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Mr.. Stanley Wiater |
On a personal note, let me first say that I'll never forget the first words that Stephen King ever spoke to me when, as a reporter on assignment, I introduced myself by immediately asking him for an interview. ''Sorry,'' he said as he brushed by me on the way to the hotel bar, ''I'm not giving any interviews now.''
The occasion was the Fifth World Fantasy Convention, held in Providence, Rhode Island on October 12-14, 1979. King was one of the guests of honor, and due to the fact that The Dead Zone had just gone to the number one position on The New York Times best-sellers list, was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with the logo ''USA #1'' printed on it.
Like all brash young reporters who never take no for an answer, I of course kept walking right behind him, and when he sat down at a table in the bar, helped myself to an empty seat. Already seated at the table was a man impeccably dressed man in an expensive suit. I recognized him as someone who recently returned from living in England after his novel Ghost Story became an international bestseller. He politely introduced himself as Peter Straub.
If there are any dark dreamers who need, as the toastmaster would say, ''absolutely no introduction,'' it would be Stephen King and Peter Straub. Since their accomplishments are well known to anyone who has the slightest interest in horror fiction, let the simple biographical facts state that Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, and currently lives in Bangor, Maine with his wife and family. His books include Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Stand, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, Different Seasons, Pet Sematary, and Misery. His latest automatic bestseller is The Dark Half. Many of his novels have been adapted into major motion pictures, and King himself has written the screenplays for several, including Creepshow and Pet Sematary.
Peter Straub was born on March 2, 1943, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and currently lives with his wife and family in Westport, Connecticut. He is the author of such novels as Julia, If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story, Shadowland, Floating Dragon, and Koko. His latest automatic bestseller is Mystery. To date, two of his novels, Julia and Ghost Story have reached the screen. In 1984, Straub and King collaborated to create the epic horror-fantasy, The Talisman. No less a cinematic talent than Steven Spielberg has purchased the films rights.
There is very little I can add to these bare facts, except that King and Straub remain the best of friends, and when it came time to include their interviews, I found it nearly impossible to separate their conversations. Indeed, the best sessions I have had with these two dark dreamers has been when talking with them at the same time. Therefore, from those dual interviews, I have excerpted the comments which are most in keeping with the general themes of this book.
I will add that, in person, I have found Stephen King to be extremely down to earth, and not in the least affected (as far I could tell) by his enormous success. Usually dressed in jeans and a work shirt, he would appear at first glance to be a truckdriver or a garage owner rather than an author. Stephen very much tries to keep as close as he can to the image of the writer as just another work-a-day man. As for Peter Straub, he is a very refined and dignified man who clearly knows what is the best in the arts and popular culture. Peter would also inevitably appear for our interviews in the most perfectly tailored of designer suits. An intellectual in the true sense of the word, Peter nevertheless approaches writing from his gut instincts and his heart, just as much as he does his well trained mind.
I owe a special a debt of thanks to these two authors, not only because they have always been forthcoming with answers to my unending list of questions, but for the other kindnesses and considerations they have extended to me along the way. In many ways, if it were not for the incredible success of these two authors--unquestionably the most famous dark dreamers in the world--the horror genre would probably never have become as accepted as it is today. And I probably wouldn't have managed to be one of the few journalists to specialize in this area. But I digress--without further adieu, let's talk to Stephen and Peter.
WIATER: Why do you think Horror finally took off as a truly contemporary genre? It's never really disappeared from the literary scene, except perhaps in the 1950's....
KING: Well, they're around. Even if you go back to a period like the fifties when this stuff was very--I mean, Weird Tales magazine died from lack of interest as much as anything--but the stuff was there, and it would crop up every now and then. There was The Search For Bridey Murphy, which was the fifties' answer to The Amityville Horror, and just as hoaxy, apparently.
STRAUB: That's right.
KING: And it's just that people have to have this stuff! You need it--like a little salt in your diet.
STRAUB: Yeah, I think that's right: people have always enjoyed it, and always will enjoy it. But I have another little theory--which I've just invented--that the whole fiction market, the whole publishing world, changed a couple of years ago when the price of paper went so high. Publishers started turning down books that they normally would have accepted. It got much harder to be a first novelist....
WIATER: Peter, the first novel of yours I read--Julia-- could actually be taken as either a ''mainstream'' or a horror novel, depending on the reader's own expectations.
