Review: 'Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences'

Stephen King is that very rare author who is just as famous as his books, and the format of Bev Vincent's new book Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences is the kind usually reserved for rock bands or really popular movies. It's a full-color, illustrated hardcover that takes a close but wholly non-academic look at his output. Each one of King's books gets between a paragraph and several pages of attention as Vincent provides a good deal of background information, a bit of a synopsis, and a few words about the reception and legacy that greeted each publication. 

I was impressed that Vincent kept the focus almost entirely on the books themselves since, with a career like King's, it would be easy to keep drifting into the cinema. But aside from very brief check lists of all the films King's stories inspired, which appear at the end of each decade-centric chapter, and the generous selection of film stills that illustrate the entries, the printed page is king. 

Stephen King is also a highly personal writer despite the popularity and fantastical nature of so much of his stuff. So we also learn a great deal about the writer's life--particularly his substance-abuse issues and the infamous 1999 car accident that nearly sent him to the person sematary--through the entries on his books, as well as the various sidebars and inserts, which detail such topics as King's collaborations, sports writing, and activities as the late Richard Bachman. More whimsically, there are also histories of Castle Rock and Derry, though a full-page digression about W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw", an influence on Pet Sematary, drifts a bit too far off the path.