

BICKS: Yeah, that was what I was tracking. So, I was reading medical texts from the time. I was reading philosophical treatises. I was reading plays, obviously.

And think about Shakespeare’s plays, right? There’s so many of these 14-year-old girls, 13-year-old girls, 16-year-old girls.

BOGAEV: You have Juliet. You have Ophelia.

BICKS: Juliet, you know, it’s two years—two weeks shy of her 14th birthday. “She has not yet seen the change of 14 years,” right? Viola and Sebastian, right, in Twelfth Night, who are in their 14th year.

And then keying that to what I was reading in treatises on cognition. And they’re not… there’s not a lot out there about adolescent girls being written at the time. But there’s enough, right, that you can start to pick up on it.

Their memories start to spark in different ways. They’re able to remember things other people can’t or won’t. They’re able to intellectualize and invent and imagine.

So, that really gave me a way into Carrie that I hadn’t, would not have thought of when I read her for the first time when I was 13 because I wasn’t thinking about that.

BOGAEV: Okay, so, you were prepping for the interview and you were looking for connections between Stephen King and Shakespeare in terms of adolescent girls.

Did you find direct inspiration that King might have gotten from Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s characters? Or did you just see that King’s and Shakespeare female characters were similar?

BICKS: You know, in that particular moment, I don’t know that King was consciously thinking about one of Shakespeare’s girls when he wrote that, but I think that he intuitively taps into these things.

He had a professor at University of Maine called Burton Hatlen. And in 1968, he was teaching Stephen King, and he said, “We all drink from the same language pool and myth pool.”

But that’s something that really, when I was going and studying his manuscripts, I would see these moments like this. They’re everywhere in King’s early works, at least—I mean, these were the ones I was focusing on—where you can see him echoing Shakespearean language, images.

I didn’t ask him specifically about Carrie and adolescent girls’ brains because honestly, I mean it’s…

BOGAEV: How random.

BICKS: It’s not like that was a really common topic that people talk about, but you know, I certainly could hear the sounds of certain images. And when I would talk to him, that would become clear that that was something he was thinking about.

But the adolescent girl thing, that was my way in. I don’t know if that was his thinking about Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: And in your book, you mention some very specific examples. You liken Carrie to Macbeth at the beginning of the play. So, what do they share? And what did you see at the beginning of the play?

BICKS: I mean, and that was really interesting to me because you know, as I was tracking how King changed Carrie, because part of the big project of this book for me was being able to have access to these early drafts and really track how he was changing these iconic characters and lines and words.

BOGAEV: His editing process, his thought process.

BICKS: Everything. Because it’s all, you know, this is pre-computers, so everything is typewritten with handwritten comments, you know?

So, in that first draft of Carrie, she’s an alien. She’s sprouting horns. She’s, like, got… I mean, she’s taking… she’s relishing the violence that she’s committing against her peers. You can’t feel badly for her at all. She’s just an exploding brain sac by the end.

But as I was watching him track and edit her and change her, he makes her so much more sympathetic, and into the girl that I think we can all say, in some ways, she’s enduring because she’s relatable. Either because she’s bullied or because… you know.

But what I really saw him doing with her, which was fascinating, was pulling… really exploring what are the limits of humanity? And how does experiencing something traumatic or engaging in an act of violence push the limits of your own humanity?

One of my favorite plays to teach is Macbeth. I love talking to students about what they see with that first aside he has, right after he’s seen the Weird Sisters. And he says, you know, “This is shaking my single state of man. Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

You know, he’s afraid of his own thoughts. He’s afraid of his own murderous imaginings, right?

BOGAEV: Right. The horror dwells more within than without.

BICKS: That’s where the horror is. And it’s good that his body’s shaking, right? That’s what I always talk about with my students. Like, that shows he has a moral compass still, right? He’s still connected to his humanity. The danger is later when he starts to stop feeling things, right?

You know, the word “horror” comes from the Latin verb horrere, which means “to bristle,” like your hair is literally standing on end. Which is, of course, the image that Macbeth uses when he describes his hair standing on end. His heart thumping against his ribs.

But as the play goes on, he starts—he stops feeling anything. He stops having any physical registering of his feelings, and this is what happens to Carrie.

You know, he starts out in a first draft saying she’s relishing in this. She doesn’t feel any horror. That’s the word he uses.

