Stephen King’s Family Business

Life in Maine, where Stephen King has spent most of his adult years, requires long drives down country roads, time that King, whose mind is restless, likes to fill by listening to books on tape. In the ’80s, however, he sometimes could not find the books he wanted on tape — or maybe he just did not bother. He had three children: Naomi, Joe and Owen. They could read, couldn’t they? All King had to do was press record. Which is how his school-age children came to furnish their father, over the years, with a small library’s worth of books on tape.

On a drizzly morning in July, King, his wife and their children gathered in Maine for a reunion the week of the Fourth and compared notes on what constituted chores in the King household. As they talked, they were crowded around a rather small kitchen table in a lakeside guesthouse, where King’s 41-year-old son, Joe Hill, was staying, a short drive from the family’s summer home.

“I read you that stupid book, that Dean Koontz book,” said Owen King, who is 36 and the youngest of the three children.

“Watch it!” interrupted his father, but Owen, seated across the table from his father, kept going: “The one where the dog is a genius, and he talks to him by pointing at Scrabble pieces with his nose.”

“Hey, I liked that book,” Joe said.

“I loved that book,” their father said.

“I remember reading ‘The Carpetbaggers,’ ” Joe said. “I remember feeling that was a very long novel.”

Tabitha King, their mother, suddenly sat upright. “That’s a filthy book — I didn’t know he would have asked you to read that. How old were you?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said, dodging for his dad. “I was innocent when I started, and I was filthy afterward.”

Owen’s wife, Kelly Braffet, was seated beside her husband. She had heard some of these details before; it was family lore that Naomi, who is 43, was asked to read and record, at age 12, “Raven,” the definitive journalistic account of the Jonestown massacre. “It was horrible,” Naomi said.

Stephen finally rallied in self-defense. “But you read me all those Wilbur Smiths!” he said to Naomi. “And ‘Anna Karenina.’ ”

Entertaining their parents, for the King children, was part job, part enrichment. At bedtime, they were the ones expected to tell their parents stories, instead of the other way around. Whatever their methods or intentions, Stephen and Tabitha’s shared vocation, and their approach to child rearing, has yielded a significant number of successful fiction writers in their household. Tabitha is an accomplished writer with eight novels to her credit, and two of their three children, Joe and Owen, are novelists. (Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist minister.) Joe’s “NOS4A2,” a sprawling mix of horror and fantasy that is his third critically praised best seller, was published last April; Owen’s second work of fiction, a well-received comedic novel titled “Double Feature,” was published in March. Owen, perhaps inevitably, married a writer, Kelly Braffet, whose third novel, a literary thriller called “Save Yourself,” is out this month. And Stephen’s much-anticipated sequel to the “The Shining,” titled “Doctor Sleep,” comes out this fall.

Circus performers, klezmer musicians — those are the kinds of entertainers we usually expect to see in a family business, not writers. There are a few exceptions — children of successful writers who have bravely followed their parents. Martin Amis (son of Kingsley) is perhaps the best-known example, but Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur) and Ted Heller (son of Joseph) have also published, more quietly, well-reviewed novels. But for sheer volume of books, cultural impact and accumulated readership, none of those families come close to the Kings. The closest comparison would have to be the Brontës, and even they maxed out at a paltry three published novelists, plus one dissipated poet.

If reading was a common escape in the King household, it was nonetheless deeply social. They read on tape, but they also took turns reading aloud after dinner, passing around “The Hobbit” or the Narnia chronicles. It followed that writing came to feel like something they all could share as well. Stephen and Tabitha did not take themselves off to quiet sheds or off-site offices to write; they wrote in their own home, upstairs, as their kids, below, wondered what words were being put on the page and played elaborate role-playing games of their own.

When the group broke from the conversation around the table to pose for a family photo outside, they continued their easy patter on books and pop culture. Joe’s corgi, McMurtry, named after the novelist Larry McMurtry, was insistently present, so that someone catching snippets, from a distance, of the family’s conversation as they made their way into the yard would have heard something like this: “Neil Gaiman . . . Spielberg . . . McMurtry! McMurtry! . . . Cronenberg . . . Matt Groening . . . McMurtry!”

“Did you see that picture of John Irving that ran somewhere — he was coming out of some swamp with his shirt off?” Owen asked. “He looked like a ninja.”

