On Not Being Stephen King

Stephen King and I have quite a lot in common. We’re both writers, for a start – although, admittedly, his sales are rather better than mine. We both have names that mean the same thing, and that begin with the same letter: he’s just before me on the shelf half-way along the ‘Fiction’ wall in your local Waterstone’s, with Koestler and Kureishi following after. We’ve also taught – or at least written about – Creative Writing (I found his On Writing an invaluable teaching aid).

Then there’s the fact that we’ve both published novels with the same title. His version of The Dark Tower consists of a series of seven novels; mine is just the one. But it does mean we’ve both been inspired by the same source – Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ – even though Stephen King’s way of developing the idea and mine couldn’t be more different.

But it does start to feel a bit like, well, a haunting, when even Crouch End, where my publisher, Arbuthnot Books, is based, turns out to be the title of a horror story King published in 1980, in which that blameless North London district is found to be the portal to another dimension, through which assorted spooks and monsters regularly visit. And I thought it was just Bob Dylan who was occasionally spotted in Crouch End.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a great admirer of my near-namesake’s work. Like most people, I’ve shivered over Carrie and The Shining, and winced at the savage treatment meted out to the writer-protagonist of Misery. I think King writes very well about being a writer, as matter of fact. His 1998 novel, Bag of Bones, contains as good an account of what it’s like to suffer from writer’s block as I’ve ever read.

It’s just that it’s got to stop – this confusion between my life and his. I’m beginning to feel like a pale shadow of a world-famous writer, and it’s not doing my morale any good. It’s almost like the plot of a Borges story – or a Stephen King story, come to that – about a writer, possessed by the spirit of another writer, who keeps typing out the same thing over and over… Or has that already been done?