My siblings wouldn't have been offended if King had declined their request for an autograph. What startled them was that he was rude and dishonest to people who, for all he knew, had done nothing other than contribute to his children's college tuition fund. Unless you're in the Sex Pistols, showing contempt for your fans is never good marketing strategy.

For any writer, however, death is a great career move, and in June 1999 King almost obliged. While walking down a country road in Maine, he was hit by a van driven by one Bryan Smith -- a very King-like name -- who was, at the time he hit King, reaching into the backseat to push his Rottweiler, Bullet, away from a cooler of meat. (His other Rottweiler was named Pistol.)

In King's subsequent recounting of the story, Smith was semi-coherent when he came to find the man he'd hit, appearing not to realize what he'd done. With his normal name, odd behavior and scary dogs, Smith resembled one of Stephen King's deranged characters. Or one of his fans. Increasingly, they're the same thing.

The bad news is that King was nearly killed. The good news, for King, was that the experience prompted the arbiters of elite culture to consider him with a new generosity. A recovering King became the critics' darling. Soon King was mingling with a more sophisticated breed of fan -- not the kind who picks up a cheap paperback at the supermarket and throws it into her cart with the Jif and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but the kind of reader who might avidly devour the New Yorker profile of King, then hide his books when guests came over for supper.

In 2000, the New Yorker also invited King to grace its 75th anniversary series of author readings. Following trendy short story writer Matt Klamm at the grunge-chic Bowery Ballroom, King made what he said was his first public appearance after the accident. Leaning heavily on a cane, he hobbled on stage looking frail and vulnerable and surprisingly old. The audience gave him (rather ironically, I thought) a standing ovation. King promptly announced that the battered glasses he was wearing were the same ones that he'd worn on the day of the accident. They'd been knocked off in the collision and landed, strangely, in the front seat of Smith's van. The crowd loved this gruesome detail -- as King knew it would. I couldn't help but wonder if it were true.

Not coincidentally, the same tidbit shows up in "On Writing," a combination writing manual/literary biography King published in 2000. "The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken," King wrote. "They are the lenses I'm wearing now, as I write this." What, I thought, did those glasses represent to King?

Being hit by a van could have been -- should have been -- King's midlife heart attack, the sign from above that tells the victim, Hey, there's more to life than the daily grind. Instead, in "On Writing," King details how, five weeks after the accident, he began writing again. He set up his trusty Powerbook, propped himself up next to a fan, and wrote for an hour and 40 minutes before the pain in his hip got too great. "When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair."

Although I suspect it's a composite story, an artificial narrative, it's certainly a moving one; King hadn't gone five weeks without writing since, probably, he knew how to write, and the experience of sitting before the keyboard and staring at an empty screen after such an unwanted interruption must have been terrifying. The description of it -- as with all of King's portrayals of the writer's life -- certainly is.

The work that followed, however, was less successfully realized. His first novel after the accident was "Dreamcatcher," the story of four men hunting in Maine woods when aliens invade. The men fight back, using telekinesis that they have possessed since adolescence -- traces of "Carrie" -- when they intervened to save a mentally retarded child from bullies.

"Dreamcatcher" is over 700 pages long, and it is incomprehensible. It reads like a jumbled, slapped-together collage of King's past work. The aliens? "Tommyknockers." Lost in the woods? "Tom Gordon" and "The Railroad." The mysterious government forces who converge on the area to eradicate the invaders and all who've seen them? "Firestarter" and "The Stand." It's all been done before, by King himself -- and better.

"Dreamcatcher" also suffers from embarrassingly flimsy efforts at characterization. The protagonists' names are Beaver, Henry, Jonesy and Pete, which is taking the Everyman thing a little too far. It's just lazy. These men have been barely introduced to us when the action kicks in, and when Beav and Pete get knocked off in the first hundred pages or so, it seems as if King himself doesn't care about their fate. (And if he doesn't, why should we?)

We're left with Jonesy and Henry, who are so exactly alike -- and so like so many other King heroes -- that I couldn't tell them apart through the next 500 pages. I'd keep reminding myself: "Henry, he's the one with the alien in his head, that's right." Well, no. That was Jonesy.

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