Collection: Night Shift

FOREWORD

Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear.

The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It's night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it's blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it's on, and so let's talk very honestly about fear. Let's talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness . . . and perhaps over the edge.

My name is Stephen King. I am a grown man with a wife and three children. I love them, and I believe that the feeling is reciprocated. My job is writing, and it's a job I like very much. The stories—Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining—have been successful enough to allow me to write full-time, which is an agreeable thing to be able to do. At this point in my life I seem to be reasonably healthy. In the last year I have been able to reduce my cigarette habit from the unfiltered brand I had smoked since I was eighteen to a low nicotine and tar brand, and I still hope to be able to quit completely. My family and I live in a pleasant house beside a relatively unpolluted lake in Maine; last fall I awoke one morning and saw a deer standing on the back lawn by the picnic table. We have a good life.

Still . . . let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness.

At night, when I go to bed I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I'm not a child anymore but . . . I don't like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. Yes, I might scream to wake the dead. That sort of thing doesn't happen, of course, and we all know that. In the stories that follow you will encounter all manner of night creatures; vampires, demon lovers, a thing that lives in the closet, all sorts of other terrors. None of them are real. The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

The Dark Tower

FOREWORD

Most of what writers write about their work is ill-informed bullshit. That is why you have never seen a book entitled One Hundred Great Introductions of Western Civilization or Best-Loved Forewords of the American People. This is a judgment call on my part, of course, but after writing at least fifty introductions and forewords—not to mention an entire book about the craft of fiction—I think it’s one I have a right to make. And I think you can take me seriously when I tell you this might be one of those rare occasions upon which I actually have something worth saying.

A few years ago, I created some furor among my readers by offering a revised and expanded version of my novel The Stand. I was justifiably nervous about that book, because The Stand has always been the novel my readers have loved the best (as far as the most passionate of the “Stand-fans” are concerned, I could have died in 1980 without making the world a noticeably poorer place).

If there is a story that rivals The Stand in the imagination of King readers, it’s probably the tale of Roland Deschain and his search for the Dark Tower. And now—goddamn!—I’ve gone and done the same thing again.

Except I haven’t, not really, and I want you to know it. I also want you to know what I have done, and why. It may not be important to you, but it’s very important to me, and thus this foreword is exempt (I hope) from King’s Bullshit Rule.

First, please be reminded that The Stand sustained deep cuts in manuscript not for editorial reasons but for financial ones. (There were binding limitations, too, but I don’t even want to go there.) What I re-instated in the late eighties were revised sections of pre-existing manuscript. I also revised the work as a whole, mostly to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, which blossomed (if that is the word) between the first issue of The Stand and the publication of the revised version eight or nine years later. The result was a volume about 100,000 words longer than the original.

In the case of The Gunslinger, the original volume was slim, and the added material in this version amounts to a mere thirty-five pages, or about nine thousand words. If you have read The Gunslinger before, you’ll only find two or three totally new scenes here. Dark Tower purists (of which there are a surprising number—just check the Web) will want to read the book again, of course, and most of them are apt to do so with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. I sympathize, but must say I’m less concerned with them than with readers who have never encountered Roland and his ka-tet.II

In spite of its fervent followers, the tale of the Tower is far less known by my readers than is The Stand. Sometimes, when I do readings, I’ll ask those present to raise their hands if they’ve read one or more of my novels. Since they’ve bothered to come at all—sometimes going to the added inconvenience of hiring a baby-sitter and incurring the added expense of gassing up the old sedan—it comes as no surprise that most of them raise their hands. Then I’ll ask them to keep their hands up if they’ve read one or more of the Dark Tower stories. When I do that, at least half the hands in the hall invariably go down. The conclusion is clear enough: although I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing these books in the thirty-three years between 1970 and 2003, comparatively few people have read them. Yet those who have are passionate about them, and I’m fairly passionate myself—enough so, in any case, that I was never able to let Roland creep away into that exile which is the unhappy home of unfulfilled characters (think of Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, or the people who populate Charles Dickens’s unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood).

I think that I’d always assumed (somewhere in the back of my mind, for I cannot ever remember thinking about this consciously) that there would be time to finish, that perhaps God would even send me a singing telegram at the appointed hour: “Deedle-dum, deedle-dower/Get back to work, Stephen,/Finish the Tower.” And in a way, something like that really did happen, although it wasn’t a singing telegram but a close encounter with a Plymouth minivan that got me going again. If the vehicle that struck me that day had been a little bigger, or if the hit had been just a little squarer, it would have been a case of mourners please omit flowers, the King family thanks you for your sympathy. And Roland’s quest would have remained forever unfinished, at least by me.

In any case, in 2001—by which time I’d begun to feel more myself again—I decided the time had come to finish Roland’s story. I pushed everything else aside and set to work on the final three books. As always, I did this not so much for the readers who demanded it as for myself.

Although the revisions of the last two volumes still remain to be done as I write this in the winter of 2003, the books themselves were finished last summer. And, in the hiatus between the editorial work on Volume Five (Wolves of the Calla) and Volume Six (Song of Susannah), I decided the time had come to go back to the beginning and start the final overall revisions. Why? Because these seven volumes were never really separate stories at all, but sections of a single long novel called The Dark Tower, and the beginning was out of sync with the ending.

My approach to revision hasn’t changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this, really? Will anyone care? Do I care myself?

When my first draft of a novel is done, I put it away, warts and all, to mellow. Some period of time later—six months, a year, two years, it doesn’t really matter—I can come back to it with a cooler (but still loving) eye, and begin the task of revising. And although each book of the Tower series was revised as a separate entity, I never really looked at the work as a whole until I’d finished Volume Seven, The Dark Tower.

When I looked back at the first volume, which you now hold in your hands, three obvious truths presented themselves. The first was that The Gunslinger had been written by a very young man, and had all the problems of a very young man’s book. The second was that it contained a great many errors and false starts, particularly in light of the volumes that followed.III The third was that The Gunslinger did not even sound like the later books—it was, frankly, rather difficult to read. All too often I heard myself apologizing for it, and telling people that if they persevered, they would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three.

At one point in The Gunslinger, Roland is described as the sort of man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. I’m that sort of guy myself, and to some extent, that is all that rewriting amounts to: straightening the pictures, vacuuming the floors, scrubbing the toilets. I did a great deal of housework in the course of this revision, and have had a chance to do what any writer wants to do with a work that is finished but still needs a final polish and tune-up: just make it right. Once you know how things come out, you owe it to the potential reader—and to yourself—to go back and put things in order. That is what I have tried to do here, always being careful that no addition or change should give away the secrets hidden in the last three books of the cycle, secrets I have been patiently keeping for as long as thirty years in some cases.

Before I close, I should say a word about the younger man who dared to write this book. That young man had been exposed to far too many writing seminars, and had grown far too used to the ideas those seminars promulgate: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind. As a result, I was not surprised to find a high degree of pretension in Roland’s debut appearance (not to mention what seemed like thousands of unnecessary adverbs). I removed as much of this hollow blather as I could, and do not regret a single cut made in that regard. In other places—invariably those where I’d been seduced into forgetting the writing seminar ideas by some particularly entrancing piece of story—I was able to let the writing almost entirely alone, save for the usual bits of revision any writer needs to do. As I have pointed out in another context, only God gets it right the first time.

In any case, I didn’t want to muzzle or even really change the way this story is told; for all its faults, it has its own special charms, it seems to me. To change it too completely would have been to repudiate the person who first wrote of the gunslinger in the late spring and early summer of 1970, and that I did not want to do.

What I did want to do—and before the final volumes of the series came out, if possible—was to give newcomers to the tale of the Tower (and old readers who want to refresh their memories) a clearer start and a slightly easier entry into Roland’s world. I also wanted them to have a volume that more effectively foreshadowed coming events. I hope I have done that. And if you are one of those who have never visited the strange world through which Roland and his friends move, I hope you will enjoy the marvels you find there. More than anything else, I wanted to tell a tale of wonder. If you find yourself falling under the spell of the Dark Tower, even a little bit, I reckon I will have done my job, which was begun in 1970 and largely finished in 2003. Yet Roland would be the first to point out that such a span of time means very little. In fact, when one quests for the Dark Tower, time is a matter of no concern at all.

—February 6, 2003

The Dark Tower

FOREWORD

Many of the people holding this book have followed the adventures of Roland and his band—his ka-tet—for years, some of them from the very beginning. Others—and I hope there are many, newcomers and Constant Readers alike—may ask, Can I read and enjoy this story if I haven’t read the other Dark Tower books? My answer is yes, if you keep a few things in mind.

