"And they lived happily ever after."

Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist. The Shining is actually in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of takes of a single scene. With that type of fascist filmmaking, you know that anything left on the cutting room floor of the 1980 Stephen King film was cut for a reason.

Still, for those super-fans out there, the Dryden Theater in Rochester New York is having a special screening of the film October 22nd, "complete with a chilling coda cut from the original release."

Feel free to take Amtrak up to Rochester for the screening, but we've seen enough "alternate" versions of The Shining to make an educated guess that it won't hold a candle to the original.

Just look at Stephen King's own botched attempt to remake his own story in a 1997 miniseries, starring Steven Weber from Wings:

Or the infamous Simpsons parody:

You just can't improve on perfection, man.

According to an IMDB forum user who claims to have seen the extra footage, it's not worth the hassle:

It's just a short scene between the shot of Jack frozen and the slow pan-up to the photo at the end. There are two people talking about how shocking the events were and isn't it sad about the wife being put into a psychiatric hospital. That's basically all there was. It might be 4 minutes long.

You know, they could have sold us if the extra four minutes included some background on that terrifying bear suit blowjob scene from the original, because what the hell was that?

It's unclear from that quote whether James was referring to the literal location of Lehman's actual books. But let's assume she was speaking figuratively, about the firm's positions in the derivatives market, as her subsequent remarks suggest.

She said she received an e-mail from former Barclays trading executive Stephen King saying Lehman had "absolutely no idea" if it had sold $2 billion more options than it had bought, or whether it owned $4 billion more than it had sold.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a company's organizational prowess. But it gets worse. James said she couldn't do due diligence on Lehman thanks to its lack of records, and things were so bad that Barclays wound up buying entire positions that it hadn't known about just as it was about to ink the deal.

1. James Patterson - $70 million
2. Stephenie Meyer - $40 million
3. Stephen King - $34 million
4. Danielle Steel - $32 million
5. Ken Follett - $20 million
   

The list also includes Stephen King's main competitor in the suspense/thriller genre, Dean Koontz ($18 million a year) and Harry Potter series author JK Rowling, who netted a surprisingly low (for Rowling) $10 million. As the first author to ever achieve billionaire status when the Potter series was going strong, Rowling was probably too busy luxuriating in massive piles of pound notes to notice the downswing.

[Forbes]

The Alliance announced the project on Tuesday, describing it as “a sultry Southern gothic mystery with a blues-tinged, guitar-driven score.” The play takes place in a fictional Mississippi town where local legend has grown out of the 1957 deaths of two brothers and a young girl. But surprisingly, this is one macabre tale that did not originate in the psyche of Mr. King; rather, the idea was Mr. Mellencamp's, and “came from a story he heard years ago in his hometown of Seymour, Ind.”

1408 is the latest product canned by the cottage industry known as Stephen King, but if you go expecting a horror movie, you’ll be disappointed. From the start, Swedish director Mikael Håfström works up a sweat trying to save a reputation damaged by the 2005 Clive Owen–Jennifer Aniston disaster Derailed, undercutting tension by a process of anticlimax, slow camera moves and ponderous music. Alas, it’s a hopeless pursuit, because the star is John Cusack, whose scowling look of permanent cynicism leaves little room for audiences to explore each mystery element of the spooky unknown on their own. He telegraphs it all for them. The director might actually be a perfect match for the overwrought follow-the-dots formulas of both Mr. King’s contrived writing and Mr. Cusack’s one-dimensional acting. He leaves everything for the twist ending, then fails to provide one.