Then they assembled; they posed, as close to a first family of letters as America is likely to have.

“The last photographer who shot me kept yelling: ‘Love me! Love me!’ ” Stephen said.

“That’s so ‘Zoolander,’ ” Kelly said.

Then: Flash.

KELLY

In 1990, when Kelly Braffet was a high-school freshman in Western Pennsylvania, her parents gave her, for Christmas, a Stephen King book-of-the-month subscription, which came, as she recalls, with a six-inch rubber skeleton — “very creepy.” It was just what she wanted. She was in her “Stephen King completist” phase, and she was trying to track down hardcover copies of his more obscure books. Her completist phase could have been considered officially over 17 years later, when she married Owen, whom she met at the Columbia M.F.A. writing program in 2001. The day they met, Braffet was carrying around a book by John D. MacDonald, a midcentury crime writer who would not be found on their syllabus but was an icon in the King household. She was a suitable girl: a book-loving, book-writing student who was pretty in glasses and had a healthy appreciation for potboilers. He was an easygoing, attentive boyfriend. Once they swapped manuscripts to make sure they did not hate each other’s writing, the relationship quickly moved forward.

Even so, Braffet was nervous about meeting her future in-laws, nervous even at the sound of Stephen King’s voice on Owen’s answering machine. “It took me two years before I could actually speak in front of Steve and Tabby,” she said.

Braffet’s father is an E.M.S. helicopter pilot, and her mother is a computer programmer who attended college late in life. Braffet herself worked two summers in a warehouse, where she “picked stickers off of one piece of paper and put them on another,” a glimpse of her possible future had she not earned a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College. Her first visit to the King family home, which is in Bangor, was unnerving: all those endless rooms and hallways, like a real-life version of the hotel in “The Shining,” and that crazy, famous fence around their home, with its wrought-iron bats and cobwebs. “Their underground library,” Braffet noted, “was bigger than the entire library in the town I grew up in. It was . . . a lot.”

Eventually, in 2004, while they were waiting to move into a condo in Brooklyn, Kelly and Owen spent six months living near the Kings in Maine, a period in which they saw them virtually every day. Braffet’s nerves clearly calmed. This July, at the Kings’ house, during some downtime, Braffet sat next to one of her childhood idols as he pored over his iPad; he was fully immersed in the video game Jetpack Joyride.

The relationship between Kelly and Stephen has the easy rapport of in-laws relieved to enjoy each other’s company, the conversation light, less likely to turn to the mysterious process of writing than to the end product — either someone else’s work or their own. The Kings’ embrace of her writing is clearly not a function of politeness; they seemed to be competing to outdo themselves in their praise of “Save Yourself” when the subject came up.

“It’s like David Cronenberg adapted an S.E. Hinton novel for David Lynch,” Joe said.

His father jumped in to refine his son’s mash-up description of the book’s tone: “It’s more like James Cain” — another of Stephen’s beloved crime writers — “adapted S.E. Hinton for David Lynch.”

What they did not say, or maybe even notice, is that the book provides a literary, Internet-age update of King’s “Carrie”: a story of savage high-school bullying that ends in a blaze of violence; it includes a vampire-inspired cult but stops short of the supernatural.

Asked about it, Braffet said she never made the connection. “Carrie” influenced her “only in the same way that every other horrifying high-school story I’d heard was sort of simmering in my subconscious.” To write any kind of page-turner is to run up against the likelihood of overlap with King’s work: there are only so many dramatic scenarios to which he has not turned his imagination over the course of 40 years.

It was important to Braffet, until now, that she publish without her in-laws’ having so much as read her work, so that she had plausible deniability should people hint that Stephen played a hand in publication. With “Save Yourself,” she finally turned to the Kings for advice, when she worried that she had lost her way. “I had no choice,” she said. “I’d already imposed on all my other readers.” Tabitha provided structural advice; Stephen, some notes on language. Mostly they told her to keep going. And no, she maintained, she was not particularly nervous. “It was more important to me that Owen like my work,” she said.

JOE

For the most part, Joe and Owen King got along well: two brothers, five years apart, who entertained themselves with “Star Wars” action figures and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and the more obscure Call of Cthulhu. But Joe had one habit that got under Owen’s skin. “I can remember being 8, and eventually everything had to stop so he could write for two hours,” Owen recalls. It did not matter if Owen was perched on the edge of slaying some imaginary monster, his brother was off: “Gotta get my two hours in.”