And then as he redrafts her, he says she is still feeling the horror. She doesn’t want to be doing this to her peers. You know, she’s shaking still. And I thought, “Oh, this is so Macbethian.”

BOGAEV: Yes, you point out really great parallels and echoes of Macbeth in the first draft of the prom massacre scene in Carrie, that she’s grown used to horror and violence and numb to it like Macbeth is in Act 3. And you quote, “I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

BICKS: Yeah. And that’s what the first draft Carrie also feels. But again, he redrafts her, and he uses the word “tedious.” I mean, he’s so clearly thinking about Macbeth, I’m sure, because the final, very final scene when Sue finds Carrie—Sue is the one survivor of the prom massacre because she’s the one who lets her boyfriend, Tommy, take Carrie to the prom.

So Tommy dies, all of her other classmates do, but Sue finds Carrie. And when Sue finds dying Carrie, what happens is she connects with Carrie’s brain, actually.

You know, so again, Carrie’s brain starts to become, like, the center of all human emotions: grief, joy, terror. Everyone starts to feel what she’s feeling, much as I was discovering looking at Shakespeare’s girls, like, that they become these lightning rods. Their brains become lightning rods for all kinds of human emotions and experiences.

But when Sue finds her, the most horrifying thing is that Sue has to experience death with Carrie. And when she’s describing how horrifying that is, so Sue runs away screaming.

She says she’s, “Running from the final horror that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.”

Now, anyone who says Stephen King is not a literary writer, I mean, that was… he wrote that in 1972, okay?

BOGAEV: That’s Faulkner.

BICKS: That is Faulkner. That is Shakespeare. And that is all the images that Shakespeare brings to the table with, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

And, you know, when I pointed it out to King, he was like, “Oh, okay.” Because I had said—because he actually famously doesn’t really think Carrie is a great book. Like, he says, “That’s not my favorite book. I think that was written by a young man who thought he knew more than he did.”

And so, he, you know, it’s his first published novel. He has not gone back and reread it. And in our final conversation, I was like, “I think you should reread it because it’s really good. And it’s very Macbethian.” He was like, “Okay, maybe I will. I think I will.”

BOGAEV: I’m just curious, how old were you when you first read Carrie?

BICKS: That’s a good question. Too young. But we all were. I mean, when I talked about it, I was thirteen and…

BOGAEV: That’s too young?

BICKS: I think it’s kind of perfect, but, you know, it’s been banned. It’s the most banned book in America. One of the most banned books in America. I read it in my school library in 1980.

So, you know, it really hit me in a particular way because I was a young girl on the edge, right? I was, “Had not yet seen the change of fourteen years,” as Capulet would say.

BOGAEV: And those experiences that she has, her first period and what happens to her at school and, how she’s bullied. It’s interesting you say King said, “What do I know about teenage girls?” And his, Tabitha, his wife—

BICKS: That’s why he threw it away. Yeah.

So, he types out three pages. You know, he and Tabitha have gotten married right after college. They’re living in a trailer in Herman, Maine. He’s teaching at Hampden Academy, making $6,400 a year, trying to make up extra money by selling short stories to men’s magazines.

So he starts typing this out, trying to think this will be a story that he can sell. And he gets through three pages, and he just throws it out. He’s like, “What do I know about teenage girls?” You know? And also, “This is… I can’t do this as a short story.”

And Tabitha was the one who fished it out of the wastebasket and said, “I think you have something here.” And she’s like, “I’ll tell you about the girls.”

BOGAEV: Handy. But another story really struck you when you were young, and that was “The Boogeyman?”

BICKS: So, “The Boogeyman” is in his first collection of short stories, Night Shift, which was the first Stephen King book I took out of the public library here in Maine where I used to come in the summer. I was twelve.

And the premise of the story is horrifying, as most of King’s stories’ premises are. But this one in particular gripped me. I had been a really anxious little kid. Like, I was always sticking super close to my mom. I didn’t want to go on the kindergarten field trips.

Like, I was just a very scared little kid, and I grew up in a totally safe home, lovely family. There’s no reason I should’ve been this way, but it’s just how I was.

So when I read this story, “The Boogeyman,” which is about three toddlers, one after the other—they’re all siblings—getting killed by a monster in their bedroom closet while their mother can do nothing to save them.

