This is outright wonderful!
Bev Vincent has answered every question you could have about Stephen King and his published/ filmed/ recorded works.
Want to know what he has written? When he wrote it? What he thought about before writing it?
Many photos.
List of his many awards.
Lovely
I highly recommend
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me this ARC

Bev Vincent's biography takes the format of a fairly chronological cataloguing of Stephen King's body of work, interspersed throughout with sidebars, interludes, photos/ scans of manuscript pages and more.
It's a difficult balancing act to cover enough synopsis of each title to make sense, without it becoming a recap that the serious fan (who presumably this type of work is aimed at) will roll their eyes at saying, "I know what the book is about". Vincent balances this well - and the accompanying archive photos with original version of pages and early covers/ images helps this a lot.
While early parts of the book's insights and King's thoughts might have been covered by the subject's own 'On Writing' and, to a lesser extent, 'Danse Macabre', there is enough new stuff there to mean it does not suffer from repetition.
Bev chooses not to offer much in the way of his own critical opinion on how well a book works or doesn't - leaving critical consideration (for the most part) to King's own benefit of hindsight views on what worked and what didn't.
There's a ton of fascinating information here taken from whatever extensive archives the author has access to - and it really makes this work stand out compared to recent entries into appraisals of King's work (I'm thinking of something like Ian Nathan's Stephen King at the Movies, which was a dull series of plot synopsis with lots of big, big photographs and movie stills). Here, the focus is on the books, but it's a comprehensive thing looking at the movies/ tv adaptations, as well as topics as varied as King's philanthropic works, radio stations, and analysis of geographic settings both real and fiction
One note - this title supplied by netgalley for review is not available as direct download to Kindle, but rather was viewed on the Netgalley shelf: when one sees how many images are included it becomes obvious why.
Overall this is a work that stands alongside Douglas Winter's The Art of Darkness as key King texts out there.

5 stars
This is a really comprehensive book about Stephan King and most of his novels. The pictures are absolutely gorgeous. It is a quick and easy read. I think a majority of King fans will treasure this.

My thanks to Net Galley and Quarto for allowing me to review this book. I was able to complete while sitting at work but had a few idsues:
1. Book was not available to kindle. Only ebook and pdf.
2. Downloaded e book and print too small to enlarge for one who wears glasses to see at a proper reading size.
3. Photos were great. Got small bits to read. But was expecting more story foremat.

This is an updated (and thus extended) edition of Bev Vincent's ILLUSTRATED STEPHEN KING COMPANION, with publication set to coincide with King's 75th birthday. Having read the original edition, a limited B&N exclusive published in 2009, this review will mostly be a comparison highlighting the differences, since most of the text is the same.

As the subtitle suggests, this is an exploration of King’s work, life, and influences—a look at his biography through the lens of his releases (up to a sneak preview of the soon to be published FAIRY TALE), uncovering how each villain or monster reflects something in King's personal life. Vincent pulls from sources such as King's non-fiction works DANSE MACABRE and ON WRITING, as well as interviews (sources are given in the appendix). There won't be much that's truly new information to a well-versed fan, but it's still nice to have such a thorough examination of everything that's influenced his work collected in a pretty book filled with personal photographs, stills from adaptations, and manuscript pages.

King hasn’t been idle since the first edition was published 13 years ago, so naturally this updated edition covers a lot of works that did not yet exist at the time. However, it’s also more detailed regarding the older back-catalogue too, touching on some less well-known (or loved) novels and collections which had not been covered before, such as THE TOMMYKNOCKERS and THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, to name but two. While the main chapter texts are largely the same, they have been updated to reflect newer and current developments in parts; one example would be the sections regarding <i>The Stand</i> which now reference the pandemic, or the Dollar Babies online screening festival held during lockdown.

The main change is that the chapters are no longer focused on a major/iconic works representative of a specific era of King’s career, more intuitively covering a decade each instead. I still have the same complaint regarding the layout of the “interludes“ (separate sections covering unrelated topics such as The Rock Bottom Remainders, King's radio stations, his philantropy, the rise and fall of Richard Bachman, etc.): They still often interrupt the main chapter mid-sentence and force the reader to flip back or forth to finish the paragraph. And a new complaint, too: The first page of each chapter and the interludes are all printed as white text on black background, which I hate—the contrast (or rather lack thereof) is hard on the eyes and caused me annoying afterimages, especially when reading a digital version off the screen.

I’m also not too keen on the new cover (what's worse than white text on black background? Red on black...), but content-wise, there’s no denying that this streamlined and more complete and chronological edition is a vast improvement over the original one, and would make a nice addition to any King fan’s shelf.

A great insight into the life of Stephen King and his works, a must read for any fan of the king of horror! Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of the book in return for my honest feedback.