King and the Fiction Suit

Finding life, cheating death, and changing reality as we know it...

November 24, 2023

(I had completely forgotten about this essay. It was published in a Russian academic journal (of all places!) in November 2009. Since I’m confident few people have read this, I’m putting it here as a Black Friday treat. Enjoy!)

INTRODUCTION

Postmodern writers flirting with the metafictional possibilities of meeting their characters within their stories has evolved dramatically in the last one hundred years. Early 20th century books like Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (Mist) play with the metaphorical look of the author as creator, so when de Unamuno meets the book’s protagonist, it is the perfect creator meeting his flawed and doomed creation.

Later books, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, reveal metafictional encounters between flawed creators and innocent creations - the stories are designed to fix not only the characters but the writers themselves. Whereas de Unamuno’s protagonist pleaded to his creator to spare his life, Vonnegut and Morrison needed their lives to be mentally or spiritually repaired by their protagonists.

So it should be unsurprising that one of the most recent metafictional encounters had Stephen King entering his The Dark Tower series to have his characters physically rescue him from the real 1999 accident that nearly claimed his life. 

This paper will examine how these metafictional encounters require the use of fiction suits, a “garment” not exclusive to writers but to all of us, and how these fiction suits alter our ability to manipulate fiction and reality. 

WRITING IS NOT LIFE

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999 when a man driving a blue van almost killed me,” wrote Stephen King in his book On Writing. The book, meant to be a look at King’s approach to writing, is also a memoir, filled with vignettes about his life as a writer, including a postscript titled “On Living,” where King recounts the details of his near-fatal accident. 

The incident happened on June 13, 1999, when 42-year-old Bryan Smith, distracted by his Rottweiler, lost control of his Dodge Caravan and struck King as he was walking on the shoulder of the road near his home. In On Writing, King lists his numerous injuries:  

My lower leg was broken in at least nine places . . . the region below my right knee had been reduced to “so many marbles in a sock.”  The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions—they’re called medial and lateral fasciotomies—to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies . . . it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle . . . I also suffered an acetabular fracture of the right hip—a serious derailment, in other words— and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took twenty or thirty stitches. [1]

The recovery process for King from the injuries was excruciating. He would be unable to write again for five weeks after the accident, and even then, it would be difficult. “That first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes,” King writes, “when it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair” [1]]. 

The particulars of King’s account of the accident and subsequent rehabilitation period – full of information provided by witnesses and quotes from the people who worked so hard to save his life – are both harrowing and hopeful. However, it is King’s morbid observations which make the story uniquely his own:

[Bryan Smith] sees I’m awake and tells me help is on the way. He speaks calmly, even cheerily. His look, as he sits on his rock with his cane drawn across his lap, is one of pleasant commiseration: Ain’t the two of us just had the shittiest luck? it says. He and Bullet left the campground where they were staying, he later tells an investigator, because he wanted “some of those Marzes-bars they have up to the store.” When I hear this little detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels. [1]

On September 21, 2000, King’s 53rd birthday, Smith was found dead of an accidental overdose of painkillers. And then, on September 21, 2004, Smith reappears in King’s book The Dark Tower, driving a Dodge Caravan and about to run off the road on that fateful June day. Like a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy, King is right after all: he was nearly killed by a character right out of one of his novels. 

To understand what happens next, especially in terms of how these events are simultaneously fiction and true, we have to look at the nature of the fiction suit and how King’s decision to wear one complicates the very nature of reality.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE FICTION SUIT

A metafictional encounter between the writer and their character within the confines of a novel is hardly new. Literary writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, have inserted themselves into their stories to varying effects. American comic books especially have a rich history of superheroes meeting their writers and artists. One of the more dramatic examples of a metafictional encounter is in Grant Morrison’s 26-issue run of Animal Man, a comic book published through DC Comics from 1988 to 1990. The title character in Animal Man is Buddy Baker, who can use the ability of animals due to an exploding spaceship. Morrison took the inherent ridiculousness of the character and deconstructed the concept within the framework of stories that emulated real-world issues, such as animal rights and vegetarianism. On top of that, as the series continued, Baker’s story became increasingly darker and more violent, culminating in the death of his wife and two children. Baker’s descent into grief and despair eventually brings him face-to-face with Morrison. Upon meeting, Morrison introduces themselves as “the evil mastermind behind the scenes. I’m the wicked puppeteer who pulls the strings and makes you dance. I’m your writer” [2]. Morrison adds, “Someone else creates you to be perfect and innocent and then I step in and spoil everything” [2]. When Animal Man later notes that this is not fair, Morrison answers: 

One of my cats died last year. Something, maybe a bone, punctured her lung. Pus built up in her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe. She suffered for four weeks and then died at the vet’s. A couple of weeks after her third birthday. Her name was Jarmara. That wasn’t fair either, but who do I complain to? See, your world is so much simpler than ours. It can be invaded by aliens or suffer catastrophes and nothing matters. It all just comes back, good as new . . . so don’t come here complaining to me about what’s fair and what’s not. [2]

Morrison’s insertion of biographical information helps reveal their ultimate intention with Animal Man, a story not only meant to be a hero quest for Buddy Baker but also a story meant to work through their personal issues, to discover meaning where they may be none. 

