From: boyajian@ruby.enet.dec.com (The Man from Another Place)
Subject: Re: Kings new alias?
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 08:49:00 GMT

In article <1992Jul25.071452.14598@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, kmrobert@nyx.cs.du.edu (Kevin Roberts) writes...

} A funny thing happened to me on the way to read a Robert R. McCammon book...
[discussion which points toward a conjecture about McCammon as a pseudonym
of Stephen King]

} The writing remind me of King's, but as if he was "writing down" so as
} not to be caught again...

} I still don't know if I believe it or not, but I am entertaining the
} thought half-heartedly... My idea of this may be due to the memory or
} due to my actual desire to read something by King that day, but alas
} there was nothing new...

} I tend to doubt King would bother with a new alias, but if I found out
} he had one outh there. This would be the name I would guess.

And you'd guess wrong. McCammon's been around too long, and too visible,
and too many people have had contact with him over the years. There's
absolutely no way that he could be Stephen King.

King has used only one other (than Bachman) pseudonym in his life. A
couple of his short stories were by-lined "John Swithen", but he owned
up to that even before the Bachman business hit the fan.

There have been a couple of false leads since the Bachman revelation
regarding another pseudonym, but one was a hoax, and the other a
misattribution.

The hoax was that King had written a porno novel back in the 60s under
a pseudonym, and that someone had dug up a copy and was planning to
publish it as a small press item. It was mentioned in a small press
magazine called FANTASY NEWSLETTER, and when King wrote to them in a
fury claiming that it was not true and that he'd sue anyone who tried
to publish such a book under the pretense that it was by King, he'd
sue them six ways from Sunday. They (FN) owned up to fact that the
news item was a hoax.

The misattribution was for a science fiction novel from Laser Books.
Can't recall the title off-hand, but the author was "Aaron Wolfe".
Word got around that it was by King, and dealers were snapping up
copies wherever they could find them and marketing them at inflated
prices. Actually, the funny part was that one dealer, Bob Weinberg,
in one of his catalogs, offered a free copy of it, autographed by the
author, to anyone who could identify the real author. His only clue
was that it was a popular horror novelist whose last name began with
"K". Bob knew the truth: it wasn't King, it was Dean Koontz. :-)

Actually, what was interesting about the whole thing was that when I
first heard the rumor, there was no title or author mentioned, just
that King had supposedly written a Laser Book under a pseudonym. I
went through my collection of Laser Books, eliminated all those by
authors I knew to be real people (like Jerry Pournelle, Tim Powers,
or J. Hunter Holly) or known pseudonyms of real people, and narrowed
it down to a handful. After examination, I concluded that if the rumor
was true, it'd have to be the Aaron Wolfe novel (among other clues was
the fact that it was set in Maine).

-- 

	"She's my radiation baby.
	 She's my teenage fallout girl."

--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, "The Mill", Maynard, MA)

    boyajian@ruby.enet.dec.com