STEPHEN KING
Everything’s Eventual
Contents:
What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1–13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.
Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art
11
Autopsy Room Four
19
The Man in the Black Suit
45
All That You Love Will Be Carried Away
71
The Death of Jack Hamilton
87
In the Deathroom
119
The Little Sisters of Eluria
145
Everything’s Eventual
211
L.T.’s Theory of Pets
265
The Road Virus Heads North
287
Lunch at the Gotham Café
313
That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French
347
1408
365
Riding the Bullet
405
Luckey Quarter
447
Everything’s
Eventual
Introduction: Practicing
the (Almost) Lost Art
I’ve written more than once about the joy of writing and see no need to reheat that particular skillet of hash at this late date, but here’s a confession: I also take an amateur’s slightly crazed pleasure in the business side of what I do. I like to goof widdit, do a little media cross-pollination and envelope-pushing. I’ve tried doing visual novels ( Storm of the Century, Rose Red), serial novels ( The Green Mile), and serial novels on the Internet ( The Plant). It’s not about making more money or even precisely about creating new markets; it’s about trying to see the act, art, and craft of writing in different ways, thereby refreshing the process and keeping the resulting artifacts—the stories, in other words—as bright as possible.
I started to write “keeping [the stories] new” in the line above, then deleted the phrase in the interest of honesty. I mean, come on here, ladies and gentlemen, whom can I possibly kid at this late date, except maybe myself? I sold my first story when I was twenty-one and a junior in college. I’m now fifty-four, and have run a lot of language through the 2.2-pound organic computer/word processor I hang my Red Sox cap on. The act of writing stories hasn’t been new for me in a long time, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost its fascination. If I don’t find ways of keeping it fresh and interesting, though, it’ll get old and tired in a hurry. I don’t want that to happen, because I don’t want to cheat the people who read my stuff (that would be you, dear Constant Reader), and I don’t want to cheat myself, either. We’re in it together, after all. This is a date we’re on. We should have fun. We should dance.
11
STEPHEN KING
So, keeping that in mind, here’s yet another story. My wife and I own these two radio stations, okay? WZON-AM, which is sports radio, and WKIT-FM, which is classic rock (“The Rock of Bangor,” we say). Radio is a tough business these days, especially in a market like Bangor, where there are too many stations and not enough listeners.
We’ve got contemporary country, classic country, oldies, classic oldies, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, and Casey Kasem. The Steve and Tabby King stations ran in the red for a lot of years—not deep in the red, but far enough to bug me. I like to be a winner, you see, and while we were winning in the Arbs (that would be the Arbitron ratings, which are to radio what the Nielsens are to TV), we kept coming up short on the bottom line at the end of the year. It was explained to me that there just wasn’t enough ad revenue in the Bangor market, that the pie had been cut into too many slices.
So I had an idea. I’d write a radio play, I thought, sort of like the ones I used to listen to with my grandfather when I was growing up (and he was growing old) in Durham, Maine. A Halloween play, by God! I knew about Orson Welles’s famous—or infamous—Halloween adaptation of The War of the Worlds on The Mercury Theatre, of course. It was Welles’s conceit (his absolutely brilliant conceit) to do H. G. Wells’s classic invasion story as a series of news bulletins and reports. It worked, too. It worked so well that it sparked a national panic and Welles (Orson, not H.G.) had to make a public apology on the following week’s Mercury Theatre. (I bet he made it with a smile on his face—I know I’d be smiling, if I were ever to come up with a lie so powerful and persuasive.)
I thought what had worked for Orson Welles would work for me.
Instead of starting with dance-band music, as the Welles adaptation did, mine would start with Ted Nugent wailing on “Cat Scratch Fever.” Then an announcer breaks in, one of our actual WKIT air personalities (nobody calls em deejays anymore). “This is JJ West, WKIT news,” he says. “I’m in downtown Bangor, where roughly a thousand people are jammed into Pickering Square, watching as a large, silvery disc-like object descends toward the ground . . . wait a minute, if I raise the mike, perhaps you can hear it.”
12
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
And, just like that, we’d be off to the races. I could use our very own in-house production facilities to create the audio effects, local community-theater actors to do the roles, and the best part? The very best part of all? We could record the result and syndicate it to stations all over the country! The resulting income, I figured (and my accountant agreed), would be “radio station income” instead of “creative writing income.”
It was a way to get around the advertising revenue shortfall, and at the end of the year, the radio stations might actually be in the black!
The idea for the radio play was exciting, and the prospect of helping my stations into a profit position with my skills as a writer for hire was also exciting. So what happened? I couldn’t do it, that’s what happened. I tried and I tried, and everything I wrote came out sounding like narration. Not a play, the sort of thing that you see unspooling in your mind (those old enough to remember such radio programs as Suspense and Gunsmoke will know what I mean), but something more like a book on tape. I’m sure we still could have gone the syndication route and made some money, but I knew the play would not be a success.
It was boring. It would cheat the listener. It was busted, and I didn’t know how to fix it. Writing radio plays, it seems to me, is a lost art.
We have lost the ability to see with our ears, although we had it once.
I remember listening to some radio Foley guy tapping a hollow block of wood with his knuckles . . . and seeing Matt Dillon walking to the bar of the Long Branch Saloon in his dusty boots, clear as day.
No more. Those days are gone.
Playwriting in the Shakespearean style—comedy and tragedy that works itself out in blank verse—is another lost art. Folks still go to see college productions of Hamlet and King Lear, but let’s be honest with ourselves: how do you think one of those plays would do on TV against Weakest Link or Survivor Five: Stranded on the Moon, even if you could get Brad Pitt to play Hamlet and Jack Nicholson to do Polonius? And although folks still go to such Elizabethan extrava-ganzas as King Lear or Macbeth, the enjoyment of an art-form is light-years from the ability to create a new example of that art-form.
Every now and then someone tries mounting a blank-verse production either on Broadway or off it. They inevitably fail.
13
STEPHEN KING
Poetry is not a lost art. Poetry is better than ever. Of course you’ve got the usual gang of idiots (as the Mad magazine staff writers used to call themselves) hiding in the thickets, folks who have gotten pretension and genius all confused, but there are also many brilliant prac-titioners of the art out there. Check the literary magazines at your local bookstore, if you don’t believe me. For every six crappy poems you read, you’ll actually find one or two good ones. And that, believe me, is a very acceptable ratio of trash to treasure.
The short story is also not a lost art, but I would argue it is a good deal closer than poetry to the lip of the drop into extinction’s pit.
When I sold my first short story in the delightfully antique year of 1968, I was already bemoaning the steady attrition of markets: the pulps were gone, the digests were going, the weeklies (such as The Saturday Evening Post) were dying. In the years since, I have seen the markets for short stories continue to shrink. God bless the little magazines, where young writers can still publish their stories for contribu-tors’ copies, and God bless the editors who still read the contents of their slush piles (especially in the wake of 2001’s anthrax scare), and God bless the publishers who still greenlight the occasional anthology of original stories, but God won’t have to spend His whole day—or even His coffee break—blessing those people. Ten or fifteen minutes would do the trick. Their number is small, and every year there are one or two fewer. Story magazine, a lodestar for young writers (including myself, although I never actually published there), is now gone.