“He looks like a horror character, though.”And King does play the part. He once did an American Express advertisement, emerging gaunt from the shadows with a raven on his arm. “He’s a big jovial enthusiastic person,” says Greil Marcus, a music critic who sings with King in a rusty writers’ band. When his local music station announced it was switching to something softer, he bought it and re-instituted the Rolling Stones. Although he writes nearly every day, except his birthday, Easter and Christmas (he is a Methodist), he fulfils his quota so quickly – before lunch – that he has plenty of time to play tennis with his children. He spends little of his income, said to be more than pounds 15m a year, preferring “to know my ass is going to be covered” – mindful of his draughty years in that hillside caravan.Like the Midwestern adolescents he writes for and still resembles, he wears jeans and T-shirts and listens to old-fashioned hard rock as he works. After the Keene break-in, he had the fence round his house extended, his gates padlocked, and a code-controlled entrance installed.Yet behind his gates King retains an affable, relatively ordinary life.

Between 1977 and 1984 he published five rather more conventional novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, complete with invented biography. So keen- eyed and hungry were some of King’s fans that they soon grew suspicious; onesearched publishers’ forms in the Library of Congress to reveal Bachman’s identity.He removed his phone number from public listing as early as 1976, and now writes in a rented bungalow several miles from his home. The middle- aged spread of his writing into longer, more fantastical novels and Roald Dahl-style short stories has lost him some of his horror-writer’s reputation. “The real fans think he’s a bit passe,” says Allan Bryce, editor of the horror magazine Darkside. “He’s a mainstream writer who dabbles.”Yet King has created a fearsome appetite among the faithful.

Unusually for his genre, half his readers are women.All this diversification has had its disadvantages. A lack of quality control has seen some of his books – which tend to be more haunted than gory – crudely hacked up into bloody straight-to-video fare. And his handful of fright-free vignettes have also become films, with Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption carrying his name far beyond horror circles. “What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”King makes sure his writing never gets too shocking, favouring eternal fears and happy endings in his reassuringly old-fashioned small towns rather than modern urban horrors. “Stephen speaks to readers who aren’t spoken to by much else,” says his editor, Chuck Verrill.The production line for what King calls his “literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries” has run at peak capacity ever since. King writes enough words for seven normal-length novels a year “Talent is cheaper than table salt,” he said once. All three became films; after thousands of nights at the drive-in and watching late-night television King instinctively saw the potential synergy between book and screen.