First, Mid-World lies next to our world, and there are many overlaps. In some places there are doorways between the two worlds, and sometimes there are thin places, porous places, where the two worlds actually mingle. Three of Roland’s ka-tet—Eddie, Susannah, and Jake—have been drawn separately from troubled lives in New York into Roland’s Mid-World quest. Their fourth traveling companion, a billy-bumbler named Oy, is a golden-eyed creature native to Mid-World. Mid-World is very old, and falling to ruin, filled with monsters and untrustworthy magic.

Second, Roland Deschain of Gilead is a gunslinger—one of a small band that tries to keep order in an increasingly lawless world. If you think of the gunslingers of Gilead as a strange combination of knights errant and territorial marshals in the Old West, you’ll be close to the mark. Most of them, although not all, are descended from the line of the old White King, known as Arthur Eld (I told you there were overlaps).

Third, Roland has lived his life under a terrible curse. He killed his mother, who was having an affair—mostly against her will, and certainly against her better judgment—with a fellow you will meet in these pages. Although it was by mistake, he holds himself accountable, and the unhappy Gabrielle Deschain’s death has haunted him since his young manhood. These events are fully narrated in the Dark Tower cycle, but for our purposes here, I think it’s all you have to know.

For longtime readers, this book should be shelved between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla . . . which makes it, I suppose, Dark Tower 4.5.

As for me, I was delighted to discover my old friends had a little more to say. It was a great gift to find them again, years after I thought their stories were told.

—Stephen King

September 14, 2011

The Dark Tower

AFTERWORD

In the High Speech, Gabrielle Deschain’s final message to her son looks like this:

The two most beautiful words in any language are : I forgive.

The Dark Tower

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The debt I owe to the American Western in the composition of the Dark Tower novels should be clear without my belaboring the point; certainly the Calla did not come by the final part of its (slightly misspelled) name accidentally. Yet it should be pointed out that at least two sources for some of this material aren’t American at all. Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, etc.) was Italian. And Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai) was, of course, Japanese. Would these books have been written without the cinematic legacy of Kurosawa, Leone, Peckinpah, Howard Hawks, and John Sturgis? Probably not without Leone. But without the others, I would argue there could be no Leone.

I also owe a debt of thanks to Robin Furth, who managed to be there with the right bit of information every time I needed it, and of course to my wife, Tabitha, who is still patiently giving me the time and light and space I need to do this job to the best of my abilities.

S.K.

 

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

Before you read this short afterword, I ask that you take a moment (may it do ya fine) to look again at the dedication page at the front of this story. I’ll wait.

Thank you. I want you to know that Frank Muller has read a number of my books for the audio market, beginning with Different Seasons. I met him at Recorded Books in New York at that time and we liked each other immediately. It’s a friendship that has lasted longer than some of my readers have been alive. In the course of our association, Frank recorded the first four Dark Tower novels, and I listened to them—all sixty or so cassettes—while preparing to finish the gunslinger’s story. Audio is the perfect medium for such exhaustive preparation, because audio insists you absorb everything; your hurrying eye (or occasionally tired mind) cannot skip so much as a single word. That was what I wanted, complete immersion in Roland’s world, and that was what Frank gave me. He gave me something more, as well, something wonderful and unexpected. It was a sense of newness and freshness that I had lost somewhere along the way; a sense of Roland and Roland’s friends as actual people, with their own vital inner lives. When I say in the dedication that Frank heard the voices in my head, I am speaking the literal truth as I understand it. And, like a rather more benign version of the Doorway Cave, he brought them fully back to life. The remaining books are finished (this one in final draft, the last two in rough), and in large part I owe that to Frank Muller and his inspired readings.

I had hoped to have Frank on board to do the audio readings of the final three Dark Tower books (unabridged readings; I do not allow abridgments of my work and don’t approve of them, as a rule), and he was eager to do them. We discussed the possibility at a dinner in Bangor during October of 2001, and in the course of the conversation, he called the Tower stories his absolute favorites. As he had read over five hundred novels for the audio market, I was extremely flattered.

Less than a month after that dinner and that optimistic, forward-looking discussion, Frank suffered a terrible motorcycle accident on a highway in California. It happened only days after discovering that he was to become a father for the second time. He was wearing his brain-bucket and that probably saved his life—motorcyclists please take note—but he suffered serious injuries nevertheless, many of them neurological. He won’t be recording the final Dark Tower novels on tape, after all. Frank’s final work will almost certainly be his inspired reading of Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon, which was completed in September of 2001, just before his accident.

Barring a miracle, Frank Muller’s working life is over. His work of rehabilitation, which is almost sure to be lifelong, has only begun. He’ll need a lot of care and a lot of professional help. Such things cost money, and money’s not a thing which, as a rule, freelance artists have a great deal of. I and some friends have formed a foundation to help Frank—and, hopefully, other freelance artists of various types who suffer similar cataclysms. All the income I receive from the audio version of Wolves of the Calla will go into this foundation’s account. It won’t be enough, but the work of funding The Wavedancer Foundation (Wavedancer was the name of Frank’s sailboat), like Frank’s rehabilitative work, is only beginning. If you’ve got a few bucks that aren’t working and want to help insure the future of The Wavedancer Foundation, don’t send them to me; send them to:

The Wavedancer Foundation
c/o Mr. Arthur Greene
101 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10001

Frank’s wife, Erika, says thankya. So do I.

And Frank would, if he could.

Bangor, Maine
December 15, 2002

The Dark Tower

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Sometimes I think I have written more about the Dark Tower books than I have written about the Dark Tower itself. These related writings include the ever-growing synopsis (known by the quaint old word Argument) at the beginning of each of the first five volumes, and afterwords (most totally unnecessary and some actually embarrassing in retrospect) at the end of all the volumes. Michael Whelan, the extraordinary artist who illustrated both the first volume and this last, proved himself to be no slouch as a literary critic as well when, after reading a draft of Volume Seven, he suggested—in refreshingly blunt terms—that the rather lighthearted afterword I’d put at the end was jarring and out of place. I took another look at it and realized he was right.

The first half of that well-meant but off-key essay can now be found as an introduction to the first four volumes of the series; it’s called “On Being Nineteen.” I thought of leaving Volume Seven without any afterword at all; of letting Roland’s discovery at the top of his Tower be my last word on the matter. Then I realized that I had one more thing to say, a thing that actually needed to be said. It has to do with my presence in my own book.

There’s a smarmy academic term for this—“metafiction.” I hate it. I hate the pretentiousness of it. I’m in the story only because I’ve known for some time now (consciously since writing Insomnia in 1995, unconsciously since temporarily losing track of Father Donald Callahan near the end of ’Salem’s Lot) that many of my fictions refer back to Roland’s world and Roland’s story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I was part of the gunslinger’s ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale. I never meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn’t), but only as a way of showing how life influences art (and vice-versa). I think that, if you have read these last three Dark Tower volumes, you’ll see that my talk of retirement makes more sense in this context. In a sense, there’s nothing left to say now that Roland has reached his goal . . . and I hope the reader will see that by discovering the Horn of Eld, the gunslinger may finally be on the way to his own resolution. Possibly even to redemption. It was all about reaching the Tower, you see—mine as well as Roland’s—and that has finally been accomplished. You may not like what Roland found at the top, but that’s a different matter entirely. And don’t write me any angry letters about it, either, because I won’t answer them. There’s nothing left to say on the subject. I wasn’t exactly crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know the truth, but it’s the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I don’t make these things up, not exactly; I only write down what I see.

Readers will speculate on how “real” the Stephen King is who appears in these pages. The answer is “not very,” although the one Roland and Eddie meet in Bridgton (Song of Susannah) is very close to the Stephen King I remember being at that time. As for the Stephen King who shows up in this final volume . . . well, let’s put it this way: my wife asked me if I would kindly not give fans of the series very precise directions to where we live or who we really are. I agreed to do that. Not because I wanted to, exactly—part of what makes this story go, I think, is the sense of the fictional world bursting through into the real one—but because this happens to be my wife’s life as well as mine, and she should not be penalized for either loving me or living with me. So I have fictionalized the geography of western Maine to a great extent, trusting readers to grasp the intent of the fiction and to understand why I treated my own part in it as I did. And if you feel a need to drop in and say hello, please think again. My family and I have a good deal less privacy than we used to, and I have no wish to give up any more, may it do ya fine. My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well. It’s enough. And on behalf of Roland and all his ka-tet—now scattered, say sorry—I thank you for coming along, and sharing this adventure with me. I never worked harder on a project in my life, and I know—none better, alas—that it has not been entirely successful. What work of make-believe ever is? And yet for all of that, I would not give back a single minute of the time that I have lived in Roland’s where and when. Those days in Mid-World and End-World were quite extraordinary. Those were days when my imagination was so clear I could smell the dust and hear the creak of leather.

