Stephen King interview (1993)

We start with Stephen King, he has been a national treasure of Terra since the publication of his first book, Kerry, in 1974. Stephen King has written 27 novels that have sold one hundred and fifty million copies worldwide and have greatly enriched him with his work. , including The Shining and the Misery. It has been adapted into 24 feature films and six television productions. His latest book, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, is a retrospective of King's phenomenal Korea, including many hard-to-find stories and several being published for the first time. We are very happy to have it. with us this time welcome Thank you charlie, it's good to be here it's really good to have you here we wanted to do this for a while tell me what kind of books you write well if you ask the average person -Mill reader, if there is such a boy or such a girl I guess I write horror novels.

I think what I really write are thrillers. What is the difference? I think the purpose of the horror novel is to make you sick. The idea of ​​this is and I am not opposed to this. I'll do it as part of the fun. It's something childish. The way the humor is. The two things are closely allied. Both provoke when they work. to the best reaction of the public, laughter, if it is comedy, a scream or a scream, if it is horror, but both are childish and it is like when you are a child and you are sitting in the dining room. table and you want to get to your sister, your brother, you chew the food and then you hang your mouth open like that, that's horror, the suspense is a little more sophisticated than that, so maybe that's why mothers are the way. that was tasteless that's tasteless yes, that's true, well, my mother when I was a child used to say Stephen, your taste is all in your mouth and that's true, but it has made me relatively rich, not even relatively much, but I have many relatives, although yes. you know where everything comes from, I mean, it comes from your imagination, but why this for you?

Why not other types of novels? No, I don't know where everything comes from and that is the literal and unvarnished truth, I don't know where it doesn't come from so I already know where the color of my eyes comes from I like where I come from well, it's okay that is genetically inherited from your mother and your father and my mother used to enjoy writing and my father wrote a lot of stories and I mailed them to pulp magazines from the '40s and '50s like Argosy and that kind of thing. I guess some were pretty good but I've never seen any so I have half of that from my parents and my kids only have one from me you wanted to write from an early age yes it was what it was what was there for me I always did it.

I still really enjoy the actual act of Composition for me, the part I don't like starts when you hand a manuscript to the editor, it's like you have your own private field full of snow in the backyard and no one is tracked in him except you and you give it to him. them and then they open it to the public, I mean, the whole creation is only yours and only you know those characters, our editor, but forget that you are the only person who lives with them, know them, know where they go, what they think, how conflict is going to happen to them and I'm the only one who has an opinion about them and then an editor comes and says well, we'll change this into this is new and nightmares and dreamscapes, a lot of the stories go back in the middle. in fact, some of them were written by a very young man and then the editor comes along and says well, maybe if you change this or modify that and it's not that they're wrong, that's not what I'm saying, it's that you say, Well, that was mine for a long time.

Now you come here and maybe there are two. I'm from Maine. I'm a Yankee. Maybe it's a Yankee reaction. You know, leave my backyard alone. Do you create characters that you like? I usually do, but I don't always create characters that I like, sometimes I create the same type of characters that I feared when I was a girl, right, oh yes, when I was a child I was a boy who may be the first of the modern ones. Serial killers use a guy named Charlie Dark Weather, right, and he left Texas, that's our little bania, no, that's much later.

Starkweather was in Nebraska and it was in the '50s and I had a scrapbook that I cut out all these clippings. He and my mother found this scrapbook. She was 57, so I was about 10 years old, and I think she decided right then and there that all my wheels were no longer on the road. Your elevator didn't go to the cell floor. She said why. Why are you interested in this guy and because he was only 10 years old and what articulation did he have so I got into the stories? And he really still is. I'm a much better writer than I am a conversationalist, which I couldn't tell him.

There was a photo of this young man who killed these people and what was in his eyes was nothing at all, I mean empty rooms, depopulated planets whose nothingness and what I couldn't tell him was that I have to take care of this guy. I need to know everything about him so that if I ever meet him or someone like him, I can go around and in my fiction, when I've created characters like John Rain Load in Firestarter or George Stark in the Dark, half of them actually bad guys, I'm telling myself, reminding myself, watch out for these guys, these guys are dangerous and they're really out there, but when they were how old did you do this?

This is when you wouldn't camp, yes, you tried to write something, so when? you were 9 and 10, oh yeah, yeah, and a lot of it was the kind of stuff I write now, there were horror stories, fantasy stories, look, I grew up on a diet of, say, the kind of comics that were supposed to be that the children did not have. read like Tales from the Crypt and the Vault of Horror and that kind of stuff, one of the first stories I remember my mother reading, my brother and I were dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so you see, was deformed from an early age, but the idea that this kind of thing, you know, someone will want to talk about your books if you write what I write and they'll sneak up on you and tell you.

