That’s one reason why I was excited to read Caroline Bicks’s book Monsters in the Archives. Bicks is a Shakespeare scholar who spent an entire year in the King Archive, studying manuscripts for five of King’s earliest (and most famous) books: Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary. Her book—which is mostly a literary analysis, with minor detours into memoir and journalistic interviewing—is a strong reminder of King’s love of language and his commitment to humanistic storytelling.
Bicks starts with Pet Sematary and works her way backward to the earlier manuscripts. Echoing the author’s memoir On Writing, the early section of Monsters in the Archives is a chatty “elements of style” guide, emphasizing King’s often-unacknowledged discipline as a wordsmith. Almost nobody (Bev Vincent excepted) thinks of Stephen King as a poet, but Bicks draws attention to word associations, rhythms and “aural effects” that give his work a “multi-sensory heft.”
Bicks also highlights revisions that made Pet Sematary more horrific by making the supernatural more ambiguous and the central characters more empathetic. King has said that the secret to telling an effective scary story is creating characters that readers will care about. Monsters in the Archives goes on to illustrate this point with in-depth analyses of The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie.
I think of the ending of The Shining as the moment when Stephen King became “Stephen King” (America’s favorite boogeyman)—because he tempered the darkness of his story with just enough light and hope to win over a mainstream audience. While writing the novel, King once said, he assumed the entire Torrance family would die at the end—but, when he got there, he just couldn’t do it. Bicks shows that this anecdote is only partly true. In an early draft, King went there. When he revised the novel, however, he made a conscious decision to tell a different ending.
Going even further back, from The Shining to Carrie, Stephen King’s manuscript revisions are even more substantial, which shows how the author honed not just his voice but a personal philosophy. King the short story writer (the voice behind the Night Shift stories) is more of a nihilist, less of a humanist… and Carrie started as a short story. In interviews over the years, King has said that the original ending of Carrie was inspired by a 1950s B-movie called The Brain from Planet Arous. This always suggested to my mind a less accessible if not downright ludicrous third act. Bicks confirms the assumption—and shows how King’s extensive revisions over the course of multiple drafts put a greater emphasis on Carrie’s inner life, giving readers a telepathic connection to her, and also building a bridge of trust between the author and his Constant Readers. What’s on display here is the evolution of an artist.
Bicks says Monsters is also a book “about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.” Although the author kicks off her confessional B-story with a genuinely creepy childhood paranormal experience, her digressions into memoir sometimes feel a bit forced to me. She seems genuinely nervous to be on King’s hallowed ground and I’m not sure why. I too have made pilgrimages to real-world locations associated with King’s stories but I have never felt unnerved by those experiences, only awed. The trips provided validation that King’s imaginary world isn’t entirely made up—and, for me, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t conjure fear; it connects me to the work and the mind behind the work. Bicks’s shared journey into the archives does the same thing, and for that I’m grateful. In the age of AI, this sort of deep dive into the inner life of an artist is more inspiring than ever.
Despite my misgivings, I can relate to Bicks when she writes about bearing “an unflattering resemblance” to Jack Torrance as he obsesses over the Overlook’s historical scrapbooks. Writing a book like Monsters in the Archives requires falling down the rabbit hole, becoming obsessed. When I was writing a biography of T.S. Eliot, I was constantly making connections between the poet’s words and my everyday world. When I was writing The Soul of Wes Craven, I saw connections to the filmmaker everywhere.
I used to go for a daily walk in the woods behind my house. When I entered the woods, the same hawk would swoop down, perch on a branch, and watch me. Wes Craven was a birder with a particular love of predatory hawks. I’m not saying I thought the hawk was Wes, or sent by Wes… but the human brain is hard-wired to make connections, and when we delve deeply into another human’s brain, there is a kind of communion that might be compared to telepathy. I don’t necessarily think this is a supernatural phenomenon…. but…. What if? Every good horror story starts with this question. Bicks writes, “What if manuscripts can absorb or store more than just inks and words? What if their pages can pass on dark energy along with their stories?” Or.... light energy?
I can’t discount the idea that stories somehow transcend reality as we know it, because I believe that our world runs on stories—and on our belief in certain stories. Everything we think we know is a really story that has been told to us, or that we’ve told ourselves. Religion is story. Politics is story. Our history—individual and collective—is story. If you believe that, it becomes pretty damn amazing to sit in an archive and hold an original manuscript of a story that has affected hundreds of thousands of lives and (literally) changed the world we inhabit. We writers love this stuff: physical artifacts of half-imagined civilizations. Stone tapes in a digital world.
I share Caroline Bicks’s emotional attachment to the mass market paperbacks of King’s classic novels, the ones she read growing up. Why? Because they’re also part of my personal history, my story—and therefore very real to me. These are not just artifacts of a bygone civilization; these are sacred scrolls. Too much? Look at it like this: With the written word, readers become co-creators in a way that we don’t with visual media. We make imaginative leaps to fill in the details. Stephen King gets this; that’s why he leaves gaps. Caroline Bicks gets it too; her book points out those gaps, and the author’s intentions, and she makes us aware of our own private collaborations. We, Constant Readers, have our own archives.
I read this book obsessively and finished it in two sittings. It left me wanting to revisit the early Stephen King novels, and King’s work in general. I think that’s the most rewarding effect that a book like this can have on a reader—making us more aware of the human beings behind our favorite stories, both the author and ourselves. Bravo, Bicks.
Monsters in the Archives will be available from all the places on April 21, 2026.
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