The Science of Stephen King

We’ve all heard the old adage that you could catch a cold if not properly dressed when outside. Trisha gets pneumonia after being lost in the woods for nine days. Is there any truth to this old wives’ tale? According to Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa, you can’t catch a cold from being cold but it can lead you to being more susceptible to illnesses. “Cold weather can dry out the lining of your nose, leaving you more vulnerable to an infection. Some research also suggests that prolonged exposure to the cold may suppress the immune system.”4 Trisha’s pneumonia was a lung infection caused by a virus or bacteria. These germs made the air sacs in her lungs fill with fluid, phlegm, or mucous, making breathing more difficult. Pneumonia is the number one leading cause of death in the world for children under the age of five. In the United States, pneumonia tends to be less fatal for children but is the number one reason they are hospitalized.5

Pneumonia is the most common cause of sepsis and septic shock, causing 50 percent of all episodes.6

Trisha survives her encounter with the bear in the woods and is able to find some peace, maybe even faith, by the end of the book. She points up at the sky, like her hero Tom Gordon does, to signify that perhaps there is a higher power.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Gwendy’s Button Box

Throughout Stephen King’s prolific career, he has written novels, short stories, and screenplays. He has even written as two men, creating his alter ego, Richard Bachman, in order to publish at an accelerated rate. He has worked with Michael Jackson on the music video “Ghosts,” appeared in films like Pet Sematary (1989) and even directed the film adaptation of his story Trucks into Maximum Overdrive (1986). So, it should be no surprise, as a creator devoted to storytelling, that King has collaborated with fellow writers. His first cowritten novel was The Talisman (1984) with Peter Straub. They worked together again to bring the sequel, Black House, to readers in 2001. In 2017, two coauthored King works were released. Sleeping Beauties, written alongside King’s son Owen King, is the story of a strange epidemic spreading across the globe. Focused on a small town in Georgia, Sleeping Beauties depicts a world in which women are cocooned like moths and men are left to figure out how to fix the chaos. A starkly feminist novel, it allows the women to save themselves. Owen King is currently writing the pilot script for AMC.

In Sleeping Beauties, the fictional disease is called “Aurora” in which women become homicidal when their cocoon is disturbed. It is named after Sleeping Beauty (1959) herself, Disney Princess Aurora.

The other collaborative work in 2017 was the novella Gwendy’s Button Box. Set in the 1970s in Castle Rock, Gwendy’s was written with a longtime friend of King’s, Richard Chizmar. It is the story of a middle schooler named Gwendy who is given an odd, magical box by a stranger. This box, which she keeps a secret from her parents and friends, is both a blessing and a curse. It gives her small chocolates that once eaten, make her life better. She loses her extra weight, gets straight A’s, and is a star on the track team. Yet, there are buttons on this box that carry a considerable burden. The stranger who gives her the box, mysterious much like the man who gives Jack the magic beans, explains that each button corresponds with a particular continent of the world. And if pressed, chaos will ensue. A curious child, Gwendy eventually presses the button that represents South America.

Before September 11, 2001, the Jonestown Massacre was the biggest single event of intentional American death. There were only thirty-three survivors out of nearly a thousand souls.

She finds out the next morning that the Jonestown Massacre, in which over nine hundred people perished, occurred the evening before. Convinced she is to blame, Gwendy is wracked with guilt. She can’t stop thinking it is her, and not Jim Jones, who is to blame. Later, the mysterious stranger assures her it is cult leader Jim Jones, not her press of the button, that caused the deaths. This led us to question the concept of coincidence.