Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King (edition 2010)

Interesting but rather breezy coverage of King's life and career. Clearly, the author harvested most of the contents from other sources -- so the value here, I suppose, is the convenience of having it "all in one place." This is sort of a hard-cover Wikipedia entry... but still, worthwhile for King fans (like me).

FYI, a fair amount of King's Paris Review interview made it into this book:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5653/the-art-of-fiction-no-189-stephen-... ( )

It must be difficult to write a biography of someone still living, who has not donated his papers to a library where one can get access to them, who is still active in his career, and who has a healthy sense of privacy. Even when the subject agrees to an interview, a biographer has to be aware that he is telling what he wants to tell and leaving out that which he does not care to discuss. If the interviewee is sufficiently charming, or is completely forthright on a particular subject that casts him in a poor light, the interviewer can easily lose sight of questions not asked. And when the subject has himself written a book or two about his past, you have to wonder just what you can come up with that’s new and interesting.

Lisa Rogak’s Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King is interesting and entertaining, but does not provide any information that is in the least new. It is surprising that this book has landed on the Edgar ballot in the Best Critical/Biographical category because, while it is competent enough, it is not in the least revelatory. There are no revelations about King’s drug and alcohol use, because he already told those stories himself in On Writing. There is nothing new about King’s writing habits, because King has described those in many an interview. And there is no critical analysis of King’s writing, because Rogak limits herself to telling the story of King’s life, and apparently has no ambition to offer commentary on King’s many novels beyond the fact that they were published and, quite often, filmed.

Moreover, Rogak offer no insights into King’s marriage, parenting, friendships, business relationships, philanthropy or politics. Some subjects seem to beg for explication. For instance, it becomes apparent at some point in the book that King’s daughter, Naomi, is a lesbian. In conservative Maine, was that a problem for her? How did Stephen and Tabitha react to their daughter’s sexuality when they first learned of it? How do the Kings feel about the gay marriage movement that is so much in the news these days? And these questions lead to larger questions: what are King’s politics? We know he is a philanthropist, especially in and about Maine; but does he donate to one or the other political party? He sounds in some places in the book as if he’s a conservative, and in others as if he is a liberal; does he fit into either category?

As the years covered in the book get closer and closer to the present, the discussion of King, his family and his career gets less and less detailed, until we are brought into the present and find we have learned almost nothing about King’s last 20 years except that he wrote a lot, threatened to retire or at least stop publishing, was very rich, gave away a lot of money, and was nearly killed in an automobile accident. Did anyone interested in King not know these things already?

In 243 pages of text (the remaining pages are devoted to a timeline and an index), Rogak competently summarizes everything in the public domain about Stephen King’s life. While that might be sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of someone who is just today discovering King’s writing, it is frustrating to anyone who has been following King’s career since Carrie first came off the presses in 1974. I suspect that the definitive King biography will not be written until decades after his death – which I hope, for the sake of my reading life, means it is many, many years away indeed. ( )

I read enough to get the information I wanted. I really like Stephen King and had my curiosities answered.

In "Haunted Heart," her unauthorized Stephen King biography, Lisa Rogak presents a straightforward look into the major events of King’s life, from his birth into an impoverished family to the multi-millionaire lifestyle he lives today. And despite how heavily the book depends on secondary sources, and all the media attention given to King for more than three decades now, even passionate Stephen King followers should come away from it with a better understanding of the man.

Any potential revelations in the book originate in Rogak’s speculation about how King’s childhood shaped him into the writer, and the man, he is today, not from the well-known facts about his youth and his career. Stephen King does not remember his father, a man who, as the story goes, went down to the corner one evening for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. King’s mother never remarried and it was only by working multiple jobs when they came her way, and with substantial help from her sisters, that she was able to keep Steve and his brother together.

The resulting insecurity King felt as a child convinced him that the world is a dangerous place filled with countless scary things wholly deserving his fear. He admits that he fears most of them and that the only way he can escape those fears, even temporarily, is to write about them - something for which his fans should be grateful.

Rogak describes the depth of King’s addiction to drugs and alcohol in great detail. However, the surprising thing is not King’s alcoholism or past drug use, neither of which is much of a secret these days. Rather, the surprise is how productive King was during even the worst years of his addictions. To put it into perspective, consider that he has no memory of the exhaustive editing process he went through to finalize Cujo or the fact that he was almost constantly drunk or stoned during the entire time he directed his first motion picture but still managed to finish the project.

"Haunted Heart" does well in its chronological presentation of Stephen King’s life, and Lisa Rogak’s assessment of what made King into the superstar writer that he is today is an interesting, if not new, theory. Readers looking for the basic Stephen King story will not be disappointed but one has to wonder what King’s take would be on all the speculation about what makes him tick. Unfortunately, without King’s participation or response we will never know how close to the truth Rogak and others have managed to get.

Stephen King fans will appreciate Rogak’s efforts but will, at the same time, wish that King had made himself available to her.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

Loved this! This one was certainly written to King's audience. Full of in-depth, interesting information and written according to chronological order...loosely. Some things and books are skipped over, but others are given a closer examination. Learning what types of things inspire an American great like Stephen King (or Steve as he likes to be called) is endlessly entertaining. Moral of this story? Steven King is a normal guy who is scared by the same things most people are. ( )