Author Event: Caroline Bicks, 'Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King'

The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author event with Blue Hill local, Shakespeare scholar, and Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at UMaine, Caroline Bicks, PhD, for her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King on Thursday, June 25 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room.

A fascinating, first-of-its-kind exploration of Stephen King and his most iconic early books, based on groundbreaking research and interviews with King—all conducted by the first scholar to be given extended access to his private archives. After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maine’s inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archive, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writer’s creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of King’s enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?

Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives—authorized by Stephen King himself and informed by interviews Bicks had with him—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

This program is free and open to all, and will be held in the library's Howard Room. Blue Hill Books will be onsite with copies of the book available for purchase. For more information, please call the library at 374-5515 or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net.

Caroline Bicks is an internationally-recognized Shakespeare scholar who has published widely on early modern drama, gender, and the history of science. She studied Renaissance poetry at Harvard University as an undergraduate and received her PhD in English Literature from Stanford University. She was tenured at Boston College in 2008, the same year that she began summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English. In 2017, she became the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. The endowed Chair’s mission is to support the public humanities, a challenge that Bicks has embraced by giving talks around the state to a wide variety of audiences, and bringing award-winning fiction writers, journalists, educators, and activists to speak and work with different Maine communities. The position also allowed her to develop a working relationship with Stephen King that led to him granting her access to his personal papers and to her writing a book about what she discovered, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King.