STRAUB: That's certainly the way I thought of it! But I certainly wanted to write a book that was going to do me some good, and would not have the problems that I had had with an earlier novel, Under Venus. So I just knocked at my imagination and that kind of story came up. But I was curious as to how I was going to write it. I remember writing the first sentences of Julia. I sat there, and the words came out, and I thought, ''Well now, this is nice,'' [laughs] ''I'm writing this just the way I write everything else.'' I could still be happy with myself.
WIATER: Steve, before you made it, when your early novels were still being rejected and you were just starting to sell stories regularly, how was it that kept you going?
KING: For two reasons. Number one: you think you can do it. You think you have the talent to go over the top and earn your living that way. In a way, you feel that's what God meant you to do, you know? You don't feel satisfied with what you're doing because you know that's not what you were meant to do, you know? I won't say I've lead a grim life, but it was--and still is--sort of a humdrum life. It isn't any big deal. I don't go out and ride around in a limousine, sniff cocaine with a babe on each arm! And neither does Peter--you've probably changed a few diapers and I know you get up at six o'clock every other day with the baby.... But it's fun--you can go and get away from all that shit. And it's escapism. It's the same reason why people watch TV. But this is like ''mind TV'' or ''mind movies.''
STRAUB: That's right! There are really two aspects, and they're contradictory. One is the enormous fun, and anybody who is a writer does it's because that's what he likes to do. You enjoy it. But there is also the unutterable tedium of it, and I don't think most people can take it!
KING: They can't, man!
STRAUB: When people say ''Gee, I wish could do what you do...'' [laughs] You know? I wouldn't wish it on anyone--because you spend most of your life alone in a room. And that's hard to adjust to a first, but you do adjust to it. There really must be a love of just working the language. A delight in making sentences. There's a wonderful character in this Philip Roth novel that I enjoyed very much, The Ghost Writer, who's an old writer. He says, ''I get up in the morning and I write a sentence. And then I turn the sentence around.'' You really have to like doing that! That's essential--that's the nuts and bolts. You really have to get a deep joy out of writing itself. And out of other people's writing, too.
WIATER: Did you ever sense that, like Stephen, you were destined to write? That even if you had to put X-amount of novels on the shelf, the next one was going to the one?
STRAUB: I never put anything on the shelf--but I was scared at the thought of writing, because it seemed to me that it was impossible to make a living out of it. And I was also scared of the commitment--that I knew once I started doing it, I would be ruined for anything else. So I stayed away from it for awhile. But...I'd be walking down the street, and I'd think: ''A thirty- year-old, sandy haired man named Jack Dugan stood in a telephone booth trying to dial his wife.'' And I'd thought, ''Hey, I could go somewhere with that.'' You know? Little bits of dialogue would come in, and I realized that I had do it! [laughs] It was on my mind all the time.
KING: The other thing that was always in play with me was I was convinced--deeply convinced--that somewhere, deep inside me, was a money machine. Waiting to be turned on. And that when I found the dials and the combinations, the money would just pour out....
WIATER: Now that you've achieved major financial and critical success, do you still feel any pressure to produce more or any better or any differently?
STRAUB: I think you'll always feel a real pressure to write better, to do better, to try and do more. But that's all part of the fun. It's scary also, because you can't let yourself down. You want to do something that's bigger and better; you want to take on more. I know Steve does--and I do too.
WIATER: Peter, any restrictions self-imposed on your work?
STRAUB: I don't know, I suppose there would be...generally I try to be as awful as I can be. At certain times I want there to be real shocks, because in a way that's part of the appeal. And this is something I learned from Steve--that there's no point in exercising too much restraint in this field, [laughs] because it's enormous fun to be scared in a big, gaudy, splashy way.
WIATER: Steve, would it be fair to say you've been writing adaptations of your own works because you've been dissatisfied with the results of other screenwriters you've dealt with to date?
KING: No, that wouldn't be fair at all. It's done because sometimes it's fun, and because I want to see what that's like. And a lot of times, I felt like a high school kid who is almost getting laid, but not quite. [laughs] Like when you're a high school kid, and you say to yourself--if you're a boy!--you say that one of the major factors working in wanting to get laid is that once you do it, you don't have to worry about worrying about it anymore! ...And I sometimes think that if I could get a screenplay that was actually produced--whether it was good or bad or indifferent--then I could say, ''Yes, I am capable of doing that. I don't have to worry about that anymore....''
