Jhonathan and the Witches

What better way to start off a new approach to the blog than to start at, essentially, the very beginning?

I don't know for sure if this is literally the first time Stephen King ever tried writing a story, but it is the first one recorded; a little faerie tale called "Jhonathan and the Witches", written in 1956 by a 9-year-old Stephen King.

To be honest, the mere concept of this has me sorta chuckling to myself. It's really a funny idea that I am able to read words King wrote this young in his life, and it's only possible due to special collector's book that specifically went collecting the earliest (known or available) writings from a number of big names, including John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Crichton, Gore Vidal and even Isaac Asimov. It's a pretty cool idea.

And thanks to this book, we have the earliest writing of Stephen King we're ever likely to get. I had a big smile on my face the entire time I was reading it, not because it was so extraordinarily good, but because it reveals that one of the most renowned authors of our time was writing the sort of thing we would expect from a little boy when he was a little boy. Nothing about "Jhonathan and the Witches" suggests a budding bestseller. It's about as simple and silly a tale as you're likely to read. If I'd been his teacher, he probably would have gotten a B, maybe even a B- due to poor spelling, grammar and sentence structure.

The story involves a cobbler's son in generic medieval times, with Jhonathan deciding to ask the King if there's work for him. Before he can get there, he rescues a rabbit from hunters, and the rabbit turns out to be a fairy in disguise. The fairy grants Jhonathan three wishes to be used whenever Jhonathan needs them.

Now, why is Jhonathan spelled the way it is? I don't know, but I strongly suspect it was because King, at age 9, didn't know how to spell it.

Anyway, the King, who is "in a very bad mood", and decides that the only work he'll give Jhonathan is the unenviable task of ridding the kingdom of three terrible witches.

You can probably guess from the equal number of wishes and witches how this story concludes. The one thing I'm going to point out is that at one point, Jhonathan is given clues on the witches' strengths by an unseen, unexplained voice. Knowledge the character needs just at the time they need, without explanation, it is a pretty Kingian trait, though here it's implied that it's the voice of the fairy, who apparently can impart that knowledge without it being a wish used up.

Like I said, this story is unretouched and unedited from when pre-teen King wrote it, and thus, it reads like something a child wrote. It's not particularly revealing or amazing. The King who would go on to write The Stand, Pet Sematary and It is not on display here. But am I glad I read this? You bet your life I am.

If you're a King fanboy like yours truly, it might behoove you to order First Words from Amazon and have a read of this yourself. But really I only read this to be a completist. If it's out there to be read, and King wrote it, I want to read it. So I have no regrets, but if you just like reading King's professionally published fiction, then there's really no need to go digging for this.

In 1959, King would write two "self-published" stories; a short story called "The Land of 1,000,000 Years Ago" and a novella called "Thirty-One of the Classics". I've never unearthed these. If you've read them, or know where they can be read, please alert me.

Two more stories written around this time, "Jumper" and "Rush Call" would be "published" in his older brother's self-created magazine "Dave's Rag" and are collected in Secret Windows, which I now own. After those two come the short stories collected in a "self-published" short story collection called People, Places and Things. I will be speaking about the "Dave's Rag" stories and as much of PP&T as has been recovered in these next posts.