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.
Here is the abstract of our article:
Between 1977 and 1984, Stephen King published five novels under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman”. Reviewers noted similarities between King’s and Bachman’s writing styles when Thinner (1984) was published, ultimately leading to King’s unmasking. We investigate whether computational authorship analysis techniques can correctly identify King as the author of the Bachman books out of a selection of contemporary candidate authors – Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, and Thomas Harris. We also perform a post-hoc analysis of the use of pop-culture references and brand names in Bachman, King, Koontz, Straub, and Harris novels, based on comments in reviews of Bachman and King novels. The references extracted from the Bachman books occurred significantly more often in King’s texts than in the others’, showing that attentive readers could have “heard King’s voice” in the Bachman books through what a reviewer denigratingly called King’s “compulsion to list brand-name products and his affinity for pop-cult teenage junk”.