In the pre-internet days the place to get updated information on all things Stephen King was Castle Rock newsletter. While Stephen King was against the idea of an official fan club, he was pretty cooperative with Castle Rock even contributing a previously unpublished story, "Dolan's Cadillac"(included later in Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1993) and made into a movie in 2009) which the newsletter serialized over several issues.
The newsletter published news about upcoming Stephen King projects, interviews, reviews, articles on collecting Stephen King and even reprinted newspaper comic strips which referenced the author, and a crossword puzzle co-created by King. You could even buy a t-shirt from WZON, the radio station that King owned at the time. King was prolific enough to justify a monthly publication with each tabloid newspaper sized issue running 8 pages on average.
With the exception of issue #6, I have the first twelve issues and am not sure how long it kept going afterwards. These issues ran from January 1985 - December 1985 an interesting time in the career of Stephen King. It was during this time that he began filming his one and only movie as director, Maximum Overdrive, and when author Richard Bachman was outed as being a pseudonym of Stephen King. Also, fans were scrambling to get their hands on the mysterious and recently published The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, at the time planned only as a limited edition book with no plans for future republication. (I was fortunate to find one of these for $20.00 at the time.)
From the October, 1985 issue came this Halloween piece by Stephen King that had originally been published in The Bangor Daily News in October, 1978. Click on any image to avoid eye strain.
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