Stephen King
August 21, 2003

The Dark Tower II

This completes the second of six or seven books which make up a long tale called The Dark Tower. The third, The Waste Lands, details half of the quest of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah to reach the Tower; the fourth, Wizard and Glass, tells of an enchantment and a seduction but mostly of those things which befell Roland before his readers first met him upon the trail of the man in black.

My surprise at the acceptance of the first volume of this work, which is not at all like the stories for which I am best known, is exceeded only by my gratitude to those who have read it and liked it. This work seems to be my own Tower, you know; these people haunt me, Roland most of all. Do I really know what that Tower is, and what awaits Roland there (should he reach it, and you must prepare yourself for the very real possibility that he will not be the one to do so)? Yes . . . and no. All I know is that the tale has called to me again and again over a period of seventeen years. This longer second volume still leaves many questions unanswered and the story’s climax far in the future, but I feel that it is a much more complete volume than the first.

And the Tower is closer.

—Stephen King
December 1st, 1986

The Dark Tower IV

The fourth volume in the tale of the Dark Tower should appear—always assuming the continuation of Constant Writer’s life and Constant Reader’s interest—in the not-too-distant future. It’s hard to be more exact than that; finding the doors to Roland’s world has never been easy for me, and it seems to take more and more whittling to make each successive key fit each successive lock. Nevertheless, if readers request a fourth volume, it will be provided, for I still am able to find Roland’s world when I set my wits to it, and it still holds me in thrall . . . more, in many ways, than any of the other worlds I have wandered in my imagination. And, like those mysterious slo-trans engines, this story seems to be picking up its own accelerating pace and rhythm.

I am well aware that some readers of The Waste Lands will be displeased that it has ended as it has, with so much unresolved. I am not terribly pleased to be leaving Roland and his companions in the not-so-tender care of Blaine the Mono myself, and although you are not obligated to believe me, I must nevertheless insist that I was as surprised by the conclusion to this third volume as some of my readers may be. Yet books which write themselves (as this one did, for the most part) must also be allowed to end themselves, and I can only assure you, Reader, that Roland and his band have come to one of the crucial border-crossings in their story, and we must leave them here for a while at the customs station, answering questions and filling out forms. All of which is simply a metaphorical way of saying that it was over again for a while and my heart was wise enough to stop me from trying to push ahead anyway.

The course of the next volume is still murky, although I can assure you that the business of Blaine the Mono will be resolved, that we will all find out a good deal more about Roland’s life as a young man, and that we will be reacquainted with both the Tick-Tock Man and that puzzling figure Walter, called the Wizard or the Ageless Stranger. It is with this terrible and enigmatic figure that Robert Browning begins his epic poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” writing of him:

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

It is this malicious liar, this dark and powerful magician, who holds the true key to End-World and the Dark Tower . . . for those courageous enough to grasp it.

And for those who are left.

Bangor, Maine
March 5th, 1991

The Dark Tower

AFTERWORD

The scene in which Roland bests his old teacher, Cort, and goes off to roister in the less savory section of Gilead was written in the spring of 1970. The one in which Roland’s father shows up the following morning was written in the summer of 1996. Although only sixteen hours pass between the two occurrences in the world of the story, twenty-six years had passed in the life of the story’s teller. Yet the moment finally came, and I found myself confronting myself across a whore’s bed—the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard on one side, the successful popular novelist (“America’s shlockmeister,” as I am affectionately known by my legions of admiring critics) on the other.

I mention this only because it sums up the essential weirdness of the Dark Tower experience for me. I have written enough novels and short stories to fill a solar system of the imagination, but Roland’s story is my Jupiter—a planet that dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there’s more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from ’Salem’s Lot, who rode out of New England on a Greyhound Bus and wound up dwelling on the border of a terrible Mid-World land called Thunderclap. This seems to be where they all finish up, and why not? Mid-World was here first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland’s bombardier eyes.

This book has been too long in coming—a good many readers who enjoy Roland’s adventures have all but howled in frustration—and for that I apologize. The reason is best summed up by Susannah’s thought as she prepares to tell Blaine the first riddle of their contest: It is hard to begin. There’s nothing in these pages that I agree with more.

I knew that Wizard and Glass meant doubling back to Roland’s young days, and to his first love affair, and I was scared to death of that story. Suspense is relatively easy, at least for me; love is hard. Consequently I dallied, I temporized, I procrastinated, and the book remained unwritten.

I began at last, working in motel rooms on my Macintosh PowerBook, while driving cross-country from Colorado to Maine after finishing my work on the miniseries version of The Shining. It occurred to me as I drove north through the deserted miles of western Nebraska (where I also happened to be, driving back from Colorado, when I got the idea for a story called “Children of the Corn”), that if I didn’t start soon, I would never write the book at all.

But I no longer know the truth of romantic love, I told myself. I know about marriage, and mature love, but forty-eight has a way of forgetting the heat and passion of seventeen.

I will help you with that part, came the reply. I didn’t know who that voice belonged to on that day outside Thetford, Nebraska, but I do now, because I have looked into his eyes across a whore’s bed in a land that exists very clearly in my imagination. Roland’s love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is what was told to me by the boy who began this story. If it’s right, thank him. If it’s wrong, blame whatever got lost in the translation.

Also thank my friend Chuck Verrill, who edited the book and hung with me every step of the way. His encouragement and help were invaluable, as was the encouragement of Elaine Koster, who has published all of these cowboy romances in paperback.

Most thanks of all go to my wife, who supports me in this madness as best she can and helped me on this book in a way she doesn’t even know. Once, in a dark time, she gave me a funny little rubber figure that made me smile. It’s Rocket J. Squirrel, wearing his blue aviator’s hat and with his arms bravely outstretched. I put that figure on my manuscript as it grew (and grew . . . and grew), hoping some of the love that came with it would kind of fertilize the work. It must have worked, at least to a degree; the book is here, after all. I don’t know if it’s good or bad—I lost all sense of perspective around page four hundred—but it’s here. That alone seems like a miracle. And I have started to believe I might actually live to complete this cycle of stories. (Knock on wood.)

There are three more to be told, I think, two set chiefly in Mid-World and one almost entirely in our world—that’s the one dealing with the vacant lot on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, and the rose that grows there. That rose, I must tell you, is in terrible danger.

In the end, Roland’s ka-tet will come to the nightscape which is Thunderclap . . . and to what lies beyond it. All may not live to reach the Tower, but I believe that those who do reach it will stand and be true.

—Stephen King
Lovell, Maine, October 27, 1996

Firestarter

AFTERWORD

While Firestarter is just a novel, a made-up tale with which I hope you, reader, have passed a pleasant evening or two, most of the novel’s components are based on actual happenings, either unpleasant or inexplicable or simply fascinating. Among the unpleasant ones is the undeniable fact that the U.S. government, or agencies thereof, has indeed administered potentially dangerous drugs to unwitting subjects on more than one occasion. Among those which are simply fascinating—if a little ominous—is the fact that both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have programs for isolating the so-called “wild talents” (a term for psionic abilities coined by the science-fiction writer Jack Vance) . . . and perhaps putting them to use. Government-funded experiments in this country have centered on influencing the Kirlian aura and proving the existence of telekinesis. Soviet experiments have centered largely on psychic healing and communication by telepathy. Reports filtering out of the U.S.S.R. suggest that the Soviets have achieved some moderate success with the latter, particularly by using identical twins as communicators.

Two other so-called wild talents that both governments have spent money to investigate are the phenomenon of levitation . . . and that of pyrokinesis. A good many real-life incidents of pyrokinesis have been reported (Charles Fort catalogues several in Lo! and The Book of the Damned); these almost always revolve around an act of spontaneous combustion where almost unimaginable temperatures have been generated. I do not say such a talent—or curse—exists, and I do not indicate that you should believe it does. I am only suggesting that some of the cases are both eerie and thought-provoking, and I most certainly do not mean to impute that the train of events in this book is likely or even possible. If I mean to suggest anything, it is only that the world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

I’d also like to thank Alan Williams, my hardcover editor at Viking; Elaine Koster, my softcover editor at NAL; Russell Dorr, P.A., of Bridgton, Maine, who was kind enough to help me with the book’s medical and pharmaceutical aspect; my wife, Tabitha, who offered her usual helpful criticisms and suggestions; and my daughter, Naomi, who brightens up everything and who helped me to understand—as much as any man can, I guess—what it is to be a young, intelligent girl approaching the age of ten. She’s not Charlie, but she helped me to help Charlie be herself.

