Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mary Shelley, famous now (and even then) as the author of Frankenstein, was casting about for a new idea for a novel. She was in emotional straits. She had already buried three children before her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in 1822. Their friend Lord Byron had just died in Greece. She felt as if everyone she knew?the age itself in which she lived?was passing away around...
...what has proved to be a surprisingly durable genre. It's true what the movie poster says: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH IS NOT ALONE. The joint is crawling with last men. Will Smith in I Am Legend. The nameless hero of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, an Oprah pick last year. Yorick from the hit comic book Y: The Last Man (which publishes its 60th and last issue at the end of this month), who survives a plague that kills only men?the women are fine. Even Disney is doing it: Wall*E, a Pixar...
Duma Key, his first novel set in Florida, inevitably followed. Named after a fictional reef, it concerns Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy man who loses his right arm in a construction accident and moves to a lonely island that seems to grant him the power to paint surreal, sometimes premonitory images. At its core, the book is about creativity and its relationship to physical and mental healing?King's continuing attempt to address his own mortality years after his near death...
Duma, with its maimed painter, follows Lisey's Story, his 2006 literary novel about a writer's widow. And while both books are concerned with the death or near death of an artist, King brushes aside the idea that any of it is autobiographical. He's already done that. "When I wrote about my accident in [2000's] On Writing, I wrote about something that actually happened," he says. "With some of these later books, I'm trying to write about what it means, how that kind of thing changes a person. I certainly don't want...
...retire, don't worry. King's age and his residence in the Sunshine State are not signs that he's thinking about calling it quits. His next book of short stories, Unnatural Acts of Intercourse, will come out this fall or next spring, and he's working on a "novel that's going to be very long. I'll be killing a lot of trees if it gets done." Still, he's pretty clear-eyed about his new life. "I think [Florida is] where pop novelists go to die, in a way," he says. "It does feel a little like...