The idea of each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst — for me, at least — is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.
The leap of faith necessary to make the short stories happen has gotten particularly tough in the last few years; these days it seems that everything wants to be a novel, and every novel wants to be approximately four thousand pages long. A fair number of critics have mentioned this, and usually not favorably. In reviews of every long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful Things, I have been accused of overwriting. In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they are just the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent. These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail-paring like Nicholson Baker’s Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Greg Matthews’s Heart of the Country is all but ignored.
But all that is by the by, not only off the subject but just a tiny bit whimpery, too — after all, was there ever a writer who didn’t feel that he or she had been badly treated by the critics? All I started to say before I so rudely interrupted myself was that the act of faith which turns a moment of belief into a real object — i.e., a short story that people will actually want to read — has been a little harder for me to come by in the last few years.
‘Well then, don’t write them,’ someone might say (only it’s usually a voice I hear inside my own head, like the ones Jessie Burlingame hears in Gerald’s Game}. ‘After all, you don’t need the money they bring in the way you once did.’
That’s true enough. The days when a check for some four-thousand-word wonder would buy penicillin for one of the kids’ ear infections or help meet the rent are long gone. But the logic is more than spurious; it’s dangerous. I don’t exactly need the money the novels bring in, either, you see. If it was just the money, I could hang up my jock and hit the showers . . . or spend the rest of my life on some Caribbean island, catching the rays and seeing how long I could grow my fingernails.
But it isn’t about the money, no matter what the glossy tabloids may say, and it’s not about selling out, as the more arrogant critics really seem to believe. The fundamental things still apply as time goes by, and for me the object hasn’t changed — the job is still getting to you, Constant Reader, getting you by the short hairs and, hopefully, scaring you so badly you won’t be able to go to sleep without leaving the bathroom light on. It’s still about first seeing the impossible . . . and then saying it. It’s still about making you believe what I believe, at least for a little while.
I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them. Nor am I speaking metaphorically. Good writing — good stories — are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages
which would otherwise prove unendurable. I can only speak from my own experience, of course, but for me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult. If the stories which have resulted from that imagination have done the same for some of the people who’ve read them, then I am perfectly happy and perfectly satisfied — feelings which cannot, so far as I know, be purchased with rich movie deals or multi-million-dollar book contracts.
Still, the short story is a difficult and challenging literary form, and that’s why I was so delighted
— and so surprised — to find I had enough of them to issue a third collection. It has come at a propitious time, as well, because one of those facts of which I was so sure as a kid (I probably picked it up in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, too) was that people completely renew themselves every seven years: every tissue, every organ, every muscle replaced by entirely new cels. I am drawing Nightmares and Dreamscapes together in the summer of 1992, seven years after the publication of Skeleton Crew, my last collection of short stories, and Skeleton Crew was published seven years after Night Shift, my first collection. The greatest thing is knowing that, although the leap of faith necessary to translate an idea into reality has become harder (the jumping muscles get a little older every day, you know), it’s still perfectly possible. The next greatest thing is knowing that someone still wants to read them —
that’s you, Constant Reader, should you wonder.
The oldest of these stories (my versions of the killer golf-ball goop and monster miscarriages, if you will) is ‘It Grows on You’, originally published in a University of Maine literary magazine called Marshroots . . . although it has been considerably revised for this book, so it could better be what it apparently wanted to be — a final look back at the doomed little town of Castle Rock. The most recent, ‘The Ten O’Clock People’, was written in three fevered days during the summer of 1992.
There are some genuine curiosities here — the first version of my only original teleplay; a Sherlock Holmes story in which Dr Watson steps forward to solve the case; a Cthulhu Mythos story set in the suburb of London where Peter Straub lived when I first met him; a hardboiled ‘caper’ story of the Richard Bachman stripe; and a slightly different version of a story called ‘My Pretty Pony’, which was originally done as a limited edition from the Whitney Museum, with artwork by Barbara Kruger.
After a great deal of thought, I’ve also decided to include a lengthy non-fiction piece, ‘Head Down’, which concerns kids and baseball. It was originally published in The New Yorker, and I probably worked harder on it than anything else I’ve written over the last fifteen years. That doesn’t make it good, of course, but I know that writing and publishing it gave me enormous satisfaction, and I’m passing it along for that reason. It doesn’t really fit in a collection of stories which concern themselves mostly with suspense and the supernatural . . . except somehow it does. The texture is the same. See if you don’t think so.
What I’ve tried hardest to do is to steer clear of the old chestnuts, the trunk stories, and the bottom-of-the-drawer stuff. Since 1980 or so, some critics have been saying I could publish my laundry list and sell a million copies or so, but these are for the most part critics who think that’s what I’ve been doing all along. The people who read my work for pleasure obviously feel differently, and I have made this book with those readers, not the critics, in the forefront of my mind. The result, I think, is an uneven Aladdin’s cave of a book, one which completes a trilogy of which Night Shift and Skeleton Crew are the first two volumes. All the good short stories have now been collected; all the bad ones have been swept as far under the rug as I could get them, and there they will stay. If there is to be another collection, it will consist entirely of stories which have not as yet been written or even considered (stories which have not yet been believed, if you will), and I’d guess it will show up in a year which begins with a 2.
Meantime, there are these twenty-odd (and some, I should warn you, are very odd). Each contains something I believed for awhile, and I know that some of these things — the finger poking out of the drain, the man-eating toads, the hungry teeth — are a little frightening, but I think we’ll be all right if we go together. First, repeat the catechism after me: I believe a dime can derail a freight-train.