by George Beahm
TV GUIDE: THE SHINING ISSUE
April 26, 1997
For a cover story on King’s remake of The Shining, starring Steven Weber as Jack and Rebecca De Mornay as Wendy, Bernie Wrightson provided a color painting for the cover of TV Guide and an interior illustration for “Before the Play.”
As TV Guide noted:
Weber knew that King didn’t want another psycho Jack [Nicholson]. The story King wanted to tell emphasized a family torn apart by a much more prevalent demon: alcohol. “It’s not just about a big star going mad,” Weber says. De Mornay agrees: “When I first saw the script I thought, ‘Who are they kidding? They’re going to do this again?’ But this script had nothing to do with the movie. It haunted me. It was a metaphor for the classic American alcoholic dysfunctional family, where the real ghost in the family is rage.”
Bernie’s painting of a snowy winter’s night, with Jack Torrance in the foreground and the Overlook Hotel in the background, grabs your attention, as does his interior illustration for King’s “Before the Play,” depicting Lottie Kilgallon, who reaches for cigarettes on the floor and has her wrist grabbed by a man under the bed.
35
STEPHEN KING:
A CHAUTAQUA IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
I can’t really lecture. I’m not good at that, and I can’t speak with any sense from prepared notes. About the most I can do is chautaqua, a fine old word that means you babble on for a little while about the things that you do and then you sit down.
—STEPHEN KING IN HIS INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS TO A PUBLIC TALK IN VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA, in 1986
I was at the Virginia Beach lecture, for which King solicited questions from the audience to be submitted in writing prior to his talk. He pulled out a few at random, answered them, and decided to take questions from the audience instead, saying he prefers live interaction. Immediately, hands went up as they always do when he appears in public, because people are curious about him and his work.
At the Pasadena talk, King answers a lot of the most commonly asked questions his readers pose to him. The following quotes are from his Q&A after his informal talk.
On Lobsters: For a lot of my childhood, I grew up where I live now, which is Maine. We used to eat a lot of lobster—a poor man’s steak. We always used to get seconds, particularly in the summer. Whatever was left over at the end of the day, you could buy for a dollar a pound.
Some kid told me that if you bought a lobster and cracked open the tail, there’s a nerve dangling down its back; and if you eat that, you’d be paralyzed. I know it’s not true, but I can’t bring myself to eat that black thread.
On a fearful imagination: I relate to the kid who is afraid because he’s heard his father talking about the twilight double-header, a monster that he thinks is in his closet.
On his fan mail: You’d be surprised at some of the letters I get. There are some strange people out there—present company excepted, of course.
On symbolism in horror stories and films: They are unreal symbols of very real fears. I don’t think that horror fiction works unless you are talking in two voices: on one level, in a very loud voice, you are screaming at your audience about ghosts, werewolves, and shape-changers; and in another, very low voice, a whisper, you are talking about real fears, so that in the best cases, you are trying to achieve that nightmarish feeling we’ve all had. We know it’s not real, but that doesn’t matter anymore. When I can get that, I know I’ve got people right where I want them.
On why he writes horror fiction: I like to scare people.
On whether or not he’s ever going to write serious fiction: I’m serious-minded whenever I sit down, regardless of what I’m writing about.
On whether evil exists: I’m haunted by the idea that there’s some kind of outside evil—something that almost floats free. I worry about guys like Ted Bundy. Whatever it was that was in him was gone when they put him in the electric chair—they fried a shell. Maybe whatever it was blew away.
On a ghost: I have seen a ghost. It’s a real ghost story. [He was at a political fundraiser event in 1984, and went upstairs to retrieve his and Tabitha’s coats.] I realize there was a man sitting by the window across the room, so I raised my head slightly to bring him into sight. Through my glasses, I saw a bald seventy-year-old man with round glasses. He was wearing a blue pinstripe suit. I began to feel very strongly that this man thought I was looking through the coats to see what I could steal, and I was feeling more and more uncomfortable. I finally said: “Gee, it sure is hard to find coats when people come in.” And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, I realized that the chair was totally empty—nobody was sitting there. My reaction to this was to get our coats and say nothing whatsoever about it.
We got halfway to the restaurant where we were going to eat dinner, and inside my mind I stopped and said to myself: Now wait a minute, the guy was there—you saw him. Why are you pushing this away? You never took your eyes off him.
My guess is that’s about as exciting as most psychic phenomena get.
On his writing speed: I write very fast.
On his storytelling process: I usually know where I’m going, and I usually have an idea about what the end is going to be. I think some of you who have read my books would be surprised to find out how many of them were intended to be much bleaker than they turned out to be. For instance, I expected everybody to die at the end of ‘Salem’s Lot and at the end of The Shining.
His favorite story: “The Body.”
On his reading material: I read a lot of novels. I have a tendency to enjoy crime novels, suspense novels, and some horror novels, although I don’t read as many horror novels as I used to. If I had to name a book that’s made an impression on me lately, it would be Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which I liked very much.… I just got around to reading for the first time Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. I loved that book. The guy didn’t know how to say quit; he would turn [to] his typewriter and everything would vomit out. I can relate to that.