Through this, Morrison “dreams of a regained state of authority and innocence, of leaving [their] own instability and timidity, and moving on to a new, more stable and pleasant realm of awareness.” [3] 

Morrison compensates for this instability by making the character of Animal Man a protector of animals and a strong supporter of animal rights. This character trait reflects Morrison’s inability to do the same in real life. As Morrison tells Animal Man, “You care about animals because I wanted to use you to draw people’s attention to what’s happening in the world. In my world, in the real world, I can’t do anything about the things that upset me.” [4] Morrison acknowledges their lack of power while simultaneously reclaiming it, or “by introducing himself as protagonist of his own text, the writer proposes a distance from his former self . . . There is a former self, and a present self.” [5]

Animal Man is a hero quest story for not only Buddy Baker as Animal Man, but for Morrison as a writer. And once they flirted with the metafictional possibilities Animal Man introduced into their work and life, it only made sense that Morrison would take this to the next level:

Once the nineties came along, I changed my life and started doing The Invisibles. I thought, I’ll do a comic that actually is a magic spell, a narrative sigil. I had made that little comic book avatar of myself for Animal Man and decided to make a better one, a “fiction suit” I could use to live an alternate life in print.  [6]

For this paper, this author will appropriate Morrison’s term fiction suit to reflect a writer’s appearance within their works of fiction. 

WE ALL HAVE FICTION SUITS

To better appreciate the nature of the fiction suit, it is important to recognize that it is not an “outfit” designed specifically for writers; everyone has their own fiction suit. 

To understand this, it is best to consider the possibility that memory works as fiction, or better yet, the possibility that “we remember our lives like stories . . . And ultimately whatever has happened to you that exists in your mind is what you have to deal with. Not the actuality of what happens to you but what you have concocted.” [7]

Take, for instance, this story from an episode of This American Life, where a husband and wife tell two dramatically different interpretations of a singular event:

Husband: It’s a beautiful, beautiful fall day, and we’re walking down Fifth Avenue. Central Park’s on our right. And Tina’s distracted. She looks over her left shoulder, and she goes, “Oh!” There I see across the street, Jackie Onassis – President Kennedy’s wife – and she’s waving very modesty at Tamar. I thought, Oh my God!  . . . And I’m looking at Tamar and Tamar’s looking at Jackie Onassis, and she gives a very tentative wave, and Jackie, returning the wave, waves a little harder. I’m speechless. Now Jackie raises her hand even more excitedly and starts moving it back and forth, back and forth, and Tamar is now a little more enthusiastic and starts waving to. And in that moment, a cab pulls up alongside Jackie Onassis, and what Jackie Onassis was actually doing was waving for a cab and my wife, by mistake, somehow thought Jackie was waving at her.

Narrator: Now, when Robert’s wife Tamar tells the story there are a few differences from the way Robert tells it. First of all, she says that it was Madison Avenue, not Fifth Avenue. She said that actually there was a small group of people who observed it happening, so it was especially humiliating. But the main difference between Tamar’s version and Robert's is kind of a big one: she says Robert wasn’t there. Was not there. Not  there at all. And she is 100% sure of this.

Wife: Yes, no, as he describes it, he can picture everything about it so very, very vividly, much more vividly than I. I just remember the humiliation of the other people on the street staring at me as the taxi pulled up. 

Narrator: Now imagine this from Tamar’s perspective, especially you married people out there. This thing happens to her. She comes home and tells her husband. Months pass. And then one day they’re at a dinner at some people’s house. 

Wife: And then, I hear him begin to tell the story, except it’s both of us. And as we leave that house, I say, “You know, Robert, you weren’t there.” And he said, “No. But I remember, I can picture it, I can see it so clearly.” And I said, “But you weren’t there.”

Husband: She said I wasn’t there, which is astonishing to me. I mean, this is like, I can feel this on my skin. The way the sun was catching leaves. I remember turning around. I remember the intake of breath and surprise. I remember all the little things going on . . . she said I wasn’t there. [8]

The husband in the above story is wearing the fiction suit by inserting himself into his wife’s story. As the husband later explains, “She told [me the story], and like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great, I occupied it. . . I just marched in and became a part of it.” [8] When asked if he believed that he was not really there, the husband acknowledges that he did. As evidenced by this story, wearing the fiction suit does not have to be a conscious act by the storyteller.