This is the underwhelming story of a hotel room in New York where scores of people have died in ghastly ways. Mr. Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a jaded author of books that debunk haunted lighthouses, unfriendly poltergeists and other paranormal activities, who hears about the blood-curdling events at the Dolphin Hotel, where Room 1408 is always unavailable. Ignoring the warnings of the hotel manager (Samuel L. Jackson), Enslin bullies his way in, confident that if he can spend one night in 1408 he’ll have his next best-seller. The Dolphin is not the Carlyle, but it’s not the Bates Motel, either. Still, its tragic history of hangings, mutilations and suicides both gruesome and amusing (one guest drowned in his chicken soup from room service) in Room 1408 (56 in all) make it an enticing rest stop for ghouls. No one has ever lasted one hour in 1408, but Enslin plans on staying all night. The hair starts to rise on the back of your neck the moment he turns the key in the lock. The thermostat sticks on 80 degrees, turning the room into a sauna. Then it drops to below zero, covering everything in ice. The window slams on his hand. The sink spouts boiling water. When he tries to escape, the door is locked and the key breaks in half. He tosses objects from the window to attract attention, but they disappear before they hit the sidewalk below. One by one, the grim events that happened in the past are restaged before his eyes. He also sees the episodes from his own past in the TV set. The daughter who died young appears in the mini-bar. There’s only one way to get out of 1408—to destroy it.

I went along with the about-face antics of Stephen King’s overactive imagination for about an hour before tedium took over and it was time for an explanation. Final upshot: There isn’t any. Regardless of how long you last in 1408, the logic to which you are entitled never comes. For the final insult, the author and the filmmakers resort to the old cop-out: The only ghosts in Room 1408 are the ones you invent yourself, and everything that happens in there is in your own mind. In a pig’s patootie.

The one-room claustrophobia gives an edge to the paranoia, but to hang the movie’s more conflicted suspense on the leers and grimaces of Mr. Cusack’s face without building any sense of the man’s inner demons is asking for trouble. Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, he looks more wacky than demoniac, weakening the fright potential even further. The unconvincing final operatics lack the depth the audience deserves for its patience. You leave 1408 haunting yourself.

Does anyone know if the word "coquette" was in vogue in Canada in the 1940's? Because if it was, you can be sure that the gravely gifted and always interesting short-story writer Alice Munro, born in rural Ontario in 1931, didn't get through high school without hearing a lot of it aimed in her direction.

Or maybe not. Maybe she was one of those teens who funneled all her energy into the track team, or the literary magazine, steering clear of those classmates who indulged in the immemorial practice of leading suitors on. In either case, I mean no disrespect to the grand dame of New Yorker contributors; let me hasten to add (or not so hasteningly-let me say it leisurely, loiteringly, taking my sweet coquettish time), that I intend the term in the most flattering sense. A literary coquette, let us stipulate, is someone who-like Ms. Munro in her worthy but rather hysterically overpraised latest collection, Runaway-piques our interest early, backtracks to fill out the context, ambles around the edges of our patience, holds all in abeyance while tension mounts, and delivers the goods at a time and place of her own choosing, if at all.

So what is the literary coquette's M.O.? Typically, she (or he) specializes in a mouth-watering come-on-certain car passengers, say, are driving around in their pajamas at midnight-about which she tells us nothing more for many pages. The characters-sometimes as many as three or four in the opening paragraphs-all know more than the reader and won't let on while the story ambles along, dilating tantalizingly and only gradually looping back to take care (or not) of our desperate narrative needs.

The technique is deliberate, reliable and (God knows) time-tested. Some of the world's favorite literary coquettes-Stephen King being perhaps the crudest and most transparently manipulative-compute their suspense by degrees in order to leave us hanging. Unless we're prone to the literary equivalent of blue balls, hanging's not necessarily a bad thing, even if we admit that the impulse to write this way-to deny the reader vital information or a central secret-is essentially withholding when not downright passive-aggressive.

Ms. Munro holds back well. She opens one of the eight stories in this, her 11th collection, with a green-faced man near a tree "fruited with jewels"; not till we turn the page are we told we're inside a Chagall print. The starkly titled stories most often feature a solitary woman with something of a gypsy air (or at least a free-form country sensibility), likely to be traveling the Canadian countryside in search of someone's old summer house in a state of composed semi-bewilderment, fueled by nostalgia to which she will never quite surrender, half ruing the lost years, half comforted that they are gone. Oddly buoyed by "lack of hope-genuine, reasonable, and everlasting," she's also sustained by a sense of solidarity with other women, both "stricken with respect" for the older role models of her youth and assured that her sister-sufferers are the sterner sex: "Women have always got something, haven't they, to keep them going? That men haven't got."

