Stan Nicholls. Interviews

Even in these troubled times it's unusual for a celebrity to have a bodyguard present during an interview.
Stephen King introduced his burly young minder as Joe. Joe seemed friendly, but not the sort of man you would want to get on the wrong side of. "He's here to look after me," King explained.
In what way?
"He'll throw himself between us if you ask an inappropriate question."
It was the kind of loquacious line you'd expect from one of his characters.
King's success transcends mere genre. Each of his twenty-eight books has achieved multi-million sales, and the latest, Bag of Bones, hit the bestseller lists the day it was published. His work continues to be adapted for the screen at a furious pace. Currently, The Green Mile is being filmed with Tom Hanks, and a television miniseries penned by King, Storm of the Century, is also underway. Here's a writer whose income must resemble the gross national product of a medium-sized country.
It's hard to believe this amiable, lanky 51 year-old, with his open, almost boyish face, needs a bodyguard. Then again, King wrote Misery, a tale of fan worship taken to extremes. "Misery wasn't based on any kind of fan atrocity," he says. "I didn't have too many of the real fanatics at that time. But I've picked up one or two since. There was a guy who broke into my house who claimed he had a bomb and would explode it if I didn't listen to his ideas. I wasn't there; I was in Philadelphia with my youngest son. My wife came down at six o'clock in the morning and this guy holds out a back-pack and says, 'There's a bomb in here. I have to talk to Stephen King.' She ran out of the house in her night gown to call the police. The bomb turned out to be pencils and erasers, and paperclips that had been pulled apart into wires. In his mind, this was a bomb."
Maniacs with phoney explosives aren't the only irritants he has to put up with. His wife once found a woman in their kitchen, going through the cupboards. 'I just wanted to see what he eats,' this stranger told her. 'Don't worry, I'm not crazy.' After these incidents, security was beefed-up at the King's home in Maine, New England.
"Another extreme case is a guy called Stuart Lightfoot, who claims I was part of a conspiracy to kill John Lennon and it's provable through my works. He even believes I've confessed to it! He sends me passages of my own writing, and photographs of Mark Chapman, to whom I bear a faint resemblance." At one point Lightfoot set himself up in a caravan outside King's house. He claims King 'stole his fame'. "He's nuts, that's all. He's like one of those guys you have standing on boxes here, at Speaker's Corner. One of the nutters in Hyde Park."
Joe's muscular presence suddenly seems a little less unnecessary.
"But at the time I wrote Misery,' King reiterates, 'I was only aware that there were a lot of people out there who read my books and who formed a connection to me through them in their own minds. It's totally untrue! I don't know these people, I don't have any relationship with them, and if we have anything in common it's just our humanity."
If the inspiration for Misery didn't come from a real-life incident, where did it come from? "Like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in a dream. In fact, it happened when I was on Concord, flying over here, to Brown's." Brown's of Mayfair, where our meeting took place, is one of London's most exclusive hotels. It's a perk of his tremendous good fortune, and a definite improvement on the second-rate motels he used at the beginning of his career. "I fell asleep on the plane," he recalls, "and dreamt about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer's skin. I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course, the plot changed quite a bit in the telling. But I wrote the first forty or fifty pages right on the landing here, between the ground floor and the first floor of the hotel." The desk he sat at was the same one often used by Rudyard Kipling when he stayed at Brown's.
"Another time," King continued, "when I got road-blocked in my novel It, I had a dream about leeches inside discarded refrigerators." He smiles at the memory. "I immediately woke up and thought, 'That is where this is supposed to go.' Dreams are just another part of life. To me, it's like seeing something on the street you can use in your fiction. You take it and plug it right in. Writers are scavengers by nature." This could explain the line in Bag of Bones that goes, 'Perhaps in dreams everyone is a novelist'.
The book features a writer, Mike Noonan, whose wife dies unexpectedly; a prelude to supernatural happenings. It's far from being the first time King has used an author as hero. "I gave the manuscript of this book to my wife, Tabitha, and she rolled her eyes and said, 'Steve, it's another book about a writer.' And I said to her, 'When you get a new Dick Francis you don't roll your eyes and say, "Oh, another book about a jockey."' She admitted that was true. Since writing's what I know about, it's a good place to go out from. But I also know about teaching, because I used to be a teacher, and I know about acting and the movie world and that sort of thing, so I can go to other places if I have to. Anyway, in a lot of respects Bag of Bones isn't so much about the world of writing as it is the world of publishing." He grins mischievously. "The publishers will love that part."