To me it was the biggest nightmare imaginable because mommy can’t save you. I was also close to my mom. And also, home is not safe, right?

So that story stuck with me, and that was really kind of the story for me when I asked the Kings if I could do this book. I really wanted to understand how had he crafted the language. When I went back and sort of looked at how he crafted it, he’s so masterful. He’s so intentional with picking his word choices.

And especially, like, day one in the archive when I was looking at the Pet Sematary manuscript that had the copy editor notes to him and his handwritten responses.

When was talking about a fight that the married couple in the novel are having, and Rachel, Louis’ wife, says, “You’re shuh-shuh-shouting.” And the copy editor whites out—if you remember Wite-Out—whites out the U-H and makes it “sh-sh-shouting.”

And that’s where King writes stat, “It is shuh-shuh-.” That’s the sound.

BOGAEV: With a S-H-U-H rather than S-H.

BICKS: He said, “Say it out loud, you’ll see.” But that’s just one example. I mean, there’s so many examples where he really explains why, for example, it should be “clittering,” not “clattering.” Because clittering is a soft, ghostly clatter. And he’ll write this to the copy editor. He doesn’t have to.

BOGAEV: Yeah, the copy editor said, “Is that even a word? What is that?”

BICKS: “Is that a word?” And he’s like… or he says, “Word okay?” And he’s like, “Yeah, word’s okay. That’s it. It’s a soft, ghostly clatter.”

And I had never heard of the word “clitter,” and I thought, “Oh my God, this is perfect.” And it’s so atmospheric, right?

And that… so day one, I was really seeing how, like, Shakespeare, he is crafting words because of how they sound, right? And that’s how they were getting into my head, I bet into millions of readers’ heads, and sticking.

BOGAEV: What’s the sentence from “The Boogeyman” that grabbed you?

BICKS: There were a couple different moments. One was the way that the boogeyman had grabbed one of the children and was shaking it like a mat of hair, like a rat. rudder.

BOGAEV: I just got a chill. Yeah.

BICKS: And it’s just like, shake it. Like you could feel it. It was so … It was a 360 experience. It wasn’t just visual to what he had done. He had done something aural.

And then the final image, he’s got the boogeyman shambling out of the closet going, “So nice. So nice.” So, you’ve got “shambling,” you’ve got “so nice,” you’ve got this slithering boogeyman, the boogeyman leaves a trail of slime everywhere it goes, and it’s just horrifying.

BOGAEV: Interesting. You were so attuned to language, and you also discovered Shakespeare at about the same time as you discovered Stephen King.

BICKS: I think that’s why just this magic coming together of these two writers, you know. Some would say not magic, traumatic, but anyway.

Yeah, I mean, I was very fortunate. I went to a school where my English teachers were passionate. They were so gifted at describing and teaching to us the power of Shakespearean language, you know?

So I fell in love with Shakespeare’s language when we were reading Twelfth Night. That was the first one, in seventh grade, which is about the time I was discovering Stephen King. So, you know…

BOGAEV: And your pubescent mind was expanding.

BICKS: Exactly! Thank you for remembering my—I was going through mental puberty, so I was like a sponge absorbing all of that, right? And putting it somewhere, putting it together in my head.

But it wasn’t until, really, I had done this deep dive into the manuscripts, bringing my English professor skillset to looking at his manuscripts, that I could really appreciate how he had done it.

BOGAEV: Well, let’s talk about The Shining, because most of us probably know the plot already from the Stanley Kubrick movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. And King famously got the idea from a trip he and his wife took to Estes Park, Colorado, but it was also inspired by a dream about his son.

BICKS: Yes. At the hotel. So, he was… he and Tabitha had moved to Colorado just for a year to Boulder. He had already published Carrie and Salem’s Lot, his first two novels, and he just wanted a change of pace. You know, they left Maine for a year with their kids.

And they took a night, though, just the two of them, to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The season was ending, so they, they were the only guests in the hotel. They stayed in room 217, which if anyone knows The Shining, that’s where the woman in the tub, which is probably his top five scariest monster after, like, Pennywise and the Boogeyman.

Anyway, he had a nightmare that his son, their eldest son Joe, was being chased down the hallways of the hotel, being chased by a fire hose. And he woke up, and he was like, “I know what my next book’s about.” So, that was the inspiration, at least the human paternal inspiration for it. Yeah.

