In "The Dead Zone," John Smith -- King likes everyman names -- meets the girl of his dreams, only to lose her the very same night when a car crash plunges him into a prolonged coma. For Larry Underwood in "The Stand," tragedy comes just as the Huey Lewis-like rocker has finally found his personal Jesus: a hit single. Unfortunately, even as his song is climbing the charts, a deadly virus is wiping out 99.8 percent of the population. Not good for sales.

The real intruders in King books aren't usually so grandiose as a plague. His genius -- yes, he did have a kind of genius -- was his intuitive understanding that, more than any imagined monster, it's the terrors of everyday life that truly frighten. Poverty. Cancer. Alcoholism. Spousal abuse. The loss of a child, as in "Pet Sematary."

His happy endings were what made King so redemptive. By creating monsters who could be slain, King always gave his characters -- and his readers -- a way to fight back, a happy (or at least a bittersweet) ending; he helped us put a stake in the vampires scratching at our window. Stephen King gave his readers hope.

It's hard to say exactly where King lost his way, but at some point in the late 1980s, his books became increasingly less distinctive. I remember his early works vividly. But I can't name a character from "The Tommyknockers," "Gerald's Game," "Insomnia," "Rose Madder," "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon," "Needful Things" or "The Langoliers." In those second-tier works, plots and themes were repeated from earlier, better King books, and characters became types rather than people. How could they not, really? By this point King was well into double-digit novel production. Judging by his sales, his fans didn't seem to care that the books were less and less compelling. Why should he?

King's most interesting books of the 1990s give some hint as to what might have been going on. In one way or another, they all focus on the horrors of literary success beyond his wildest imagination. In "The Dark Half," King's protagonist is a bestselling writer whose sadistic doppelganger comes to life when he tries to stop writing. In "Misery," another bestselling writer is taken hostage by a rabid fan, who disapproves of the writer's attempt to kill off a serial character. And in "Bag of Bones," yet another bestselling writer stops writing.

It's never a good sign when a writer gives up writing about the problems in his readers' lives and starts writing about the burdens of success. King is said to have an excellent relationship with his many readers, but the evidence that he feels harassed by his large, loyal and hungry fan base (are the fans the real bloodsuckers?) is ubiquitous.

Consider the series of questions and answers his Web site, StephenKing.com, provides for fans. "Will he read my manuscript?" Nope. "To avoid any litigation problems, he has been advised by his agents not to look at any manuscript that has not been accepted by a publisher." Does he accept story ideas? "To avoid any litigation problems, he has been advised ... " Can he help find an agent? "There being some legal problems with this ... " You get the picture. King has built a tall, spiked, wrought-iron fence around himself, and hung a "Beware of (Rabid) Dog" sign on it.

Or maybe his devoted readers built it for him. It's hard not to be sympathetic to King's plight -- at least as sympathetic as one can be to a writer who's earned over one hundred million dollars in his career. I do not doubt that people exist who, in a bogus attempt to make a fast buck, would claim that King read and stole their story idea. And the nature of King's material pretty much guarantees that some of his readers are going to be a little, well, odd.

Still, one gets the feeling that King's efforts at isolation are about more than legal concerns. King feels so imposed upon by his audience that he has to tell them, in books such as "Misery," to back off -- they're losing their grip on reality. They have become the ones scaring him.(And there are a lot of more of them than of King.) But it doesn't work: The readers make even these passive-aggressive books massive bestsellers. So King resorts to less artistic forms of self-defense.

A couple years ago, my sister and brother-in-law spotted King at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. (With his spiky black hair, weirdly wide eyes, and semiskeletal features, he's pretty distinctive.) Thinking that I might like an autograph, they approached him and said politely, "Excuse me -- are you Stephen King?" A little intrusive, perhaps, but not terribly; my siblings are polite people, and distinctly non-threatening.

King looked at them, uttered a flat "No," and turned away. End of conversation.

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