Caroline Bicks will read from her new book, Monsters in the Archives. Books available for sale and signing courtesy of Compass Rose Books. A reception to follow hosted by Stefanie Scheer Young.

About Monsters in the Archives

After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maine’s inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archive, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writer’s creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of King’s enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?

Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives—authorized by Stephen King himself and informed by interviews Bicks had with him—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

Caroline Bicks is an internationally recognized Shakespeare scholar who has published widely on early modern drama, gender, and the history of science. She studied Renaissance poetry at Harvard University as an undergraduate and received her PhD in English Literature from Stanford University. She was tenured at Boston College in 2008, the same year that she began summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English. In 2017, she became the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine.