Author releases ‘Drunken Fireworks" early as an audiobook

This week, Award winning author Stephen King, In an unusual experiment, released a new short story, “Drunken Fireworks,” as an audiobook months before the story arrives in print.

Mr. King credits his decades-long obsession with audiobooks with sharpening his prose, improving the pacing of his narratives and helping him ward off lazy phrases and clichés.

“If you listen to something on audio, every flaw in a writer’s work, the repetitions of words and the clumsy phrases, they all stand out,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “As a writer, I say to myself, how will that sound?”

This week, Mr. King will find out whether his fans share his appetite for narrated books. Though he risks disappointing devoted fans of his print books, Mr. King is betting that “Drunken Fireworks” will turn more of his readers into audiobook converts.

“Every now and then, the discussion will come up, ‘Are audiobooks as good as books in print?’ and the answer to me is a no-brainer,” he said. “Yes, they are, and they might even be better.”

“Drunken Fireworks” unfolds as a detailed statement given to the police by a hard-partying man who is arrested for his role in a Fourth of July fireworks competition on a lake in Maine. The narrator, Alden McCausland, is a bumbling, unemployed man who spends his days drinking coffee brandy cocktails with his mother, and going to great, and illegal, lengths to outdo his nemesis’s annual fireworks display.

Mr. King wrote it for his coming short story collection, “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams,” but wanted to see if the story could stand on its own as a spoken performance.

“It’s an oral kind of story that should be listened to,” he said.

The arrival of “Drunken Fireworks” as a stand-alone work of audio is the latest sign that audiobooks, which were once little more than an afterthought for writers and publishers, are evolving into a vibrant and independent art form.

With “Drunken Fireworks,” which costs $15 as a CD and $10 for the digital version, Mr. King and his publisher are testing whether audio can serve as an effective teaser for a future print book.