Joe was 11, a kid in love with his Sherlock Holmes-style deer-stalking cap, when he first started writing daily. Following his father’s equally compulsive example, he made no exception for weekends or holidays. By high school, Joe was serious enough about his literary ambitions that he was already worrying about getting out from under his father’s shadow. He came up with the pen name Jay Stevenson (a pun on “J., Stephen’s son”) and started asking his parents: What would it take to change my name legally?

He attended Vassar College, then moved to New Hampshire and started writing full time, under the pseudonym Joe Hill. “I was very insecure, and I didn’t want to sell something because someone saw it as a way to make a quick buck and then have it come out and someone would say it was terrible,” Hill says. He signed with a New York agent, from whom he concealed his actual identity for eight years. (Over that time, they never met in person.) If he gave a reading and a blogger noted that he bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Stephen King, Hill privately requested that the blogger remove the reference. He spent several years on a novel, which was universally rejected. Years passed. A second novel went nowhere. His parents financially supported him, his wife and his first two children, never once suggesting that he might want to re-examine his options. (He and his wife are divorced.)

And then finally, in 2007, at 35, Hill published “Heart-Shaped Box,” a ghost story with an aging rock star as its hero, a novel less schematic than many of his father’s books, more dreamy. Firmly grounded in celebrity culture, unpredictable both in form and plot, the book was almost immediately a best seller.

At times in his life, Hill actually contemplated hiring an actor to do readings of his work, to conceal that unmistakable resemblance to his father. By the time “Heart-Shaped Box” was published and he had forged ahead with some readings, his alias had been blown. In the end, in light of the book’s success, that did not seem to matter; now he’s comfortable writing in a genre his father dominates. “Sometimes I think the kid who’s like, ‘I’m never going to be like my dad in any way whatsoever,’ is less his own person,” he said.

His acclaim brought different stresses. “I think the pressure of that success resulted in some anxieties picking up,” Hill said. At its worst, about five years ago, while he was writing his second novel, “Horns,” Hill’s anxiety crossed into something more like classic paranoia. “I would do stuff like get to a hotel room and tear the room apart looking for fiber-optic video cameras — I once took my car apart.” He developed other compulsions: he could not stop working if a sentence ended on an odd count of letters; he missed appointments because he made so many trips back home to make sure he had turned off the oven.

Hill suspects that those tendencies are another inheritance from his father, along with the compulsion to write and a fascination with the macabre. Stephen King is uneasy about the number 13, which is not something he puts on simply to charm the press (asked to donate $13,000 to bring home some Maine troops for the holidays in 2009, he donated, instead, $12,999). He is compulsive about certain kinds of counting. He has concocted a mind-numbing game that involves continually resetting his car’s odometer while crossing out numbers in a notebook. And “ravens freak him out, crows freak him out a little bit,” Joe says. “They’re harbingers of death. My mom is more like the family reality check — I learned the oven stuff from him.”

Hill’s most recent book, “NOS4A2” (pronounced Nosferatu), features an immortal villain who whisks children off to a hellishly jolly Christmasland. The book is filled with details so troubling they border on nauseating: implied sexual violence, a mentally impaired reprobate, desperate messengers of doom. To marvel at how deftly he disturbs is to wonder how talent — and this particular talent — passes from father to son.

King and Hill have a way of turning questions about the roots of their dark imaginations into opportunities to sound more wholesome and sane than the person posing the query. In a recent interview with Terry Gross, King joked about how journalists inevitably try to turn into “Dr. Freud and put me on the couch,” then confessed to a happy childhood. Hill, too, seemed, at first, to think the investigation is pointless. “I wonder why no one looks at an engineer and thinks, What was it in his childhood that made him want to be an engineer?” But Hill eventually conceded that something about his particular mental makeup did lend itself well to his subject matter — and it seemed he had thought about that subject quite a lot. “I’ve had a lot of practice spinning paranoid scenarios in fiction — which means I’m good at spinning paranoid scenarios in my own life,” he told me. “It’s a chicken-or-egg situation: Which came first? Is fiction and creating scenarios a way of getting rid of that anxiety? Or is it the practice of writing that has made me more vulnerable to the panic attack?”

