Blood and Smoke including 1408 - Stephen
King read by Stephen King Audio Book CD
Brand New Unabridged 3 CDs 4 Hours
Stephen King reads three of his classic short stories including 1408, now a feature film!
Enter a nightmarish mindscape of unrelenting horror and shocking revelations as the greatest storyteller of our time takes us inside a world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction. It is the world of the smoker.
Stephen King's audio original story collection blood and smoke features the tale 1408, now a Dimension Films motion picture starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson.
Also inside are In the Deathroom and Lunch at the Gotham Café, both horrific tales of withdrawal, desperation, and unfiltered suspense.
Stephen King has forced us to confront our greatest fears. He has guided us through the depths of our imagination to places we never would have ventured alone. Now, in Blood and Smoke, he takes us inside a world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction. It is the world of the smoker.
In this audio-only collection, the now politically incorrect habit plays a key role in the fates of three different men in three unabridged stories of unfiltered suspense.
In Lunch at the Gotham Café, Steve Davis is suffering through intense withdrawal -- from both nicotine and his wife. His desperation for a cigarette and for his ex are almost too much to bear, but that's nothing compared to the horrors that await him at a trendy Manhattan restaurant.
In 1408, Mike Enslin, bestselling author of "true" ghost stories, decides to spend the night in New York City's most haunted hotel room. But he must live to write about it without the help of his ex best-friends, his trusty smokes.
And in In the Deathroom, a man named Fletcher is held captive in a South American stronghold. His captors will use any tortuous means necessary to extract the information they want from him. His only hope lies with his last request -- one last cigarette, please.
A carton full of chills and thrills, Blood and Smoke is classic Stephen King. The most mesmerizing storyteller of our time is at his inventive and compelling best.
About the Author Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author best known for his highly successful horror novels. A 2003 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, King's books have been enormously successful, and are often featured on bestseller lists.
King's stories frequently involve as an unremarkable protagonist such as a middle-class family, a child, or many times, a writer. The characters are involved in their everyday lives, but the supernatural encounters and extraordinary circumstances escalate over the course of the story. King evinces a thorough knowledge of the horror genre, as shown in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, which chronicles several decades of notable works in both literature and cinema. He also writes stories outside the horror genre, including the novellas The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (later adapted as the movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, respectively), as well as The Green Mile and Hearts in Atlantis.
Stephen King also wrote under the name of Richard Bachman.
Biography
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine and is of Scots-Irish ancestry. When King was two years old, his father deserted his family. Ruth raised King and his adopted older brother David by herself, sometimes under great financial strain. The family moved to Ruth's home town of Durham, Maine but also spent brief periods in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Stratford, Connecticut. King attended Durham Elementary School and Lisbon High School. He grew to stand 6'4" tall.
King has been writing since an early age. When in school, he wrote stories based on movies he had seen recently and sold them to his friends. This was not popular among his teachers, and he was forced to return his profits when this was discovered. The stories were copied using a mimeo machine that his brother David used to copy a newspaper, "Dave's Rag," which he self-published. "Dave's Rag" was about local events, and King would often contribute. At around the age of thirteen, King discovered a box of his father's old books at his aunt's house, mainly horror and science fiction. He was immediately hooked on these genres.
From 1966 to 1971, King studied English at the University of Maine at Orono, Maine. At the university, he wrote a column titled "King's Garbage Truck" in the university magazine. He also met Tabitha Spruce; they married in 1971. King took on odd jobs to pay for his studies, including one at an industrial laundry. He used the experience to write the short story The Mangler. The campus period in his life is readily evident in the second part of Hearts in Atlantis.
After finishing his university studies with a Bachelor of Arts in English and obtaining a certificate to teach high school, King taught English at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this time, he and his family lived in a trailer. He wrote short stories (most were published in men's magazines) to help make ends meet. As told in the introduction in Carrie, if one of his kids got a cold, Tabitha would joke, "Come on Steve, think of a monster". King also developed a drinking problem which stayed with him for over a decade.
During this period, King began a number of novels. One of his first ideas was of a young girl with psychic powers. However, he grew discouraged, and threw it into the trash. Tabitha later rescued it and encouraged him to finish it. After completing the novel, he titled it Carrie, sent it to Doubleday, and more or less forgot about it. Later, he received an offer to buy it with a ,500 advance (not a large advance for a novel, even at that time). Shortly after, the value of Carrie was realized with the paperback rights being sold for 0,000 (with 0,000 of it going to the publisher). Shortly after its release, his mother died of uterine cancer. She had the novel read to her before she died.
In On Writing, King admits that at this time he was consistently drunk and that he was an alcoholic for well over a decade. He even admits that he was drunk during his mother's funeral while delivering the eulogy. He states that he had based the alcoholic father in The Shining on himself, though he did not admit it for several years.
Shortly after the publication of The Tommyknockers, King's family and friends finally intervened, dumping his trash on the rug in front of him to show him the evidence of his own addictions: beer cans, cigarette butts, grams of cocaine, Xanax, Valium, NyQuil. He sought help, and quit all forms of drugs and alcohol in the late 1980s.