WIATER: Could you tell me about the origins of Danse Macabre?
KING: Sure. There was quite a bit of research involved in it, but I don't think it shows in the book a lot! That is to say, hopefully it shows in the sense that the facts are right, the facts are straight. But what happened was Bill Thompson, who edited the first five novels that I did--Carrie through The Stand--went to Everest House. He called me up later and said, ''Do you want to do a book about horror in movies and on TV and radio and all this stuff over the last thirty years or so?'' And I said, ''No.'' And he said, ''How many times have you been asked why do you write that stuff?'' And I said, ''Billions.'' He said, ''How many times have you been asked why do people read that stuff?'' And I said, ''Billions.'' He said, ''Write this book. And whenever anybody asks you those questions, you can just say, 'I wrote this book.' And then you'll sell books and never have to answer those questions again!'' So I said, ''Okay, I'll write the book.'' I got into it in a very casual way, and found it very difficult to write. It's got some autobiography in it, because in discussions like this, they always want to go back to Freud: they want to know what your childhood was like. ..
STRAUB: Sometimes they say, ''Didn't you have a really rotten childhood? [laughs] You must have had a rotten childhood!''
KING: I told a story--this is in the book--at a convention, a mystery convention. And we were on a panel about fear. There was myself, and there was Robert Morasco--who did Burnt Offerings-- and there was Janet Jeppson who is Issac Asmiov's wife and who is also a psychiatrist--a clinical psychiatrist. So you know why she was there. And that shows where they come from, when they set that panel up!Somebody in the audience said, ''Did anything ever happen to you in your childhood that was really horrible?'' And I told a story that I thought would satisfy them. I mean, it isn't anything I remember, it's something my mother told me. She said I was out playing one day with this friend of mine. I was about four. I came home, deadly pale, and I'd peed in my pants. And I didn't want to talk. She asked me what happened, but I went upstairs and closed the door and stayed in my room all afternoon. She found out that night that this kid I had been playing with had been over by a train, okay? I can remember her telling me that they picked up the pieces in a basket. A wicker basket.
I don't remember anything about it; the chances are very good that by that time he had wandered off on his own somewhere, and then I wasn't anywhere around. There's a small chance that maybe I did see it happen, maybe the kid chased his ball onto the tracks or something. So I told this story, and said, ''I don't remember it at all,'' and immediately what Janet Jeppson said was, ''And you've been writing about it ever since!!!'' The whole audience applauded--[claps hands together]--because they want to believe that you're twisted!
WIATER: But it would seem to me that you're slighted either way: first because you both don't appear to follow the clichÇ of what a horror writer should look like, and then because you appear too ''normal'' to be one. It's as if the public really wants you to run around in a black cape, acting crazy.
STRAUB: Yeah--absolutely nuts! [laughs]KING: But these things...it's odd that it should work that way. One of the things that psychiatry--the Freudian brand--is supposed to do is to allow you to open up lines of communication from your subconscious to the outside, where you can finally externalize it to the world. So, on the one hand, we say that psychiatry allows us to talk about our innermost fears, and that's wonderful, it helps you to get ''normal.'' But if you do what Peter and I do, you must be ''weird'' because those channels are open. If they were closed, people would say you're normal, because you can't talk about your fears. You're all fucked up! Situation normal: all fucked up!
STRAUB: On the other hand, there's probably a great deal of truth to the proposition that books like this come out of conflicts which are imperfectly resolved. And I suppose these conflicts--if we presuppose their existence--are things that we actually are not aware of, but they seek their resolution in our books. You really want to protect those problems....
KING: No, I don't believe so either. One of the things that has comforted me about my own work is that, in almost all cases, I've begun with a premise that was really black. And a more pleasant resolution has forced itself upon that structure. Like in 'Salem's Lot. I was convinced that everybody was going to die! That's what I wanted to happen in that book. But when it didn't, and I didn't try to monkey with that fact because I knew in the end that it was right that they not all die.
STRAUB: Oh, of course! It would have been disastrous if they all died.
KING: Yeah, I think so. So that's okay, I think. It works both ways.
STRAUB: However, I think part of what our work is trying to do is to celebrate aspects of humanity which are worth celebrating. Courage. Gallantry. Humor and steadfastness.... These things ought to be celebrated.