By the way, what was your childhood like? Of course it did, but mine was perfectly normal. As you know, it is a general case. Going back to the question I asked, what kind of books do you write? What do you compare yourself to? Without false modesty with anyone. When you look back, who would you like to be compared to? Where do you put your work in general once it's finished and bound and in a book I put it on the shelf? It's a place where I send it to Hollywood. I send the check, yes. writers that I like, there are writers that I greatly admire and there are writers whose styles have helped me in various moments that I have taken in my own mix and have tried to make part of myself.

I think writers when they're growing up are like what my mother always used to say, the milk in the refrigerator takes on the flavor of whatever's next to it, you know, so when I was a kid, if I read a lot of HP Lovecraft, I wrote like Lovecraft, there are a couple of pastiches in nightmares and dreamscapes, the new book there is a Sherlock Holmes story that was written as part of a competition at a mystery weekend in Mohawk, upstate New York, and there's also a tough Chandler-style detective story from Philip Marvel because I admire that style.

You tremendously know how I am. I don't necessarily want to be compared to anyone, but just tell me who you know because there are people that I asked the question about, there are many that say and this is a compliment to you, look back. In a few years, we will look back at what Stephen King was writing and see you in a very different way, as the audience that loves you so much and buys 150 million copies sees you, they may very well be responding to these types of emotions. basic. of a great story, first of all, I don't think you sell unless you tell a great story.

I guess you think that too, if you remember me. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing when you think about it. writers who come and enjoy tremendous popularity and sort of disappear, so that you find their works on the back shelves of hotel suites or, you know, in the cheap barns of New England, if I could write a book, Let's say of my gender, that it was remembered. the way Dracula remembered I loved the idea of ​​the novel Dracula because it's unabashed Pulp Fiction and it's melodramatic and it has a lot of things that critics considered vices and yet it enjoyed its own life, it held its ground.

Test of time, that's true, yes, and do you think yours will stand the test of time? Well, I'd like to think so and I think some of that has a chance because horror fiction is a rule of thumb and lives its own guerrilla life, so sometimes it's the kind of thing where a kid tells a another if you read this, you know, and they're going to take it out of the library and I think some of those things have a tendency to, unfortunately, both at the surface level and at the top level not surface level but at the top what?

It's what makes it so attractive that it sells something to cover yours and others' what it's about whatever you don't call it Horeb your work Horeb don't you call yourself a horror novelist? for any reason except for yourself, but okay, I'm not suggesting you give it up, right, I'm not, but what is it that attracts an audience on the first level? forbidden a few minutes forbidden for you to tell someone to come with me and I will tell you things that no one else will say and I will show you things that no one else will find it so horrible to imagine it that's how it is and again it shares the same appeal as the comedy that says the same thing comedy humor says comedy humor get me out of here I just wash my mouth and I can't do anything with it, but a movie that's really funny and really makes people laugh usually says, "I'm going to show you something you haven't done." We've seen it before, so when Mel Brooks did Blazing Saddles back in '74 or whatever and the Cowboys ate beans and then sat around the fire and started farting, well, no one had ever heard anyone fight in a movie and we all fell to the ground. floor laughing you know that movie was made so it was something that had previously been prohibited you know that we all know it we all know that people pass gas but no one had ever put it on the big screen and here what you are doing is prohibited well for example, in Pet Sematary what I said was that here is something we don't talk about, people sometimes have children who die, terrible things happen and sometimes a child dies young and in Pet Sematary that happened and I followed the family through the process mourning and then the father goes to the cemetery and digs up his son and tries to bring him back to life and that can't happen, it's a totally fictional thing in case any of the viewers thought that. they could dig people up and bring them back to life, it doesn't work that way, but in fiction sometimes it can and the important thing is that you know, I like to say that fiction is a lie, but good fiction is the truth within Of the lie. and the truth that anyone who has ever lost a child knows is that they wish they could bring them back to life and the story explores what could happen if something like that could happen, so horror fiction for me is a big draw for me. the forbidden of the forbidden now in a Deposit and/or additional level is also a feeling of dealing with your own fears.

