Stephen King

Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished (2005, 2012) by Australian-New Zealand writer Rocky Wood is a survey and analysis of creative writing by the bestselling American author and master of contemporary horror, Stephen King. The work analyzes over 130 previously unpublished pieces from King, ranging from unfinished novels to newspaper articles he wrote in high school. King, born in 1947, has been actively writing since the early 1960s, and this is the first major work to analyze some of his writings as a teenager. The themes of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished include the author-reader relationship, anxiety over one’s place in the world, and skepticism toward dogmatism.

Unpublished refers to works never disseminated in public and uncollected includes works that were only published in smaller outlets, such as community newsletters. More works were discovered after 2005, and the 2012 expanded edition contains more of King’s original nonfiction, as well as commentary on the findings by Stephen King himself. Both editions, for which Wood successfully searched through hundreds of archives, as well as public and private libraries, were praised for his thoroughness in finding King’s work.

Rocky Wood, who died in 2014, was known as a completist and someone who obsessed over all aspects of a subject. In addition to Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, Wood also published in his lifetime, The Stephen King Collector's Guide, Stephen King: The Non-Fiction, and Stephen King: A Literary Companion.



Each story that Wood analyzes is arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically. While the book received several good reviews, it was criticized in several peer-reviewed journals for not offering enough original writing by King and too much commentary and selected quotes by Wood. While the work can be read from front-to-back, Wood has said in interviews that it is more useful as a guide one can visit on occasion to learn more about specific topics regarding Stephen King.

In the introduction, Wood, along with his co-writers David Rawsthorne and Norma Blackburn, say that although King had published about two hundred pieces of fiction by 2010 (before the second edition), about one hundred pieces – from screenplays to poems – were never published. Two of Wood’s larger essays present the plots of the short stories, “An Evening at God’s” and “Squad D,” currently in private libraries and the contents of which would not be known to the general public without Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.

The authors examine King’s admitted history of developing Realities (sic) which are highly developed settings in which nearly all of his hundreds of stories take place. This includes the Dark Tower, where dark magic appears to operate. The most popular among these categories is “IT,” about a killer clown; the most prolific works include The Dark Tower series. Maine Street Horror is influenced by King’s home state of Maine. It is represented in books like Carrie where a young girl, humiliated by her peers, uses her psychic powers to kill everyone at a prom school dance.



The shortest of these five realities is The Stand, which includes works where the plot hinges on a major illness, a mass epidemic that affects metropolitan areas, ships, or isolated towns. America Under Siege includes works like The Dead Zone or Firestarter. These texts examine ideas about American beliefs. Despite the name, these stories don’t always take place in the U.S. Some, like “In the Deathroom” take place in Latin America. The last Reality is New Worlds where entire new worlds are created and are the closest that King comes to science fiction.

The short stories that tell a lot about King as a writer include “American Vampire,” “The Little Green God of Agony,” “Premium Harmony,” and “Mile 81.” The poem “Dino” was found in the E.S. Bird Library of Syracuse University. It was published in a small literary journal that had few copies and was never digitized for storage online.

Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished includes a chapter from Sword in the Darkness (1970). The novel was considered to have been lost, and until this collection was published, only a few of King’s friends could recall reading it. King wrote it while attending college at the University of Maine.



In the second edition, King comments on several of his screenplays, including “The Street Kid’s Bible,” “On the Island,” “The Tommyknockers.” Wood looks at one screenplay in particular, “Molly,” which was an early draft of what would become an X-Files episode, “Chinga.”

Both editions conclude with an appendix that applies to published and unpublished works. The appendix includes some instructions on how to find each of the original works to read it in its entirety.

Woods notes that King was (and is) such a prolific writer, that it is perfectly possible that even more works will be uncovered. In that event, he offers some tips on preserving precious documents, pointing to several libraries that would be interested in purchasing more of King’s papers.