Strict with herself, as befits the class tease, she is brave and stoical, even when her beloved daughter (in the devastating story "Silence") runs off to a spiritual retreat and, year after agonizing year, opts not to return. Stiffened by inner resources, she appears in one story (perhaps standing in for the strong-jawed and frumpy-hatted Ms. Munro herself?) as "beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner ... was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles."

Often lapsing into reminiscence, these splendid women-just beyond our fingertips!-are burdened by a sense of propriety so old-fashioned that one of them is reluctant to call a young doctor by his first name, while another declines to use the word "breast" to describe where Cleopatra's asp mortally bit her. Somewhat stunted by the limitations of their time and place ("She gags on the word spirituality, which seems to take in … everything from prayer wheels to High Mass"), most are concerned with nothing more earth-shaking than the business of marriage proposals-who is egging on whom, who gets turned down for the third time and who is marked for spinsterhood. (In this regard, it may be of interest to note that "Some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.")

All these details are delivered in the manner of a prom queen of yore dispensing her favors to the football captain while she hums the school anthem-dispassionately, almost with a sense of disavowal. "She recalled now how the sun was coming up behind them, how she looked at Clark's hands on the wheel, the dark hairs on his competent forearms, and breathed in the smell of the inside of the truck, a smell of oil and metal, tools and horse barns. The cold air of the fall morning blew in through the truck's rusted seams." And then, of course, there's the chasteness of the act itself: "The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming." Of actual congress, nary a word.

So what's it like for a coquette to be teased herself? Ms. Munro's characters seem to thrive on it, whether they're pining for an estranged daughter's return, in one story, or counting the days that separate them from a potential lover, in another. (Ardently touching her fingers to the name of her beloved's hometown on a map, "she might have touched the very place he was in" and becomes aware "of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings," making her "walk differently and smile for no reason." The yearning gives purpose to her existence, filling her with "tension and defiance, the risk of her life.") And when the unspeakable occurs-when word comes down that the daughter has produced five grandchildren that the mother has no hope of meeting, or when the man seems to turn his lover away without a word of explanation-their corseted natures do them proud: Ms. Munro's characters won't let themselves go. Women in Runaway are given to weeping offstage; afterward, we see only their reddened eyes.

In the end, her sufferance bequeaths Ms. Munro the long view, the ability to witness and anticipate how small towns change over time, how old houses heave and give up the ghost, how families morph and vengeances are wreaked and love sparks anew, sometimes from the very ashes that seemed to cool decades earlier. Call it the wisdom of the literary coquette. One after the other, these stories, saturated with grieving insight, leave us "outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame"-with endings that are as satisfyingly appropriate as they are goose-bumpingly unforgettable. And that's a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.

In 1983, a gaunt, stringy-haired drifter fakes his own death by murdering a fellow passenger he meets on a bus and stealing his identity. This senseless act of violence triggers a string of grim, ritualistic mutilation killings throughout the world, all unsolved. Now, after 20 years, the maniac is spotted on a Montreal ferry by his mother and more new bodies pile up, causing no end of annoyance to the cops, who haven't got a clue. In the old days, this was a job for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but they must have gone the way of the nickel phone call, because there isn't a horse in sight. It's now a job for Angelina Jolie, a tough, two-fisted, tricep-bulging American agent from the Nautilus Academy of Dramatic Art who specializes in butch assignments for which Ashley Judd is unavailable. To the chagrin of her Canadian counterpart (Olivier Martinez), who resents interfering foreigners the way New Yorkers raise eyebrows over the overwhelming number of women answering office telephones these days with Mary Poppins accents, Ms. Jolie theorizes that the chameleon killer is hijacking the lives of his victims and assuming their personalities-something the rest of us knew from the opening flashback. But never mind. Suddenly the killer is thwarted in his latest bloodbath by a key witness-a shy art dealer who bravely tries to save a new victim's life, endangering his own. Ethan Hawke gives a quirky, fascinating performance as this Good Samaritan, who is so weird that he becomes instantly suspicious to everyone but the intuitive homicide detective, Ms. Jolie, who breaks all of her own rules by falling for the witness-a disastrous mistake that costs her her job and almost her life. Meanwhile, director D.J. Caruso, who has watched too many reruns of The Silence of the Lambs , piles on the lurid details, and screenwriter Jon Bokenkamp litters the trajectory with more red herrings than the traffic can bear in less than two hours.

