Desperation, Derivation
One year ago this week, Christina F. Starobin ’71 was nursing a newly shattered dream. U.S. District Judge David Hurd had just dismissed on summary judgment a complaint Starobin filed alleging the “literary rape” of her unpublished vampire novel manuscript Blood Eternal by horror entrepreneur Stephen King in his 1996 ephemeral-spirit novel Desperation.
Starobin can no longer legally call the incident plagiarism because Hurd decided against her. Well, actually, he decided against both of them from the start.
“Quite frankly, neither work was a particularly good read,” he writes, after admitting to a first read of both King and Starobin. She is shot down again when Hurd asserts: “There are no common characters, locations, or occurrences shared by her novel and King’s. There are no common references to popular culture, historical events or common sequences of events.”
Starobin is moving on from this loss, but still disillusioned with the big break that wasn’t and the lawsuit that went horribly wrong.
Pursuing legal action seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, her manuscript Blood Eternal, which is about vampires who operate a car service in the suburbs of New Jersey, had languished “for about nine months” in Penguin Viking’s editorial offices. She originally sent it to a sympathetic Penguin editor she met at a Chicago book fair. This Starobin booster switched jobs before any Blood Eternal progress was made and her replacement had no interest in unagented horror from an unknown author. Starobin finally got her manuscript back and, disappointed yet still oddly determined, moved on to other projects.
That would have been the end of it if Starobin’s boyfriend, “an avid reader,” hadn’t read Stephen King’s Desperation and left it lying around their apartment waiting to be thrown away. Starobin picked it up and her spirits plummeted.
“It bore more than a passing resemblance to my book, a rather unhappy realization for me,” she says. “There were many elements of the plot, similarities in language, tone, images. There was no word for word plagiarism. And I know you can make arguments about copying literary form and that Romeo and Juliet can appear in many different forms but this was not that simple a story.”
It was a private disappointment at first. For four years she sat with her suspicion that while her manuscript sat in the Viking offices someone working for King lifted the essence of her work and copied it into Desperation, a novel about an ancient evil spirit released from a mine into a Nevada desert.
Starobin says she knew it was time to take legal action after a low moment in a shopping mall. While signing for a credit card purchase, the salesperson told that her handwriting looked as messy as a doctor’s. Starobin explained that she was a doctor, a doctor of literature, and also an author. The amiable clerk asked if any of her work was published, which led to a discussion of King’s pilfering of her vampire plot.
“I realized I was telling the story to a complete stranger in a shopping mall and that I hadn’t gotten over it,” she says. Legal help was “prohibitively expensive” so Starobin represented herself.
“I don’t know that [King’s lawyers] treated it like a joke but they wanted it to be treated like a joke,” she says. “One of King’s lawyers said ‘even if King had written this book with my book on his lap, it wouldn’t have been plagiarism.”
Starobin stresses that she sued King not for the money or publicity, but because she could not go on believing that someone had ripped off her work without pursuing every available avenue. She didn’t want any publicity (and did not subsequently get an agent) and in fact says that “I really was prohibited from seeking any type of publicity because to do so would damage the case. This was the last thing I wanted,”
All she wanted was to tell a different kind of vampire story. “It wasn’t the typical story with garlic and crosses. It was very mysterious,” she says.
“The unpleasant thing with a case like this is it’s very easy to come out looking like a kook,” she says. Starobin made herself most vulnerable with her arguments against King’s literary talent, as judged by her oft-referenced Ivy League educated perspective. Hurd is particularly snarky when he remarks on this point. “[Starobin] also states that “BLOOD ETERNAL” , ‘which is the product of an Ivy League education, is not the work of an untutored hack,’” Hurd paraphrases. He then goes to the text (Starobin’s novel, that is) to refute the point. “Plaintiff’s unpublished manuscript for Blood Eternal contains the following simile: ‘She could feel the long teeth at the front of her mouth growing longer like tiny little car antennae looking for blood.’”
Hurd left the commentary, tucked in a footnote of the decision, at this. Starobin avoids responding directly to the sting of the decision that both crushed her hopes and mocked her mercilessly.
Reflecting on the experience a full year after the judge’s decision, Starobin is humbled but upbeat. Something good did come of her painful legal entanlgement. “One of King’s lawyers had a paralegal read my book. When she told me she liked it, I was so happy. That’s what I did it for.”