I think it is. I think in comparison to what good in comparison saying no matter how bad things are, you know they are. It's not that bad, there are two stories no matter how scared you may be, this is the deepest and the darkest, but on a level that I like to work on now because I've been here for a long time, I've done a lot of these things . Self-parody terrifies me. I'm terrified of running out of ideas and just recycling old stuff. What interests me most right now is the fact that sometimes things happen that are terrible and don't seem clear. which is why there are two stories and nightmares and dreamscapes, this one called rainy season and there is another one called rainy season with the moving finger, it's about these tourists who are besieged by killer toads right on the moving finger, it's a story about a man from Queens who one night sees a finger taken out of the bathroom drain only one finger and it lengthens and in no case do these phenomena explain one of the things that particularly in Hollywood filmmakers like to do is explain where these came from monsters of or whatever the phenomenon started this which is ridiculous why they would want to move on is ridiculous yeah why would they look at it why would they want to do that because that ruins the mystery of the whole thing, doesn't it? right, and the reason you're doing what you're doing instead of producing movies is because you're relatively rational, you can understand that, well, let's get to that topic, I mean, what about movies that have been made from your novels?

I mean, some of them forget whatever's in the book and take the title and go out and make their movie mm-hmm now you know it's just trying to make a few bucks, yeah, but what about the ones that they are more? True to what you have written, why do they fail? I don't mean failing in terms of failing, in terms of being liked, not in terms of audiences, not in terms of ma

king

money, but in terms of Stephen King saying, jeez, they did a good job, well, a movie. that departs considerably from the book that is a failure is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is correct and I thinkI got excited because I don't remember what a list was of all the ways you've killed people.

Yes, it was amazing. Yeah, I remember, but I've had a long career and I've killed a lot of people. Well, whichever one was the most delicious for you, and I choose the word delicious on purpose, yeah, I think that's probably a story. called survivor type, it's a short story, it's not in Nightmares and Dreamscapes which, if you're wondering, are on sale in a bookstore near you, even as we speak from the press search, there is an earlier collection called Skeleton Crew, there a story where this type of survivor was in and didn't appear anywhere else because I couldn't.

I didn't sell it to a magazine, it was about a doctor who smuggled heroin, who was on a ship that sank and landed on a desert island and there was nothing to eat, and since he's a surgeon and he has all this anesthesia, he eats a piece. at the same time and I remember going to this retired doctor who lived next door to us and telling him how much of a person he could have personally cut before dying from shock or trauma and here's a me and his aunt this is the same guy a year ago I went to him before and asked him if it would be humanly possible for a human being to swallow a cat, so it got to the point where you can actually do it, it was really strange, mikono, much stranger than I thought, I never did did you expect?

As expected, he told me that a person with a strong survival instinct could eliminate quite a bit of this person. We've had a couple of examples of that recently where people have been trapped and had limbs cut off to free themselves, otherwise they would have died, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what you're tal

king

about, yeah, well, this guy, except this guy eats when I cut him, although he made a fire and cooked a little, so I guess so, but that's the worst. well, you said the tasty, tasty, delicious, yes, what is the most, Your Highness, the worst boy?

You put me in a bind like I said. I think of many wounded men. I think there was a guy in the fire starter. Well, I guess let me put it this way. In nightmares and dreamscapes there is this couple who get eaten alive by carnivorous toads, so, well, that worked, yeah, I'll take it. Have you ever gone too far and said no, no, no, I've gone too far? Well, as I say generally, I'm going to go ahead and write them anyway because at this point I'm kind of running and I'll tend to put it aside, so there are several times where I thought I'd gone too far, Pet thought.

The Sematary Right went a step too far and was a wildly popular book that shows that it is almost impossible to faze the American people and, at this point in my career, the British, the French or the Germans, either, but I can say that I paraphrase that. I think I have a couple of ideas that are probably a little out of the ordinary, yeah, what's your worst fear that one of my kids will die? That is the basis of Pet Sematary. I think the call in the middle of the night with a police officer saying, get ready. for some bad news that would be the most horrible thing yeah after you've done everything you've done to bow down to me I don't know about you I'm a control freak and to me some say well when your kids grow up , go. alone and you can't protect or secure them from the lashes and scorns of outrageous fortune and you just have to let them go and I understand that because I'm a relatively rational human being despite the guy who eats Himself, you know, and the carnivorous Toad.

I'm a rational human being, but there's a part of me that just doesn't want to let go and wishes I could guarantee your success. You can't negotiate with God. You once said that the readers are interested in your secrets, not what you read, that is, what well, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how if I give you an

interview

about my career, what I dedicate myself, sooner or later someone will say. By the way, what was your childhood like? People want to know where the bodies are buried. They want to know what made me do what I'm doing and the truth is even more horrible.

The answer is nothing. I'm just like that naturally. That's what I thought. Yes, it is. great to have you, it's great to be here. Nightmares and dreamscapes by Stephen King. It's a collection. I'm going back and people say it's delightful to read some of those that are a little older. Yes vintage great to have you thank you so much Bangor Maine pride Stephen King we will be back stay with us