AFTERWORD
Although 'Where do you get your ideas?' has always been the question I'm most
frequently asked (it's number one with a bullet, you might say), the runner-up is
undoubtedly this one: 'Is horror all you write?' When I say it isn't, it's hard to tell if the
questioner seems relieved or disappointed.
Just before the publication of Carrie, my first novel, I got a letter from my editor, Bill
Thompson, suggesting it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do for an
encore (it may strike you as a bit strange, this thinking about the next book before the
first was even out, but because the pre-publication schedule for a novel is almost as long
as the post-production schedule on a film, we had been living with Carrie for a long time
at that point - nearly a year). I promptly sent Bill the manuscripts of two novels, one
called Blaze and one called Second Coming. The former had been written immediately
after Carrie, during the six-month period when the first draft of Carrie was sitting in a
desk drawer, mellowing; the latter was written during the year or so when Carrie inched,
tortoiselike, closer and closer to publication.
Blaze was a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby,
planning to ransom it back to the child's rich parents ... and then falls in love with the
child instead. Second Coming was a melodrama about vampires taking over a small town
in Maine. Both were literary imitations of a sort, Second Coming of Dracula, Blaze of
Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
I think Bill must have been flabbergasted when these two manuscripts arrived in a single
big package (some of the pages of Blaze had been typed on the reverse sides of milkbills,
and the Second Coming manuscript reeked of beer because someone had spilled a
pitcher of Black Label on it during a New Year's Eve party three months before) - like a
woman who wishes for a bouquet of flowers and discovers her husband has gone out and
bought her a hothouse. The two manuscripts together totalled about five hundred and fifty
single-spaced pages.
He read them both over the next couple of weeks - scratch an editor and find a saint - and
I went down to New York from Maine to celebrate the publication of Carrie (April, 1974,
friends and neighbours - Lennon was alive, Nixon was still hanging in there as President,
and this kid had yet to see the first grey hair in his beard) and to talk about which of the
two books should be next ... or if neither of them should be next.
I was in the city for a couple of days, and we talked around the question three or four
times. The final decision was made on a street-corner - Park Avenue and 44th Street, in
fact. Bill and I were standing there waiting for the light, watching the cabs roll into that
funky tunnel or whatever it is - the one that seems to burrow straight through the Pan Am
Building. And Bill said, 'I think it should be Second Coming.'
Well, that was the one I liked better myself- but there was something so oddly reluctant
in his voice that I looked at him sharply and asked him what the matter was. 'It's just that
if you do a book about vampires as the follow-up to a book about a girl who can move
things by mind-power, you're going to get typed,' he said.
'Typed?' I asked, honestly bewildered. I could see no similarities to speak of between
vampires and telekinesis. 'As what?'
'As a horror-writer,' he said, more reluctantly still.
'Oh,' I said, vastly relieved. 'Is that all!'
'Give it a few years,' he said, 'and see if you still think it's "all".'
'Bill,' I said, amused, 'no one can make a living writing just horror stories in America.
Lovecraft starved in Providence. Bloch gave it up for suspense novels and Unknown-type
spoofs. The Exorcist was a one-shot. You'll see.'
The light changed. Bill clapped me on the shoulder. 'I think you're going to be very
successful,' he said, 'but I don't think you know shit from Shinola.'
He was closer to the truth than I was. It turned out that it was possible to make a living
writing horror stories in America. Second Coming, eventually retitled 'Salem's Lot, did
very well. By the time it was published, I was living in Colorado with my family and
writing a novel about a haunted hotel. On a trip into New York, I sat up with Bill half the
night in a bar called Jasper's of the Rock-Ola; you had to kind of lift him up to see what
the selections were, and told him the plot By the end, his elbows were planted on either
side of his bourbon and his head was in his hands, like a man with a monster migraine.
'You don't like it,'I said.
'I like it a lot,' he said hollowly.
"Then what's wrong?'
'First the telekinetic girl, then the vampires, now the haunted hotel and the telepathic kid.
You're gonna get typed.'
This time I thought about it a little more seriously - and then I thought about all the
people who had been typed as horror writers, and who had given me such great pleasure
over the years - Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber,
Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Shirley Jackson (yes, even she was typed as a
spook writer). And I decided there in Jasper's with the cat asleep on the juke and my
editor sitting beside me with his head in his hands, that I could be in worse company. I
could, for example, be an 'important' writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every
seven years or so, or a 'brilliant' writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for
bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still
legible GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.
'That's okay, Bill,' I said, 'I'l1 be a horror writer if that's what people want That's just fine.'
We never had the discussion again. Bill's still editing and I'm still writing horror stories,
and neither of us is in analysis. It's a good deal.
