Stephen King’s Family Business

Barbel Schmidt for The New York Times

From left: Joe Hill, Tabitha King, Kelly Braffet, Owen King, Stephen King, Naomi King and Joe's dog, McMurtry. The family now boasts five novelists, four of whom have books out this year.

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.

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