The Kings of Fiction

He and his brother have taken different approaches to dealing with Stephen King's enormous shadow. Joe chose to employ a pseudonym and for eight years wouldn't even tell his agent who his father was. It wasn't until he'd published his best-selling first novel, "Heart-Shaped Box" -- which a New York Times reviewer called "a wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror" -- that he confirmed rumors about his identity.

"I think he felt he had to make a separation," Owen says. The reason seems obvious: "Joe Hill's" work had a good deal in common with Stephen King's.

Owen published his first book, a 2005 collection called "We're All in This Together," under his own name. Consisting of a novella and four stories, it carries a blurb comparing its author to Anne Tyler and John Irving.

"I sort of felt like I was pseudonymous by writing about something completely different," he says.

Tabitha King, meanwhile, hasn't always found it easy to be the other writer in the King household. As Stephen has often pointed out, one of the things he loves about his wife is her willingness to say exactly what she thinks. And on the subject of their side-by-side writing careers, she stays true to form.

"I think of myself as toe jam," she says.

Um -- meaning?

"Well, there's this elephant in the room, always."

Both halves of the couple were already writing when they met at the University of Maine at Orono. "She was writing wonderful poetry," Stephen says, and when she eventually collected it, she "submitted it to the Yale Younger Poets, where I still think it should have won."

Tabitha isn't buying this. "It was returned by return mail," she says.

She persevered, switched to prose, managed to write with three children in the house. "I ignored them," she deadpans. Then she explains that by the time she was finally able to finish a novel, the kids were old enough so that "it wasn't a case of having to constantly watch them to prevent fatalities."

Six novels later, in the late '90s, she and Stephen were sharing an editor at Viking Penguin when he got into a fight over money. "It's a political story," Tabitha says, involving dueling editors and their mega-selling novelists, the other being Tom Clancy.