On the novel Misery: It’s pretty accurate in terms of emotional feeling. I sometimes don’t know what people want.… People really like what I do, or at least some people do, but some of them are quite crackers. I have not met Annie Wilkes yet, but I’ve met all sorts of people who call themselves my “number-one fan” and, boy, some of these guys don’t have six cans in a six-pack.
On selling his work to Hollywood: When you sell something to the movies—and I love the movies; it’s immensely flattering to have somebody want to turn your book into a movie—there’s two ways to go about it: Get involved all the way, or part of the way, and stand up and take the blame or criticism for everyone else; or to say, I’m going to sell it and take the money. But when you don’t get involved, you are in a no-lose situation because if it’s good you can say, “It’s based on my work.” But if it’s bad you can say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
On being typecast as a horror writer: All I can say is … I’m a horror writer if you want me to be one. You can call me anything you want to—I don’t care.
In America, everybody’s got to have a brand name. You’ve got your generic gameshow host; you’ve got your generic Western writer; you’ve got your generic bad-guy actor; and you’ve got your generic horror writer.
I just write stories, but I tend to write horror stories.
A few years ago I tried very hard to write a western because it’s a form I like. I wrote about 160 pages, but the only scene that really had any power was when the old guy got drunk outside a farmhouse and fell into the pigsty, and the pigs ate him. That one scene had some real drive and punch. That is what turned on my lights, for some reason I don’t understand.
On his writing schedule: I write two or three hours in the morning. I crank up the music as high as I can: It keeps people away when you turn the music up loud, because it poisons the air.
On his taking a break from writing: I’d go crazy. I’m a creature of habit.
&n
bsp; On breaking into print: I’m not sure what you do about it. I was lucky enough to have a book that was adapted into a successful film [Carrie]. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Carrie the film had been a failure. Would I be anywhere near where I am today? I like to think so, but who knows?
I think it’s something of a crapshoot, but I’ll tell you one thing I believe: talent almost always finds the light, even today. If you need proof of that, look at Amy Tan, who is a fantastic success story and deserves every bit of it. I just wish as many people as know Amy Tan knew Katherine Dunne, who wrote Geek Love.
On writer’s block: I’ve had it twice. Shortly after Carrie, I went through a writer’s block that was about a year long. And after I finished The Tommyknockers, I went through a year of hell that I would never wan to go through again. Nothing would seem to come up. I would write and it would fall apart, like wet tissue paper. I don’t know how to dscribe it, except to say that it’s the most impotent, nasty, awful feeling. You feel like a batter in a slump. Finally, what happened was that I wrote a little story called “Rainy Season” [in Nightmares & Dreamscapes] and, all at once, everything opened up and flooded out. I’ve been writing horror every since.
36
DIFFERENT SEASONS
1982
The four stories in Different Seasons were written for love, not money, usually in between other writing projects. They have a pleasant, open-air feel, I think—even at the grimmest moments … there’s something about them, I hope, that says the writer was having a good time, hanging loose, worrying not about the storyteller but only about the tale.
—STEPHEN KING, ON DIFFERENT SEASONS, IN A WALDENBOOKS PUBLICATION, BOOK NOTES
Stephen King’s readers know that he has a penchant for addressing the reader directly in the forewords or afterwords of his short-fiction collections. He began this practice with Night Shift, for which he wrote a lengthy piece that dovetailed the introduction by John D. MacDonald, whom he asked to write it.
The practice of commenting on the fiction, so far as I can tell, was popularized by Harlan Ellison, whose prolific output of short fiction gave him ample opportunities to explain the story behind the stories, which he does in an entertaining and illuminating fashion.
Readers, for the most part, like it when the author comes out of the shadows to shed light on the stories. It’s as if you’ve met the writer at a bar afterward as he explains what happened behind the scenes. It’s one reason why King’s fans feel connected to him in a personal way, because his forewords and afterwords read as if they are long letters to the reader—and in a way they are.
From “The Body”: Runaround Pond in Durham.
In collections of short fiction in which there’s no explanatory text, the reader comes away with a distancing experience, because the author himself is out of sight. Typically, novels never have any explanatory text, which is a shame because there’s much an author can say about a novel—its genesis and its connection to the real world—that readers would find interesting.
In an introduction to a collection of his short fiction, Neil Gaiman, who like Ellison and King is also fond of writing introductions and afterwords, wrote in Smoke and Mirrors that “[s]tories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.”
As Gaiman knows, writers hold up mirrors to reality, but they aren’t ordinary mirrors, the kind most often used. A writer’s mirror reflects different realities, showing us what could be, or what could never be: It makes us see the world in a new, different light, as do the stories in this collection.
In King’s afterword to Different Seasons, he explicates an oft-asked question: “Is horror all you write?” His short answer is “no,” but a simple answer isn’t what the audience wants to hear.
