On June 19th, 1999, the novelist Stephen King, walking along the highway outside his summer home in Lovell, Maine, was run into by a wayward camper van. Bones were broken and organs damaged. He was lucky to survive and will be maimed for life. Therapy may restore the partial use of his limbs, but can it mend his genius?
For King, writing had always been as physical an endeavour as prize-fighting. A bear of a man, 1.93-metre tall and 200 lbs in weight, he turned out his fiction in what his fans called "firestorms"; three-book contracts (fulfilled in a couple of years) were commonplace. Stories rolled out of him like hot lava.
King's fiction was as generously proportioned as its author. Hyped up by high-volume rock'n'roll (he owns the local radio station, WKIT 100.3), King consistently produced half a million printed words a year. He liked big books - works like The Stand which are the size of breeze blocks. And everything he wrote was a super-seller. He was the first author routinely to have a million-copy first print run. No novelist has had more millions from the publishers. And he makes even more millions for them.
Above all, King seemed to love writing as a champion athlete loves his sport. Everything he did was infused with his exuberant energy. He had, in his time, used stimulants - alcohol and drugs - to drive himself to ever-higher levels of overachievement. But with middle age, the grace of God and the devotion of his wife, Tabitha, he conquered those personal demons. He worked as hard and productively in sobriety as he had in intoxication. Harder, even. Nothing could stop him - except two tonnes of out-of-control recreational vehicle. How would the trauma of being mashed into pulp affect Stephen King the writer? Could he ever be the same again? King's fans have been uneasy on the point.
The line which was put out by King in his communiques was that he would take a year's sabbatical after the accident and return to the fray, full time, in July 2000. That year is now up. It's showtime.
No one could accuse Stephen King of lacking a sense of the dramatic. He rides back not merely with a new novel but with an attempt, singlehandedly, to overturn the whole American publishing industry. Stephen King has gone to war against the book trade. His new work, The Plant, is being released on his official website (www.stephenking.com). Access is free. The narrative will be downloadable and - unlike his previous web novel, Riding the Bullet, which was read-only - The Plant can be printed out and passed on.
The first instalment came out on Monday, the second (already written) is due on August 21st. Each instalment comprises some 5,000 words.
There is no purchase-price or charge. Those who read or download the episodes are, however, bound by an "honour system". If they like what they read, they are required to kick in a "buck an episode" to King. "Napster this ain't," King has declared. No freebies. If 75 per cent of those who log in to the story come through with their dollar (the website can compute this precisely) a third episode of The Plant will be forthcoming in late September. If subscription stays "strong" the author will bring the novel to its conclusion in however many instalments it takes. As King puts it: "If you pay, the story rolls. If you don't, the story folds." The crunch will be the number of new subscribers and whether they act honourably. Human nature being what it is, one has one's doubts. Sales figures this week were disappointing (40,000 on the first day), and figures have now been gagged until Monday.
What is King playing at? Whatever else, the game is big. As he puts it, The Plant represents a whole new system of producing and distributing works of the imagination: "My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare. Not only are we going glueless, look Ma, no e-Book! No tiresome encryption! Want to print it and show it to a friend? Go ahead! There's only one catch: all this is on the honour system. Has to be. I'm counting on plain old honesty. `Take what you want and pay for it,' as the old saying goes."
Publishing historians of the future will probably see The Plant as an interesting technical experiment - perhaps a breakthrough. In his July 11th announcement on his website, King claimed that with The Plant he was blazing a trail for the "marginalised" of the writing profession. Authors of the world can unite around him.
No longer need novelists be in thrall to the stony-hearted publisher and bookseller. Thanks to King (assuming it all works out) they can post their works on the web and wait for the money to roll in from all those honest, kind-hearted readers.
Philanthropy apart, King loves the new. He had an electric typewriter when everyone else was manual. He has experimented with film tie-ins, pseudonymy, audio tapes, and innumerable forms of author franchise. With The Green Mile, he quixotically revived the Dickensian novel in monthly episodes. Like Dickens, he made money with The Green Mile and cultivated his own version of make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait.
Riding the Bullet demonstrated that there was a big market for popular fiction on the Internet. And there are no great difficulties in the mechanics of online publishing. Difficulty presents itself when you try to collect. Within a couple of hours of Riding the Bullet going on sale, bootleg copies were available on the web. The cash-flow stopped, dead.
It is impossible to sustain viable commerce if your product is saleable only for a few minutes after its launch. But protecting words on the page, when there is no page, is like catching moonbeams.
During his year off, King has evidently come to the conclusion that the only way to create a revenue stream for the novelist from net publication is trust. Hence he has drawn up a contract, on his authorised website, with his fans. In his missive of July 11th, he lays out - in quasi-legal clauses - what he as producer undertakes to do (write the damn thing) and what the consumer must do (cough up).
The web will only work for creative artists if a new morality and new contractual relationships can evolve. As it is, the only cultural product that thrives is pornography. But even if King succeeds with The Plant, as he has succeeded with everything else, his is not an example which less addicting writers can hopefully imitate: if most novelists threatened never to write another word - unless that word were adequately remunerated - the reading public wouldn't care less.
Like Charles Dickens, Stephen King is a Great Inimitable. It is hard not to suspect King is mounting this elaborate scheme as a test of whether his readers really love him. Their dollars will be tokens of loyalty - "love gifts", as the televangelists like to call them.
There is another test hinted at. Can Stephen King still work his old magic on his readers? Does he still have what it takes? Those dollars will tell him. If they roll in, they will do more for him than all the physiotherapists.
There is another strange aspect to The Plant. It has been widely described as a new and original work of fiction, specifically written for Stephen King's comeback to active authorship. It is not. The Plant was begun (but never completed) as three short instalments of a story, issued on Christmas cards to King's friends in 1982, 1983 and 1986.
King printed the works himself, under his Philtrum imprint. Only 200 copies of the fascicules were run off. The Plant fragments, as first produced almost two decades ago, are among the most sought-after collector's items in King's oeuvre - his Dead Sea Scrolls. Few have been privileged to read them and they have not (until now) been reprinted. But the general outline of the unfinished narrative has been described in the extensive library of commentary on King's work.
Why, one may ask, would King go back to this early and discarded work now? He has had a fallow year (his first for decades). Could he not come up with something new? Even if The Plant is a huge success, it augurs ill that he should have exhumed this ancient piece of fiction. Has he dried up? Or is the old mastery still there? Pay your dollar and find out.
The Plant is at www.stephenking.com