Whether it happened on Fifth Avenue or Madison Avenue, with or without a crowd watching, and with or without the husband’s presence, the story of Jackie Onassis is as true as it is false because actuality does not matter when it comes to memory. 

As writer Merilyn Simonds explains, “We don't absorb actuality. The actuality doesn't influence us. What influences us is what we remember. Our memory -- our weird minds -- you overlay an event with the color of your lipstick. Or the blue candle behind you. And the smell in the air. And my mind might layer that with something I've remembered reading in a book and then a bit of a dream and that can concoct a reality. All that stuff becomes layered in your mind, and that's what becomes real.” [7] 

The husband’s unique interpretation of his reality is what shaped his retelling of a story where he was not present, to the point of “feeling it on [his] skin.” 

Morrison, looking at the mind as an infinite tesseract space, proposes a mental exercise that hints at how the fiction suit can be used not only to put a husband into a story where he was not but to shape how one interprets their reality: 

Imagine yourself going to Paris . . . What you’re seeing in your head may not be the real Paris . . . you’ll see some cool stuff that represents your unique view of Paris. That’s the way to get into it. Lie back and send yourself someplace, explore and imagine. There are no rules and no one is judging the performance. Maybe you see Nazi tanks or flying saucers. Where are they going? What year is it? Now go into a store, look around, pick up items. What items do you see? Are the signs in French or another language? Are there any gods or devils, angels or aliens around? . . . The imagination has no limits; entire universes, multiverses even, fit comfortably inside the human head without breaking it open from within. It’s a kind of tesseract space . . . There’s infinite space inside us all, and it’s there to be explored. [6]

This infinite tesseract space that is meant to be explored internally is also the space that allows us to explore the external, with or without our fiction suits. If the internal can be shaped into any story we choose, can the external be fiction? Or, “Is the world itself not a novel, a fiction in which he is a character? Is it possible to verify what is real and what is fiction, or what a writer fictionalizes and what is fictionalized for him?” [3]

ESCAPING DEATH IN THE FICTION SUIT

When King spoke with Paul Fillebrown, the medical technician who first arrived at the scene of his accident, for On Writing, Fillebrown said, “I didn’t think you’d make it to the hospital. You’re a lucky camper to still be with the program.” He “then suggests that perhaps someone was watching out for [King].” [1] If taken into context with King’s use of the fiction suit in The Dark Tower, the writer provides readers with a curious possibility of who was watching over King on that fateful June day. 

King began writing the first book of The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, back in 1970. This book follows Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, as he makes his way across the desert in pursuit of the man in black. Though the man in black appears to be the book’s antagonist, this chase is merely another obstacle in Roland’s quest to the Dark Tower, believed to be the nexus of all universes. While the story takes place in a world that “had moved on” and that “had emptied” [8], it becomes clear throughout the series that this world is one of many within a multiverse that crosses over into King’s “Prime Reality” [10], which is the fictional universe where a majority of King’s books take place.

By the time Roland is within reach of the Tower in The Dark Tower, the seventh and last book in the series, he has traveled to various realities and met characters from King’s other stories. More importantly, Roland and his companions have discovered a collection of Stephen King books in which they are characters. This awareness eventually brings them to the Keystone Earth – meant to reflect our reality – where they meet Stephen King. The series’ penultimate book Song of Susannah ends with a newspaper article from the Portland Sunday Telegram with the headline “STEPHEN KING DIES NEAR LOVELL HOME” [11], setting the stage for one of the most unusual metafictional encounters where Roland must save King’s life to save the universe.

King has recounted the events of the June 19, 1999 accident twice. In the non-fictional On Writing, he tells the story in the first person, doing his best to accurately describe the accident as best as he can recall. In the fictional The Dark Tower, the accident is told again, this time in the third person through an omniscient narrator. Interestingly enough, the omniscient narrator is revealed to be King himself in The Dark Tower’s Coda, when he gives readers the choice to continue to the end or not: “Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken.” [12] 

These varying descriptions – one requiring the use of the fiction suit – allow readers the unique opportunity to compare the incident, such as the moment Smith’s car hits King: 

Smith wasn’t looking at the road on the afternoon our lives came together because his rottweiler had jumped from the very rear of his van into the back-seat area, where there was an Igloo cooler with some meat stored inside. The rottweiler’s name is Bullet (Smith has another rottweiler at home; that one is named Pistol). Bullet started to nose at the lid of the cooler. Smith turned around and tried to push Bullet away. He was still looking at Bullet and pushing his head away from the cooler when he came over the top of the knoll; still looking and pushing when he struck me. [1]

Or:

In order to gain the purchase necessary to twist further in the driver's bucket, [Smith] presses down firmly with both feet. One of them, unfortunately, is on the accelerator. The van puts on a burst of speed as it rushes toward the top of the hill. At this moment, in his excitement and outrage, Bryan has completely forgotten where he is (Route 7) and what he's supposed to be doing (driving a van). All he cares about is getting the package of meat out of Bullet's jaws.