A low dose of Paxil has kept Hill’s paranoia in check, as he wrote on a post on his Tumblr account, which he titled “Took Off My Crazypants.” His writing is not suffering, and he is enjoying success. And unlike his father, he said, “now I don’t really care about the number 13.”

TABBY 

In 2003, Stephen King won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and was invited to give a speech at the National Book Awards. King spent close to the first half of the lengthy speech celebrating his wife for always believing in him, for encouraging him to write, even when they were scraping by in a trailer home with two kids and she was working at Dunkin’ Donuts and he did shifts at a laundry. You could develop the impression that Tabitha — Tabby, as she’s known — was the stand-by-your-man type, a wife who would graciously defer to the dreams of her husband at the expense of her own comfort. That may all be true. But after seeing her with her family, I came away with the strong sense that if she encouraged King to keep going, it was because she was no fool — she had editorial judgment and knew good writing when she saw it. They were both students at the University of Maine in 1969 when King handed her a short story to read. “I remember thinking,” she recalled, “This guy’s publishable right this second.”

One of Tabby’s favorite T-shirts reads, “If I’m speaking, you should be taking notes,” and frequently, her family members do. “When I wrote ‘NOS4A2,’ I wrote a really bleak ending, and I was artistically committed to it, come hell or high water — right up until Mum read it,” Joe said, sitting at the table with his family. “She said, ‘You know, Joe, that ending really won’t do.’ I was like, ‘Aww, all right.’ My artistic integrity lasted about 15 seconds on the phone with my mum.”

The feedback goes both ways. “And when you wrote ‘Survivor,’ Tabby, we all ganged up on you about the ending in that book,” Stephen recalled.

“Yeah, and the changes made it a best seller,” Tabby joked, then blew a loud raspberry. The book came and went, although Library Journal called it a “compelling psychological drama,” a book that “belongs in most fiction collections.” Tabby, who is slowly working on her ninth book, clearly feels ill served by the publishing industry, so much so that she encouraged Joe to use a pseudonym. “The perception that Steve’s success got me published cannot be erased for some people,” she said. The assumption, natural though it may be, is misguided: a trilogy of novels she wrote set in Maine — “Pearl,” “The Book of Reuben” and “One on One” — is pure narrative pleasure (the author Jennifer Weiner said “Pearl” was one of her all-time favorite reads). It may have been her husband’s shadow that held her back, or it may have been the same problems that hold back many midlist writers — work that falls between literary and comedy, novels with no gimmicks or glamorous locations. That her books aren’t better known pains her sons, both of whom consider her influence on their work as strong as that of their father’s. “At least, I hope that’s true,” Owen says. “Her sense of place, her sense of character — it’s just so strong.”

If Tabby does occupy something of a saintly status in the King household, it is not just because she stood by her husband when he was young and desperate, but because she threatened to walk away, years later, when he was famous and a full-blown alcoholic with a coke habit. In 1987, Tabby staged an intervention that all three children — Naomi, then 17, Joe, 15, and Owen, 10 — attended. All Owen knew until that point was that his father “consumed massive amounts of alcohol — but I might as well have assumed that everybody’s dad did that.” Tabby explained to all of them that if their father did not agree to get sober, she would ask him to leave. “I didn’t want to lie to my kids,” she said. “I’ve never really gotten lying anyway, because all you do is postpone the day at which you’re revealed to be a liar.” As the family discussed the intervention all these years later, the conversation grew almost hushed. “It was terrifying,” Naomi said. “Are you going to have a dad anymore?”

It took about two years, but King finally did get sober. Then there was a period of calm, until 1999, when King ran up against a series of near-tragic events. While walking down a country road near his home, he was hit by a van that tossed him 14 feet and reduced the bones in his lower left leg “to so many marbles in a sack,” in the words of one doctor. In chronic pain for months of recovery, he developed (and eventually kicked) an addiction to the painkillers. And finally, he came down with pneumonia, checking into the hospital within 24 hours of the speech he gave toasting his wife at the National Book Awards. “The pulmonologist wasn’t sure he’d get through the night, but that’s just what he did,” Tabby said. “I’ve told him, I’m not doing that again. It was just too hard.”

