Part 70 (1/2)

To my delight, I found a videoca.s.sette. 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as head of Lord John Press, wrote and asked if he could do a limited edition of one of my short stories, preferably an unpublished one.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 s.h.i.+ft, 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 s.h.i.+ft. 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 s.h.i.+ts in person - woman-pawing s.e.xists, 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.

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 n.o.body 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 f.u.c.k 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 a.s.set: 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 h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sic 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 circ.u.mstances; 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 a.s.sault 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 grat.i.tude. 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 s.h.i.+ed 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).

Richard bought 'Sorry' the day he read it, and had it in production a week or two later. A month after that, it was telecast . . . as a season premiere, if my recollection serves. It is still one of the fastest turns from in-the-head to on-the-screen that I've ever heard of. This version, by the way, is my first draft, which is a little longer and a little more textured than the final shooting script, which for budgetary reasons specified just two sets. It is included here as an example of another kind of story-telling . . . different, but as valid as any other.

'The Ten O'Clock People' - during the summer of 1992 I was walking around downtown Boston, looking for an address that kept eluding me. I eventually found the place I was looking for, but before I did, I found this story. My address-hunt took place around ten in the morning, and as I walked I began to notice groups of people cl.u.s.tered in front of every expensive high-rise building, groups that made no sociological sense. There were carpenters hobn.o.bbing with businessmen, janitors shooting the breeze with elegantly coiffed women in power clothes, messengers pa.s.sing the time of day with executive secretaries.

After I'd puzzled over these groups - granfalloons Kurt Vonnegut never imagined - for half an hour or so, the penny dropped: for a certain cla.s.s of American city dweller, addiction has turned the coffee-break into the cigarette-break. The expensive buildings are now all no-smoking zones as the American people go calmly about one of the most amazing turnabouts of the twentieth century; we are purging ourselves of our bad old habit, we are doing it with hardly any fanfare, and the result has been some very odd pockets of sociological behavior. Those who refuse to give up their bad old habit - the Ten O'Clock People of the t.i.tle - const.i.tute one of these. The story is intended as no more than a simple amus.e.m.e.nt, but I hope it says something interesting about a wave of change, which has temporarily, at least, re-created some aspects of the separate-but-equal facilities of the forties and fifties.

'The House on Maple Street' - remember Richard Rubinstein, my producer friend? He was the guy who sent me my first copy of Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burd.i.c.k. Richard attached a note in his spiky handwriting: 'You'll like this' was all it said, and all it really needed to say. I did like it.

The book purports to be a series of drawings, t.i.tles, and captions by the eponymous Mr. Burd.i.c.k - the stories themselves are not in evidence. Each combination of picture, t.i.tle, and caption serves as a kind of Rorschach inkblot, perhaps offering more of an index to the reader/viewer's mind than to Mr. Van Allsburg's intentions. One of my favorites shows a man with a chair in his hand - he is obviously prepared to use it as a bludgeon if he needs to - looking at a strange and somehow organic bulge under the living-room carpet. 'Two weeks pa.s.sed and it happened again,' the caption reads.

Given my feelings about motivation, my attraction to this sort of thing should be clear. What happened again after two weeks? I don't think it matters. In our worst nightmares, there are only p.r.o.nouns for the things, which chase us back to wakefulness, sweating and shuddering with horror and relief.

My wife, Tabitha, was also taken with The Mysteries of Harris Burd.i.c.k, and it was she who suggested that each member of our family write a short story based on one of the pictures. She wrote one; so did our youngest son, Owen (then twelve). Tabby chose the first picture in the book; Owen chose one in the middle; I chose the last one. I have included my effort here, with the kind permission of Chris Van Allsburg. There's no more to add, except that I've read a slightly bowdlerized version of the tale to fourth-and fifth-graders several times over the last three or four years, and they seem to like it a great deal. I have an idea that what they really get off on is the idea of sending the Wicked Stepfather off into the Great Beyond. I certainly got off on it. The story has never been published before, mostly because of its tangled antecedents, and I am delighted to offer it here. I only wish I could offer my wife's and son's stories as well.

'The Fifth Quarter' - Bachman again. Or maybe George Stark.