—Stephen King
Bangor, Maine

The Green Mile

Foreword: A Letter

October 27, 1995

Dear Constant Reader,

Life is a capricious business. The story which begins in this little book exists in this form because of a chance remark made by a realtor I have never met. This happened a year ago, on Long Island. Ralph Vicinanza, a longtime friend and business associate of mine (what he does mostly is to sell foreign publishing rights for books and stories), had just rented a house there. The realtor remarked that the house “looked like something out of a story by Charles Dickens.”

The remark was still on Ralph’s mind when he welcomed his first houseguest, British publisher Malcolm Edwards. He repeated it to Edwards, and they began chatting about Dickens. Edwards mentioned that Dickens had published many of his novels in installments, either folded into magazines or by themselves as chapbooks (I don’t know the origin of this word, meaning a smaller-than-average book, but have always loved its air of intimacy and friendliness). Some of the novels, Edwards added, were actually written and revised in the shadow of publication; Charles Dickens was one novelist apparently not afraid of a deadline.

Dickens’s serialized novels were immensely popular; so popular, in fact, that one of them precipitated a tragedy in Baltimore. A large group of Dickens fans crowded onto a waterfront dock, anticipating the arrival of an English ship with copies of the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop on board. According to the story, several would-be readers were jostled into the water and drowned.

I don’t think either Malcolm or Ralph wanted anyone drowned, but they were curious as to what would happen if serial publication were tried again today. Neither was immediately aware that it has happened (there really is nothing new under the sun) on at least two occasions. Tom Wolfe published the first draft of his novel Bonfire of the Vanities serially in Rolling Stone magazine, and Michael McDowell (The Amulet, Gilded Needles, The Elementals, and the screenplay Beetlejuice) published a novel called Blackwater in paperback installments. That novel—a horror story about a Southern family with the unpleasant familial trait of turning into alligators—was not McDowell’s best, but enjoyed good success for Avon Books, all the same.

The two men further speculated about what might happen if a writer of popular fiction were to try issuing a novel in chapbook editions today—little paperbacks that might sell for a pound or two in Britain, or perhaps three dollars in America (where most paperbacks now sell for $6.99 or $7.99). Someone like Stephen King might make an interesting go of such an experiment, Malcolm said, and from there the conversation moved on to other topics.

Ralph more or less forgot the idea, but it recurred to him in the fall of 1995, following his return from the Frankfurt Book Fair, a kind of international trade show where every day is a showdown for foreign agents like Ralph. He broached the serialization/chapbook idea to me along with a number of other matters, most of which were automatic turndowns.

The chapbook idea was not an automatic turndown, though; unlike the interview in the Japanese Playboy or the all-expenses-paid tour of the Baltic Republics, it struck a bright spark in my imagination. I don’t think that I am a modern Dickens—if such a person exists, it is probably John Irving or Salman Rushdie—but I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I first encountered in The Saturday Evening Post, and I liked it because the end of each episode made the reader an almost equal participant with the writer—you had a whole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read and experienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they were rationed. You couldn’t gulp, even if you wanted to (and if the story was good, you did).

Best of all, in my house we often read them aloud—my brother, David, one night, myself the next, my mother taking a turn on the third, then back to my brother again. It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza, Route 66) that we watched together; they were a family event. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered Dickens’s novels had been enjoyed by families of his day in much the same fashion, only their fireside agonizings over the fate of Pip and Oliver and David Copperfield went on for years instead of a couple of months (even the longest of the Post serials rarely ran much more than eight installments).

There was one other thing that I liked about the idea, an appeal that I suspect only the writer of suspense tales and spooky stories can fully appreciate: in a story which is published in installments, the writer gains an ascendancy over the reader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy—simply put, Constant Reader, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.

I still remember walking into our living room once when I was twelve or so and seeing my mother in her favorite rocker, peeking at the end of an Agatha Christie paperback while her finger held her actual place around page 50. I was appalled, and told her so (I was twelve, remember, an age at which boys first dimly begin to realize that they know everything), suggesting that reading the end of a mystery novel before you actually get there was on a par with eating the white stuff out of the middle of Oreo cookies and then throwing the cookies themselves away. She laughed her wonderful unembarrassed laugh and said perhaps that was so, but sometimes she just couldn’t resist the temptation. Giving in to temptation was a concept I could understand; I had plenty of my own, even at twelve. But here, at last, is an amusing cure for that temptation. Until the final episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how The Green Mile turns out . . . and that may include me.

Although there was no way he could have known it, Ralph Vicinanza mentioned the idea of a novel in installments at what was, for me, the perfect psychological moment. I had been playing with a story idea on a subject I had always suspected I would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair. “Old Sparky” has fascinated me ever since my first James Cagney movie, and the first Death Row tales I ever read (in a book called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, written by Warden Lewis E. Lawes) fired the darker side of my imagination. What, I wondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric chair, knowing you were going to die there? What, for that matter, would it be like to be the man who had to strap the condemned in . . . or pull the switch? What would such a job take out of you? Even creepier, what might it add?

I had tried these basic ideas, always tentatively, on a number of different frameworks over the last twenty or thirty years. I had written one successful novella set in prison (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption), and had sort of come to the conclusion that that was probably it for me, when this take on the idea came along There were lots of things I liked about it, but nothing more than the narrator’s essentially decent voice; low-key, honest, perhaps a little wide-eyed, he is a Stephen King narrator if ever there was one. So I got to work, but in a tentative, stop-and-start way. Most of the second chapter was written during a rain delay at Fenway Park!

When Ralph called, I had filled a notebook with scribbled pages of The Green Mile, and realized I was building a novel when I should have been spending my time clearing my desk for revisions on a book already written (Desperation—you’ll see it soon, Constant Reader). At the point I had come to on Mile, there are usually just two choices: put it away (probably never to be picked up again) or cast everything else aside and chase.

Ralph suggested a possible third alternative, a story that could be written the same way it would be read—in installments. And I liked the high-wire aspect of it, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better than me, unless it’s my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letters each week, demanding the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followers of Roland; another year or so and your wait will end, I promise). One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT DARK TOWER BOOK AT ONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care—a little—about the creatures of one’s imagination.

In any case, I’ve decided to publish The Green Mile in a series of small paperbacks, in the nineteenth-century manner, and I hope you’ll write and tell me (a) if you liked the story, and (b) if you liked the seldom-used but rather amusing delivery system. It has certainly energized the writing of the story, although at this moment (a rainy evening in October of 1995) it is still far from done, even in rough draft, and the outcome remains in some doubt. That is part of the excitement of the whole thing, though—at this point I’m driving through thick fog with the pedal all the way to the metal.

Most of all, I want to say that if you have even half as much fun reading this as I did writing it, we’ll both be well off. Enjoy . . . and why not read this aloud, with a friend? If nothing else, it will shorten the time until the next installment appears on your newsstand or in your local bookstore.

In the meantime, take care, and be good to one another.

—Stephen King

Dolores Claiborne

Foreword

In the northwestern part of Maine—in the area known as the Lakes District—the small town of Sharbot curves like a crescent around a beautiful body of water called Dark Score Lake. Dark Score is one of the deepest lakes in New England—better than three hundred feet in some places. Some of the locals have been known to claim it is bottomless . . . but usually only after a few beers (in Sharbot, half a dozen is considered a few).

If one were to draw a straight line across a map of the state from northwest to southeast, beginning at the tiny cartographic point which represents Sharbot and continuing through the larger dot that marks the city of Bangor, one would eventually come to the smallest dot of all—a tiny green grain standing off in the Atlantic about sixteen miles from Bar Harbor. This small green grain is Little Tall Island, population 204 in the 1990 census, down from an all-time high of 527 in the census of 1960.

These two tiny communities, exactly one hundred and forty miles apart as the crow flies, bracket the island and coastal aspects of New England’s largest state like a pair of nondescript bookends. They have nothing whatever in common; one would be hard put, in fact, to find a citizen in either who had any knowledge of the other.

Yet in the summer of 1963, the last summer before America—and the whole world—would be changed forever by an assassin’s bullet, Sharbot and Little Tall were linked by a remarkable celestial phenomenon: the last total eclipse visible in northern New England until the year 2016.

Both Sharbot, in far western Maine, and Little Tall Island, the state’s easternmost spot, lay in the path of totality. And although over half the towns along the path of the eclipse were denied a view of the phenomenon by low-hanging clouds on that still, humid day, both Sharbot and Little Tall enjoyed perfect viewing conditions. For residents of Sharbot, the eclipse began at 4:29 P.M., EDT; for residents of Little Tall, it began at 4:34. The period of totality which raced across the state lasted almost exactly three minutes. In Sharbot, total darkness lasted from 5:39 until 5:41; on Little Tall, darkness was total from 5:42 until almost 5:43, a period of fifty-nine seconds, in fact.

