Perhaps one of the most audacious adaptations of the works of Stephen King is Haven, a new Showcase Original series about a phenomena-friendly female FBI agent and some very strange shenanigans in a tiny town in Maine. The audacity stems from the fact that Haven is loosely based on King’s 2005 crime novella The Colorado Kid—a novella notable for featuring not just a genre outside of the horror legend’s typical comfort zone, but also an unsolvable mystery that indeed remains unexplained at story’s end.

Adaptation, of course, is a slippery skill, and those who play with it often change not just the rules but the game itself. Who’s to say then, that the Colorado Kid’s story had to end (really, not end) as it did in King’s deftly executed short novel? Herewith, a series of blogs examining the hows, wherefores and whys concerning various adaptations of Stephen King’s works, beginning and ending with the one that brought us and agent Audrey Parker to coastal Maine in the first place, Haven.

Haven Blog, Part 1:
THE HAVEN'S AND THE HAVEN'-NOTS
by Gary Butler

The unsolved mystery story in Stephen King’s novella The Colorado Kid comes to the small screen in Haven, where it has been repurposed as the 13-episode series’ over-arching backbone—in fact, Haven’s lead character, FBI agent Audrey Parker, is directly tied to the titular fiction character’s mysterious death. The book itself is a fun and intentionally dawdling narrative about two colorful career town newsies telling the Kid’s open-ended non-story to their new, eager-beaver junior editor. That’s it, that’s all she wrote—save for the fact that newshound Stephanie McCann never even writes up the piece.

Over to the TV series: Agent Parker (played by relative newcomer Emily Rose) finds herself dispatched to retrieve an FBI fugitive suspected to have returned to his home, the small town of Haven, Maine. The town takes its name from the Micmac name for the area, Tuwiuwok—roughly translated, Haven for God’s Orphans. Parker fits in immediately, in part because she is open-minded about psychic phenomena, no fewer than three instances of which are offered up in the premiere episode’s first fifteen minutes. Bonus: Parker is also an orphan.

It’s clear from the outset that Haven will adopt an X-Files format, with more than a dash of Veronica Mars—Rose very much looks the part for the latter, and her super-mouthy character is something of a compromise between Mulder and Mars. The premiere episode presents a one-off crime tied to a mysterious phenomenon, and (mostly) resolves it; at the same time, the bigger-picture story of The Colorado Kid is launched, clearly to be woven into the background of the rest of the series. That said, the source material’s presence is so thinly acknowledged that it’s tempting to call this show an adaptation in name only. (Then again, it’s called Haven, not The Colorado Kid, so... And in fairness, The Colorado Kid is definitely the wrong name for this show; meanwhile, Haven is an admittedly more compelling name than Moose-Lookit Island, which is what the town was called in King’s novel.)

Easily the second-biggest major change is having reporter Stephanie morph into fibbie Audrey—not to mention the fact that the total number of FBI agents that show up in the book is, well, zero.

While it’s easy to assume that Stephen King would be less-than-thrilled with this significant level of tampering, the more likely truth is that he’s just fine with it—because one of the most interesting motifs that the author examines over the course of The Colorado Kid is storytelling itself, particularly what makes the process work when it works. King specifically compares the process of reporting to lying, or at the very least hiding the fact that news rarely distributes actual information, preferring instead to simply tell tales. (Bear in mind that the book’s three leads all work at a newspaper.)

“Pick up any big-city paper, and what do you find on the front page?” ninety-year-old newspaper editor Vince Teague asks rhetorically. “Questions disguised as stories.” Vince’s amusing examples: Where is Osama Bin-Laden? We don’t know. Why is the President doing whatever he is doing right now? We don’t know because he doesn’t know… (In terms of incidental changes, Teague becomes Teagues in the TV show, and his partner David ‘Dave’ Bowie becomes his brother, Dave Teagues.)

Teague also draws the line between the two types of printed reportage: news stories and feature stories, the former being accounts of unfolding events, the latter constituting narratives that have an actual beginning, middle and end. The legend of The Colorado Kid, he explains, qualifies as neither: The man in question is a dead body found on the seashore one morning in 1980 (the book is set in 2005, the TV show 2010), and while his identity is eventually discovered, the circumstances of his death—right down to the question of whether or not he was murdered—remain forever impossible to resolve.

Haven’s Colorado Kid shows up as an old newspaper headline, “Who Killed The Colorado Kid?”, overtop of a dockside photo of a corpse in front of which stands a woman, staring in horror. Newshound Vince Teagues makes the visual connection: The woman in the photo looks exactly like Agent Parker. Bonus: There is a little girl at the woman’s side…

Perhaps the greatest ‘mystery’ surrounding Haven, then, will be whether or not it will allow the dead man’s past—indeed, his fate—to remain not just unexplained but inexplicable, and whether the individual one-off episodes will feature mysteries in the same vein. Early in The Colorado Kid, Teague outlines the ideal recipe for gripping storytelling: Create one unknown scenario with one concrete detail (what the newsies call a ‘musta-been’) and “your reader will tell himself a story.” An interesting take on audience participation, to be sure.

Haven is a TV series that very specifically concerns the supernatural—understandable, given that King’s fans will be tuning in for horror, not crime—but that’s fine, because the genre deftly loans itself to the unknown, the unknowable, the criminally mysterious. If the show’s screenwriters can pull together scripts for individual stories that play out in the spirit of Teague’s audience-involvement lesson, then Haven might prove to be a more accurate adaptation than those of many other of King’s works. Who’s to say that its ultimate resolution won’t one up The X-Files or Lost?

King directly addresses his readers in an intriguing and persuasive afterword to The Colorado Kid wherein he states that people everywhere “live in a web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better… reality.” In Haven, Agent Parker responds to her boss chiding her for chasing a perp down a blind alley, “Where I grew up, a blind alley was even better than reality.”

The point that King is making, though, is that this terminological substitution is what basically keeps us sane, given that the randomness of life makes the majority of things ultimately unknowable. “Wanting [to know] may be better than knowing,” he offers. It remains to be seen whether Haven’s creators and characters—and viewers—agree.

Haven airs Monday nights at 10pm ET/PT on Showcase.

TWO WEEKS FROM NOW, Haven Blog, Part 2: Urban, suburban and small-town legends