"Gimme it!" he shouts, tugging. Tail wagging more furiously than ever (to him it's now a game as well as a meal), Bullet tugs back. There's the sound of ripping butcher's paper. The van is now all the way off the road. Beyond it is a grove of old pines lit by lovely afternoon light: a haze of green and gold. Bryan thinks only of the meat. He's not going to eat hamburg with dog-drool on it, and you best believe it. [12]

Outside of the obvious artistic license and inherent speculation regarding Smith’s participation in the vehicle before the van struck King, his biggest divergence is the inclusion of the gunslinger Roland and his adopted son Jake Chambers, who are both at the scene to rescue King from certain death. 

As King speculated in On Writing, writing “can be a way back to life” – never is it more palpable than it is in these moments.

King’s doctor tells him that he “must have pivoted to the left just a little at the last second . . . if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation” [1], but The Dark Tower tells a different story. When Roland fails to reach King in time, it is Jake who “turned King to the left, shielding him with his body, and so it was Jake the vehicle struck.” [12]

The details of the accident and the fictional rescue are reconciled in the rest of the novel, as Roland hypnotizes King and Smith so they would not remember the events as they happened in The Dark Tower. Instead, they would remember them as King did in On Writing. King’s ability to create a scenario that makes both accounts of the same event true helps to establish the Gunslinger and all of King’s characters to be real. This is similar to when Animal Man asks Morrison if he is real, and the writer responds, “Of course you’re real! We wouldn’t be talking if you weren’t real.” [2]

A WAY BACK TO LIFE

King’s conscious insertion into The Dark Tower series, like Morrison before him in Animal Man, is fundamentally no different than the husband who subconsciously inserted himself into his wife’s story of Jackie Onassis, as “the metafictional writer-hero insists on functioning as not only a re-interpreter or re-organizer of reality but also its manipulator, or inventor.” [3] This re-organizing of reality is similar to the way the narrator from George Garrett’s “A Story Goes with It” tackles his storytelling:

You know what Wright Morris is quoted as saying in a lecture at Princeton? He said: “Anything processed by memory is fiction.” In that sense, this is all fiction. In that sense, a lot of our “real” lives is pure fiction . . .  I hereby solemnly promise to tell you nothing more or less than what I do truly remember. Except for little things like imaginary dialogue . . . I plan to stick close to the facts, insofar as I know what they are. [13]

If memory is a collection of interconnecting stories operating within what Grant Morrison refers to as a “tesseract space,” allowing people to access these stories at any point in time and space with seemingly infinite possibilities, both true and untrue, then one could safely say that a book is no different than memory: “Is the world itself not a novel, a fiction in which he is a character? Is it possible to verify what is real and what is fiction, or what a writer fictionalizes and what is fictionalized for him?” [3]

SOURCES

[1] King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Pocket Books. 2000. 

[2] Morrison, Grant. Animal Man. #26 (August 1990), DC Comics.

[3] Andrzejczak, Krzysztof. The Writer in the Writing: Author as Hero in Postwar American Fiction. Łódż, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. 1996. 

[4] Morrison, Grant. Animal Man. #13 (July 1989), DC Comics.

[5] Ziegler, Heide. John Barth. New York: Methuen. 1986

[6] Ebb, Zoetica and Ales Kot. “Grant Morrison – Embracing the Apocalypse.” Coilhouse. Issue 4. 66-75 

[7] Richards, Linda. "January Interview - Merilyn Simonds." January Magazine. May 1999. <http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/simonds.html>

[8] Glass, Ira. “Every Marriage is a Courthouse Prologue” This American Life.  02 May 2008. YouTube.

[9] King, Stephen. The Gunslinger. London, England: Hodder. 2003.

[10] Golden, Christopher, Wagner, Hank and Wiater, Stanley. The Complete Stephen King Universe. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2006.

[11] King, Stephen. Song of Susannah. London, England: Hodder. 2006.

[12] King, Stephen. The Dark Tower. London, England: Hodder. 2006.

[13] Garrett, George. Empty Bed Blues. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. 2006.

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