Now that I’ve said all that, just let me add that if I really thought ‘Dedication’ needed to be defended, I never would have offered it for publication in the first place. A story that can’t serve as its own defense lawyer doesn’t deserve to be published. It’s Martha Rosewall, the humble maid, who wins this battle, not Peter Jefferies, the big-shot writer, and that should tell the reader all he or she needs to know about where my sympathies lie.
Oh, one other thing. It seems to me now that this story, originally published in 1985, was a trial cut for a novel called Dolores Claiborne (1992).
‘The Moving Finger’ — my favorite sort of short story has always been the kind where things happen just because they happen. In novels and movies (save for movies starring fellows like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger), you are supposed to explain why things happen.
Let me tell you something, friends and neighbors: I hate explaining why things happen, and my efforts in that direction (such as the doctored LSD and resultant DNA changes which create Charlie McGee’s pyrokinetic talents in Firestarter) aren’t very good. But real life very rarely has
what movie producers are this year calling ‘a motivation through-line’ — have you noticed that? I don’t know about you, but nobody ever issued me an instruction manual; I’m just muddling along as best I can, knowing I’m never going to get out of it alive but trying not to fuck up too badly in the meantime.
In short stories, the author is sometimes still allowed to say, ‘This happened. Don’t ask me why.’ The story of poor Howard Mitla is that sort of tale, and it seems to me that his efforts to deal with the finger that pokes out of his bathroom drain during a quiz-show form a perfectly valid metaphor for how we cope with the nasty surprises life holds in store for all of us: the tumors, the accidents, the occasional nightmarish coincidence. It is the unique province of the fantasy story to be able to answer the question ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ by replying, ‘Feh — don’t ask.’ In a tale of fantasy, this gloomy answer actually seems to satisfy us.
In the end, it may be the genre’s chief moral asset: at its best, it can open a window (or a confessional screen) on the existential aspects of our mortal lives. It ain’t perpetual motion . . .
but it ain’t bad, either.
‘You Know They Got a Hell of a Band’ — there are at least two stories in this book about what the lead female character here thinks of as ‘the peculiar little town.’ This is one; ‘Rainy Season’ is the other. There will be readers who may think I’ve visited ‘the peculiar little town’ once or twice too often, and some may note similarities between these two pieces and an earlier story of mine,
‘Children of the Corn.’ There are similarities, but does that mean ‘Band’ and ‘Season’ are lapses into self-imitation? It’s a delicate question, and one each reader must answer for him- or herself, but my answer is no (of course it is, what else am I gonna say?).
There’s a big difference, it seems to me, between working in traditional forms and self-imitation. Take the blues, for instance. There are really only two classic guitar chord-progressions for the blues, and those two progressions are essentially the same. Now, answer me this — just because John Lee Hooker plays almost everything he ever wrote in the key of E or the key of A, does that mean he’s running on auto-pilot, doing the same thing over and over again? Plenty of John Lee Hooker fans (not to mention fans of Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Furry Lewis, and all the other greats) would say it doesn’t. It’s not the key you play it in, these blues aficionados would say; it’s the soul you sing it with.
Same thing here. There are certain horror-tale archetypes, which stand out with the authority of mesas in the desert. The haunted-house story; the return-from-the-grave story; the peculiar-little-town story. It’s not really about what it’s about, if you can dig that; this is, by and large, the literature of the nerve-endings and the muscle-receptors, and as such, it’s really about what you feel. What I felt here — the impetus for the story — was how authentically creepy it is that so many rockers have died young, or under nasty circumstances; it’s an actuarial expert’s nightmare.
Many younger fans view the high mortality rate as romantic, but when you’ve boogied your way from The Platters to Ice T, as I have, you start to see a darker side, a crawling kingsnake side.
That’s what I’ve tried to express here, although I don’t think the story really starts to move and groove and creep and crawl until the last six or eight pages.
‘Home Delivery’ — this is probably the only story in the book which was written to order. John Skipp and Craig Spector (The Light at the End, The Bridge, plus several other good horror splatterpunk-ish novels) came up with the idea of an anthology of stories exploring what things would be like if George Romero’s zombies from his Dead trilogy (Night of, Dawn of, Day of)
took over the world. The concept fired off in my imagination like a Roman candle, and this story, set off the coast of Maine, was the result.
‘My Pretty Pony’ — in the early eighties, Richard Bachman was struggling to write a novel called (naturally enough, I suppose) My Pretty Pony. The novel was about an independent hitman named Clive Banning who is hired to put together a string of like-minded psychopaths and kill a number of powerful crime figures at a wedding. Banning and his string succeed, turning the wedding into a bloodbath, and are then double-crossed by their employers, who begin picking them off, one by one. The novel was to chronicle Banning’s efforts to escape the cataclysm he had induced.
The book was a bad piece of work, born in an unhappy time of my life when a lot of things that had been working pretty well for me up until then, suddenly fell over with a resounding crash. Richard Bachman died during this period, leaving two fragments behind: an almost complete novel called Machine’s Way under his pseudonym, George Stark, and six chapters of My Pretty Pony. As Richard’s literary executor, I worked Machine’s Way up into a novel called The Dark Half and published it under my own name (I did acknowledge Bachman, however). My Pretty Pony I junked . . . except for a brief flashback in which Banning, while waiting to begin his assault on the wedding party, remembers how his grandfather instructed him on the plastic nature of time. Finding that flashback — marvellously complete, almost a short story as it stood
— was like finding a rose growing in a junkheap. I plucked it, and I did so with great gratitude. It turned out to be one of the few good things I wrote during an extremely bad year.
‘My Pretty Pony’ was originally published in an overpriced (and overdesigned, in my humble opinion) edition produced by the Whitney Museum. It was later issued in a slightly more accessible (but still overpriced and overdesigned, in my humble opinion) edition by Alfred A.
Knopf. And here, I am pleased to see it, polished and slightly clarified, as it probably should have been in the first place — just another short story, a little better than some, not so good as others.
‘Sorry, Right Number’ — remember how I started off, about a billion pages ago, talking about Ripley’s Believe It or Not’? Well, ‘Sorry, Right Number’ almost belongs in it. The idea occurred to me as a ‘teleplaylet” one night on my way home from buying a pair of shoes. It came as a
‘visual,’ I suppose, because the telecast of a film plays such a central part. I wrote it, pretty much as it is presented here, in two sittings. My West Coast agent — the one who does film deals —
had it by the end of the week. Early the following week, Steven Spielberg read it for Amazing Stories, a TV series which he then had in production (but which had not yet begun to air).
Spielberg rejected it — they were looking for Amazing Stories that were a little more upbeat, he said — and so I took it to my long-time collaborator and good friend, Richard Rubinstein, who then had a series called Tales from the Darkside running in syndication. I won’t say Richard blows his nose on happy endings — he likes a happily-ever-after as well as anyone, I think —
but he’s never shied away from a downer; he was the guy who got Pet Sematary made, after all (Pet Sematary and Thelma and Louise are, I think, the only major Hollywood films to end with the death of a major character or characters since the late 1970s).