There was a moment during the interview when one of the King children was talking about a book, and Stephen turned toward his wife and took her hand. He grasped it, tightly, and they both closed their eyes and leaned in toward each other, as if in prayer. Later, when asked about that moment, Stephen could not remember what inspired that moment — maybe nothing at all. “Sometimes I just take her hand,” he said. “We’ve always been close, Tab and me. I love her.”

NAOMI

It is an odd twist of fate that Stephen King’s first child, Naomi, was born with a chronic deficit of the hormone adrenaline. She grew, over time, to be an avid reader, but the power of her father’s books was lost on her, as terror, she believes, is a hard emotion for her to access. So her father asked her, when she was a teenager, what it was that she did like. She told him she liked dragons, and her father wrote her a book, “The Eyes of the Dragon,” a fantasy tale complete with an evil, conniving magician in the king’s palace. He dedicated the book to her.

As a young girl, long before she met the Kings, Braffet used to stare at that dedication. “And I remember thinking to myself, Wow, Naomi King’s life must be awesome,” Braffet recalled at the Kings’ kitchen table. Naomi responded, with the same light sarcastic tone her mother employs to great effect, “Every minute.”

The advantages of being a King are, of course, considerable, and the family is close; but there were also the difficult years of Stephen’s addiction, years Naomi was old enough to recognize as painful. And then there are the assumptions people have about her as the offspring of Stephen King. “There’s the expectation that I love horror as a genre or that I care about monsters,” she said. “And I do care about monsters — I care very much about theological interpretations of how we make friends with our monsters. If we demonize other people and create monsters out of each other and act monstrous — and we all have that capacity — then how do we not become monsters ourselves?”

Naomi sounds, maybe, like what Stephen might sound like if, in some alternate universe, he entered divinity school to become a minister, as Naomi did in 1999. It was uncharted territory in the King household. “I truly can’t imagine a more secular family than ours,” Owen said. But Naomi maintains that religion was always there: Tabitha’s family was Catholic, and Stephen, who grew up with devoutly Christian family members, used to win prizes at Sunday school for reciting Bible verses. “I’m not sure you can grow up with those stories without them influencing you and making their way into your everyday speech,” Naomi says. And then, of course, the presence of A.A. in their home was its own kind of influence, if not a religious one, then a spiritual one.

If Naomi is at peace with her choice, the family still seems to be mulling why she did not pursue fiction. “I think possibly Naomi has been more intimidated by the production of fiction than you guys were,” Tabitha said, meaning Joe and Owen. “She made a deliberate choice to find her own area.”

Stephen added: “But you know you were always good — she was always good. She wrote fantasy when she was a kid and into her teenage years, and it was all terrific stuff. It just needed some seasoning.”

Naomi sighed — the encouragement was well intentioned but misplaced. “I have different stories, and those are the ones I tell. It’s just a different genre.” There are the stories she communicates to readers through her online ministry. There are also the stories she creates through sock monkeys costumed as adventuring pirates, whose exploits she creates and then documents on her Flickr account. “It’s about play, and it’s totally congruent with who I am as a religious leader,” she said, “but that isn’t what people have been taught to think.” Like every other member of her family, she has stories in her life, and they sustain her.

Although she writes daily prayers that she posts on Facebook and her blog, Naomi’s ongoing health problems have made a full-time ministry impossible. She now works at the Pietree Orchard, a shop and property near her parents that they purchased in 2007, rather than see it converted to condominiums.

She likes her work, and although she also reads widely, she has never secretly hoped that a 600-page zombie novel will spring from her mind. There is an old Hasidic tale Naomi likes to share, about an aged scholar named Zusya. One after the next, his students approach him, concerned that they might not be measuring up to greatness. Why, one asks him, am I not more like Jacob? Why, asks another, am I not more like Moses?

Naomi smiled as she narrated the ending: “When I die, I’m not going to be asked why I wasn’t like Moses,” Zusya tells them. “I’m going to be asked why I wasn’t like Zusya.”

It was a good story. She told it well.

OWEN 

Owen’s first novel, “Double Feature,” opens with a young man awakening abruptly from a dream: “A shadow grew, grew and grew, its mountainous shoulders overwhelming the bright frame.” The young hero panics. His pulse “was in his fingers and his toes, behind his eyes, under his tongue. He was afraid.” Then the shadow speaks: it is the son’s father; he has read the son’s screenplay; he wants to share some notes.