Does he find it easier to write a narrative first-person, as here? "No, it's usually a little bit harder. Purely in a technical way it's harder to get to all corners of the story when you're telling that story from the first-person perspective. It has its advantages, and it's the natural way people write to start with, but I think that for a novel it's a little more challenging, because you can't get to another place. You have to show how events work on the main character, because the reader can only see what he sees."
In the book, Noonan admits that he finds it difficult to ask for help, or to express his feelings. Some would say that kind of buttoned-down attitude is very English. Is it very Stephen King? "Yes, it is. It's me, it's very English, and you have to remember that when I write a book like Bag of Bones I'm writing about New England, where we're very close to our English forebears. Sometimes people ask, 'Why have your books been such a success in England?'' and I'll say, 'Because I'm their people and they're my people and we're close.' So yeah, it's an English thing and it's a Yankee thing to say, 'I'm fine. I don't need any help.'" Readers in the UK have taken a particular liking to his brand of scare-mongering. A fair chunk of the 80 million plus books he's sold have gone to fans in this country.
Something else his hero says is that being paid to write is like having 'a license to steal.' Does he feel that way himself? "Yes, I do. I think it's wonderful that they pay me and it's allowed me to send my kids to college. When I got married I had a teaching degree but I couldn't find a teaching job, so I went to work in an industrial laundry, washing motel sheets. It was probably 110, 120 degrees in there in the height of the summer and I got down to about 175 pounds. I was working sixty hours a week and making $1.75 an hour, barely enough to support the family. Now I work maybe four hours a day, seven days a week, and that's still only twenty-eight hours a week. I sit in an air-conditioned office and they pay me millions. It's a lot easier than let's say loading lorries at a warehouse out in Sheffield or somewhere." Then he adds, "But it's the work I was made for in the same way that it's the work you were made for, and of course I'd do it for free if I didn't get paid." This is certainly true. He's a born writer. But as he currently earns advances of around $17 million per book, it's unlikely to happen.
He began writing seriously while holding down a day job teaching. Pounding out his work on a second-hand typewriter costing $35, he made his professional break in 1967 when he sold a short to Startling Mystery Stories magazine. The payment amounted to a few cents a word. His career really took off with the publication of his debut novel, Carrie, in 1974, and Salem's Lot the following year. These days, he's said to be outsold only by The Bible and The Koran.
As he did it all with horror, often graphically described, the question has to be if there's anything he wouldn't write about, any taboo areas he wouldn't touch. "It's a question I usually elect not to answer. Because then somebody says, 'Well, what are those things which you choose not to write about?' But my feeling is that the more taboo the subject seems to be, the more it interests me to see whether or not I can write about it. I like the challenge of it and I like the danger of it. Take my novel The Dead Zone. If there's a taboo in the States, it's a great sensitivity to the idea of political assassinations. At the same time there's a whole load of people in America who say that everybody should be able to own a gun if they want to, despite the fact that all the major assassinations were carried out with guns. Now, you can't get close enough to a president, or to someone like Martin Luther King, to strangle them or stab them because somebody like Joe over there would step in and stop you." Joe fidgets a bit and looks slightly uncomfortable. "But if a guy's got a rifle he can take me out or take you out if he wants to. So what we've done is to try and create this taboo about using guns, and to present assassination as a cowardly act, something no sane person would do. I started to wonder, 'Would there ever be justification for that sort of assassination, the man in the high place with a gun? Would you kill Hitler if you could go back in a time machine?' That was the starting point for The Dead Zone."
King is aware that we're living through an age in which sticking your head above the parapet isn't always a wise thing to do. This is touched on in Bag of Bones, where Noonan worries that onlookers might misunderstand his motives in trying to comfort a child in the street. "Wasn't there a story in this country recently about teachers being warned not to put suntan lotion on kids?" King says. "I have a friend who teaches high school in my home town. He's probably forty-five, and he's done the job for a long time. I've seen teenage girls, his pupils, run to him and he'll give them a big hug. I said to him one time, 'Lenny, you're going to get in trouble if you do this.' His response was, 'Fuck 'em. The day I get into trouble for hugging a kid I'm out of this business, because that's part of what kids are about.'