So I got typed and I don't much mind - after all, I write true to type ... at least, most of the
time. But is horror all I write? If you've read the foregoing stories, you know it's not ...
but elements of horror can be found in all of the tales, not just in The Breathing Method -
that business with the slugs in The Body is pretty gruesome, as is much of the dream
imagery in Apt Pupil. Sooner or later, my mind always seems to turn back in that
direction, God knows why.
Each one of these longish stories was written immediately after completing a novel - it's
as if I've always finished the big job with just enough gas left in the tank to blow off one
good-sized novella. The Body, the oldest story here, was written direct after Salem's Lot;
Apt Pupil was written in a two-week period following the completion of The Shining
(and following Apt Pupil I wrote nothing for three months -I was pooped); Rita Hayworth
and Shawshank Redemption was written after finishing The Dead Zone; and The
Breathing Method, the most recently written of these stories, immediately following
Firestarter*
None of them have been published previous to this book; none has even been submitted
for publication. Why? Because each of them comes out to 25,000 to 35,000 words - not
exactly, maybe, but that's close enough to be in the ballpark. I've got to tell you: 25,000 to
35,000 words are numbers apt to make even the most stout-hearted writer of fiction shake
and shiver in his boots. There is no hard-and-fast definition of what either a novel or a
short story is - at least not in terms of word-count - nor should there be. But when a writer
approaches the 20,000-word mark, he knows he is edging out of the country of the short
story. Likewise, when he passes the 40,000-word mark, he is edging into the country of
the novel. The borders of the country between these two more orderly regions are illdefined,
but at some point the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he's come or
is coming to a really terrible place, an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the
'novella' (or, rather too cutesy for my taste, the 'novelette').
Now, artistically speaking, there's nothing at all wrong with the novella. Of course,
there's nothing wrong with circus
* Something else about them, which I just realized: each one was written in a different
house - three of those in Maine and one in Boulder, Colorado.
freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus. The point is that there
are great novellas, but they traditionally only sell to the 'genre markets' (that's the polite
term; the impolite but more accurate one is 'ghetto markets'). You can sell a good mystery
novella to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, a
good science fiction novella to Amazing or Analog, maybe even to Omni or The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ironically, there are also markets for good
horror novellas: the aforementioned F&SF is one; The Twilight Zone is another and there
are various anthologies of original creepy fiction, such as the Shadows series published
by Doubleday and edited by Charles L. Grant.
But for novellas which can, on measure, only be described with the word 'mainstream' (a
word almost as depressing as 'genre')... boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o'
trouble. You look at your 25,000-to-35,000-word manuscript dismally, twist the cap off a
beer, and in your head you seem to hear a heavily accented and rather greasy voice
saying: 'BueSos dias, senorl How was your flight on Revolution Airways? You like to
eeet pretty-good fine I theenk, si? Welcome to Novella, senorl You going to like heet
here preety-good-fine, I theenk! Have a cheap cigar! Have some feelthy peectures! Put
your feet up, senior, I theenk your story is going to be here a long, long time ... quepasal
Ah-ha-hah-hah-hah!' Depressing.
Once upon a time (he mourned) there really was a market for such tales - there were
magical magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and The American
Mercury. Fiction - fiction both short and long - was a staple of these and others. And, if
the story was too long for a single issue, it was serialized in three parts, or five, or nine.
The poisonous idea of 'condensing' or 'excerpting' novels was as yet unknown (both
Playboy and Cosmopolitan have honed this particular obscenity to a noxious science: you
can now read an entire novel in twenty minutes!), the tale was given the space it
demanded, and I doubt if I'm the only one who can remember waiting for the mailman all
day long because the new Post was due and a new short story by Ray Bradbury had been
promised, or perhaps because the final episode of the latest Clarence Buddington Kelland
serial was due.
(My anxiety made me a particularly easy mark. When the postman finally did show up,
walking briskly with his leather bag over his shoulder, dressed in his summer-issue shorts
and wearing his summer-issue sun helmet, I'd meet him at the end of the walk, dancing
from one foot to the other as if I badly needed to go to the bathroom; my heart in my
throat. Grinning rather cruelly, he'd hand me an electric bill. Nothing but that. Heart
plummets into my shoes. Finally he relents and gives me the Post after all: grinning
Eisenhower on the cover, painted by Norman Rockwell; an article on Sophia Loren by
Pete Martin; 'I Say He's a Wonderful Guy', by Pat Nixon, concerning - yeah, you guessed
it - her husband Richard; and, of course, stories. Long ones, short ones, and the last
chapter of the Kelland serial. Praise God!)
And this didn't happen just once in a while; this happened every fucking week! The day
that the Post came, I guess I was the happiest kid on the whole eastern seaboard.