The source material for Taking Lives is a book by mystery writer Michael Pye in which the detective wasn't even a woman. So much for integrity. Still, for crash-and-bash fans, there are grisly elements galore: severed fingers, a dead body falling out of ceiling, a disinterred corpse, a hidden room behind a bookcase, a case of twins with the wrong twin in the cemetery, and the revelation of the killer at last. Of course, it's the wrong killer. And I don't think I can soon forget the unwanted electroshock therapy I got from watching a knife plunged through the stomach of a pregnant woman.

Don't get me wrong. While not for the squeamish, parts of Taking Lives are well constructed and suspenseful, and the fact that it is never boring is the ultimate compliment it deserves. But the actors are wasted, especially Kiefer Sutherland as a plot insertion designed solely to mislead us into detours we have no intention of taking. As the muscular detective, Angelina Jolie inspires more controversy than satisfaction. While she sifted through the subterranean detritus of crime searching for clues, I hardly noticed. I was too busy watching her flesh-a lot of which is exposed here-searching for the words "Billy Bob," wondering how many gallons of body paint were factored into the budget just to cover up her famous tattoos. Even more distracting is the cruel and wasteful use of the great Gena Rowlands. In Europe, an icon like Jeanne Moreau is still regarded as a ripe symbol of maturity, of ageless female sexual allure. In America, an icon like Gena Rowlands gets a bullet through her skull in an elevator. While everyone around her burns calories trying to look industrious, she makes them look like amateurs with one curl of her lip. I'd like to see a thriller like Taking Lives with her as the lady detective. With Angelina Jolie, youth may be hired, but it's not being served.

Depp-rivation

In 1988, David Koepp established squatter's rights in my database by co-writing one of my favorite films-the original, offbeat, gripping and totally hypnotic suspense chiller Apartment Zero . As both a writer and director, he's had some box-office successes since then as well as some clinkers, but nothing as inventive. With the deadly Secret Window , there is no trace of the creepy unconventionality I hoped would become his trademark.

This stagnant bore, another in an endless stream of adaptations from Stephen King potboilers, is garnished with slick performances by Johnny Depp, Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, Charles S. Dutton and others, but it's dead on arrival. In another of those self-mocking sendups of the acting craft that Mr. Depp is perfecting to the point of caricature, he plays Mort Rainey, a writer of crime stories with a torturous writer's block that is slowly turning lethal. Too slowly, if you ask me. He sleeps. He putters around a lakefront cabin in a ratty bathrobe with the kind of hair that can only be achieved by sticking a wet toe into a hot socket. His computer is as blank as his expression. He talks to himself in mirrors and to the mangy dog who is his sole companion since his wife (Maria Bello) ditched him for another guy and confiscated his house in town, which she shares with her new lover (Timothy Hutton). Mort is, needless to say, on the verge of going homicidal. It's a character-and a theme-Stephen King has explored before. The writer paying for his sins-who is always Stephen King himself-showed up in Misery , of course, where, impersonated by James Caan, he was held prisoner by a sadistic fan, and in The Dark Half , where Mr. King envisioned himself half-serious-writer and half-serial-killer in the guise of Timothy Hutton (who now guests in a smaller role). What a daunting idea. Most writers have problems just holding onto one mind, but Mr. King always has two. In Secret Window , neither of them works, and both of them are flatlining.

Is it my imagination, or is Stephen King a one-man writing industry that publishes four books a year the size of the Sears catalog? This one, based on a novella in the book Four Past Midnight , is the story of a desperate writer who can't think of anything new. Suddenly a wacko Mississippi cracker named John Shooter knocks on his door, played by John Turturro with an accent so phony that it makes Ellie Mae Clampett sound like Dame Sybil Thorndyke. This spook claims that Mort stole one of his stories and published it under his own name in 1997. Mort calls the intruder a liar: His story was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine three years earlier, in 1994, and he can produce the magazine to prove it. But this means he has to drive into town and confront his estranged wife, who has been begging him to sign the divorce papers to no avail. Is it any shock that the magazine arrives from his agent, but the pages with the original story are missing? Meanwhile, he reports the strange, threatening intruder to the retarded sheriff (Len Cariou), who spends his time needlepointing. He also hires a bodyguard (Charles S. Dutton). Did I forget to mention the story in question was about a man betrayed by his wife who kills her and buries her in the garden? If you don't figure out what's coming, you deserve to be relieved of the inflated price of admission and turned into a fool for make-believe.