"Our generation is terrified of license because we grew up with everything. If you had a nickel for all those things the people in our generation have not told our kids we've tried; the drugs, the sex, the theft, the destruction of property ... You've got a woman who is, let's say, 40 years old, who says to her teenage daughter, 'I don't want you out with him past 11 o'clock at night. You could get AIDS.' Or she'll say, 'What are you doing walking around in a tank top? Anybody can see your bra-straps.' What she's not telling the kid is that when she was twenty she had lice in her hair, she was hitch-hiking, fucking guys for rides between LA and Washington, because that was a different world. I think people from my generation have forgotten on a conscious level exactly what we were into and what we were up to. But on a deeper level it's still there, and it's come out in this really absurd Victorian response to sexuality. One of the motive forces behind Bag of Bones is that I've been married for twenty-five years, and I've been faithful to my wife, but I notice young girls much more than I used to, and I think a lot of people in my generation have so sublimated their own desires and their own feelings that they have these tendencies to see monsters everywhere. Monsters of sexuality, monsters from the id. We know what kind of trouble we got into with that behaviour. Maybe we don't always want to admit it to ourselves, but we know and we'd like to spare our kids that. I mean, isn't that part of being a parent? You want to spare your kids some of the bullshit you went through. What was fun at twenty seems tiresome at forty."
He's written stories with vampires, werewolves and ghosts as the menaces, but for him real horror lies in everyday tragedy, like losing a wife or suffering writer's block, fates inflicted on the protagonist in Bag of Bones. "They're terrifying thoughts in the way that cancer is a terrifying thought, where you say, 'I hope this doesn't happen to me, but it can't possibly happen to me because it's so terrible.' That's the denial that kicks in." He stops and asks, "Have you ever had writer's block?" I tell him yes, something approximating it, and it was very frightening. "Yeah, it's scary," King agrees. "I had writer's block when I was in college. I was taking a lot of writing courses at that time and I believe writing is one of those things where the more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's something you ought to do pretty well unregarded. But I don't worry about it a whole lot."
Is it the old rule of 'easy to read, hard to write' with him? Does he do lots of revisions? Does he sweat? "I do a lot more than I used to and there are a number of reasons for that. The more success you have, the more people are watching what you do. I mean, people are paying attention and that causes you to be self-conscious. But all that isn't really the way I see writing. I have always had a view that books are pre-existing things. I don't feel that I make stories up. I feel that I excavate them. I think that the job of the writer is like the job of the palaeontologist or the archaeologist. Here's this thing that's buried. Your job is to get it out as whole as you can. It's very fragile so you dig around it and you use your brushes or whatever as you try to get it out. It's there for you and you dig it up."
How can a book pre-exist in that way? Does he mean in the sense that to a sculptor a slab of marble has a figure in it? "Yeah, that's right. For instance, people say to me, 'Where did you get the idea for Bag of Bones?' and I say, 'I don't know.' I was thinking one day about Rebecca, and about the Gothic, and how the Gothic is about secrets, about buried things. I guess at that point I had some sort of an idea that I was going to write a story about a man who's haunted by ghosts belonging to buried bodies on his property. Then at some further point I thought about a young woman being harassed by an old rich man who wanted custody of her child. But how those two things came together was like ... " He pauses to consider his words. This isn't easy for him to explain. "As I said, it was like archaeology. If there's a novel buried in the ground, so to speak, it's as though digging in one place brought up the base of a spine, digging in another revealed a skull. The actual excavation is an act of faith. You simply start at the beginning and assume that everything's there, and in this case everything was. But there was no outline, there was no plan, no road map of the plot. It kind of ... revealed itself." King laughs, the spell broken, a little embarrassed perhaps at revealing how the creative process works for him. He pushes a plate of biscuits our way. "Have a cookie."
Joe doesn't take one. No doubt he has to keep in shape.