As this strange darkness rolled its wave across the state, stars came out and filled the daytime sky; birds went to roost; bats circled aimlessly above chimneys; cows lay down in the fields where they had been cropping and went to sleep. The sun became a blazing fairy-ring in the sky, and as the world within that swatch of unnatural blackness lay suspended and hushed and the crickets began to sing, two people who would never meet sensed each other, turned toward each other as flowers turn to follow the heat of the sun.

One was a girl named Jessie Mahout—she was in Sharbot, at the western end of the state. The other was a mother of three named Dolores St. George—she was on Little Tall Island, at the eastern end of the state.

Both heard owls hoot in the daytime. Both lay in deep valleys of terror, nightmare geographies of which both believed they would never speak. Both felt the darkness was entirely fitting, and thanked God for it.

Jessie Mahout would marry a man named Gerald Burlingame, and her story is told in Gerald’s Game. Dolores St. George would take back her birth name, Dolores Claiborne, and she tells her story in the pages that follow. Both are tales of women in the path of the eclipse, and of how they emerge from the darkness.

Different Seasons

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 side 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 totaled 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 neighbors—Lennon was alive, Nixon was still hanging in there as President, and this kid had yet to see the first gray 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 Forty-sixth 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 entitled ’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 (where a huge, fog-gray tomcat apparently owned 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 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’ll 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 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 directly 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.I

None of them has 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 you: 25,000 to 35,000 words are numbers apt to make even the most stout-hearted writer of fiction shake and shiver in his boots. There is no hard-and-fast definition of what either a novel or a short story is—at least not in terms of word-count—nor should there be. But when a writer approaches the 20,000-word mark, he knows he is edging out of the country of the short story. Likewise, when he passes the 40,000-word mark, he is edging into the country of the novel. The borders of the country between these two more orderly regions are ill-defined, but at some point the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place, an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the “novella” (or, rather too cutesy for my taste, the “novelette”).

Now, artistically speaking, there’s nothing at all wrong with the novella. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with circus freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus. The point is that there are great novellas, but they traditionally only sell to the “genre markets” (that’s the polite term; the impolite but more accurate one is “ghetto markets”). You can sell a good mystery novella to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, a good science fiction novella to Amazing or Analog, maybe even to Omni or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ironically, there are also markets for good horror novellas: the aforementioned F&SF is one; Twilight Zone is another and there are various anthologies of original creepy fiction, such as the Shadows series published by Doubleday and edited by Charles L. Grant.

But for novellas which can, on measure, only be described with the word “mainstream” (a word almost as depressing as “genre”) . . . boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o’ trouble. You look at your 25,000-to-35,000-word manuscript dismally, twist the cap off a beer, and in your head you seem to hear a heavily accented and rather greasy voice saying: “Buenos dias, senor! How was your flight on Revolucion Airways? You like eet preety-good-fine I theenk, si? Welcome to Novella, senor! You going to like heet here preety-good-fine, I theenk! Have a cheap cigar! Have some feelthy peectures! Put your feet up, senor, I theenk your story is going to be here a long, long time . . . que pasa? Ah-ha-hah-hah-hah!”

Depressing.

Once upon a time (he mourned) there really was a market for such tales—there were magical magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and The American Mercury. Fiction—fiction both short and long—was a staple of these and others. And, if the story was too long for a single issue, it was serialized in three parts, or five, or nine. The poisonous idea of “condensing” or “excerpting” novels was as yet unknown (both Playboy and Cosmopolitan have honed this particular obscenity to a noxious science: you can now read an entire novel in twenty minutes!), the tale was given the space it demanded, and I doubt if I’m the only one who can remember waiting for the mailman all day long because the new Post was due and a new short story by Ray Bradbury had been promised, or perhaps because the final episode of the latest Clarence Buddington Kelland serial was due.

(My anxiety made me a particularly easy mark. When the postman finally did show up, walking briskly with his leather bag over his shoulder, dressed in his summer-issue shorts and wearing his summer-issue sun helmet, I’d meet him at the end of the walk, dancing from one foot to the other as if I badly needed to go to the bathroom; my heart in my throat. Grinning rather cruelly, he’d hand me an electric bill. Nothing but that. Heart plummets into my shoes. Finally he relents and gives me the Post after all: grinning Eisenhower on the cover, painted by Norman Rockwell: an article on Sophia Loren by Pete Martin; “I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy” by Pat Nixon, concerning—yeah, you guessed it—her husband, Richard; and, of course, stories. Long ones, short ones, and the last chapter of the Kelland serial. Praise God!)

And this didn’t happen just once in a while; this happened every fucking week! The day that the Post came, I guess I was the happiest kid on the whole eastern seaboard.

There are still magazines that publish long fiction—Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker are two which have been particularly sympathetic to the publication problems of a writer who has delivered (we won’t say “gotten”; that’s too close to “misbegotten”) a 30,000-word novella. But neither of these magazines has been particularly receptive to my stuff, which is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit it) downright clumsy.

To some degree or other, I would guess that those very qualities—unadmirable though they may be—have been responsible for the success of my novels. Most of them have been plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s. I am able to recognize elegant prose and to respond to it, but have found it difficult or impossible to write it myself (most of my idols as a maturing writer were muscular novelists with prose styles which ranged from the horrible to the nonexistent: cats like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris). Subtract elegance from the novelist’s craft and one finds himself left with only one strong leg to stand on, and that leg is good weight. As a result, I’ve tried as hard as I can, always, to give good weight. Put another way, if you find out you can’t run like a thoroughbred, you can still pull your brains out (a voice rises from the balcony: “What brains, King?” Ha-ha, very funny, fella, you can leave now).

The result of all this is that, when it came to the novellas you’ve just read, I found myself in a puzzling position. I had gotten to a place with my novels where people were saying King could publish his laundry list if he wanted to (and there are critics who claim that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last eight years or so), but I couldn’t publish these tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long. If you see what I mean.

“Si, senor, I see! Take off your shoes! Have some cheap rum! Soon thee Medicore Revolucion Steel Band iss gonna come along and play some bad calypso! You like eet preety-good-fine, I theenk! And you got time, senor! You got time because I theenk your story ees gonna—”

—be here a long time, yeah, yeah, great, why don’t you go somewhere and overthrow a puppet imperialist democracy?

So I finally decided to see if Viking, my hardcover publisher, and New American Library, my paperback publisher, would want to do a book with stories in it about an off-beat prison-break, an old man and a young boy locked up in a gruesome relationship based on mutual parasitism, a quartet of country boys on a journey of discovery, and an off-the-wall horror story about a young woman determined to give birth to her child no matter what (or maybe the story is actually about that odd club that isn’t a club). The publishers said okay. And that is how I managed to break these four long stories out of the banana republic of the novella.

I hope you like them preety-good-fine, muchachos and muchachas.

Oh, one other thing about type-casting before I call it a day.

Was talking to my editor—not Bill Thompson, this is my new editor, a real nice guy named Alan Williams, smart, witty, able, but usually on jury duty somewhere deep in the bowels of New Jersey—about a year ago.

“Loved Cujo,” Alan says (the editorial work on that novel, a real shaggy-dog story, had just been completed). “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”

Deja vu sets in. I have had this conversation before.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “I have given it some thought—”

“Lay it on me.”

“What would you think about a book of four novellas? Most or all of them just sort of ordinary stories? What would you think about that?”

“Novellas,” Alan says. He is being a good sport, but his voice says some of the joy may have just gone out of his day; his voice says he feels he has just won two tickets to some dubious little banana republic on Revolucion Airways. “Long stories, you mean.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I say. “And we’ll call the book something like Different Seasons, just so people will get the idea that it’s not about vampires or haunted hotels or anything like that.”

“Is the next one going to be about vampires?” Alan asks hopefully.

“No, I don’t think so. What do you think, Alan?”

“A haunted hotel, maybe?”

“No, I did that one already. Different Seasons, Alan. It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“It’s got a great ring, Steve,” Alan says, and sighs. It is the sigh of a good sport who has just taken his seat in third class on Revolucion Airways’ newest plane—a Lockheed Tristar—and has seen the first cockroach trundling busily over the top of the seat ahead of him.

“I hoped you’d like it,” I say.

“I don’t suppose,” Alan says, “we could have a horror story in it? Just one? A sort of . . . similar season?”

I smile a little—just a little—thinking of Sandra Stansfield and Dr. McCarron’s Breathing Method. “I can probably whomp something up.”

“Great! And about that new novel—”

“How about a haunted car?” I say.

