Stephen Kings decides to try a different genre: Historical Fiction...CoRyAnN

Stephen King is afraid of cellphones. Insects. Elevators. The number 13. Unhinged fans.

"I just write about what scares me," Mr. King said during an interview at his home in Bangor, Maine. "When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'Think of the worst thing that you can, and if you say it out loud then it won't come true.' And that's probably been the basis of my career."

For nearly 40 years, Mr. King has trafficked in horror and fantasy tales that spring from his freakishly fertile imagination. He has published 50 novels and written some 400 short stories, selling more than 350 million copies world-wide. Now, for the first time, he's grounded a novel in historical fact, creating a chilling bogeyman based on one of America's most notorious villains: Lee Harvey Oswald.



Mr. King pored over historical documents and newspaper archives and toured the site of the former Texas School Book Depository. .His new novel, "11/22/63," set to be published Nov. 8, follows Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher in a small town in contemporary Maine. Jake travels through a mysterious time portal to 1958, aiming to stop Oswald from killing President John F. Kennedy. Set almost entirely in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the narrative tracks Oswald's movements in the months and days leading up to the Dallas shooting, and features historical figures such as James Hosty, the FBI agent who investigated Oswald; Bonnie Ray Williams, Oswald's co-worker at the Texas Book Depository, and George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian geologist and friend of the assassin.

"I've never tried to write anything like this before," said Mr. King, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt. "It was really strange at first, like breaking in a new pair of shoes."

His foray into fact signals a new chapter for the 64-year-old novelist, who has sought to establish himself as more than just a horror writer in recent years. Mr. King certainly doesn't lack readers, but he wants new ones.

"This might be a book where we really have a chance to get an audience who's not my ordinary audience," he said. "Instead of people who read horror stories, people who read 'The Help' or 'People of the Book' might like this book, if they can get the message," he added, referring to best-histselling orical novels by Kathryn Stockett and Geraldine Brooks.

Getting the message out to new readers might be tough. Mr. King recalled a woman who approached him in a supermarket in Florida, where he has a winter home.

"She said, 'I know who you are, you're that writer, you write those horror stories, and I said, "Yes, ma'am, I guess," and she said, 'I don't read that kind of thing. I respect what you do but I don't read those. I like uplifting things like that 'Shawshank Redemption,' '' Mr. King recalled. "I said, 'I wrote that one, too,' and she goes, 'No, you didn't,' and she just went on her way."

Mr. King and his publisher, Scribner, face an odd challenge as they unleash an elaborate marketing campaign to promote "11/22/63." How do you rebrand one of the world's most famous and successful living authors? Scribner is targeting history buffs with book-giveaway promotions on bio.com and history sites. To reach news junkies, the publisher bought ad time on 11 p.m. news programs in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The 30-second ad, which will also run on the CNN airport network and on the A&E and Syfy networks, shows archival footage of Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, with a voice-over that says, "What if instead of justwatching history, you could change it?" Mr. King's book tour will include appearances at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, the site Oswald fired from. The Dallas museum is preparing to host 1,000 people.

Mr. King helped plan the marketing strategy. An unusual joint venture with Scribner grants him greater control than most authors over how his books are packaged and sold. He gets a relatively small advance for a best-selling author—in the mid-seven-figure range—and then splits the production and marketing costs and the profits roughly down the middle. He typically publishes one to two books a year.

"He's like a different order of human being," said Scribner publisher Susan Moldow.

Mr. King considered retiring nearly a decade ago, a few years after he was struck by a van in a near-fatal accident. Since then, he has entered a remarkably fertile period. On a recent morning at his Bangor home—a dark-red, Gothic-looking house behind a tall metal gate decorated with bats and dragons and a huge spiderweb—he was working on the 12th draft of "Ghost Brothers of Darkland County," a musical he wrote with John Mellencamp that will open in Atlanta next spring. He recently finished the eighth book in his 3,700-plus page "Dark Tower" fantasy series, which Scribner will release next year. He's 500 pages into a sequel to his 1977 classic "The Shining," about a possessed writer in a haunted hotel and his psychic son, Danny. In the sequel, Danny is grown up and working in a nursing home, where he specializes in helping people as they die.



. "It takes him less time to write a book than it takes me to edit it, or even read it," said his agent and long-time editor Chuck Verrill, who described Mr. King's discipline as a form of "obsessive compulsive disorder."

Mr. King says he's been pushing himself lately to deliver on ambitious projects before his productivity and stamina taper off. "Cleaning house—we want to get everything nice and clean and neat for when we exit the building," he said. "These things have been there for a long time, and now's the time to do them if I'm going to do them at all. I'm not getting any younger."

The idea for "11/22/63" first struck him in 1973, when he was on the brink of publishing his first novel, "Carrie," about a bullied teenage girl with psychic powers. At the time, Mr. King felt the historical novel required too much research, and greater literary chops than he possessed. Though Mr. King doesn't keep a writer's notebook—"The good ideas stick," he said—the idea lingered for 35 years.

In "11/22/63," Mr. King creates a time-travel narrative that's packed with minutiae like the 1958 price of a pint of root beer (10 cents) or a haircut (40 cents). Mr. King and his longtime researcher, a New Hampshire-based physician's assistant named Russ Dorr, pored over historical documents and newspaper archives from the period, looking at clothing and appliance ads, sports scores and television listings.

