Literary Interview

I watched a biography of Stephen King on the Biography Channel (of all places) and was really struck by how fundamentally normal he was. Mind you, he's rich as Croesus and as one of the most fabulously successful writers of all time, he can do things that to us ordinary mortals would seem like magic. But strip away his money and success and he comes across as normal, perhaps even a bit dweebish. The biography did leave out certain less than appealing phases in his life, but that's okay - everyone has moments in their life that they aren't terribly proud of, and what's the point of dwelling on them? I used to have a mullet haircut, for example, an abomination that I am only too glad was not photographed in the wild. I would feel awful if my life ended up on the Biography Channel and I had to hear Peter Graves say something like "The mid-Eighties were dominated by hockey hair and cheap beer, desperate cries for help that were answered by..."

Best to leave such insalubriousness alone.

But even so, the normalcy of Stephen King's life seems strange. We seem to expect, perhaps even need, for him to be weird and unsettling. How could he write things like "The Mist" and "The Mangler" and not be weird and settling? So I imagined an interview with Stephen King as carried out by Lorna Doon, cub reporter for the Wittmann Windbreaker, a free newspaper whose masthead reads "Ripping good news or triple your money back!"

Thank you, Mr. King, for agreeing to meet with me.

Not a problem, and call me Steve.

Thank you, Steve. You know, as I was ringing your doorbell, I couldn't help but notice that terrible steel blade leaning against the wall. That was the blade of the guillotine that was used to decapitate Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, if I'm not mistaken, and it doubtless keens in the night as it remembers its bath in blood --

No, actually, that's my new snow shovel. I already had a good one, but Tractor Supply Company had them on sale, so I bought another one. I left it there because they're predicting snow in a week and this way I won't have to clump around to the shed to get a shovel.

Um. I see. A snow shovel... Well, what about that urn by the door; that's quite striking. Tell me, does it contain the still-living guts of a five thousand year old Sumerian priest-king? Do the guts writhe and churn with ceaseless hatred toward all those who walk the Earth? Do they --

We got that at Crate & Barrel, I think. We used to put dried flowers in the vase, but the cats keeps tearing them up, so we stopped. Shouldn't you be, um, more interested in my writing technique, or my insight as a author?

Yes, precisely. Let's talk about how you get ideas for your stories. It's said that you have a scriptorium under the house, a vile debauched library where you consult scrolls inked in blood on human skin where the blackest and most vile blasphemies are --

Actually, that's my library over there. Those bookcases.

That large book, that must surely be the handwritten diary of a Nazi concentration camp commandant, written on tanned skin torn from a Jewish inmate! Surely it must be full of the most perverse and twisted occult rites where the Nazis sought union with Wotan, the War-Father, to --

Farmer's Almanac.

What?

It's a Farmer's Almanac, published in 1903. I bought it at an antique store.

And doubtless it describes the black paleo-pagan harvest rituals used in fin de siecle New England, where dour farmers ritually crucify young women so that their cries of anguish would enrich and protect the harvest through the shedding of innocent blood --

I think it actually predicted a wetter-than-usual spring.

Floods? Tidal waves? Torrents of endless rain that drive men mad, that drive them to take up axes in sweaty, twitching and --

A wetter than usual spring for 1904.

All right, all right. Let's talk about your office, where you write. It must be below, yes, down in the cellar, the basement, the crypt, in the dank and damp realms of the earth --

It's right there. That desk. That's where I write. Under the kitten calendar.

Well let's talk about your cellar anyway. The the Unholy of Unholies. What's down there, really? Bodies stacked like cordwood? Egyptian sarcophagi looted from the Valley of the Kings, still redolent of pitch and natron? A heart in a jar! Robert Bloch's heart in a jar!

Actually, there isn't much down there except the storm shutters, some sleds, and my fishing gear. Maybe some reserve toilet paper and a box of Christmas ornaments.

Fishing gear, stainless steel treble hooks the size of pine cones that you use in your attempts to capture Neptron, who swims the icy depths hungering for human blood even as his dim consciousness tries to convince him that not all people are bad; what the high school kids did to him on that terrible night with the broom handle and the overhead projector and the can of refried beans, that not all people are like that and he doesn't need to kill them all, all --

Actually I don't fish much. The fishing gear is just protective coloration so people don't think I'm weird for just sitting on the lakeside and watching the clouds go by.

Yes, outside, the great outdoors, beneath the hard pitiless stars, where beyond angled space blind twisted entities gnaw at the stuff of of the universe, where unseeing and uncaring alien creatures and principalities go about their rounds in supreme indifference to us and our terrible fate, ants, mere ants, derelict and void beneath the pitiless stars --

Actually, most days I'm in bed by eight PM; I don't stay up very late these days.

Oh come on, Steve, I mean, make with the horror! Isn't there anything horrible around here? Anything at all?? Not even pig's knuckles??

Well, I could show you my MC Hammer phat pants, if that would help.

It's a start...