“My man!” Alan cries. I have the feeling that I’m sending him back to his editorial meeting—or possibly to jury duty in East Rahway—a happy man. I’m happy, too—I love my haunted car, and I think it’s going to make a lot of people nervous about crossing busy streets after dark,

But I’ve been in love with each of these stories, too, and part of me always will be in love with them, I guess. I hope that you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do—make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you’ve never been. It’s the most amiable sort of magic I know.

Okay. Gotta split. Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.

Love and good wishes,

STEPHEN KING
January 4th, 1982
Bangor, Maine

Full Dark, No Stars

AFTERWORD

The stories in this book are harsh. You may have found them hard to read in places. If so, be assured that I found them equally hard to write in places. When people ask me about my work, I have developed a habit of skirting the subject with jokes and humorous personal anecdotes (which you can’t quite trust; never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself). It’s a form of deflection, and a little more diplomatic than the way my Yankee forebears might have answered such questions: It’s none of your business, chummy. But beneath the jokes, I take what I do very seriously, and have since I wrote my first novel, The Long Walk, at the age of eighteen.

I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at all with those who see the art of story-fiction as essentially worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, and the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the question, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—there’s a reason.

From the start—even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing The Long Walk in his college dormitory room—I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face. I have no quarrel with literary fiction, which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers. Making them think as they read is not my deal. I put that in italics, because if the tale is good enough and the characters vivid enough, thinking will supplant emotion when the tale has been told and the book set aside (sometimes with relief). I can remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 at the age of thirteen or so with growing dismay, anger, and outrage, charging through the pages and gobbling up the story as fast as I could, and what’s wrong with that? Especially since I continue to think about it to this day when some politician (I’m thinking of Sarah Palin and her scurrilous “death-panel” remarks) has some success in convincing the public that white is really black, or vice-versa.

Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place—like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922”—then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all? The great naturalist writer Frank Norris has always been one of my literary idols, and I’ve kept what he said on this subject in mind for over forty years: “I never truckled; I never took off my hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth.”

But Steve, you say, you’ve made a great many pennies during your career, and as for truth . . . that’s variable, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve made a good amount of money writing my stories, but the money was a side effect, never the goal. Writing fiction for money is a mug’s game. And sure, truth is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to fiction, the writer’s only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart. It won’t always be the reader’s truth, or the critic’s truth, but as long as it’s the writer’s truth—as long as he or she doesn’t truckle, or hold out his or her hat to Fashion—all is well. For writers who knowingly lie, for those who substitute unbelievable human behavior for the way people really act, I have nothing but contempt. Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do—to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

I have tried my best in Full Dark, No Stars to record what people might do, and how they might behave, under certain dire circumstances. The people in these stories are not without hope, but they acknowledge that even our fondest hopes (and our fondest wishes for our fellowmen and the society in which we live) may sometimes be vain. Often, even. But I think they also say that nobility most fully resides not in success but in trying to do the right thing . . . and that when we fail to do that, or willfully turn away from the challenge, hell follows.

“1922” was inspired by a nonfiction book called Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), written by Michael Lesy and featuring photographs taken in the small city of Black River Falls, Wisconsin. I was impressed by the rural isolation of these photographs, and the harshness and deprivation in the faces of many of the subjects. I wanted to get that feeling in my story.

In 2007, while traveling on Interstate 84 to an autographing in western Massachusetts, I stopped at a rest area for a typical Steve King Health Meal: a soda and a candybar. When I came out of the refreshment shack, I saw a woman with a flat tire talking earnestly to a long-haul trucker parked in the next slot. He smiled at her and got out of his rig.

“Need any help?” I asked.

“No, no, I got this,” the trucker said.

The lady got her tire changed, I’m sure. I got a Three Musketeers and the story idea that eventually became “Big Driver.”

In Bangor, where I live, a thoroughfare called the Hammond Street Extension skirts the airport. I walk three or four miles a day, and if I’m in town, I often go out that way. There’s a gravel patch beside the airport fence about halfway along the Extension, and there any number of roadside vendors have set up shop over the years. My favorite is known locally as Golf Ball Guy, and he always appears in the spring. Golf Ball Guy goes up to the Bangor Municipal Golf Course when the weather turns warm, and scavenges up hundreds of used golf balls that have been abandoned under the snow. He throws away the really bad ones and sells the rest at the little spot out on the Extension (the windshield of his car is lined with golf balls—a nice touch). One day when I spied him, the idea for “Fair Extension” came into my mind. Of course I set it in Derry, home of the late and unlamented clown Pennywise, because Derry is just Bangor masquerading under a different name.

The last story in this book came to my mind after reading an article about Dennis Rader, the infamous BTK (bind, torture, and kill) murderer who took the lives of ten people—mostly women, but two of his victims were children—over a period of roughly sixteen years. In many cases, he mailed pieces of his victims’ identification to the police. Paula Rader was married to this monster for thirty-four years, and many in the Wichita area, where Rader claimed his victims, refuse to believe that she could live with him and not know what he was doing. I did believe—I do believe—and I wrote this story to explore what might happen in such a case if the wife suddenly found out about her husband’s awful hobby. I also wrote it to explore the idea that it’s impossible to fully know anyone, even those we love the most.

All right, I think we’ve been down here in the dark long enough. There’s a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I’ll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I’m happy to go there, because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am.

It’s you I’m not entirely sure of.

Bangor, Maine
December 23, 2009

'Salem's Lot

Afterword

I first read Dracula when I was nine or ten—around 1957, this would have been. I can’t remember why I wanted to read it, something some kid at school had said, or perhaps some vampire movie on John Zacherley’s Shock Theater, but I did, and my mother brought it home from the Stratford Public Library and passed it over without comment. My brother, David, and I were both precocious readers, and our mother encouraged us greatly by forbidding us only a little. Quite often she would hand us a book one of us had requested, adding “That’s trash” in a tone which suggested she knew that the news wouldn’t stop us; might, on the contrary, actually encourage us. Besides, she knew that trash has its place.

To Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, The Blackboard Jungle was trash; The Bat, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, was trash; The Amboy Dukes, by Irving Shulman, was serious trash. None of these books were forbidden to us, however. A very few others were. These our mother described as “bad trash,” and Dracula wasn’t one of them. The only three in that category I can remember for sure were Peyton Place, Kings Row, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I had read all of these by the age of thirteen and enjoyed them all...but none of them could match Bram Stoker’s novel of old horrors colliding with modern technology and investigative techniques. That one was in a class by itself.

I remember that Stratford Library book clearly and with great affection. It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader’s spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us; how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

“You might not like it,” my mother said. “It looks like nothing but letters to me.”

Dracula was my first encounter with the epistolary novel as well as one of my earlier forays into adult fiction, and turned out to be comprised not just of letters but of diary entries, newspaper cuttings, and Dr Seward’s exotic “phonograph diary,” kept on wax cylinders. And after the original strangeness of reading such a patchwork wore off, I loved the form. There was a kind of justified snoopiness to it which exerted tremendous appeal. I loved the story, too. There were plenty of frightening sections—Jonathan Harker’s growing realization that he has been imprisoned in the Count’s castle, the bloody staking of Lucy Westenra in her tomb, the burning of Mina Murray Harker’s forehead with the holy wafer—but what I responded to most strongly (I was only nine or ten, remember) was the intrepid band of adventurers which takes off in blind, brave pursuit of Count Dracula, hounding him first out of England, then back to Europe, and finally to his native Transylvania, where the issue is resolved at sunset. When I discovered J. R. R. Tolkien’s Rings trilogy ten years later, I thought, “Shit, this is just a slightly sunnier version of Stoker’s Dracula, with Frodo playing Jonathan Harker, Gandalf playing Abraham Van Helsing, and Sauron playing the Count himself.” I think Dracula was the first fully satisfying adult novel I ever read, and I suppose it is no surprise that it marked me so early and so indelibly.

A year or two later (by this time my mother and my brother and I had left Connecticut and moved back to our native Maine), I discovered a cache of comic books (with torn-off covers) for sale in a local notions store called The Kennebec Fruit Company. These could be had for a nickel apiece. Some were Classics Illustrated (bad), some were Donald Ducks (good), and a great many were E.C. titles such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror (best of all). In these comics I discovered a new breed of vampire, both cruder than Stoker’s Count and more physically monstrous. These were pale, paranoid nightmares with gigantic fangs and fleshy red lips. They did not sip delicately, as Count Dracula sipped at the ever-more-wasted veins of Lucy Westenra; the E.C. vampires created by Al Feldstein and brought most gruesomely to life by the pen of Graham “Ghastly” Ingels were prone to tearing and ripping and shredding. In one story, vampires running a restaurant actually installed spigots in the necks of their dying victims, suspending them upside down and drinking splurting red streams of hot plasma like kids quaffing from the backyard hose. And the victims didn’t just moan or sigh, like Lucy in her maiden’s bed; they were more apt to scream in long strings of repeated E’s and Y’s and G’s, making sounds—“Eeeeeeeahh!” “Arrgggggh!” “Eyyyyyyyggghh!”—that looked like terrible phlegmy expectorations. These vampires did not just scare me; they fucking terrified me, chasing me through my dreams with their lips peeled back to show their monstrous cannibal teeth.

