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 β 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.
Keywords: Stephen King , stylometry , pop culture , authorship verification , contemporary English-language fiction. Published on He did not wish to oppose himself to being given that label; he was proud of his accomplishments at that point as a regular in the New York Times bestseller list and receiver of advances of well over one million dollars for a new novel.
In fact, before starting on what was to become his first published novel, Carrie , he had already completed four other novels β none of them horror. King described in detail when he wrote those four pre- Carrie books, and how he tried, unsuccessfully, to get them published. It is understandable that an author would rather remain vague about unpublished material. Both readers and reviewers noticed how similar the text was to King novels in style, theme, and narrative drive. In stylometry, attribution and verification are commonly distinguished.
Authorship attribution is the process of attributing an unknown document to an author within a set of candidate authors Koppel et al. Authorship attribution is distinct from authorship verification in that authorship verification involves comparing an unknown text to a corpus of texts by a known author, where the aim is to determine whether the unknown document is also by that author.