We agree that there are one or two insightful critics. "Even three or four," King amends. My point is that occasionally someone will see something in the work that the author themselves wasn't aware they'd put in. Has this happened to him, and did he ever take the credit when it did? "Yeah, that happens. Like, I was at a writers' workshop where people were required to read something by me and then write a paper on it. The papers were presented while I sat at the back of the room and listened. Then I had to react to these papers, deliver a kind of conversational critique, which puts the writer in a really uncomfortable position at times. Anyway, one guy critiqued my story Children of the Corn, about some people who fetch up in a small town in Nebraska where the children have murdered their parents on the orders of a heathen corn god. This guy did a long, really brilliantly executed paper saying this was all a parable about the American experience in Vietnam, and these children were symbolic Vietcong and the corn was the jungle and the interlopers were Americans, and God, it never crossed my mind! I never thought once about Vietnam during the course of writing that story. While they were waiting for my comments, I'm thinking, 'This guy worked for weeks on his paper, he's got to get graded on it. All I have to do is open my mouth and say "You're full of shit" and he's down in flames'. What I said was, 'Certainly the Vietnam War was a big part of my early life and there are a lot of things we draw from without even realising it, so this is probably a valid interpretation of the story.' But of course it wasn't.
"As for taking credit for that stuff; usually no. But, it's funny, sometimes the weirdest things happen when you write. For example, I wrote a story called Apt Pupil, which is about an American boy who's doing a research paper on the Holocaust, and he discovers this Nazi war criminal living on his block. It's about their relationship, because the boy's price for not turning this Nazi in is to hear about what went on in the camps and the extermination of the Jews. I gave this boy the name Tod Bowden, and my editor at that time said, 'This name is very clever.' I asked him what was clever about it and he said, 'Tod is German for death.' I said, 'Oh yes, of course it is.' I didn't know."
Maybe it was something he picked up and stored subconsciously. "I'm not sure there really is a subconscious. I think the subconscious is a fairy tale for adults." He doesn't subscribe to Freud's world-view? "Oh God, no!" Or Jung's? "No. Well ... maybe. Sure, we get things passed on probably through our DNA, our chromosomes, but I believe our subconscious mind is a lot simpler and a lot cruder than Freud ever gave us credit for. It's basically about as important perhaps as your gall-bladder, which you can have out and continue to live very nicely. The idea of all this subconscious stuff is bullshit." What about race memory? "I believe in broad racial characteristics of thought and reaction, but they're very, very general. So general you could almost say they're part of the human metabolism. But race memory? No, I think it's probably romantic crap."
On the subject of collective memory, I recall a scientist of some kind I heard on the radio a few weeks earlier. He was talking about why so many people are frightened of spiders, and his theory was that if you go back far enough in time spiders were a genuine threat to humans because they were much bigger. Like, the size of Alsatians. This strikes a chord. King pulls a face. "Spiders. I loathe them. I've heard another theory, and you'll love this, that we have such a deep fear of spiders because they're actually extra-terrestrials. They came here a long time ago on a meteor or something, and developed as a life-form. We understand instinctually that they're not from our planet."
Uncomfortable a thought as this is for we spider phobics, it's also somehow funny. I remind King that when Psycho was released, Hitchcock said he couldn't understand why audiences found it so frightening. He regarded it as a comedy. Did King see any of his own work that way? "Some of it, yes. My book Needful Things was meant to be a comedy. It was written very much with the Reagan administration in mind. I felt that Reagan was a kind of demon who came into town, the town in this case being America, and saying, 'You can have whatever you want. It's easy, anybody can do it. Junk bonds? Fine! Leverage buy-outs? Great! Cocaine? Fantastic! Whatever you want, you can have it. All you have to pay is your soul.' I guess a lot of people feel that way about the Thatcher regime here in England. I think that avarice and greed, any sort of sin of excess, is funny. I think acquisitiveness is funny. It just is, I'm sorry. What I'm talking about are crimes that we indulge in where we say to ourselves, 'We're really not hurting anybody, we're doing things for the best.' I mean, one of the problems Clinton's facing over the Lewinsky business is that he looks like a buffoon, doesn't he? Chasing after a woman who's 21 years old, who's basically not very interesting except for her physical attributes, reduces him to the level of a Punch cartoon. He looks like an elderly sugar daddy." He doesn't buy the idea of a right-wing conspiracy then? "God, no. He's just a horny guy."
Even Joe cracks a cautious smile at that one.
