On the heels of my strange list of books I'm not as familiar with, I would like to offer another unusual list. These are works I'm not familiar with because I haven't had opportunity! But, simply, these are works I'd like to read.
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1. The Plant. Who cares if it's like Little Shop of Horrors, I'd like to see Kings version.
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2. All of the original version of the Cannibals. It was so unlike Under The Dome, I was interested in where it was going.
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3. The Aftermath. This was the first full length novel King wrote. It is the story of an atomic war that has destroyed a large part of the world's population. Unfortunately, I can't read it because the manuscript is deposited in the Special Collections archive of the Raymond Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, and access requires written permission from King. George Beahm, who has seen the novel, has said that it is very much like a Bachman book.
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4. I Was A Teenage Grave Robber. This is King's first published short story. Don't know where you'd find a copy -- and if I did find a copy, the sad things is that I wouldn't read it. No, that's the kind of stuff that gets saved. I griped at my wife when she read by first edition hardback of The Dark Tower. "I had to know how it was going to come out," she protested. Still, the cover got a wrinkle. Concerning "I was a Teenage Grave Robber" -- I don't know that it's ever been reprinted anywhere. Reminds me, hate to say, of a certain film originally titled "Grave Robbers from outer space" or renamed, "Plan 9 from Outer Space."
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5. Sword of Darkness. I first became familiar with this work from The art of Darkness, by Douglas Winter. However, the best description of the work appears in The Lost Work of Stephen King, by Stephen J. Spignesi. He describes this as the longest of Kings unpublished novels. And again, he rates it as "impossible" to get a copy. It is a 150,000 word, 485 page novel about a race riot in a big city called Harding. Spignesi says that it is really about a boy named Arni Kalowski (and yes, Spignesi says right off the bat that this guy is a prototype for Arnie Cunningham in Christine.) Anyway, I would love to read this.
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I'll stop here. So this is really a top 5 list. I do highly recommend Spignesi's book. Interesting even to read about books he rates as "impossible" to find, now published. (Blaze comes immediately to mind). So, with Stephen King, there is always hope that someday this stuff will be published.
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