An afterword is King’s opportunity to have the reader’s undivided attention and write the answers to these questions at length, without the pressure of time at a public event.
Although King answers both questions to most readers’ satisfaction in this book’s afterword, I’d like to add a few thoughts on the second question, because it strikes at the heart of this collection of four novellas.
As King readily admits, usually with a long, deep sigh, Americans—and indeed the world—perceive of him as being, as he put it, America’s best-loved bogeyman. It’s a convenient label for people who haven’t read his work but only know of him as a household name because of his general reputation. They would likely be astonished if they only knew the wide range of his literary output—poems, screenplays, nonfiction of all stripes, short fiction, novella-length fiction, and novels. Certainly the element of fear is a thread that runs through most of his works, but horror takes many forms: both supernatural, of course, and real-world—horror, unfortunately, is an inextricable part of life, the dark side of human existence.
Of the four stories in Different Seasons, only one has an element of supernatural horror—the last one, “The Breathing Method,” about a very unusual birth. The other stories explore nonsupernatural horror: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” examines the horror of incarceration, of losing one’s freedom, sustained by dim hope; “Apt Pupil” examines the parasitic and horrific relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp commandant and his impressionable protégé, whose great interest in the “gooshy stuff” is a whirlpool that sucks both teacher and pupil under; and “The Body,” a coming-of-age story that explores two young boys’ fears of growing up only to be trapped in dead-end jobs in small towns: a fate almost worse than death.
In other words, when someone asks King if horror is all he writes, the questioner is thinking about ’Salem’s Lot, The Stand, “The Mist,” Cycle of the Werewolf, and other tales in which supernatural horror is obviously an element.
I submit that King’s enduring popularity stems in part from his refusal to write only supernatural horror, in which the monsters are external. Those books can be highly entertaining fiction, and popular in their own right—The Stand, in fact, is often cited by fans as their favorite King novel—but the stories in which the monsters are mortal are often more frightening because they are real: In “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” the warden of Shawshank Prison is a sanctimonious yet monstrous man who hides behind his piety and wields the Bible as a weapon while behaving demonically. And in “Apt Pupil,” Todd Bowden’s abnormal interest in sadism, in the suffering of Jewish concentration camp inmates, is horrific; his wholesome outward appearance contrasts sharply with the moral decay that rotted him from the inside out.
The standout piece in this collection is “The Body,” a carefully nuanced tale whose narrator is Gordon LaChance, who grew up in Castle Rock and aspired to break free from the confines of that small Maine town. Gordon’s fear is that he, like his friend Chris, will be trapped and never go beyond its restrictive confines, that he will never realize his dreams or fulfill his potential; Gordon’s hope is that he will break free to realize his dream as a full-time freelance writer.
Taken as a whole, this collection of stories stands among his best books. As Michael Collings wrote in The Stephen King Companion (1995), “[T]he stories in Different Seasons are among King’s most powerful mid-length works. Lacking the depth and breadth of the novels, they nevertheless allow King more scope than the short stories.”
Which brings us back to the original question: Is horror all that King writes? As this collection amply illustrates, obviously not.
MICHAEL COLLINGS ON NOVELLAS FROM DIFFERENT SEASONS
“Apt Pupil” is appropriate as a companion piece to The Shining. In both stories, innocence is corrupted by pervasive evil. Jack Torrance’s alcoholism is as destructive as Todd Bowden’s obsession with the “gooshy” parts of Kurt Dussander’s Nazi past, and both aberrations lead the characters to insanity and murder, either potential or actual.
“
The Breathing Method” is a traditional “winter’s tale,” a fireside story of single-minded determination (an internal connection among the four stories of Different Seasons, by the way) that results in a fracturing of what one assumes to be natural law. In its closing paragraphs, in fact, “The Breathing Method” expands until it comments elliptically, and with more than a touch of horror, on the nature of fiction and storytelling itself.
“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” In spite of its horrific setting—Shawshank Prison, with its concrete walls and cruel, sometimes stupid wardens and guards, and its bands of “Sisters” whose lives are devoted to viciousness, rape, and violence—”Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” paradoxically comes across not as an exercise in gritty realism but almost as an attempt at idealism. As seen through the eyes of a hardened inmate … Andy Dufresne brings light to the darkness, a strong gentleness that opposes the stone walls surrounding him. His ultimate escape becomes not only a justified consequence of his patient endurance of a judicial injustice, but also a tribute to the indomitable human spirit.
“The Body.” Of the four stories, the most resonant is “The Body,” perhaps because it is more familiar to recent readers through Rob Reiner’s superlative film adaptation, Stand by Me. Again told without any substantiative recourse to supernatural horror, “The Body” is a semiautobiographical story of a young would-be author finding in himself and his experiences the stuff of true storytelling.… Restrained, symbolic, even apocalyptic in the etymological sense of “uncovering that which is hidden,” “The Body” is a remarkable achievement. With only minimal plotting, it nevertheless provides riveting portraits of boys on the verge of become men, of children confronting adult realities, and of the necessary transition from innocence into experience.