When the dog, the bodyguard and the only neighbor who witnessed the Mississippi marauder all end up in a pile of blood with screwdrivers in their skulls, things look dark. But then the wife's house burns down. Mr. Turturro disappears from the screenplay, Mort is now wearing the black hat and smoking the Pall Malls left behind by the cornpone Caligula, and talking to-a second Mort! By now, any sane audience should be shouting to the wife, "Don't go near the garden!" Except for one thing. At the theater where I caught a screening of Secret Window on a busy Saturday night, there was no audience at all !

Johnny Depp is terrible. Maybe it's not his fault. The script is unplayable and he seems to be directing himself. But it doesn't help that he looks like an escaped inmate from a mental ward who has been living far too long on Thorazine and porridge. "The only thing that matters is the ending," he says, rolling his eyes like somebody in Henry Aldrich Haunts a House . "It's the most important part of the story." This lox of a movie has no story, no ending and no redeeming value. Color it gone.

Lives Intertwined

Intermission , the vigorous debut feature by British stage director John Crowley, is a rambling collage of intertwined lives in modern Dublin. Fifty-four characters emerge and overlap in 11 different stories in a punchy, gregarious drama that connects seemingly unrelated people in a much more sobering and realistic way than last year's silly romantic farce, Love Actually . Returning to his Irish roots with shaved head and none of the restrictions imposed by Hollywood stardom, Colin Farrell plays a sociopathic, small-time crook trying to bag one last haul that will enable him to retire from the underworld and live the good life with his girlfriend (heartthrob Kelly Macdonald of Gosford Park ). Before making a long-term commitment that might be the equivalent of a sentence in the slammer, they decide to take an "intermission" from their relationship. They try to prove that they are independent and unaffected by the separation, but the consequences are dour. She courts misery to show that he has left her unscathed, while he continues to dream about the big score that is always just beyond his reach and the perfect girl who is always just within his grasp-until she turns out to be an impostor. Their hiatus has repercussions for many people besides themselves, and sets off a chain of events that Mr. Crowley chronicles with deliberate invasion of privacy.

Among the many splendid cast members who contribute heartily: Cillian Murphy, as a man torn between his dull but honest job at the supermarket and a tempting role as Mr. Farrell's sidekick, a job that could send him to jail for the rest of his adult life; Shirley Henderson, as Ms. Macdonald's forlorn sister; and Colm Meaney, as a burly cop who infiltrates the gritty landscape like Mr. Crowley's handheld cameras. The stories collide and reflect off each other like prisms of light on the blade of a razor, while the characters remain ignorant of the currents that flow through their lives. One of the film's great joys is the cumulative energy of the fine ensemble cast. The performances are well-rounded, and the free-form script by Mark O'Rowe gives them plenty of room to flex. Without the burden of carrying an entire movie, Colin Farrell is the most startlingly relaxed he has ever been on-camera. (Alas, his Irish brogue is a bit too startling, lapsing as it sometimes does into leprechaun jabberwocky.) The supportive direction by Mr. Crowley, a fixture at London's Donmar Warehouse, segues from stage to screen with surprising visual fluidity. A gritty tapestry embroidered with the light and dark chiaroscuro of wit and sorrow, Intermission is a jagged hymn to transience and the self-discovery it offers. I don't think it has a prayer in the trashy oppressiveness of modern commercial cinema, but it's a fresh diversion from the ordinary.

The title of this genial, informal book is misleading. On Writing is most compelling as a kind of deliberately fragmented partial autobiography–those parts constitute much of the book and will fascinate any reader. The stuff on writing, which the author admits he found very hard to write, is less successful.