That one page — with its slapstick nod to the anxiety of influence, to the literary shadow that might well be on readers’ minds — is as close to writing actual horror as Owen King ever gets. He is not drawn to the genre; by the time he was 10, he had been exposed, he felt, through his father’s films, to enough maggot-infested corpses and severed heads to leave him “a little bit squeamish.” “Double Feature” feels more Nick Hornby than Stephen King, tracing the story of an ambitious indie filmmaker — the son of a well-known B-movie actor — whose pet project becomes a cult classic for all the worst reasons.

Owen insists that any resemblances in the book to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental, unless that person is Orson Welles. But the emotional architecture seems clearly modeled on something familiar from his own home. “I think the particulars are completely different,” says his friend Tom Bissell, a cultural critic, “but it is about influence and feeling somehow trapped by that influence. And I think in some wonderful ways the book is an escape act — he did it.”

Tabby has sympathy for her children’s desires to stake out their own territory but also feels that their burdens are hardly unusual. “Everybody’s got parents, and they carry something from that,” she told me. “Sometimes it’s the children of a doctor dealing with: Is dad ever home or is he too demanding? Or else you’re the child of the town drunk or the town minister. You’re the child of somebody who has cast some sort of a shadow over your life, from whom you have to differentiate yourself.”

Owen spent years watching B-movies as research for the book and is known among his friends for being the kind of person who will forever be capable of naming them all, while cross-referencing their third-string stars with those actors’ other, even more obscure works. His brother and father also share that skill. “The King men seem able not only to read and write and allude faster than the rest of us — they seem to watch TV faster, listen to music faster, to defy the physics of consumption,” says Joshua Ferris, a novelist and close friend of Owen’s. Of the two brothers, Joe is the more enthusiastic fanboy — picture him unironically wearing his favorite “Jaws” T-shirt, because “Jaws” is one of his four favorite movies. Owen’s favorite T-shirt ever, by contrast, was for a defunct girls’ magazine and read, “Jane: Everything Great About Being a Girl.” He wore it to meet Kelly’s parents for the first time.

Like Joe, Owen, as a young boy, often sat down with his father to talk about books — in his case, to deconstruct what made a Flannery O’Connor story work or to find the ways he could make his own writing more vivid. He enjoyed these sessions, but not because he already had some idea that he wanted to be a writer. “It was something I’d seen my dad do with my brother, and I sort of wanted to feel included,” he told me. As much because of temperament as subject matter, Owen’s current relationship with his father is less intensively collaborative than that of Joe, who gets feedback on all his drafts from both parents and frequently calls to talk shop. “I have a much more typical relationship with my parents,” Owen said. “I’m looking for unconditional love from my parents. I’m not particularly interested in getting heavy literary criticism from them.”

On one public occasion, he got it anyway. His father, in an interview with this magazine in 2000, casually characterized Owen’s early work as “flavor-of-the-month, New York relationships.” Owen was angry at the time, but he is easy on his father now, even protective. “Yeah, that wasn’t the greatest,” he said. “My dad felt really bad. But that was a long time ago, and what I do has become easier for my parents to understand.” His father apologized, and Owen, who was getting his M.F.A. at Columbia, kept writing. While he was there, on two occasions, professors at Columbia extravagantly dismissed his father’s body of work while Owen was in the room. He learned that if he was going to write, he would have to be fairly confident that he could find his own voice, regardless of who was talking to him about what fiction should be. When Owen’s novel came out, Stephen turned his Web site into an enthusiastic ad: If you are in the mood to laugh your posterior off, he said in his own vernacular, “ ‘Double Feature’ will perform that surgery and painlessly.”

Owen can live with selling fewer books than his brother or father, both of whom set unusually high standards for that metric. “I think my brother’s and father’s drive for success is greater than mine,” he said. “I just want to sell enough books to be able to justify continuing to write.” As the youngest of the siblings and the one who stayed home, rather than go to boarding school, he was exposed more often than they were to his father’s growing fame — the snapping cameras everywhere, the strangers forever approaching them. “I want to be as successful as I can be while still living a very private life,” he said, “and I think my ambition is probably a little bit limited by that desire.”