"There is an element of irony in the Clinton situation," King adds. "I mean, for the first time since Kennedy we have a president who's young enough to have an interest in sexual matters. Kennedy certainly had a lot of affairs, apparently used his office in very much the same way as Clinton has used his, but then in America there's a kind of unspoken rule of thumb: Republicans want your wallet and Democrats want your women. Those are the vices that they have. But anyway, I wrote this novel Needful Things, where a man comes to town and opens up a shop and basically trades for goods, and the trade always involves you doing some sort of a prank on one of your neighbours. Pretty soon the whole town is at war. Some nasty things happen in that book. There's a dog that's killed with a corkscrew, and there's a woman who's beaten to death, and a whole lot of other horrible stuff. But I say it's a comic novel. Certainly any story where a woman sells her soul to get Elvis Presley sunglasses you have to laugh about! Thing is, the book reviewed very badly because nobody saw it as a comedy. There's a mind-set that comes into play with my work or with Hitchcock's work; we're seen a certain way. But anybody who pays attention to Hitchcock knows that he had a great black sense of humour."
Many writers have little rituals, superstitions almost, they have to go through in order to start working. With Hemingway it was sharpening twenty-four pencils every morning. "Oh, I have them too," King admits, "sure I do. And the rituals all serve the same purpose for the writer, which is to put him in the mood to write. It's like hypnotic trances. If you've never been hypnotised I've got to work to hypnotise you, but if I give you certain triggers you can hypnotise yourself. You just have to go through a set ritual. With me, when I get up I want to have a glass of orange juice, and I want to have it somewhere where I can look at the newspaper. But mostly what I'm doing is just looking at the pictures. Then I have to put on the kettle, and it can't be on high heat, it can't be on low heat, it's got to be on medium heat because that way, before the kettle whistles it's going to be twenty-five or thirty minutes, and by that point I'll be into what I'm doing. It's like going up on a ski-lift. You know, you wait until the hook comes along and then it catches you and you start up the slope. I also have to have one aspirin, and I was doing that long before I found out it was good for the heart. I take it because it's got caffeine. It's just a little accelerator to get you up that slope. It used to be nicotine for me. I was a heavy smoker before I finally gave it up. The writing implements I use don't matter too much. I like the word processor because it's fast." Though he feels they have one important downside. "I used to do a draft with a typewriter or by hand, and you know what I'm talking about, this would be a big untidy stack of paper with coffee-rings on it and I'd have stuff scribbled out and I'd have shit written between the lines. Now, with a word processor, the first draft looks like the finished draft. There are no strike-overs, there are no interlinings; it's all nice and neat and it looks great. But I have to remember it still needs to be rewritten. Fact is I'm just as comfortable with a pen and a piece of paper." A surprising number of his books, despite running to 500 pages and more, are written by hand.
"Mind you," he tacks on, "I do have the perennial writer's fear that I'll be found out. You know, that the scales are going to fall from my publisher's eyes one day and they'll say, 'You fraud! We're paying you all this money and the emperor has no clothes on!'" He's joking. Mostly.
"What else frightens me? I've always thought clowns were scary. That's why I put one in It. And I noticed, taking my kids to the circus, that they didn't want anything to do with them. They were terrified, my daughter in particular, because clowns are freakish, they're strange. Circuses are basically safe havens for the freakish and the weird. Those grotesque faces and that unending laughter is the kind of thing you find in a lunatic asylum. Even children understand that's not natural."
In the publicity material accompanying Bag of Bones, King refers to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson personifies the brand of fiction he finds most unsettling. "As far as the ghosts and vampires and so on go, we like that sort of thing because we know they're not true. They're very safe in a way. They're fun. Whereas The Haunting of Hill House is very, very upsetting to read. Jackson's book, and something like James' The Turn of the Screw, are upsetting to us for a couple of reasons. One is because we don't know how much of it is an actual supernatural phenomenon, and if it is a supernatural phenomenon it's still terrifying because those ghosts are not friendly. The other possibility is that we're watching the workings of a mind that's not sane any longer, and that's disturbing too.
"I love Shirley Jackson. She's the best. I'd like to think my fiction could be as affecting. Over the course of the years you get to know when you've written something that seems to work; when you've got that thing out of the ground pretty much intact. I feel like I did that with Bag of Bones. I love the book. Also, I've been doing this job for twenty-five years now, and a lot of people who are reviewing me grew up reading my stuff and I'm getting the benefit of that. You get good critical comments if you've done the job well. But you also get points for still being alive, like Bob Dylan or Pete Townsend."
It's time to go. I leave him pondering his longevity, nod to Joe and make my way out.
I calculate that a couple of hundred more Stephen King books have been sold in the time we were talking.