The pair spent a week in Dallas, where they visited Oswald's apartment building on West Neely Street and paid a resident $20 for a peek inside. They tracked down the home of Gen. Edwin Walker, one of Oswald's failed assassination targets. They got a private tour of the Sixth Floor Museum, the site of the former Texas School Book Depository where Oswald worked and fashioned his sniper's nest out of book cartons on Nov. 22, 1963.

Mr. King studied various conspiracy theories. He ultimately dismissed them, drawing the unsettling conclusion that a single person with no political power or charisma managed to alter the course of history by himself.

He invited the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and the author of the Abraham Lincoln book "Team of Rivals," to dinner to pick her brain. Ms. Goodwin, who said in an email that she loves alternate history, weighed in on possible worst-case scenarios that could unfold if Mr. King's hero managed to change history. Mr. King used some of her points in the novel.

For all its historical heft, "11/22/63" bears many of Mr. King's trademarks. It's ultra-violent and suspenseful, with supernatural overtones. There are cameos by characters from his 1986 novel "IT," which takes place partly in the late 1950s in Derry, a fictional Maine town where children are killed by a shape-shifting monster. He also drops in some autobiographical nuggets. The time portal deposits Jake in the Worumbo Mills, a textile mill in Lisbon Falls where Mr. King worked in high school.

A Maine native, Mr. King began writing when he was 6. He sold stories to his eighth-grade classmates for a quarter. Throughout his adolescence, he submitted stories to fantasy and horror magazines, collecting a pile of rejection slips. He attended the University of Maine at Orono, where he met his wife, Tabitha, also a novelist. After graduating, he carved out a living washing motel sheets. Tabitha worked at Dunkin' Donuts. In 1973, he was making $6,400 a year as a high-school English teacher when he sold his novel "Carrie" to Doubleday for $2,500. The paperback rights sold for $400,000. Mr. King quickly became a blockbuster horror writer with hits such as "Salem's Lot," "The Shining," "The Stand" and "Pet Sematary."



. In the 1990s, Mr. King was collecting advances of around $16 million a book. He now calls those advance sums "grotesque." "They were ridiculous," he says. "It became almost like a d—-measuring contest—my advance is bigger than your advance. For a guy like me or a guy like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich, why do we need an advance?"

When he left his publisher, Viking, 14 years ago, he traded gargantuan advances for his current deal with Scribner, granting him much smaller advances and roughly half of the profits. Most authors get 10 to 15% of royalties. If a book does phenomenally, he stands to earn multiple millions.

Mr. King has demanded greater leverage in other areas of his career. He has sold movie rights to his books for $1 in exchange for keeping creative control of the projects. In another unusual move, Mr. King leases his titles to publishers, typically for a period of 15 years, rather than selling them. Most authors sell copyrights, which typically last until 70 years after the author's death. Mr. King credits his former agent, Kirby McCauley, for driving that bargain. "He said, 'There's no need to sell the rights for these books when you can rent them,' " said Mr. King. "It gives you the option to move on if you don't like the way that particular publisher is selling things, and that motivates them to try to move the books."

Mr. King has struggled with the scrutiny that comes with blockbuster status. He still smarts over a caricature that depicted him as a huge head devouring piles of money pouring out of a typewriter. "The disturbing part was that it was saying anybody who sells a lot of books must ipso facto be selling dreck," he said.

He's also grown wary of his more ardent fans. He says he spends less time in his Bangor home now because tourists cluster outside the gate and snap photos. When he goes on book tours, fans find out where he's staying and camp out outside. "It's very unsettling," he said. "They always call you by your first name—'Stephen, Stephen, over here. Just sign this one baseball.' Then it turns out they've got about 19,000 other things."

In his more paranoid moments, he thinks of Mark Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon: "If there's ever going to be a Mark Chapman for me, it's going to be one of those people."

Though he's grown increasingly private, in person he's relaxed, profane and unguarded, discussing everything from his love of dogs, especially corgis, to his aversion to cell phones, which he called "slave bracelets." Eating a cinnamon bun in his kitchen, he spoke about how his sons Joe and Owen, both writers, tend to show their manuscripts to their mother rather than him.

Mr. King still writes every day, working for five or six hours. He mulls over stories during long morning walks and when he's lying in bed at night. Lately, he's been amusing himself at night by imagining a Raymond Chandler-style detective story. His sparely decorated office has a small, high picture window that lets in light but offers no view. "No distractions," he says.

When he's not writing, he's reading—literary fiction, crime novels, fantasy, horror and classics. In the cavernous recreation room where he watches sports and movies and reads, books line the walls, ranging from works by Michael Connelly, Tom Clancy and James Ellroy to Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, A.M. Homes, T.C. Boyle and Shakespeare.

In recent years, Mr. King, now a grandfather of four, has become less concerned about his reputation. Ever since he won an O. Henry award for a short story he published in the New Yorker in 1994, and the National Book Foundation's award for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2003, literary critics have been kinder to him, he says. But he says he remains keenly aware of his "place" in the literary landscape.

"I've never fooled myself that I'm going to have much popularity beyond my lifetime," he says. "There may be one or two books that people read later on." BY:Alexandra Alter

I'm a big fan and I can't wait to read 11/22/63

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