KING: It's the only place you can write anymore, it seems to me, where you can still deal with romantic notions and not seem impossibly corny. You still have to be really careful though, or people will laugh.
WIATER: How important is it for you to really get under a reader's skin? To really getting close to the actual fears someone may have?
STRAUB: That's an important part of the job. You are supposed to burrow under the reader's skin. And unsettle them. Steve sometimes uses the word ''hurt,'' which is a wonderful word, in a way, because it sounds so violent! [laughs] Sometimes you want to hurt these readers. But at the same time you don't want to hurt them too badly--I mean, you do want to hurt them very badly at a couple points--but I don't think you want to leave them that way.
KING: No, not really.
WIATER: Critics are now reading all sorts of things into your work. Have there been some ''underlying meanings'' purposely placed in your work which readers might have missed along the way?
STRAUB: Well, especially in the case of reviewers! People sometimes construct meanings that I had never seen, and never intended. In a way its interesting, and I don't mind it at all. And they can make elaborate structures, and when I come to meet them, I look like an absolute idiot because that stuff has never crossed my mind. But very rarely do people actually fasten on what I thought of as the center of a book. Either they talk about their own peculiar theory or they talk about the scares. More or less ignoring what I was actually doing in various books.
WIATER: Steve, the vast majority of your short stories deal with horror in supernatural, rather than psychological, terms. Any reason for this preference? ''The Man Who Loved Flowers'' is one of the very few stories that fall into the latter category.
KING: I like to make stuff up! [laughs] There's a scene in Shadowland--it's my favorite single moment--where this guy looks up from an examination and there's this pencil floating in the air, and Delmar Nightingale sees it and snatches it away because he doesn't want anyone else to see it. But that's the essence of the attraction the supernatural story has for me: that pencil just floating there in the air. It's like those Magritte paintings where trains are coming out of fireplaces, Dali paintings where clocks are lying over branches. In ''The Mist,'' for instance, the great attraction in a story like that to me was I really I don't care what causes it, or anything else. It's the idea of that train coming out of the fireplace. The familiar juxtaposed with the unusual and the strange. That, to me, is the attraction. The psychological stories just seem...nastier, somehow.
WIATER: It seems that Charles Beaumont--one of my personal influences--has always been one of the great unsung horror and fantasy writers. What did you think of him?
KING: I think he was great. I think he was wonderful, and I think--if he had lived--he would have been just an amazing writer. I just wish I had gotten to meet him sometime! I think he was amazing...wonderful. The Magic Man and Night Ride and all that stuff. It was good....***************************(out)
STRAUB: Yeah, it's easier to get scared in a movie. What I said was probably too harsh. Like Steve, I'm sent a lot of galleys, and I don't have time to read about half of them, but sometimes when you read those galleys, you find something that is very, very good by some first novelist. I don't think I've ever been scared by one of those books, but I've certainly read a couple that I liked a lot. But the reason I'm not scared when I read these things is that I'm too conscious of the technique. Because I know what he's doing--I just want to see how well he can dance. Which is not to say I'm immune to shocks. But I think really, that if you think about that kind of thing all day long, you're less open to purely literary fear.
KING: But good writing in itself is a pleasure, and it can seduce you into the story. I'm not very concerned with style or anything like that, but I am concerned with the balance. Language should have a balance, and it should be a balance the reader can feel and get into, and feel a sort of rhythm to the language as it moves along. The language should be able to carry you into the story. And that's it. Because if the reader is seduced into the story, then it carries him away.
WIATER: Speaking of language, should the horror writer not only seduce the reader but terrorize or enrage him as well?
STRAUB: Not as far as I'm concerned. You mean, to fling an outrage in the public's face? No--I can't find any echoes there. That's not what I'm trying to do. It's not the same as scaring someone, because we definitely do want to scare. But gross-outs? I'm not interested in that.
KING: [enthusiastically] Oh, I am!!
WIATER: There's a scene in the film version of 'Salem's Lot where the young hero is shown to be ''monster-crazy.'' At least in the sense that his room is filled with monster models, posters, and so forth. A lot of people, including myself, went through that phase as kids. Was your room anything like that when you were that character's age?
