Stephen King

In the old monster movies, one of the more charming rituals was The Explanation."My God, Professor Williams, you mean that thing mutated from radiation and grew as large as a city block?!"Or, "Good heavens, Gridley, it was frozen in ice at the polar cap for 50 million years, and now it's been melted by our atom bomb and ... it's alive!?"But that was the '50s, and we believed things had to mak sense. In the '90s, we know they never will -- there's simply too much random violence and ugliness in the world -- and so such moments of inspired scientific mumbo-jumbo are no more, as witness "Stephen King's Graveyard Shift."

"The past is obdurate. It doesn't want to change. " The past is also a dangerous, fickle place - and woe to anyone who dares alter it. That's the mantra coursing through "11/22/63. " Stephen   King's  mammoth, generous and thrilling novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is Jake Epping, a divorced, 35-year-old high school English teacher from Lisbon, Maine, who discovers a time-travel portal in the pantry of a neighborhood diner.

To get the chance to meet her favorite author, Sally DeWitt had to overcome more obstacles than, well, a character in a Stephen King novel. The 60-year-old woman woke up at 3 a.m. Wednesday so she could drive from her home in Aberdeen to Dundalk, where the best-selling novelist was scheduled to appear that evening. And it really was a dark and stormy night. "I'm an avid horror fan," she says. "My boyfriend woke up, and it was raining, so he thinks I'm totally nuts." DeWitt secured her wrist band - number 116 of the 400 who were guaranteed signed books - but her adventures had barely begun.

Atop my messy desk lies a thick book with a powder blue cover and the riveting title: "Consolidated Transportation Program Draft: 2011 State Report of Transportation FY 2011-2016. " No, it's not exactly great beach-side reading, which might be why the Maryland Department of Transportation releases each year's draft CTP in September, just as the secretary and top aides embark on their annual "road show" to the 23 counties and Baltimore city. But if you're morbidly obsessed with transportation and where the money you paid in gas taxes, registration fees, titling taxes, tolls and other revenue-raisers is going, the book is a fascinating snapshot of how our state proposes to spend almost $9.4 billion on capital projects over the next six years.

Stephen King is what got Richard Chizmar, owner of Cemetery Dance Publications, into the business of publishing horror and suspense books. Now King is his business. Chizmar read one of King's short stories in high school — "The Monkey," about a cymbal-banging toy possessed by an evil spirit — and became an instant fan. When he started his company in 1988, Chizmar would send the author copies of magazines and books he published and slowly developed a professional and personal relationship with him. That connection led King to choose Chizmar's firm of five employees to publish his latest book, "Blockade Billy."

"The past is obdurate. It doesn't want to change. " The past is also a dangerous, fickle place - and woe to anyone who dares alter it. That's the mantra coursing through "11/22/63. " Stephen   King's  mammoth, generous and thrilling novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is Jake Epping, a divorced, 35-year-old high school English teacher from Lisbon, Maine, who discovers a time-travel portal in the pantry of a neighborhood diner.

"Rose Madder," by Stephen King. New York: Viking. 420 pages. $25.95 Rose Madder is a book you'll love . . . and hate.It is a sinister tale of a vile cop - a slayer of the helpless - and his pursuit of his wife, whom he intends to torture, and torture some more before killing her. The wickedness of Norman Daniels, the cop, is extraordinary. His is no mere meanness. He relishes his killings. He enjoys their brutality.His wife, Rose McClendon Daniels, is the heroine. Finally fed up with Norman's beatings, she flees, trying to find a new life in a new town.

IN SCENE One of "Golden Years" -- oops, make that "Stephen King's Golden Years" -- an actor obviously made up to look much older than he is comes to work as a janitor at some sort of agricultural research facility that has the security of a nuclear silo.Though he is clearly a bright, alert fellow, there is much talk of his advanced age -- nearly 71. And, a few scenes down the line, he is even forced into retirement by a bad guy military boss citing a close failure on an eye exam, as if eagle eyesight is important for the clean-up crew.

"Stephen King's Sometimes They Come Back" is a horror story for grown-ups.This spooky film, to air at 9 tonight on WBAL-TV (Channel 11), depends more on teen thugs than on ghouls and murder for its impact. It pushes a bunch of the right buttons, the biggest of which is the fear adults have of gangs of boys who wear leather jackets and don't seem to care about anything at all.Here's the story: A high school teacher, Jim Norman (Tim Matheson), returns to his hometown after 27 years away. When Norman was 9, he and his older brother, Wayne, were stopped by four punks in a car. Wayne and three of the punks were killed by a passing train.

