A lotta folks seem to've grown bored with Stephen King, and I really can't blame 'em. The guy's been a trademark name for years, and his prolix productivity has resulted in a bibliography that's definitely seen its highs and lows. I have three remaindered King hardbacks (Black House, Dreamcatcher and From A Buick 8) on the shelves myself that I haven't read yet - see what too much teevee time'll lead to, kids? - so I'm not the one to go to for a take on the man's more recent prose. But I continue to believe that at his best (last A-grade King book for me: Bag of Bones), the man is a great pulpster.

So I was intrigued by the new weekly ABC mini-series, Kingdom Hospital, which has been adapted and New Englandized by King from a teleseries by Danish filmster Lars von Trier. Could the Yankee horrormeister mesh with the Euro art sensitivities of the director who gave us Bjork as a tragic factory girl? Early word on the series has been that King has infused his style all over the work, but after viewing the first three hours, the primary elements that hit me are those places King departs from his well-established tics.

To be sure, the writer's openly invited the charges of King-sizing by inserting his own familiar lifestory into the plotline. He even sets the series in his familiar Maineland (Castle Rock, we learn, is nearby - and one of the hospital nurses is named Bannerman). After a prologue describing a 19th century mine fire that led to the death of 200 men & women ("good Yankees all," the narrator tells us), we flash to the present where the title hospital has been erected over the ashes. Cut to Porter Rickman (Jack Coleman), a successful artist who gets struck by a van while jogging and listening to Fountains of Wayne's "Red Dragon Tattoo" on his Discman. (Wouldn't "Hat And Feet" have been a better choice?) Rickman, who sees a giant talking anteater/bearlike creature while he lies paralyzed along the road, gets carted off to Kingdom Hospital and spends the next three episodes drifting in and out of a coma-like state.

But once we get inside the building, things grow quirkier. The staff turns out to be comically odd or incompetent (Ed Begley's feckless hospital admin, a bug-eyed security man, two retarded kitchen workers who appear to be attuned to the supernatural goings on), incompetent (Bruce Davison's inappropriately arrogant neurologist) or Andrew McCarthy (yikes!) The hospital's maintenance man, the improbably named Johnny B. Goode, appears to be on permanent vacation, replaced by a different weirdly knowing figure (Charles Martin Smith in the second episode) daily. And then, of course, there's all the supernatural happenings.

In addition to that chatty anteater, which also appears bedside to chat with the demi-conscious Rickman and to mess with Dave Hooman (the low-life transdermal patch junkie who was driving the van and who winds up in ICU next to the painter by ep three), Kingdom Hospital is haunted by the wraithlike figure of a little girl. (One of the first times we see her, it's in the reflection of the ER door window, just above a posted copy of the Patient's Bill of Rights - a neat touch.) A good number of pre-Child Labor Law children perished in that mine fire, but why the ghostly apparition has started appearing in the hospital halls and weeping in the elevators now is one of the series' central mysteries. For hypochondriacal psychic Eleanor Druse (Diane Lane), the auditory visitations are the "sound of a child coming from Swedenborgian space." The line - which prompts a whaa? from Andrew McCarthy's goodguy Dr. Hook - is meant to both cement and deflate the supernatural proceedings. It deliberately prompts a chuckle even as it provides grounding for the events to come.