But I didn’t discover it sooner, I didn’t want to stop, and so I did the only thing I could think of I called my big brother and asked for help.
Dave King is what we New Englanders call ‘a piece of work,” a child prodigy with a tested IQ
of over 150 (you will find reflections of Dave in Bow-Wow Fornoy’s genius brother in ‘The End of the Whole Mess’) who went through school as if on a rocket-sled, finishing college at eighteen and going right to work as a high-school math teacher at Brunswick High. Many of his remedial algebra students were older than he was. Dave was the youngest man ever to be elected Town Selectman in the state of Maine, and was a Town Manager at the age of twenty-five or so. He is a genuine polymath, a man who knows something about just about everything.
I explained my problems to my brother over the telephone. A week later I received a manila envelope from him and opened it with a sinking heart. I was sure he’d sent me the information I needed, but I was equally sure it would do me no good; my brother’s handwriting is absolutely awful.
To my delight, I found a videocassette. When I plugged it in, I saw Dave sitting at a table piled high with dirt. Using several toy Matchbox cars, he explained everything I needed to know, including that wonderfully ominous stuff about the arc of descent. Dave also told me that my protagonist would have to use highway equipment in order to bury Dolan’s Cadillac (in the original story he did it by hand), and explained exactly how to jump-start the big machines your local Highway Department is apt to leave around at various road-repair sites. This information was extremely good . . . a little too good, in fact. I changed just enough so that if anyone tries it according to the recipe in the story, nothing will happen.
One last point about this story: when it was finished, I hated it. Absolutely loathed it. It was never published in a magazine; it simply went into one of the cardboard boxes of Bad Old Stuff I keep in the hallway behind my office. A few years later, Herb Yellin, who publishes gorgeous limited editions in his function as head of Lord John Press, wrote and asked if he could do a limited edition of one of my short stories, preferably an unpublished one. Because I love his books, which are small, beautifully made, and often extremely eccentric, I went out into what I think of as the Hallway of Doom and hunted through my boxes to see if there was anything salvageable.
I came across ‘Dolan’s Cadillac,’ and once again time had done its work — it read a lot better than I remembered, and when I sent it to Herb, he agreed enthusiastically. I made further revisions and it was published in a small Lord John Press edition of about five hundred copies. I have revised it again for its appearance here, and have changed my opinion of it enough to have put it in the lead-off position. If nothing else, it’s a kind of archetypal horror story, with its mad narrator and its account of a premature burial in the desert. But this particular story really isn’t mine anymore; it belongs to Dave King and Herb Yellin. Thanks, guys.
‘Suffer the Little Children’ — this story is from the same period as most of the stories in Night Shift, and was originally published in Cavalier, as were most of the stories in that 1978
collection. It was left out because my editor, Bill Thompson, felt the book was getting ‘unwieldy’
— this is the way editors sometimes tell writers that they have to cut a little before the price of the book soars out of sight. I voted to cut a story called ‘Gray Matter’ from Night Shift. Bill voted to cut ‘Suffer the Little Children.’ I deferred to his judgment, and read the story over carefully before deciding to include it here. I like it quite a lot — it feels a little bit like the Bradbury of the late forties and early fifties to me, the fiendish Bradbury who reveled in killer babies, renegade undertakers, and tales only a Crypt-Keeper could love. Put another way, ‘Suffer the Little Children’ is a ghastly sick-joke with no redeeming social merit whatever. I like that in a story.
‘The Night Flier’ — sometimes a supporting character in a novel catches a writer’s attention and refuses to go away, insisting he has more to say and do. Richard Dees, the protagonist of ‘The Night Flier,’ is such a character. He originally appeared in The Dead Zone (1979), where he offers Johnny Smith, the doomed hero of that novel, a job as a psychic on his awful paper, the supermarket tabloid Inside View. Johnny throws him off the porch of his dad’s house, and that was supposed to be the end of him. Yet here he is again.
Like most of my stories, ‘The Night Flier’ started off as nothing but a lark — a vampire with a private pilot’s license, how amusingly modrun — but it grew as Dees grew. I rarely understand my characters, any more than I understand the lives and hearts of the real people I meet every day, but I find that it’s sometimes possible to plot them, as a cartographer plots his or her maps.
As I worked on ‘The Night Flier,’ I began to glimpse a man of profound alienation, a man who seemed to somehow sum up some of the most terrible and confusing things about our supposedly open society in the last quarter of the century. Dees is the essential unbeliever, and his confrontation with the Night Flier at the end of the story recalls that George Seferis line I used in
‘Salem’s Lot — the one about the column of truth having a hole in it. In these latter days of the twentieth century, that seems to be all too true, and ‘The Night Flier’ is mostly about one man’s discovery of that hole.
‘Popsy’ — is this little boy’s grandfather the same creature that demands Richard Dees open his camera and expose his film at the conclusion of ‘The Night Flier’? You know, I rather think he is.
‘It Grows on You’ — a version of this story was originally published in a University of Maine literary magazine called Marshroots back in the early seventies, but the version in this book is almost entirely different. As I read through the original story, I began to realize that these old men were actually the survivors of the debacle described in Needful Things. That novel is a black comedy about greed and obsession; this is a more serious story about secrets and sickness. It seems a fitting epilogue to the novel . . . and it was great to glimpse some of my old Castle Rock friends one last time. To put it another way, I want you to be a little bit afraid every time you step into my parlor. I want you unsure about how far I’ll go, or what I may do next.
‘Dedication’ — for years, since I first met and was appalled by a now-dead famous writer, whom I will not name here, I have been troubled by the question of why some enormously talented people turn out to be such utter shits in person — woman-pawing sexists, racists, sneering elitists, or cruel practical jokers. I’m not saying that most talented or famous people are this way, but I have met enough who are — including that one undeniably great writer — to wonder why. This story was written as an effort to answer that question to my own satisfaction.
The effort failed, but I was at least able to articulate my own unease, and in this case, that seemed enough.
It’s not a very politically correct story, and I think a lot of readers — the ones who want to be scared by the same comfy old bogies and funhouse demons — are going to be outraged by it. I hope so; I’ve been doing this job for quite awhile now, but I like to think I’m not quite ready for the old rocking chair yet. The stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes are, for the most part, the sort that critics categorize (and then all too often dismiss, alas) as horror stories, and the horror story is supposed to be a kind of evil-tempered junkyard dog that will bite you if you get too close. This one bites, I think. Am I going to apologize for that? Do you think I should? Isn’t that
— the risk of being bitten — one of the reasons you picked this book up in the first place? I think so. And if you get thinking of me as your kindly old Uncle Stevie, a sort of end-of-the-century Rod Serling, I will try even harder to bite you. To put it another way, I want you to be a little afraid every time you step into my parlour. I want you unsure about how far I’ll go, or what I may do next.