Of course, Stephen King has long been considered the most important writer of the Pre-Fall period–stories that have entered the lexicon and endured over centuries. We’ve all had a high school production of Carrie or Maximum Overdrive, even as the now-archaic language in the books is sometimes derided as stuffy and overly formal. But despite the longevity of his timeless tales and characters, historical information about King himself is frustratingly hard to come by. Other than a civil register for his marriage and the births of his children, as well as an official obituary and of course his lavish tomb in St. John’s in Bangor, complete with effigy of the author at his typewriter.

Indeed, only a handful of images of the author survive as well. The tomb effigy, of course, though some claim the veined marble is a crude likeness. The King First Fifteen Folios, the omnibus of the author’s collected novels and short stories, also features an illustration of the author on its back jacket, but it is done in an artistic and minimalist ink style and is often ignored. Various other images, such as the Simpsons Cel and the Overdrive Trailer Frame, have been claimed to represent or depict King, but they are rent with controversy. It’s thought that many images may once have existed but were lost in the Fall–or at least, that is the current academic consensus.

But there is a small but vociferous minority who insist that the known details of King’s life do not correspond with the man who wrote his works. Any such author, they argue, would necessarily have needed extensive literary training at the college level, a lengthy apprenticeship in a practical writing field such as journalism, and connections to high society and the publishing world–none of which are present in the few biographical details that are extant. They insist that the historical King either was a fabrication or a patsy used to hide the actual author of the King canon.

A number of candidates have been put forward. One popular candidate was dairy farmer Richard Bachman, whose novels adherents claim to be extremely similar to King’s despite being written by an older man living two states away. While this was once in vogue–enough so that a King-Bachman Society existed for a time–there are irreconcilable problems with the theory that have led to its gradual abandonment. For one, Bachman–a former sailor–had even less of a literary background than King. For another, Bachman died in 1985, decades before King and in advance of many of King’s most popular novels. The popular reply–that Bachman had written all the King books before his death and they were published posthumously, or that his 1985 death was incorrect, with some evidence that he survived as late as 2007–has often failed to convince.

The most popular “alternative candidate” for the “true author” of King’s oeuvre is Dean Koontz, a college-educated and prize-winning author who also worked as a writing teacher before turning his hand to fiction. In Koontz, proponents see an older and more educated author whose many works share distinct similarities in theme and tone to King’s writing. Of course, as with Bachman, there are a number of problems with the hypothesis–one being why Koontz needed to use a pseudonym at all, and why he would have chosen the historical King as his patsy. The current leading explanation presented by the Koontz-King Society is that King was actually Koontz’s literary agent, and the deception was created to allow Koontz to publish additional books per year without cannibalizing his own market.

Without the discovery of more physical records from the Pre-Fall era, the controversy–such as it is–cannot be resolved. Academics and experts on King insist that there is no controversy, naturally, but the Koontz and even the Bachman camp have adherents to this day, as the producers of the biopic The False King have demonstrated.