BOGAEV: But he also originally conceived of The Shining as a five-act Shakespearean tragedy?

BICKS: So, that was the big discovery for me. And really, I don’t think, you know, that particular draft, his first draft of The Shining is called The Shine. And it’s in the archives, but it has not been studied or talked about. So, it was a real gift to be able to find that.

And the original one, what’s remarkable about it, is that it’s divided into Roman numeral acts and scenes, five acts. So, it looks like an Elizabethan tragedy.

And sure enough, I was reading this introduction he had written—that’s also in the archives, it’s not very well known—to a Whispers magazine issue from 1982, very obscure—where he describes how he was imagining a Shakespearean tragedy when he wrote The Shining.

So, of course I thought, “Well, this is the greatest literary mystery of all time for me to solve.” Like, which Shakespearean tragedy? So, as I was going through that first draft, The Shine, that’s when I found references to Macbeth. You know, clearly Macbeth is, like, a play on his mind, you know?

BOGAEV: Well, sure.

BICKS: I mean, it’s in more than one. It’s the Ur-horror, right? I mean, this is it.

BOGAEV: And run those down for us, some of those.

BICKS: Some of the…?

BOGAEV: Some of the references.

BICKS: The Macbeth references?

BOGAEV: Some of the… maybe, the clues, let’s call them.

BICKS: The clues. Well, this one was actually, this is the only direct reference to Macbeth in The Shining was, and it got cut. It doesn’t make it past that first draft, The Shine.

Dick Hallorann is on his way. Dick Hallorann is the summer cook who also has the telepathic abilities that Danny has. So, he’s down in Florida and he tells Danny before he leaves, you know, “If you’re ever in trouble, just call for me and I’ll get, I’ll find you.” You know, “Telepathically call for me.”

So, Dick Hallorann has gotten the telepathic call from Danny. Things are going bad.

BOGAEV: Danny the young boy. The son of Jack.

BICKS: Danny, sorry, the five-year-old. The five-year-old who has these powers.

So, Dick Hallorann’s on his way, trying to get to them in the middle of the winter. You know, he’s driving in these snowstorms, and he goes off the road, but this snowplow guy comes and helps get him out, and this guy also has the shining.

And so Dick Hallorann just has an interior monologue where he says, “Huh, that’s two shines in one day. You know, this is like one of those Shakespearean tragedies. This is like the three witches. When shall we three meet again? Ha, ha, ha.”

So, I was like, “Ah, I’ve solved it. Macbeth is the tragedy he’s thinking of.” Because, you know, it also has a brain-bashing parent. You know, Jack is swinging a mallet after him. It has hallucinations. It has ghosts.

BOGAEV: Infanticide. It has ghosts.

BICKS: It has the whole thing. The whole buffet, right?

BOGAEV: Right.

BICKS: So, I’m like, “Well, this must be Macbeth, and here’s the evidence.”

But then I found a passage that also didn’t make it into the final draft but was in The Shine where Jenny, which is Wendy’s name in the first draft—Wendy and Jack are the couple, but she was originally Jenny. And he told me he changed Jenny to Wendy because Jack and Jenny was too jingle-jangly. He’s always thinking about sound.

BOGAEV: Too Jack and Jill.

BICKS: Yes, exactly.

BOGAEV: So attuned, his ear.

BICKS: So. All the time.

And there’s a scene where Wendy, Jenny, is looking at Jack, and he’s standing in front of the elevator, and he’s started to lose his mind already. The hotel is starting to haunt him and trying to convince him to kill his family, which the spirits have managed to do with the previous caretaker.

And she looks at him and she calls him a nightmarish 20^th-century Hamlet, and then—which does make it to the final. But then she says, “Does that make her Ophelia, then? Was this going to end with madness and death?”

And then he crosses that out in the next draft and tries another version saying, “Did that make her his Ophelia then? Was he going to turn around and tell her to get to a nunnery?”

And then he just runs a line through it. He just cuts it. So, for whatever reason, he keeps the Ophelia out.

But what was extraordinary to me was, I mean, there were a couple ways that the Hamlet piece was there. In the first draft of The Shining, in The Shine, it has an incredibly different ending than what people know.

Jack actually manages to kill his wife in the original. In the final version that goes to print and Kubrick’s film, you know, she gets away with Danny. They escape. Jack blows up with the hotel.

