The House on Value Street

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The House on Value Street is the title of an unpublished novel attempted by Stephen King in the late 1970s.

In his 1981 treatise on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, King describes his attempts to write a fictionalized novel about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. King talks about attempting multiple drafts from various angles, before deciding he could not finish the novel to his satisfaction. King does not describe the plot in any detail, except that the fictionalized SLA's headquarters would be in the titular house on Value Street.

[edit] House on Value Street and The Stand

In Danse Macabre, while examining how the seeds of effective horror fiction may be found in the cultural climate and political current events, King credits his failure to complete House on Value Street as the genesis of his apocalyptic best-seller The Stand.

As King tells it, he began free-associating on his SLA research, and typed the sentence "Donald DeFreeze is a dark man." This first evocation of his recurring villain Randall Flagg, and the societal malaise at the center of Value Street gave King his core ideas to begin The Stand.

The House on Value Street was never completed.