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the complete review - literature

Monsters in the Archives

by
Caroline Bicks

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : a neat look at some of how works of fiction are shaped (through various drafts and otherwise)

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "This book is Bicks’s account of what happened when King gave her permission to spend a year in his archive, poring over the drafts of five of his most popular novels (...) This is the kind of close reading usually associated with academic lit crit, so it can feel odd to find it in a book aimed at King’s ardent fanbase. But Bicks deftly interweaves textual analysis with more general biographical data, gleaned from her conversations with King, both in person and via email. (...) (F)or those with the patience to follow Bicks’s more erudite detours into Stephen King’s monstrosity, there is much to relish in this highly original book." - Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Caroline Bicks took up the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine in 2017 -- as a Shakespeare scholar, and with instructions from university officials not to seek out the local author after whom the chair was named. A few years later, however, King himself initiated contact, and then let Bicks spend a sabbatical year exploring his and wife Tabitha's archives -- located in an extension to the family home.
       Bicks focused her research on: "the five early works that I first read as a kid, and that continue to scare me today; Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary". The resulting work, Monsters in the Archives, is then divided into five chapters, each devoted (primarily) to one of these works. . Her approach to researching these texts -- with the various drafts and related materials accessible to her in the archive -- includes also re-connecting with them as she had in her youth, to the extent that she purchases the editions she had first read them in, e.g. re. Night Shift: "I've purchased the paperback Signet edition on eBay (original cost, $3.50), the same one I'd taken out of the Castine public library". (I'm slightly older than Bicks, but the King editions of these titles I read and own are also the old Signet mass-market paperbacks .....).
       Much of Monsters in the Archives is focused on the re-writing of these works by King, Bicks comparing different drafts (which sometimes differ markedly from the published version) as well as pointing out some of the editorial changes made as the books came closer to publication.
       Some observations are of small details, as regarding this in Pet Sematary:

     In the first two drafts, Jud says "sometimes death is better." But King crosses "death" out in the copyedited version and pencils in "dead." The galley proof compositor missed this change, so King has to write it in again.
     A two-letter edit may seem small, but listen to what it does: the ed sound in "dead" and "better" creates an echo that wasn't there before. The kind that gets in your head and keeps resonating.

These columns are collected in the Kings' personal archives, but I wanted to read everything that was in the paper each week to get a broader view of what was happening around him when he was writing them. The full editions are only available through UMaine's Fogler Library, so that's where I go next.

King explains that he typed his stories single-spaced and with small margins, because "paper cost money, and we had none to waste on extra sheets for first drafts." A month before he completed this first draft, King had sold Carrie to Doubleday for $2,500, giving the young family enough money to move to an apartment in Bangor; the day after he finished it, he received the life-changing news that the paperback rights for Carrie had sold for $400,000. This windfall might account for the fact that he typed the second draft of his vampire novel on a new typewriter with courier font across 520 double-spaced pages.

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 April 2026

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Links:

• Hogarth publicity page
• Hodder & Stoughton publicity page
• Q & A at KJZZ
• Q & A at The Other Maine
• How Stephen King Made The Shining Even Scarier by Caroline Bicks

• Capes & Tights
• The Guardian
• Nerd Daily
• PopMatters
• Strange Horizons

• Official site
• Faculty page

• The Colorado Kid
• Joyland

• See Index of Books on Books and Publishing
• See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

       Caroline Bicks teaches at the University of Maine.

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© 2026 the complete review

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