He doesn’t get frozen in a maze. He didn’t like the Kubrick film. Kubrick changed the ending.

But anyway, he blows up in the hotel, but they get away. But in the first draft, as King imagined it, Jack kills Jenny in the bathtub.

BOGAEV: It’s a bloodbath. It ends like Hamlet.

BICKS: It ends like Hamlet, and it’s in a bathtub, right? So, it makes sense to me. Like Ophelia, the tragic drowned heroine. It made sense to me that he was imagining Hamlet.

And sure enough, when I asked him, finally, he said, “Short answer, it was Hamlet.” Which I was like, “That’s the best short answer in the history of short answers.”

But then we had a really interesting conversation too, because you know, just the far reach of a play like Hamlet, right? I mean, there’s so many ways that Hamlet gets adapted, but I don’t think people would know or appreciate that King’s doing it as well if you didn’t see that first draft.

But it’s still there in the layers and in the foundation and in the psychological intensity of that book. Because that book is about intergenerational trauma.

And in the book, Jack has also been abused by his father, so Jack has also abused Danny, his five-year-old son. And so, it’s a story about, “Am I going to pass on…?” It’s about the ghosts of your past, right?

BOGAEV: And you have another great King quote about this, that, “The past is a ghost which haunts our present lives constantly.” And he goes on to say, “With my Methodist upbringing, I began to wonder if the haunted house couldn’t be turned into a kind of unexpiated sin.”

BICKS: Yeah. Thank you for reading that.

BOGAEV: That’s a lot of layers in there.

BICKS: So many layers. And, you know, in The Shining, he thinks he’s hearing the voice of Jack’s father, who’s dead, speaking through the radio of the Overlook Hotel. They’re snowed in, and it’s his only communication is this radio. And the voice is saying, “You’ve got to kill your family,” right?

Now, of course, this is the crisis for Hamlet. Is it the ghost of Hamlet’s father? I mean, this is why he waits so long, right? He’s got to figure it out. Like, is this a demon, right? With his good Protestant training.

BOGAEV: Or is it all in my mind?

BICKS: Is it in my mind, right? Should I follow… if it is my father, am I supposed to follow his narrative, his revenge tragedy ethos and kill a member of my family, my uncle? Even if he has done something horrible, right? Or am I going to stop the cycle?

BOGAEV: So, why did King change, then, the ending?

BICKS: Yeah. So that, I mean, that was one of my most interesting conversations I had with him.

And also, I should say, I took, just this last year, I got a chance to teach The Shining in a class called American Ghost Stories, where we also read Fat Ham, which is a wonderful American version of Hamlet.

BOGAEV: Wonderful.

BICKS: And I asked King if he’d come talk to our students. He let me bring them to his home in Bangor, and he talked to them for an hour about The Shining.

And what was so magical about that—so, this pairs up with the conversation I had had with him when I was writing my book. You know, he talks about how he lets his characters drive plot. So, if he changes a plot line, it’s because a character spoke to him in a particular way, or, you know. He doesn’t plot out things in advance.

BOGAEV: Yeah, he said he doesn’t make outlines

BICKS: He doesn’t make outlines, he doesn’t know where a story’s going, he really lets the characters lead him. And this was a great example.

So, we were talking about it with him, and he said, “You know, the thing is,” he said, “I fell in love with Danny and with Wendy. And I just couldn’t do that to them.”

BOGAEV: Well, stepping back a bit, do you see commonalities between Shakespeare and Stephen King that might explain the similarities in writing? Not just that we all swim in this soup of Shakespeare because of Shakespeare with a capital S, but in their bios, in their circumstances.

BICKS: Oh yeah, so much. So, you know, they both were not considered elite writers.

BOGAEV: For one, yes.

BICKS: Like, let’s just start with the obvious one, right? I mean, they, you know, it’s not like Shakespeare was considered the high literary writer that now he’s perceived to be.

But, I think they both take the same kind of hits from high literary scholars or people who have something at stake in keeping boundaries up between popular literature and high literature.

BOGAEV: And highbrow.

BICKS: And highbrow literature.

I think also, obviously, they are both writing for money and to make, you know, in the early days at least, the manuscripts I’m looking at, they’re trying really hard to make money. But that doesn’t mean you’re not…

BOGAEV: Right. Butts in seats and eyes on the page.