There are still magazines that publish long fiction -Atlantic Monthly and The New
Yorker are two which have been particularly sympathetic to the publication problems of a
writer who has delivered (we won't say 'gotten'; that's too close to 'misbegotten') a
30,000-word novella. But neither of these magazines has been particularly receptive to
my stuff, which is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell
to admit it) downright clumsy.
To some degree or other, I would guess that those very qualities - unadmirable though
they may be - have been responsible for the success of my novels. Most of them have
been plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries
from McDonald's. I am able to recognize elegant prose and to respond to it, but have
found it difficult or impossible to write it myself (most of my idols as a maturing writer
were muscular novelists with prose styles which ranged from the horrible to the
nonexistent: cats like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris). Subtract elegance from the
novelist's craft and one finds himself left with only one strong leg to stand on, and that
leg is good weight. As a result, I've tried as hard as I can, always, to give good weight.
Put another way, if you find out you can't run like a thoroughbred, you can still pull your
brains out (A voice rises from the balcony: 'What brains, King?' Ha-ha, very funny, fella,
you can leave now).
The result of all this is that, when it came to the novellas you've just read, I found myself
in a puzzling position. I had gotten to a place with my novels where people were saying
King could publish his laundry list if he wanted to (and there are critics who claim that's
exactly what I've been doing for the last eight years or so), but I couldn't publish these
tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long. If you see
what I mean.
'Si, senor, I see! Take off your shoes! Have some cheap rum! Soon thee Medicore
Revolucion Steel Band iss gonna come along and play some bad calypso! You like eet
preety-good-fine, I theenk! And you got time, senor! You got time because I theenk your
story ees gonna -'
- be here a long time, yeah, yeah, great, why don't you go somewhere and overthrow a
puppet imperialist democracy?
So I finally decided to see if Viking, my hardcover publisher, and New American
Library, my paperback publisher, would want to do-a book with stories in it about an offbeat
prison-break, an old man and a young boy locked up in a gruesome relationship
based on mutual parasitism, a quartet of country boys on a journey of discovery, and an
off-the-wall horror story about a young woman determined to give birth to her child no
matter what (or maybe the story is actually about that odd Club that isn't a Club). The
publishers said okay. And that is how I managed to break these four long stories out of
the banana republic of the novella.
I hope you liked them preety-good-fine, muchachos and muchachas.
Oh, one thing about type-casting before I call it a day.
Was talking to my editor - not Bill Thompson, this is my new editor, real nice guy named
Alan Williams, smart, witty, able, but usually on jury duty somewhere deep in the bowels
of New Jersey - about a year ago.
'Loved Ciyo,' Alan says (the editorial work on that novel, a real shaggy-dog story, had
just been completed). 'Have you thought about what you're going to do next?'
Deja' vu sets in. I have had this conversation before.
'Well, yeah,' I say. 'I have given it some thought -'
'Lay it on me.'
'What would you think about a book of four novellas? Most or all of them just sort of
ordinary stories? What would you think about that?'
'Novellas,' Alan says. He is being a good sport, but his voice says some of the joy may
have just gone out of his day; his voice says he feels he has just won two tickets to some
dubious little banana republic on Revolucion Airways. 'Long stories, you mean.'
'Yeah, that's right,' I say. 'And we'll call the book something like "Different Seasons", just
so people will get the idea that it's not about vampires or haunted hotels or anything like
that.'
'Is the next one going to be about vampires?' Alan asks hopefully.
'No, I don't think so. What do you think, Alan?'
'A haunted hotel, maybe?'
'No, I did that one, already. Different Seasons, Alan. It's got a nice ring to it, don't you
think?'
'It's got a great ring, Steve,' Alan says, and sighs. It is the sigh of a good sport who has
just taken his seat in third class on Revolucion Airways' newest plane - a Lockheed Tri-
Star - and has seen the first cockroach trundling busily over the top of the seat ahead of
him.
'I hoped you'd like it,' I say.
'I don't suppose,' Alan says, 'we could have a horror story in it? Just one? A sort of...
similar season?'
I smile a little - just a little - thinking of Sandra Stansfield and Dr McCarron's Breathing
Method. 'I can probably whomp something up.'
'Great! And about the new novel -'
'How about a haunted car?' I say.
'My man? Alan cries. I have the feeling that I'm sending him back to his editorial meeting
- or possibly to jury duty in East Rahway - a happy man. I'm happy, too - I love my
haunted car, and 1 think if s going to make a lot of people nervous about crossing busy
streets after dark.
But I've been in love with each of these stories, too, and part of me always will be in love
with them, I guess. I hope that you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any
good story should do - make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little
while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic
I know.
Okay. Gotta split. Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some
good books, be useful, and don't take any shit from anybody.
Love and good wishes,
Stephen King
January 4th, 1982
Bangor, Maine
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