Caroline Bicks: Let the Process and the Language Lead You To Buried Treasure

Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern culture, and horror fiction. She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas; and co-host of the "Everyday Shakespeare" podcast. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the show Afterbirth. She lives in Blue Hill, Maine, with her family. Learn more at CarolineBicks.com, and follow her on Instagram.

In this interview, Caroline discusses the archives that led to her new biography, Monsters in the Archive: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Caroline Bicks
Literary agent: Elizabeth Kaplan at Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency
Book title: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King
Publisher: Hogarth
Release date: April 21, 2026
Genre/category: Horror/Literary Biography
Previous titles: Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (PRH); Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World (Cambridge UP); Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Routledge)
Elevator pitch: An English professor walks into the King of Horror’s archives, faces her childhood fears, and gets to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

I’m trained as a Shakespeare scholar, but I grew up reading and loving Stephen King’s books. In 2017, I jumped at the chance to become the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at his alma mater, the University of Maine. A few years in, I had a sabbatical coming, and I knew that he and his wife, Tabitha, had just collected their personal papers and attached them to their home in Bangor, Maine. I had a rare window of extended free time, and they had a treasure trove of archival materials to which no one outside their family and Foundation had been granted extended access. I asked them if I could spend a year reading early drafts of the five books that had scared me the most when I was a teenager (and that still haunted me): Carrie, Pet Sematary, The Shining, Night Shift, and Salem’s Lot. I wanted to track how he’d crafted these iconic stories and explore why the words (and not just the plotlines) were still sticking in my head, along with those of millions of other readers. They generously agreed to let me dive in and see what I’d find.

The year I was working in the archives, I wasn’t thinking about what kind of book would come out of my research. I was just living in the moment—feeling the heady thrill of the literary chase, and the fears and pleasures of re-experiencing these horrifying stories. It took three months of my being out of the archives and metabolizing what I’d discovered before I realized the book I wanted to write. I kept thinking about Amy Tan’s comment to King in the foreword to his On Writing, when she wonders why no one ever asks about the language during their book talks. That’s all I’d been doing for the past year, both by talking to King and exploring the nooks and crannies of his drafts. My book would chronicle what I discovered when I asked about the language.

I approached my current agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, who immediately saw the potential in my idea and encouraged me to put together a proposal. She steered it to the wonderful David Ebershoff at Hogarth, and we were off to the races. The basic idea (and even the title) remained the same from start to finish, which was about two-and-a-half years. What did change, thanks to David’s guidance, was how much of my own story I eventually wove into the book. He encouraged me to bring all my writerly voices (the Shakespeare scholar, the creative nonfiction writer, and the storyteller) into the narrative.

I’ve published books before but not one with this kind of reach and with so many moving parts. There’s a lot I didn’t understand about who was responsible for what, how to get foreign permissions, what happens at each stage of the production process, etc. So, I had to ask a lot of questions and manage a lot of different people’s and entities’ expectations: the King Foundation, the University of Maine, my Hogarth team, the eight different foreign presses (to date) that have bought it. Not to mention Stephen King, who has been lovely through this whole process, but is still, you know, STEPHEN KING. In the book, I talk about what an anxious little kid I was, and how I tried to manage my fears by anticipating worst-case scenarios and controlling things accordingly as best I could. As an adult, this manifests as perfectionism. I had to learn to let some of that go during the publication process and give myself a break if I wasn’t doing everything right and pleasing everyone all the time. 

I was surprised by how quickly I was able to write it compared to the other, more academic books I’ve written. Sometimes I got stuck trying to find the human story behind the granular discoveries I was making about King’s word choices and editorial changes to each of the books. But once each chapter’s heart surfaced for me, my own words came forward pretty easily to meet it. I just had to get out of my own head and let King’s stories meet my own.

It may sound counterintuitive, but fear is a powerful pathway to feeling and to belonging. The last few years have been so full of real-life horrors, that most of us have become numb to grief, both our own and other people’s. My hope is that this book will help readers reconnect with some of these feelings and to their fellow humans—and to recognize that well-crafted horror writing (and King’s in particular) can accomplish this vital act of emotional reawakening.

Don’t go into a project knowing what you’re going to write, and (if you’re writing about someone else’s work) what you’re looking for. Let the process and the language lead you to the buried treasure. Don’t worry—it’s there.