My mother didn’t approve of the E.C.’s, but neither did she take them away; they were trash, and she often said so, but they were apparently not bad trash. Eventually I gave them up on my own (as she probably knew I would, and all the quicker if I wasn’t nagged about it), but those vampires remained with me all the same, as vivid and as vital in their own way as Stoker’s Count. Perhaps even more vivid and vital because, unlike Count Dracula, they were American vampires. Some of them drove cars...went out on dates...and there were the ones that owned the vampire restaurant (where, I remember, one of the specials was French Fried Scabs). Why, if owning a goddam beanery wasn’t good old American free enterprise, what was?

I reencountered Dracula in 1971, when I was teaching a high school English class called Fantasy and Science Fiction. I came back to it with some trepidation, knowing that a book read—not just read but studied and taught, even at the high school level—at twenty-four looks a lot different than one read at the age of nine or ten. Usually smaller. But the great ones only get bigger and cast longer shadows. Dracula, although created by a man who never wrote much else of lasting worth in his life (a few short stories, such as “The Judge’s House,” still bear scrutiny), is one of the great ones. My students enjoyed it, and I’d say I enjoyed it even more than they did.

One night, the second time through the adventures of the sanguinary Count (I only taught high school for two years), I wondered out loud to my wife what might have happened if Drac had appeared not in turn-of-the-century London but in the America of the 1970s. “Probably he’d land in New York and be killed by a taxicab, like Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta,” I added, laughing.

My wife, who has been responsible for all of my greatest successes, did not join my laughter. “What if he came here, to Maine?” she asked. “What if he came to the country? After all, isn’t that where his castle was? In the Transylvanian countryside?”

That was really all it took. My mind lit up with possibilities, some hilarious, some horrible. I saw how such a man—such a thing—could operate with lethal ease in a small town; the locals would be very similar to the peasants he had known and ruled back home, and with the help of a couple of greedy Kiwanis types like real estate agent Larry Crockett, he would soon become what he had always been: the boyar, the master.

I saw more, as well: how Stoker’s aristocratic vampire might be combined with the fleshy leeches of the E.C. comics, creating a pop-cult hybrid that was part nobility and part bloodthirsty dope, like the zombies in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And, in the post-Vietnam America I inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts), I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me, where the rich got richer and the poor got welfare...if they were lucky.

I also wanted to tell a tale that inverted Dracula. In Stoker’s novel, the optimism of Victorian England shines through everything like the newly invented electric light. Ancient evil comes to the city and is sent scatting (not without some struggle, it is true) by thoroughly modern vampire-hunters who use blood transfusions and stenography and typewriting machines. My novel could look through the other end of the telescope, at a world where electric lights and modern inventions would actually aid the incubus, by rendering belief in him all but impossible. Even Father Callahan, the man of God, cannot really believe in Mr. Barlow—no, not even when the evidence appears before his very eyes—and so Callahan is sent hence, into the land of Nod which lies to the east of Eden (in ’Salem’s Lot, Detroit serves as a stand-in for Nod). I thought that, in my story, the vampires would probably win, and good luck to them. Drive those cars, boys. Run that restaurant. WELCOME TO JERUSALEM’S LOT, BLOOD SAUSAGE OUR SPECIALTY.

The story didn’t quite turn out that way—as you will see for yourself—because some of my human characters turned out to be stronger than I had expected. It took a certain amount of courage to allow them to grow toward each other as they wanted to do, but I found that courage. If I ever won a single battle as a novelist, that was probably it. Writers have found it so much easier to imagine doom in the years since World War II (and especially in the years since Vietnam), easier to imagine characters who grow smaller as a result of their trials rather than bigger. Ben Mears, I discovered, wanted to be big. Wanted, in fact, to be a hero. I let him be what he wanted to be. I have never been sorry.

’Salem’s Lot was originally published by Doubleday in 1975. It is dated in many ways (I have always been more a writer of the moment than I wanted to be), but I still like it well enough to number it among my favorites. I like the picture it draws of a small New England town; I like its sense of deepening menace; I like its strong, intended echoes of Dracula and of the EC comics where the vampires ripped and snarked and tore instead of sipping delicately like wine-snobs at a vicarage tasting party. Most of all I like the moment where it takes off like a big-ass bird into a world where all the rules have become moot and anything is possible. Carrie, the book which came before it, seems almost fey by comparison. There is more confidence here, more willingness to be funny (“The world is falling down around our ears and you’re sticking at a few vampires,” one of the characters says), more pushing of the envelope. In a way, this book was my coming-out party.

The woman who brought me Dracula from the Stratford Public Library never saw ’Salem’s Lot. By the time the first draft was completed, she was too ill to read much—she who read with such enjoyment over the course of her life—and by the time it was published, she was dead. If she had read it, I like to think she would have finished the last hundred pages in one of her marathon chain-smoking readathons, then laughed, put it aside (not without some affection), and pronounced it trash.

But maybe not bad trash.

Longboat Key, Florida
February 24, 1999

 

Author’s Note

No one writes a long novel alone, and I would like to take a moment of your time to thank some of the people who helped with this one: G. Everett McCutcheon, of Hampden Academy, for his practical suggestions and encouragement; Dr John Pearson, of Old Town, Maine, medical examiner of Penobscot County and member in good standing of that most excellent medical specialty, general practice; Father Renald Hallee, of St John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine. And of course my wife, whose criticism is as tough and unflinching as ever.

Although the towns surrounding ’salem’s Lot are very real, ’salem’s Lot itself exists wholly in the author’s imagination, and any resemblance between the people who live there and people who live in the real world is coincidental and unintended.

S.K.

11-22-63

AFTERWORD

Almost half a century has passed since John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, but two questions linger: Was Lee Oswald really the trigger-man, and if so, did he act alone? Nothing I’ve written in 11/22/63 will provide answers to those questions, because time-travel is just an interesting make-believe. But if you, like me, are curious about why those questions still remain, I think I can give you a satisfactory two-word response: Karen Carlin. Not just a footnote to history, but a footnote to a footnote. And yet . . .

Jack Ruby owned a Dallas strip joint called the Carousel Club. Carlin, whose nom du burlesque was Little Lynn, danced there. On the night following the assassination, Ruby received a call from Miss Carlin, who was twenty-five dollars short on the December rent and desperately needed a loan to keep from being turned out into the street. Would he help?

Jack Ruby, who had other things on his mind, gave her the rough side of his tongue (in truth, it was the only side Dallas’s Sparky Jack seemed to have). He was appalled that the president he revered had been killed in his home city, and he spoke repeatedly to friends and relatives about how terrible this was for Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Ruby was heartsick at the thought of Jackie having to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial. The widow would become a national spectacle, he said. Her grief would be used to sell tabloids.

Unless, of course, Lee Oswald came down with a bad case of the deads.

Everybody at the Dallas Police Department had at least a nodding acquaintance with Jack. He and his “wife”—that was what he called his little dachshund, Sheba—were frequent visitors at DPD. He handed out free passes to his clubs, and when cops showed up there, he bought them free drinks. So no one took any particular notice of him when he turned up at the station on Saturday, November twenty-third. When Oswald was paraded before the press, proclaiming his innocence and displaying a black eye, Ruby was there. He had a gun (yes, another .38, this one a Colt Cobra), and he fully intended to shoot Oswald with it. But the room was crowded; Ruby was shunted to the back; then Oswald was gone.

So Jack Ruby gave up.

Late Sunday morning, he went to the Western Union office a block or so from the DPD and sent “Little Lynn” a money order for twenty-five dollars. Then he wandered down to the cop-shop. He assumed that Oswald had already been transferred to the Dallas County Jail, and was surprised to see a crowd gathered in front of the police station. There were reporters, news vans, and your ordinary gawkers. The transfer hadn’t occurred on schedule.

Ruby had his gun, and Ruby wormed his way into the police garage. No problem there. Some of the cops even said hi, and Ruby hi’d them right back. Oswald was still upstairs. At the last moment he had asked his jailers if he could put on a sweater, because his shirt had a hole in it. The detour to get the sweater took less than three minutes, but that was just enough—life turns on a dime. Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen. As a pig-pile of cops landed on top of Sparky Jack, he managed to yell: “Hey, guys, I’m Jack Ruby! You all know me!”

