Stephen King had drugstore cotton stuffed up his nose so the blood wouldn’t drip onto the keys of his typewriter. It wasn’t a scene from one of his novels: it was his work routine for much of the 1980s.
The author of ‘The Shining’ and ‘It’ confessed that his cocaine addiction reached such an extreme point that his heart was pumping at 130 beats per minute while he wrote in the early hours of the morning. The result of that altered state was some of the best-selling works in 20th-century popular literature. The paradox: King openly admitted that he does not remember writing several of those books. Entire pages, complete plots, characters that millions of readers know by heart, born from a mind that he himself can no longer reconstruct.
It was his wife, Tabitha King, who finally gathered the evidence of the deterioration and organized a family intervention in 1987. On the table they placed cigarette butts, bags, bottles, and papers. King accepted treatment. What remains to be answered is how many of his darkest stories were actually born from that abyss.
