Together with Dorothy Henriette Modrall Sperling and Mike Kestemont, I (Vincent) have written an article that was recently published in the Journal of Computational Literary Studies. The article is titled ‘The Authorship of Stephen King’s Books Written Under the Pseudonym “Richard Bachman”: A Stylometric Analysis’.

When we started work on this over a year ago, our research question was simply: would current methods in computer stylometry be able to identify King’s style in his novels published as Bachman? This proved to be the case. Additionally, we asked ourselves which aspects of King’s style were so present in the early Bachman books that may have caused many readers at the time to have strong suspicions that Bachman was King. We arrived at his use of brand names and references to popular culture as a clearly identifiable characteristic of his texts.