His brother, by contrast, embraces the public’s attention. He recently posed for a series of photos in which he pantomimed being strangled and stabbed by fans, then posted them on Twitter. Owen admired the project but could not relate to the impulse. “I don’t want to be choked by a stranger,” he said. “Not even pretend choked.”

STEPHEN

On the Fourth of July, the extended King family gathered at the Pietree Orchard and ate pizza on the picnic benches outside the shop. Some of the grandchildren had gone strawberry picking; later there would be fireworks. Stephen King, sitting on a picnic bench, turned to his 10-year-old grandson. “So if I had a stroke,” King asked him, “what do you think I should do? Should I go into a nursing home? Would that be the best thing?”

The questions were both matter of fact and macabre — a late-in-life version of what the family called the writing game, in which they would each take five minutes to rescue some hero from peril, only to place him once again in danger before passing the challenge on to the next family member. This is the kind of plot twist that most haunts King now: illness, dementia, the loss of his uncommonly active mind.

A few minutes later, he was eager to share an image he had on his iPad. He whisked past pictures — his grandchildren, trees, whoops, there goes Meg Ryan — and then there was a black-and-white photo: a smiling woman sitting on the knee of a merchant mariner. “Those were my parents,” he said. His father abandoned the family when King, the younger of two children, was 2, but when King was about 10, he stumbled upon his father’s stash of old pulp novels. It was Stephen’s first introduction to horror — among the finds there was “Lovecraft,” with a cover of a monster crawling out of a grave. Either because he is his father’s son or because he was a son seeking out his father — King believes it’s the first of those options — he was immediately obsessed, reading every book in the collection and seeking out more wherever and whenever he could. His father, his mother told him, wrote stories, good ones, too, and although he did not stick with it, some magazine editors had encouraged him. The subtext of King’s personal narrative would seem to be that of a child trying to please an absent father, as loudly and successfully as he can. King, however, sees it as a matter of simple genetics. So the fact that his sons, in turn, would be writers, that one of them might even write horror, is therefore wholly predictable to King. “I do think it’s built in,” he said. “You know, sometimes people say to me, ‘Why do you choose to write that creepy stuff?’ And I usually say, ‘What makes you think I have a choice?’ ”

At the guesthouse, after the group portrait was finally taken, the family started to disperse. “Did you really think that the Neil Gaiman book was — what did you call it? Something like ‘an incomparable masterpiece?’ ” Owen asked Joe, referring to a recent blog post about Gaiman’s new novel. “You like everything on Twitter — you can’t like that much stuff.”

Joe shrugged. “I’m a positive guy” he responded, “not a negative guy.”

He had proposed earlier that they gather that evening to play an old game called Ex Libris. The game, a bit like Balderdash, would have them all competing to write the most convincing first line of a randomly chosen actual novel. Somebody wondered: How old was this game?

“It’s as old as storytelling,” Stephen intoned.

“Yeah, the very first Irish balladeers were playing this game,” Owen said. That got a laugh from his dad, so he kept going. “The Gilgamesh guy was playing this game.”

Joe, who had been strenuously trying to turn the conversation back to the rules of Ex Libris, joined in. “They were playing at the Alexandria library,” he said. “As it burned.”

It went on like this for a few minutes. Naomi made a reference to an obscure ancient manuscript depicting beer, Owen cracked a joke about pulps in Mesopotamia.

“In the Old West — ” Joe started.

His father suggested, not unkindly, that they wrap up the conversation. Maybe they would play the game some other time. After lunch, Owen and Kelly wandered down toward the lake with Joshua Ferris and his wife, who were visiting. Stephen and Tabby went back to their primary summer home. And Joe headed inside with the book he had been carrying around all day, a galley his dad gave him of another author’s horror book.

A few days later, Joe and Stephen were having another typical conversation: hashing out what novel could be considered the “Moby-Dick” of horror.

That one with all the footnotes, they argued — no, not that one, the other one: Mark Danielewski’s “House of Leaves.”

Joe bragged that his youngest son, who is 10, was doing some writing of his own. “He’s working on two stories: one is called ‘Scrap’; the other is called ‘The Bad Thing.’ ”

Stephen brightened: he liked that, “The Bad Thing.” “I’m sorry,” he said, as if he had just found someone else’s shiny penny, “I might have to use that.”

Joe understood. “I know,” he said. “I had the same thought myself.”