I wonder how many male American writers grew up fatherless on the edge of poverty? Robert Stone, Toby Wolff, myself for a start, and also Stephen King, an authentic working-class hero, truly rags to riches, who does not turn his back on his past, but seems, if anything, to cling to it a bit. He talks about his job in a laundry and his ascension to high school teacher; he refers to his "working-class" background. Maybe he harps on this because that is the social milieu he writes about, as his fan Joyce Carol Oates points out. Having money or not having money, as life goes on, may or may not have a strong effect on one's sense of identity, but this book begs that question, as it has every right to do. To my mind Mr. King, in his novels, has a good sense of ordinary people, and an authentic affection for them as well. What he thinks about, or what he feels when he looks down at America from his chartered planes–a friend says he saw one painted to look like a giant bat–is another matter for some other book.

He writes about family, his early struggles trying to get published in various sci-fi and horror magazines in an almost off-hand manner, moving fairly rapidly over tough times that must have taken much strength and dedication to get through. How interesting that he knew he was an alcoholic in 1975 when he wrote The Shining (about an alcoholic writer). By the mid-80's he was drinking a case of beer–16-ounce "tallboys"–every night, as well as snorting cocaine and doing pills. He feels that his splendid novel Misery , whatever else it was, was a cry for help. He almost killed himself with booze and coke until his wife Tabitha arranged what A.A. calls an "intervention," and he got straight and has remained straight. One reads between the lines–without the "buzz," as he calls it, of writing fiction, the powerful sense of being in the flow–and without the support of his remarkable wife, Mr. King, as strong as he is, would most likely have sunk into death or obscurity.

Mr. King declares that "most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do–not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad." Truer words were never spoken. One might only add E.L. Doctorow's observation that "writing is not an entirely rational process." So one might expect a certain amount of disagreement when it comes to giving young writers advice. Most of what Mr. King advises is good, it seems to me. His enthusiasm for Strunk and White is appropriate. His assertion that you must read, you must read a lot, and you must read continuously if you ever hope to write is correct. (He has read widely himself, judging from the people he mentions and the books he refers to.) His almost strident insistence that the writer be "honest"–that is to say, don't bullshit the reader–is valuable, but he might have gone a bit deeper into the kinds of unconscious dishonesty that so bedevil many serious young writers. It is a more complex question than his language suggests.

There are times when I disagree with him. " Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful ." What he means by this is harmless enough–don't dress up your narrative with fancy $10 words because you're ashamed of simple words–but the implications of "using the first word" are ominous. Less ominous for what used to be called a "natural writer," but still artistically limiting. Beyond the first level of expression, I believe George Orwell's advice is better: "Pick the word. Do not let the word pick you."

Mr. King says, "Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity." The second phrase is true, but the first is misleading, because a powerful symbol does more than adorn and enrich; it can lift a narrative into territory usually associated with poetry and hence represents the greatest challenge a prose writer can face. Think of the muffled sound of the cannon from the ferry on the river when Tom, Huck and Joe are hiding out on the island. Think of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking down from an oculist's billboard in The Great Gatsby . Think of the white whale. Remember the fog in Bleak House . Mr. King suggests that we forget about symbolism and simply let it happen if it happens. I think a more active role is needed for the writer–a kind of sustained meditation on the text in order to find images or objects that contain and distill its essence.

But on the whole, when the author talks about omitting needless words, doing away with adverbs almost entirely, writing good dialogue, crafting paragraphs, trying to find resonance, etc., he makes a lot of sense. About process in general, there may be a bit of confusion about what happens to Mr. King when he writes and what might happen to someone a bit less protean when he or she writes, but that is understandable, perhaps to some degree unavoidable. Not everyone can match his pace; he writes 10 pages a day, after all. Orwell was happy when he could do 500 words.

On Writing ends with a completely engrossing description of the famous accident on the side of the road in Maine the summer of 1999, when a moderately crazed local hit Mr. King with his van. Death was even closer this time–an immediate touch-and-go situation with Mr. King falling in and out of consciousness, aware he was at the edge of life. It's a 15-page tour de force of good writing, containing no more than five adverbs by my count.

Tens of millions of readers, lovers of well-told stories, are happy Stephen King made it. They want to read more of him. Me, too. There are all kinds of pleasures in fiction, and that is how it should be.

Frank Conroy, the author of Stop-Time , is the director of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.