KING: No. I think maybe I had an Aurora model werewolf at one time that I put together, but that was all. I wanted to try to set up a situation where we would be able to believe in the kid dealing with this. I knew that there were kids who were--and are--big monster freaks. You know, about the only thing that still amazes me about Forry Ackerman's "Famous Monsters of Filmland" was the letters page. And they have something that says: ''Wanted--More Readers Like Sean Beatty of Camden, New Jersey!!'' And there'll be a picture of some smiling, beautiful little boy. They always look beautiful, and you think to yourself, ''Here's this kid, and he's wild about monsters. But he doesn't look like he should be wild about monsters.''
WIATER: Peter, did you go through any similar phases growing up?
STRAUB: I didn't surround myself with the accouterments of monsterdom, but as a kid I certainly read those horror comics, those E.C. Comics that were so awful that my parents really objected to these kind of things! But I thought there was some kind of marvelousness to them. But I didn't have stuff like that on the wall....
KING: You said on The Dick Cavett Show that your imagination was powerful enough that you had to put down ''The Rats In The Walls'' once or twice. It was in that big collection--
STRAUB: Did I? Oh...the Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Yeah, it was very scary. That was a great one. And there was one that had something to do with cancer....? Where these awful, wormy white sluggy creatures that flowed down a staircase and into a man's room, and two years later he died of cancer.
KING: [almost jumping out of his seat] Holy shit!! Isn't that awful! I don't remember that one--I've blocked that one out!! Wow!
STRAUB: I remember the Arthur Machen story, ''The Great God Pan,'' and that really affected me.KING: Yeah, me too!
STRAUB: In fact, I cribbed from it unmercifully in Ghost Story.
KING: Oh, that's an amazing story. That's just a good one!
WIATER: What's a typical work day for you both?STRAUB: Well, in my case it's what I do; it's my job. And I do it in a way people do jobs...I suppose my usual writing day is from about eleven to about six. But if I am ''warmed up,'' and it's getting towards the end of a book--and I'm writing in my head all the time--then I might write to very late at night. But in general, it's just like ''Daddy's going to the office,'' and then Daddy comes home.
KING: I start at about eight-thirty--I try and get out and walk two or three miles first--and start to ''write'' as I'm walking around.
STRAUB: Walking is so wonderful for that! I don't know why, but it's just magical.
KING: Yeah. And you see things. A lot of times I'll see things while I'm walking that will turn up later that day at some point in my work. Not as a major thing, but I'll come back and have a big glass of ice water, and then I'll write from, say, eight- thirty until eleven o'clock. Then I'll stop, and then for the rest of that day and that night I'll go in there with two quarts of beer and rewrite for about two and a half hours. So I work maybe five hours a day.
STRAUB: That's about what I do....
WIATER: But you don't let the work sit there--you go back at night and rewrite what you've just done in the morning?
KING: No. I always let it sit--the rewrite that I do is always on something else. What I'm working on in the morning is what I'm working on. The other material that I'm rewriting, that's a different function all together for me. That's a very-- ''mechanical'' is the wrong word--but it's a nuts and bolts kind of operation. You get down there...it's like adjusting the carburetor or something to make it right. That's what you do. But I always like to drink beer with that because it's fun, and it's not as demanding of something in me that says in the morning when I sit down, ''I'm really working!
STRAUB: ''Invent!'' Get in there and invent--work!!
WIATER: Okay, so when the muse tells you to go ''invent,'' do either of you need a special room or setting in which to get your creative gears turning?KING: Both Peter and I have our special rooms.
STRAUB: Yes, we have our rooms, but that's not what triggers it off--because if we were stuck on a boat, we'd write on the boat.
KING: Maybe not as well...!
STRAUB: But it's internalized--there's an internal lightning bolt or something that one is very grateful for...it just comes up and slams you on the head! You set up this little universe, and you order it just the way you want it, and then you get hot.
WIATER: Peter, what do you enjoy most about ''horror fiction?''
STRAUB: Steve was talking about those images of Magritte and Dali. I've always thought that the real advantage to the kind of books we write--over other genres--is that they have a deep vein of surrealism in them. It's that aspect of the field that I really find most valuable. I don't mean that in any pretentious way, but I mean that in the heart of very good books in the ''Gothic'' manner, there is this basic question about the nature of reality. Like the juxtaposition in Magritte of two ordinary things that creates some kind of spark of disquiet and unease. There is a shaking up the material world that supernatural fiction has to do--it has to jolt reality, and slice into it.
