That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved between then and
now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much more likely to be true), but I
remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear that went through me when Stevens swung
the oaken door wide – the cold certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and
hellish in the bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an unspeakable darkness of an hour’s duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand years. I cannot
explain it, but I tell you that world exists – I am as sure of that as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield went on breathing. I thought for that one
timeless second that the door would open and Stevens would thrust me out into that
world and I would then hear that door slam shut behind me … forever.
Instead, I saw 35th Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling plumes of
exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.
‘Yes, always more tales,’ Stevens repeated. ‘Goodnight, sir.’
Always more tales.
Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I’ll tell you another.
AFTERWORD
Although ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ has always been the question I’m most
frequently asked (it’s number one with a bullet, you might say), the runner-up is
undoubtedly this one: ‘Is horror all you write?’ When I say it isn’t, it’s hard to tell if the questioner seems relieved or disappointed.
Just before the publication of Carrie, my first novel, I got a letter from my editor, Bill Thompson, suggesting it was time to start thinking about what we were going to do for an
encore (it may strike you as a bit strange, this thinking about the next book before the first
was even out, but because the pre-publication schedule for a novel is almost as long as
the post-production schedule on a film, we had been living with Carrie for a long time at that point – nearly a year). I promptly sent Bill the manuscripts of two novels, one called
Blaze and one called Second Coming. The former had been written immediately after Carrie, during the six-month period when the first draft of Carrie was sitting in a desk drawer, mellowing; the latter was written during the year or so when Carrie inched,
tortoiselike, closer and closer to publication.
Blaze was a melodrama about a huge, almost retarded criminal who kidnaps a baby,
planning to ransom it back to the child’s rich parents … and then falls in love with the
child instead. Second Coming was a melodrama about vampires taking over a small town
in Maine. Both were literary imitations of a sort, Second Coming of Dracula, Blaze of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
I think Bill must have been flabbergasted when these two manuscripts arrived in a
single big package (some of the pages of Blaze had been typed on the reverse sides of
milk-bills, and the Second Coming manuscript reeked of beer because someone had
spilled a pitcher of Black Label on it during a New Year’s Eve party three months before)
– like a woman who wishes for a bouquet of flowers and discovers her husband has gone
out and bought her a hothouse. The two manuscripts together totalled about five hundred
and fifty single-spaced pages.
He read them both over the next couple of weeks – scratch an editor and find a saint —
and I went down to New York from Maine to celebrate the publication of Carrie (April,
1974, friends and neighbours – Lennon was alive, Nixon was still hanging in there as
President, and this kid had yet to see the first grey hair in his beard) and to talk about
which of the two books should be next … or if neither of them should be next.
I was in the city for a couple of days, and we talked around the question three or four
times. The final decision was made on a street-corner – Park Avenue and 44th Street, in
fact. Bill and I were standing there waiting for the light, watching the cabs roll into that
funky tunnel or whatever it is – the one that seems to burrow straight through the Pan Am
Building. And Bill said, ‘I think it should be Second Coming.’
Well, that was the one I liked better myself- but there was something so oddly reluctant
in his voice that I looked at him sharply and asked him what the matter was. ‘It’s just that
if you do a book about vampires as the follow-up to a book about a girl who can move things by mind-power, you’re going to get typed,’ he said.
‘Typed?’ I asked, honestly bewildered. I could see no similarities to speak of between
vampires and telekinesis. ‘As what?’
‘As a horror-writer,’ he said, more reluctantly still.
‘Oh,’ I said, vastly relieved. ‘Is that all!’
‘Give it a few years,’ he said, ‘and see if you still think it’s “all”.’
‘Bill,’ I said, amused, ‘no one can make a living writing just horror stories in America.
Lovecraft starved in Providence. Bloch gave it up for suspense novels and Unknown-type
spoofs. The Exorcist was a one-shot. You’ll see.’
The light changed. Bill clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I think you’re going to be very
successful,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think you know shit from Shinola.’
He was closer to the truth than I was. It turned out that it was possible to make a living writing horror stories in America. Second Coming, eventually retitled ‘Salem’s Lot, did very well. By the time it was published, I was living in Colorado with my family and
writing a novel about a haunted hotel. On a trip into New York, I sat up with Bill half the
night in a bar called Jasper’s of the Rock-Ola; you had to kind of lift him up to see what
the selections were, and told him the plot By the end, his elbows were planted on either
side of his bourbon and his head was in his hands, like a man with a monster migraine.
‘You don’t like it,’I said.
‘I like it a lot,’ he said hollowly.
“Then what’s wrong?’
‘First the telekinetic girl, then the vampires, now the haunted hotel and the telepathic kid. You’re gonna get typed.’
This time I thought about it a little more seriously – and then I thought about all the
people who had been typed as horror writers, and who had given me such great pleasure
over the years – Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, Robert
Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Shirley Jackson (yes, even she was typed as a spook
writer). And I decided there in Jasper’s with the cat asleep on the juke and my editor
sitting beside me with his head in his hands, that I could be in worse company. I could,
for example, be an ‘important’ writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven
years or so, or a ‘brilliant’ writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright
academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible
GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.
‘That’s okay, Bill,’ I said, ‘I’l1 be a horror writer if that’s what people want That’s just
fine.’
We never had the discussion again. Bill’s still editing and I’m still writing horror
stories, and neither of us is in analysis. It’s a good deal.
So I got typed and I don’t much mind – after all, I write true to type … at least, most of the time. But is horror all I write? If you’ve read the foregoing stories, you know it’s not …
but elements of horror can be found in all of the tales, not just in The Breathing Method –
that business with the slugs in The Body is pretty gruesome, as is much of the dream
imagery in Apt Pupil. Sooner or later, my mind always seems to turn back in that
direction, God knows why.
Each one of these longish stories was written immediately after completing a novel –
it’s as if I’ve always finished the big job with just enough gas left in the tank to blow off
one good-sized novella. The Body, the oldest story here, was written direct after Salem’s Lot; Apt Pupil was written in a two-week period following the completion of The Shining (and following Apt Pupil I wrote nothing for three months -I was pooped); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was written after finishing The Dead Zone; and The
Breathing Method, the most recently written of these stories, immediately following Firestarter*
None of them have been published previous to this book; none has even been
submitted for publication. Why? Because each of them comes out to 25,000 to 35,000
words – not exactly, maybe, but that’s close enough to be in the ballpark. I’ve got to tell