King fans note that the relative wealth of King's characters has risen through the decades, but not as precipitously as King's wealth itself:
* His earliest works (Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, as well as much of the work in Night Shift), deal with working-class families struggling from paycheck to paycheck in minimum-wage jobs.
* Late-1980s work involved middle-class people like teachers and authors
* Late-1990s work sometimes dealt with airplane pilots, writers and others who can frequently afford a second homestead.
Stephen King's books have influenced many writers of our time.
Car accident
In the summer of 1999, King was in the middle of writing On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. At the time, he had finished the memoir section and had abandoned the book for nearly eighteen months, unsure of how to proceed or whether to bother. King reports that it was the first book that he'd abandoned since writing The Stand decades earlier. He had just decided to continue the book. On June 17, he had written up a list of questions that he was frequently asked about writing, as well as some that he wished he would be asked about it; on June 18, he had written four pages of the section on writing.
On June 19, about 4:30 PM, he was walking on the right shoulder of Route 5 in North Lovell. Driver Bryan Smith, distracted by an unrestrained Rottweiler moving in the back of his 1985 Dodge Caravan, struck King, who landed in a depression about 14 feet (4 meters) from the pavement of Route 5.
Oxford County Sheriff's deputy Matt Baker recorded that witnesses said the driver was not speeding or reckless.[1] Baker also reported that King was struck from behind. King's official website, however, states that this was incorrect, and that King was walking facing traffic.
King was conscious enough to give the deputy phone numbers to contact his family, but in considerable pain. The author was first transported to Northern Cumberland Hospital and then flown by helicopter to Central Maine Hospital. His injuries - a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of the right leg, scalp laceration, and a broken hip - kept him in Central Main Medical Center until July 9, almost three weeks later.
Earlier that year King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel where one of the characters dies in an automobile accident. Of the eerie similarities, King says that he tries "not to make too much of it." King's 1987 novel, Misery, is also of a writer who experiences severe injuries in an auto accident, but that novel focuses on the mental ill-health of a devoted fan who nurses the writer.
After five operations in ten days and physical therapy, King resumed work on On Writing in July, though his hip was still shattered and he could only sit for about forty minutes before the pain became intolerable.
King's lawyer and two others purchased Smith's van for ,500, reportedly to avoid it appearing on eBay. Smith, a disabled construction worker, died in his sleep in September 2000 at the age of 43.
Recent Years
In 2000, King published a serialised novel "The Plant" over the internet, bypassing print publication. Sales were unsuccessful, and he abandoned the project. In 2002, King announced he would stop writing, apparently motivated in part by frustration with his injuries, which had made sitting uncomfortable and reduced his stamina.
"I'm writing but I'm writing at a much slower pace than previously and I think that if I come up with something really, really good, I would be perfectly willing to publish it because that still feels like the final act of the creative process, publishing it so people can read it and you can get feedback and people can talk about it with each other and with you, the writer, but the force of my invention has slowed down a lot over the years and that's as it should be. I'm not a kid of 25 anymore and I'm not a young middle-aged man of 35 anymore — I'm 55 years old and I have grandchildren, two new puppies to house-train and I have a lot of things to do besides writing and that in and of itself is a wonderful thing but writing is still a big, important part of my life and of everyday."
Since 2003, King has provided his take on pop culture in a column appearing on the back page of Entertainment Weekly, usually every third week. The column is called "The Pop of King", a reference to "The King of Pop", Michael Jackson.
In October 2005, King signed a deal with Marvel Comics, to publish a seven-issue, miniseries spinoff of The Dark Tower series called The Gunslinger Born. The series, which focuses on a young Roland Deschain, is plotted by Robin Furth, dialogued by Peter David, and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Jae Lee. The first issue was published on February 7, 2007, and because of its connection with King, David, Lee, and Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada appeared at a midnight signing at a Times Square, New York comic book store to promote it. The work had sold over 200,000 copies by March 2007.
In June 2006, King appeared on the first installment of Amazon Fishbowl, a live web-program hosted by Bill Maher.
King, a long time supporter of small publishing, has recently allowed the publication of two past novels in limited edition form. The Green Mile and Colorado Kid will receive special treatment from two small publishing houses. Both books will be produced and be signed by both King and the artist contributing work to the book. Half of King's published work has been re-published in limited (signed) edition format.
On February 14, 2007, Joblo.com announced that plans were underway for Lost co-creator J. J. Abrams to do an adaptation of King's epic Dark Tower series.
In June 2007, King's novel Blaze, which was written in the early 1970s, under his long-time pseudonym Richard Bachman, was published. He is also finishing the novel Duma Key and writing a play with John Mellencamp titled Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.
On April 20, 2007, Entertainment Weekly asked King if he felt there was a correlation between Seung-Hui Cho's writing and the Virginia Tech massacre. King stated, "Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing would have raised red flags, and I'm certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them" and "Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, 'just mean.' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a**hole who went DEFCON-1." King felt that Cho's work had issues because of its themes and the lack of writing ability and a meaningful story.
On August 15, 2007, King was mistaken for a vandal in an Alice Springs bookstore. King signed six books in total, after a customer thought she had caught a vandal scribbling in volumes in the fiction section and reported him to store manager Bev Ellis.
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