Stephen King

Stephen King’s written several thousand books, many of them several thousand pages long: scientific and philosophical treatises, a forty-six volume encyclopedia of an entirely imaginary universe, plus cookbooks, home-repair manuals, and unorthodox handbooks on child rearing. There’s also nearly a dozen memoirs, each largely contradicting the others, not to mention persistent rumors in Internet chat rooms naming him as the pseudonymous and purportedly unreliable biographer of public figures as diverse as erstwhile Cars frontman Ric Ocasek and former Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson. And then, of course, he’s written novels about psychopaths and vampires and that sort of very popular thing. He was once run over by a car and nearly killed, and may have written a book about that. But we know for sure that he has a new book, Lisey’s Story, about someone named Lisey whose husband is dead. It’s kind of a romantic ghost story and features a blurb from Nora Roberts, who knows about that sort of thing.