BICKS: Eyes on the page.

But you can be a popular writer and a brilliant writer at the same time. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. So, they have that in common.

They were both young fathers. They both had three children at very young ages. And so, I had a great conversation with him about “The Boogeyman,” if you can say a conversation about “The Boogeyman” is ever great. But it was very powerful.

And I asked him, I was like, “What—so, tell me a little more about that particular story, because that’s the one that got to me when I was twelve. And I still can’t sleep next to an open closet door.”

And he said, “Well,” he said, “You know, at that point I had two very small children.” And he said, “And I was always very in touch with my fears.” And he said, “I was really scared about crib death.”

And that was like one of those moments where I thought, “Wow, that’s extraordinary that I’m scared of that story from a child’s point of view, and he was imagining it from a parent’s point of view.” And that’s why those stories hit, because no matter where you are on your timeline as an adult, right, or a human, right—

BOGAEV: You can identify.

BICKS: You’ll identify. You’ll connect in some way, and it’s not going to stay the same.

And this is how I feel about Shakespeare, you know? I feel like a story like… the first play I really fell in love with and connected with Shakespeare was King Lear.

And I was sixteen, you know, and Cordelia, right? I was like totally identified with Cordelia, with being, you know, a daughter misunderstood by a father. And I was a real pain of a kid, like, of a teenage daughter. And I had totally identified.

Now when I read King Lear, I can feel the parent, right? I could feel the pain, right, of being rejected. What would that be like?

BOGAEV: Of aging.

BICKS: Of aging and have alienated your kids. And I haven’t fortunately done that yet, but I hope I won’t.

But, you know, like that’s… I feel like that’s why they have that in common too. That they can tap into… you know, Stephen King’s stories, it’s not about gross-out and monsters. That’s sort of what I came to by the end of this, because I would see him paring back the monstrous elements, the more over-the-top elements, and really homing in on the psychological things.

Whether it’s Jack Torrance, “Should I stay or should I go? Should I kill my family or not?” You know, that kind of Hamletian, like, thing.

BOGAEV: To leave or not to leave the hotel.

BICKS: Exactly.

BOGAEV: And also trying to maintain a connection with your moral core, your moral center.

BICKS: One hundred percent. Yep. Yeah.

BOGAEV: And not lose yourself.

BICKS: And not lose yourself. But I would say the other connection with Shakespeare that really became clear to me was that attention to word sound.

BOGAEV: Did he talk about how he thinks about rhythm in sentences?

BICKS: Yes, yes, so, he said, “First of all,” he says, you know, “The words are important.” He says, “But it’s the sentences. It’s the words in relation to each other that creates a particular rhythm.”

He says, “I always have to be thinking about how words clang on the reader’s ear.” He says, “That’s important. Individual words matter, but how they’re put together matters because of that rhythm.”

And he used that language. And I could just see it again and again, instance after instance, in how he’s re-crafting really intentionally these lines, these moments to make them better, to make them stick in your head.

BOGAEV: Stephen King seems like a real mensch.

BICKS: He’s such a mensch.

BOGAEV: And this was a very personal book for you.

BICKS: It was a very personal book.

BOGAEV: These were the… you focused on the books that really struck you.

BICKS: Yes. This was a very personal project for me, and I know it was personal for him, too. I mean, you know, because it was diving into his creative process and showing him stuff from fifty years ago that he hadn’t looked at.

BOGAEV: Yeah, his youth.

BICKS: His youth, right. And pages he didn’t remember, you know?

So, I am so grateful to him that he was vulnerable. He let himself be vulnerable. It was very brave of him, you know?

Toward the end, he said, “You know, I feel like I’m like walking around naked, like when you show me some of these like first drafts.” I’m like, but I said, “You know, you’re doing a service to writers everywhere because they need to see it doesn’t come out perfectly the first time.” And then I talked to him about the quote-unquote “bad quarto” and the Hamlet speech.

BOGAEV: Right, even Shakespeare.

BICKS: I said, “You know what? That didn’t hit the first time.” And I said, “You should…” and he said, “That makes me feel a little bit better.”

BOGAEV: Well, it’s been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.

BICKS: Thank you so much for having me.

——————–

KARIM-COOPER: : That was Caroline Bicks interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King is out now from Hogarth Books.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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