WIATER: Not only the unease in our perceiving reality, but the idea of what is sanity versus what is termed insanity?
STRAUB: Insanity is real, actual horror. And of course a depiction of it only works if it's coming as much from inside the characters as from outside. It really must do that, or it's childish. There has to be some kind of ''echo'' in the characters of the basic situation, and there be some kind of ''rhyme'' between the situation and the characters. I think you really should have characters for whom you feel deeply, since you want to have characters who have ''worlds'' inside them, because everybody you know has a world inside them. And you want these people to be as complete as possible--and then subject them to whatever godawful thing you subject them to....
WIATER: Recent comments have been made about ''rock 'n' roll horror.'' Didn't you once say that you've compared writing in this genre to playing the blues?
STRAUB: That's really the way I feel about it. The analogy is that there is an incredible amount of richness and variety in what seems to be an extraordinarily limited stock of situations. But it's only limited to the extent that your imagination is limited! You know there's only a certain chord progression, and that's the blues! It goes twelve bars and repeats itself. But-- what you can do with that chord progression is staggering.
WIATER: Considering the millions of words you two have published over the years, are you still--
KING: Friends? [laughs]
WIATER: --bubbling over with new ideas? And are you still at the stage that the more stories you do, the more that occur to you?
STRAUB: Certainly I think Steve and I both have many, many ideas yet. I'm conscious now that I'm in a different stage in my own approach, and maybe working on The Talisman had something to do with this. That is, I'm much more level-headed about it and I rewrite and revise much, much more than I ever did before.
KING: It's the word processor, I think.
STRAUB: I don't think so...
KING: [sighing] I revise--I mean, it's insane how much I revise!
STRAUB: But I think its also that I've become more conscious of my errors than I used to be, and I can then see them much better. Maybe this means I just grew up a little bit as a writer. When I read over a page or four or five pages I wrote during the day, I can see right away the goofy spots and the errors and the dumb passages and the unnecessary parts. And I didn't used to be able to see it that well. The only other changes I feel, right now, is that I'm not very interested in supernatural horror anymore, and I'm not going to write it for awhile because I figure that I pretty much did it. I did what I could with that.
WIATER: But aren't your publishers saying ''Look, you're doing just fine writing chillers--don't risk it all by changing?''
STRAUB: No. I felt that particular pressure much more strongly several years in the past. And I understand that I have a duty, if I'm going to get large advances, to be entertaining and to supply a lot of narrative tension. To tie the reader to the book. So I'm going to continue to do that. I think I do that naturally, anyhow.
WIATER: Steve, are your publishers ever afraid that you might someday not want to frighten your readers anymore as well?
KING: No. No, I don't really think so. I do think that it's true that ''if we give you enough rope you'll hang yourself.'' I think now I have enough rope so I can hang myself in Times Square at high noon with three network coverage. If I told somebody I wanted to rewrite The Bible in common prose, I could probably get six figures for it at this point. And that's the problem--I'm not saying that to be a hot shit or conceited or anything else. But for me, that's the problem.As far as I'm concerned--It is my final exam. I can't say anymore about monsters. I don't have anything else to say about monsters: I put all the monsters in that book.
But then I never had any interest in horror to begin with. I never did! I just wrote all these ''horror novels'' because that's what came out. I mean, I didn't write it to make money, because, Jesus, when I started and when Peter wrote Julia, you couldn't make any money writing this stuff. It's ridiculous--the money came to us, we didn't go to the money.....
WIATER: You both have already achieved an incredible degree of success in your careers--
KING: And I have enjoyed it!
WIATER: --but do you have any other goals beyond writing? Has this success opened other doors for you?
KING: To be a good husband and a good father....to try and stay alive...try not to get too fat, try not to drink too much beer...I'd love to hit the inside fast ball....
STRAUB: I don't know. I couldn't tell you. I'd love to be able to play ''Cherokee'' on the tenor saxophone at a real fast tempo.
KING: Guys like me, you know, and I won't say guys like us because I won't presume for Peter, but guys like me, we were duds in high school.... Writing has always been it for me. I was just sort of this nerdy kid. I didn't get beat up too much because I was big, played a little football and stuff like that. So mostly I just got this, ''King--he's weird. Big glasses. Reads a lot. Big teeth.'' I've thought about stopping--sometimes it seems to me I could save my life by stopping. Because I'm really compulsive about it. I drive that baby....
