Newsday from New York, New York • 146

txevsew! Stephen King shows his range Stephen King with his youngest child, Owen and, keeps on writing stories that have appeared in magazines and are part of a long work King doesn't expect to complete for years, issued this summer by Donald M. Grant, a Rhode Island publisher. The $60 signed deluxe edition of 500 is sold out. The regular $20 edition of 10,000 is nearly gone. There will be no more.

The publication was a friendly arrangement for a mall house that specializes in elegant editions of supernatural and science fiction. King, who will be 35 in September, started life as an impoverished kid from Maine and worked at a lot of unfulfilling jobs janitor, textile mill bagger, library ahelver before his writing began to sufF port his family. As might be expected, he eqjoys a By Nina King Newsday Book Editor "DIFFERENT SEASONS, by Stephen King (Viking, 527 In the afterword to this collection of four novellas, Stephen King takes the critical worda right out of the reviewers mouth. "My stuff, he writes, "is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit it) downright clumsy. True indeed.

But it is also true that Kings "stuff has remarkable narrative energy and that it is animated by an imagination that seems to touch dark, secret places in almost every reader. Consider the second of these four stories, "Apt Pupil. Todd Bowden, age 13, knocks on the door of an old man who lives alone in his southern California neighborhood. Through a series of coincidences, Todd has identified the old man as an escaped Nazi war criminal, "Kurt Dussander, the Blood-Fiend of Pa-tin, a concentration camp commandant Todd is a fresh-faced, all-American boy whose hobby is reading about World War II; he is also a perverse extortionist In exchange for keeping quiet about Diissanders past Todd wants "to hear all about it: "The firing squads. The gas chambers.

The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff. The premise of "Apt Pupil the twisted, mutually dependent relationship that develops between Dussander and Todd is Stephen King at his imaginative and creepy best But, unfortunately, the story also demonstrates Kings weaknesses: his clumsiness, his tendency to go too far.

Not content to stick with the psychological horror of that relationship, King piles contemporary corpses on those of the historical past and, by his sheer excessiveness, draws the readers attention to the holes in the plot and to the many coincidences on which it hinges. "Apt Pupil is a horror story without occultism, and only one of the four tales in this volume features the supernatural chills for which the author of "The Shining and "Carrie is famous. Curiously, its the least successful of the four. Called The Breathing Method, its a story-within-a-story. The framing narrative concerns a mysterious gentlemens club, whose members gather periodically to tell stories.

(The dubs motto is "It is the tale, not he who tells it, and it seems to exist in a timeless other dimension, the eternal present of the fiction writer.) The stoiy-within-a-story is a particularly gruesome tale about decapitation and a young womans awesome dedication to Lamaze-style natural childbirth. The juxtaposition of the two stories doesn't really add much to either. The two remaining novellas are by far the best; they are also the least like Kings other work. One of them, "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, is an ingratiating tale about false imprisonment and an ingenious jailbreak that takes 27 years, a Rita Hayworth poster and a knowledge of geology. The other, The Body, is an ambitious, awkwardly constructed but evocative and deeply felt story of boyhood.

Set during a summer heatwave in rural Maine in 1960, "The Body chronicles the journey of four 12-year-old-boys in search of the body of the title (that of a boy from another town who, they have learned, has been killed by a train). In the course of this adolescent odyssey, this four friends elh with a junkyard dog, are attacked by leeches and come close to disaster crossing a railroad trestle. But, beneath the surface, more important adventures are taking place as two of the four youths taka the first steps towards maturity and towards an inevitable parting of the ways. Like King himself, Gordie, the narrator of The Body, grows up to be a writer of horror stories, one who will "parlay all those childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars. It is haroto avoid reading this story as autobiography, as an attempt by King to probe the origins of his work.

Filled with nostalgia for a "green nd brown summer of boyhood and with darker memories of a dead boys "upward staring eye, "The Body is about the writers art as a way iff transforming and thereby controlling the unruly terrors of real life, In Sundas book section: "Haig: The Generals Progress" by Roger Morris By Helen Dudar The great American growth industry known as Stephen King has been busier than usual lately. On casual inspection, the results might seem like a glut, but not to the legions of addicts who cant wait to be scared, haunted, unhinged or, at the very least, entertained by one of the best young writers spinning horror tales for mass audiences. Beginning right now, theres something for any taste and any purse. It will all make a richer man of King, who is already so rich he can afford to cut his price on principle. The main King item, "Different Seasons, a collection of four previously unpublished stories, is his ninth book of fiction since 1973.

Although everybody knows that collections of novellas dont sell, the Book-of-the-Month Club paid a half-million dollars for it and Viking ordered a first printing of 190,000. The volume fulfills a three-book contract for which New American Library, Kings primary publisher, paid $2.9 million five years ago. For his next novel, "Christine, coming in the spring of 1983, King asked and received an advance of $1 each from NAL and Viking. King says he decided on the token advance during a trip to the West Coast when he happened to drive by Judith Krauts home. was grossed out by that business where she got something like $3 million for 'Princess Daisy, he Bays.

"Most writers are making less a year than the guy who sweeps up the offices at Doubleday. Its not right. Its not fair. I can no longer justify taking a huge advance when I'm not starving. These advances have become increasingly odious to me.

What did Judy Krantz need that for? Shes already got a swimming pool According to his agent, Kirby McCauley, King also believed that postponing his own earnings might open up money for other authors. No less important was the fact that "Steve is tired of being told he writes strictly for money. The critics have sometimes been cruel, and the unkind-naan has hurt "You can say to yourself, don't really care, King says. "But I do. I work hard I dont need somebody to say, Gee Steve, that was great But I would like somebody to say, Okay, you worked hard.

You have to get past this thing where if youre making a lot of money, the work cant be good. Prolific authors are also subject to suspicion and, this season, King gives new manning to the word. Item: "Craepwow, a trade paperback comic book of five tales written as an original screenplay for George Romero, the horror film director. The movie, with King playing one of the featured roles, is coming in October. The comic book appeared thin month.

Item: The paperback edition of last years bestselling "Cujo, to be issued next month in a first printing of 2.3 million. Item: The Gunslinger, a collection of related few conspicuous fruits of success: a big Victorian place in Bangor, a hilltop, lakeside summer house in western Maine; all the computer games he and his three children can handle, and three automobiles. He also eqjoys a singularly constructive affliction: He must write every day. Failure to placate the compulsion produces Immmnia and irritability. Right now, he is involved in an unusual collaboration.

King and his friend Pater Straub, author of the best-selling "Ghost Story and a resident of Connecticut, are working together on a scary novel without ever leaving their homes. The joint venture is sustained through word processors linked by telephones. They expect to finish The Talisman next March for publication later in the year. Without ever writing another word, unthinkable though that may be, King could keep publishing new stuff right through the decade. He works fast and steadily and squirrels away finished manuscripts to ripen like fine cheese.

"Christine, the story of a haunted car, was completed in 1978. He has five more novels sitting around mellowing. He remembers a couple of them as "awful, but he thinks he has a big one thats good, real good, 1,200 pages of sheer terror, Helen Dudar writes frequently about Index to features 1.