Book Review: Monsters in Archive by Caroline Bicks

 

Monsters in the Archives by Caoline Bicks

304 pages, Hardcover
Published April, 2026 by Hogarth

 I am interviewing Caroline on the Live PKD hangout Tuesday, June 23.  JOIN US!

I somehow missed the initial roll-out of this book until a member of PKD weekly hangouts, Nick McCracken, mentioned that it was a book he had been reading. I ordered before he was done talking about reading it. Bicks is an academic with one of the coolest job titles in the known universe…The Stephen E. King chair of the English department at King’s alma mater, the University of Maine.  

So the idea with this book is that the Bicks was given a year to dig around the various papers collected in the Stephen King archives. So she gives us a deep look into Night Shift, the first three novels, and Pet Sematary. This includes information about various drafts, editorial notes, and insights from correspondence between King and Bicks.

I am an archive nerd, so this book was made for me. I have dug around the Philip K. Dick papers, the Gene Roddenberry papers, and more. So my interest in this book and Bick's progress was personal. Not only have I been reading SK since IT was a new release, but those early years' books are special to me.

So my copy of Monsters in Archives is dog-eared and yellow-highlighted. One of the things that makes this book special is that it takes us under the hood of these books. Authors have this experience working with editors when we go deep, talking about word choices. On page 58 we see a great example. The famous line from Pet Semetary, “Sometimes Dead is better.” Bicks can show us where he had Death and, with a pencil, crossed it out and handwrote dead. I had a similar experience with the manuscript of A Scanner Darkly (PKD) when the year of the novel was 1984 and was scratched out for 94 in the 1977 SF novel.

MITA is filled with moments like this, differences between Second Coming and Salem’s Lot, The Shine and the Shining. Choices to make: The events in room 217 are less gruesome, early college drafts of Night Shift, and more. The masterclass of Danny Glick at the window. All stuff explored in such detail, constant readers will be delighted to learn about them. It is a great under-the-hood look at one of the most important writers of the 20th century.