STRAUB: I don't want to be a school teacher. I don't want to be be an IBM executive. For me, that's boring. One advantage to this position that we have, is that we can meet people we like, whose work we admire. Steve can hang around with rock and rollers and I can hang out with jazz musicians that I just cherish. Somehow we've got a mysterious access, and they sort of believe in us!
KING: I don't know exactly what it is, but they treat you like maybe you were...smart. [laughs]
WIATER: Steve, we're always under the impression that writers are supposed to lead some kind of private and sedated lifestyle. Of course, we realize that when you become a bestselling author, you're obviously going to become a little more accessible to the public. Yet you acted in Creepshow, and did a television commercial for American Express.
KING: [mockingly] Do you know me? Instead of saying, ''I wrote Carrie, I carry the American Express card.''
WIATER: Isn't it coming to a point where you'll be recognized whenever you walk down the street? Was this a conscious decision to get your face known as well as your name?
KING: No, it wasn't. I mean, if only people knew--this idea that somehow you have a career planned. But we were sitting around the living room and George said to me, ''Do you want to play Jordy Verrill?'' Because I did this redneck in Knightriders. George has got a certain sense of humor and it tickled him. He thought it would be funny--and so I did Jordy.I did the American Express commercial...because I thought, ''Jesus Christ, that's really flattering. I must have arrived.'' So I did the commercial. I also did it because I thought it was a chance to do something amusing that was diametrically opposite to Jordy Verrill--sort of a late seventies faggot Hugh Hefner! Then, you have to draw a line someplace; the other day these people called me up from some other ad agency: ''Saw your American Express ad. Loved it! You wanna do a Miller Lite ad?''
And I went, ''Jesus! Yeah, I do want to do a Miller Lite ad--those are really cool!'' Then I thought to myself: ''You know, you're a writer. You do about three more of these things and you can go on "Hollywood Squares," for all the reputation that you've got.'' Not that I've got much of a reputation anyway.....
WIATER: Have you two reached a point where you still can stop and say, ''No that's not good enough,'' and start over, or do you just say, ''Yeah, that's good enough to make the grade because my name is on it.''
STRAUB: I'm less satisfied than I used to be. I think I work harder to get it right. And I see it as a part of the obligation.
KING: [solemnly] I'll tell you what: it's getting later and I want to get better, because you only get about so many chances to do good work. There's no justification not to at least try to do good work when you make the money. I mean, there are guys who are starving, just about. And they're trying to do good work. Some of them are.
STRAUB: Some of them--some of them don't know what it is.
KING: And that's why they're starving, in some cases.
WIATER: Do you two feel any responsibility for ''double handedly'' raising the public awareness of the genre so that it's now far more acceptable--and respectable--than it ever was before?
STRAUB: I think we wrote ''horror'' novels that were actually novels. They were different from most previous horror novels. In a way, they kind of redefined what it was. Then others came in and started pushing away at the idea of what a horror novel was, too. And then commercial success gave what we were doing acceptability. Part of it is that we obtained the commercial success because we gave people the horror in a flavor in which they could take it and believe in it.
KING: And they were not expected to say, ''Well, this a horror novel so I have to expect all of this junky characterization and unbelievable developments and everything.'' I think that's what Peter means when he says we ask them to accept it as a novel first. I'm not sure how much we raised the awareness of horror or gave it any kind of a cultural cachet. I'm sure that we allowed a lot of contracts to be signed by a lot of writers, put a lot of money in a lot of pockets, that otherwise wouldn't have gone there. And I think that's a wonderful thing and I'm delighted because most of the people who are doing it aren't in it for a free ride. They're really serious about it. I think now--and I didn't use to think this way--but I think now that we might actually have a serious place in American literature in a hundred years or so....
STRAUB: In a kind of a queer way, yeah...!
KING: Well, I think that we might first look to people like ''Monk'' Lewis or Anne Radcliffe, or neo-Gothic revival, or something like that! But maybe we'll still do a lot of good work and people will say, ''Hey--they weren't so bad.''
STRAUB: And the answer to the other question is, ''Yes, every word is autobiographical!''
[The entire interview can be found in DARK DREAMERS]
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