The rats are in the cornfield.If you don't know what that expression means today, there's a good chance you will tomorrow. Such is the power of Event Television to seize the popular imagination overnight with new characters, catch phrases and even worlds. And it looks as if ABC has itself an event and a half in Stephen King's "The Stand.""The Stand" airs in four parts on WJZ, Channel 13 -- tonight, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. each night.For the four or five people in the mid-Atlantic region who have not read King's best seller, you're not going to need a lot of background to get into the sprawling, eight-hour, four-night epic that reinvents America in a manner beyond even the wildest dreams of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Stephen King is what got Richard Chizmar, owner of Cemetery Dance Publications, into the business of publishing horror and suspense books. Now King is his business. Chizmar read one of King's short stories in high school — "The Monkey," about a cymbal-banging toy possessed by an evil spirit — and became an instant fan. When he started his company in 1988, Chizmar would send the author copies of magazines and books he published and slowly developed a professional and personal relationship with him. That connection led King to choose Chizmar's firm of five employees to publish his latest book, "Blockade Billy."

To get the chance to meet her favorite author, Sally DeWitt had to overcome more obstacles than, well, a character in a Stephen King novel. The 60-year-old woman woke up at 3 a.m. Wednesday so she could drive from her home in Aberdeen to Dundalk, where the best-selling novelist was scheduled to appear that evening. And it really was a dark and stormy night. "I'm an avid horror fan," she says. "My boyfriend woke up, and it was raining, so he thinks I'm totally nuts." DeWitt secured her wrist band - number 116 of the 400 who were guaranteed signed books - but her adventures had barely begun.

To get the chance to meet her favorite author, Sally DeWitt had to overcome more obstacles than, well, a character in a Stephen King novel. The 60-year-old woman woke up at 3 a.m. Wednesday so she could drive from her home in Aberdeen to Dundalk, where the best-selling novelist was scheduled to appear that evening. And it really was a dark and stormy night. "I'm an avid horror fan," she says. "My boyfriend woke up, and it was raining, so he thinks I'm totally nuts." DeWitt secured her wrist band - number 116 of the 400 who were guaranteed signed books - but her adventures had barely begun.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a magnum opus about a haunted gunslinger on a quest for a mysterious spire, stretched out over 22 years, seven novels and 4,272 pages of eerie adventure. But here's the really spooky thing: King fans want more. Now they're about to get it, although King is taking his readers to a new place that might scare some off. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, the Marvel Comics series, launches this week, and more than 100 retailers are opening for midnight release parties.

Lisey's Story Stephen King Simon & Schuster / 528 pages / $28 No more apologies. For years, I and many other serious readers have had to mumble their love of Stephen King as if it were a unmentionable fetish, a peccadillo that dare not speak its name in polite - read "literary" - company. No more. King, whose horror novels, stories, films and e-books have kept millions of readers up at night for more than 30 years, has crossed over. No, not into the other realms of which he writes so convincingly (The Shining is possibly the scariest novel ever written)

Cell Stephen King Scribner / 384 pages / $26.95 Oh, the horror, the horror. Stephen King has returned to his glorious, gory roots with his latest opus, Cell, a not-so-veiled assault on the techno-culture most of us claim to be revulsed by, even as we chat away on our cellular phones and text message our BlackBerries, oblivious to real people right next to us. And if you are thinking King (in Christine) and others have covered this ground before, well, read on. Imagine a sun-drenched afternoon much like any other in a city much like any other.

Stephen King begins his first nonfiction book since "Danse Macabre" in 1981 by promising that it will not be "an autobiography." Instead, he says it will be "a kind of curriculum vitae -- my attempt to show how one writer was formed." The fulfillment is "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" (Scribner, 288 pages, $25), an uneven but very engaging romp through his breakneck, pop-lit superstar career, woven into a surprisingly neat writing lesson. King is almost boyishly forthright, often mock self-deprecatorily.

Can even Stephen King keep America scared for six hours?Probably not, but he sure gives it his best shot with "Stephen King's The Shining," a three-night sweeps-month extravaganza debuting on ABC tomorrow night at 9.A faithful adaptation of King's breakout novel (no wonder; he wrote the script), "The Shining" includes some genuinely scary moments, excellent performances, a script that touches on horrors both man-made and supernatural, and a surprisingly effective choice of weapon -- who would have thought a croquet mallet could be so dangerous?

DAWN BROKE cool and partly cloudy in Boston yesterday, as if it were just like any other brisk autumn morning in New England. It wasn't, of course. The Boston Red Sox, once left for dead like the last Ben Affleck/J-Lo romantic comedy, were still shockingly alive - the only team in the history of baseball to force a Game 7 after falling behind by three in a best-of-seven playoff series. Can't imagine how it must feel to be a long-suffering Sox fan on the threshold of history, but here's a slightly twisted, chronological look at the hours leading up to last night's cataclysmic American League championship showdown at Yankee Stadium: 6:45 a.m.: Author and Red Sox fan Stephen King wakes up. Walls are bleeding again.

After playing a pirate captain in the Caribbean and a blinded, pistol-wielding rogue CIA agent in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Johnny Depp takes a quieter turn in his next film, Secret Window, written and directed by Panic Room screenwriter David Koepp based on the Stephen King novella, "Secret Window, Secret Garden." In many ways it's a one-actor story, primarily concentrated on an isolated writer with a little too much time on his hands. In the film, which opens tomorrow, Depp plays successful writer Mort Rainey, who secludes himself in an isolated cabin by a lake after he discovers that his wife (Maria Bello)