The assassin died at Parkland Hospital shortly thereafter, without making a statement. Thanks to a stripper who needed twenty-five bucks and a half-assed showboat who wanted to put on a sweater, Oswald was never tried for his crime, and never had a real chance to confess. His final statement on his part in the events of 11/22/63 was “I’m a patsy.” The resulting arguments over whether or not he was telling the truth have never stopped.

Early in the novel, Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald was the lone gunman at ninety-five percent. After reading a stack of books and articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine. Because all of the accounts, including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky. Were the odds of it happening just the way it did long? Yes. So are the odds on winning the lottery, but someone wins one every day.

Probably the most useful source-materials I read in preparation for writing this novel were Case Closed, by Gerald Posner; Legend, by Edward Jay Epstein (nutty Robert Ludlum stuff, but fun); Oswald’s Tale, by Norman Mailer; and Mrs. Paine’s Garage, by Thomas Mallon. The latter offers a brilliant analysis of the conspiracy theorists and their need to find order in what was almost a random event. The Mailer is also remarkable. He says that he went into the project (which includes extensive interviews with Russians who knew Lee and Marina in Minsk) believing that Oswald was the victim of a conspiracy, but in the end came to believe—reluctantly—that the stodgy ole Warren Commission was right: Oswald acted alone.

It is very, very difficult for a reasonable person to believe otherwise. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

I was also deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken—by my rereading of William Manchester’s Death of a President. He’s dead wrong about some things, he’s given to flights of purple prose (calling Marina Oswald “lynx-eyed,” for instance), his analysis of Oswald’s motives is both superficial and hostile, but this massive work, published only four years after that terrible lunch hour in Dallas, is closest in time to the assassination, written when most of the participants were still alive and their recollections were still vivid. Armed with Jacqueline Kennedy’s conditional approval of the project, everyone talked to Manchester, and although his account of the aftermath is turgid, his narrative of 11/22’s events is chilling and vivid, a Zapruder film in words.

Well . . . almost everyone talked to him. Marina Oswald did not, and Manchester’s consequent harsh treatment of her may have something to do with that. Marina (still alive at this writing) had her eye on the main chance in the aftermath of her husband’s cowardly act, and who could blame her? Those who want to read her full recollections can find them in Marina and Lee, by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I trust very little of what she says (unless corroborated by other sources), but I salute—with some reluctance, it’s true—her survival skills.

I originally tried to write this book way back in 1972. I dropped the project because the research it would involve seemed far too daunting for a man who was teaching full-time. There was another reason: even nine years after the deed, the wound was still too fresh. I’m glad I waited. When I finally decided to go ahead, it was natural for me to turn to my old friend Russ Dorr for help with the research. He provided a splendid support system for another long book, Under the Dome, and once more rose to the occasion. I am writing this afterword surrounded by heaps of research materials, the most valuable of which are the videos Russ shot during our exhaustive (and exhausting) travels in Dallas, and the foot-high stack of emails that came in response to my questions about everything from the 1958 World Series to mid-century bugging devices. It was Russ who located the home of Edwin Walker, which just happened to be on the 11/22 motorcade route (the past harmonizes), and it was Russ who—after much searching of various Dallas records—found the probable 1963 address of that most peculiar man, George de Mohrenschildt. And by the way, just where was Mr. de Mohrenschildt on the night of April 10, 1963? Probably not at the Carousel Club, but if he had an alibi for the attempted assassination of the general, I wasn’t able to find it.

I hate to bore you with my Academy Awards speech—I get very annoyed with writers who do that—but I need to tip my cap to some other people, all the same. Big Number One is Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. He answered billions of questions, sometimes twice or three times before I got the info crammed into my dumb head. The tour of the Texas School Book Depository was a grim necessity that he lightened with his considerable wit and encyclopedic knowledge.

Thanks are also due to Nicola Longford, the Executive Director of The Sixth Floor Museum, and Megan Bryant, Director of Collections and Intellectual Property. Brian Collins and Rachel Howell work in the History Department of the Dallas Public Library and gave me access to old films (some of them pretty hilarious) that show how the city looked in the years 1960–63. Susan Richards, a researcher at the Dallas Historical Society, also pitched in, as did Amy Brumfield, David Reynolds, and the staff of the Adolphus Hotel. Longtime Dallas resident Martin Nobles drove Russ and me around Dallas. He took us to the now-closed but still standing Texas Theatre, where Oswald was captured, to the former residence of Edwin Walker, to Greenville Avenue (not as gruesome as Fort Worth’s bar-and-whore district once was), and to Mercedes Street, where 2703 no longer exists. It did indeed blow away in a tornado . . . although not in 1963. And a tip of the cap to Mike “Silent Mike” McEachern, who donated his name for charitable purposes.

I want to thank Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, former Kennedy aide-de-camp Dick Goodwin, for indulging my questions about worst-case scenarios, had Kennedy lived. George Wallace as the thirty-seventh president was their idea . . . but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. My son, the novelist Joe Hill, pointed out several consequences of time-travel I hadn’t considered. He also thought up a new and better ending. Joe, you rock.

And I want to thank my wife, my first reader of choice and hardest, fairest critic. An ardent Kennedy supporter, she saw him in person not long before his death, and has never forgotten it. A contrarian her whole life, Tabitha is (it does not surprise me and should not surprise you) on the side of the conspiracy theorists.

Have I gotten things wrong here? You bet. Have I changed things to suit the course of my story? Sure. As one example, it’s true that Lee and Marina went to a welcome party thrown by George Bouhe and attended by most of the area’s Russian emigres, and it’s true that Lee hated and resented those middle-class burghers who had turned their back on Mother Russia, but the party happened three weeks later than it does in my book. And while it’s true that Lee, Marina, and baby June lived upstairs at 214 West Neely Street, I have no idea who—if anybody—lived in the downstairs apartment. But that was the one I toured (paying twenty bucks for the privilege), and it seemed a shame not to use the layout of the place. And what a desperate little place it was.

Mostly, however, I stuck to the truth.

Some people will protest that I have been excessively hard on the city of Dallas. I beg to differ. If anything, Jake Epping’s first-person narrative allowed me to be too easy on it, at least as it was in 1963. On the day Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place. Confederate flags flew rightside up; American flags flew upside down. Some airport spectators held up signs reading HELP JFK STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY. Not long before that day in November, both Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson were subjected to spit-showers by Dallas voters. Those spitting on Mrs. Johnson were middle-class housewives.

It’s better today, but one still sees signs on Main Street saying HANDGUNS NOT ALLOWED IN THE BAR. This is an afterword, not an editorial, but I hold strong opinions on this subject, particularly given the current political climate of my country. If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.

Before I finish, I want to thank one other person: the late Jack Finney, who was one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers. Besides The Body Snatchers, he wrote Time and Again, which is, in this writer’s humble opinion, the great time-travel story. Originally I meant to dedicate this book to him, but in June of last year, a lovely little granddaughter arrived in our family, so Zelda gets the nod.

Jack, I’m sure you’d understand.

Stephen King
Bangor, Maine

The Colorado Kid

Afterword

Depending on whether you liked or hated The Colorado Kid (I think for many people there’ll be no middle ground on this one, and that’s fine with me), you have my friend Scott to thank or blame. He brought me the news clipping that got it going.

Every writer of fiction has had somebody bring him or her a clipping from time to time, sure that the subject will make a wonderful story. “You’ll only have to change it around a little,” the clipping-bearer says with an optimistic smile. I don’t know how this works with other writers, but it had never worked with me, and when Scott handed me an envelope with a cutting from a Maine newspaper inside, I expected more of the same. But my mother raised no ingrates, so I thanked him, took it home, and tossed it on my desk. A day or two later I tore the envelope open, read the feature story inside, and was immediately galvanized.

I have lost the clipping since, and for once Google, that twenty-first century idiot savant, has been of no help, so all I can do is summarize from memory, a notoriously unreliable reference source. Yet in this case that hardly matters, since the feature story was only the spark that lit the little fire that burns through these pages, and not the fire itself.

What caught my eye immediately upon unfolding the clipping was a drawing of a bright red purse. The story was of the young woman who had owned it. She was seen one day walking the main street of a small island community off the coast of Maine with that red purse over her arm. The next day she was found dead on one of the island beaches, sans purse or identification of any kind. Even the cause of her death was a mystery, and although it was eventually put down to drowning, with alcohol perhaps a contributing factor, that diagnosis remains tentative to this day.

The young woman was eventually identified, but not until her remains had spent a long, lonely time in a mainland crypt. And I was left again with a smack of that mystery the Maine islands like Cranberry and Monhegan have always held for me—their contrasting yet oddly complimentary atmospheres of community and solitariness. There are few places in America where the line between the little world Inside and all the great world Outside is so firmly and deeply drawn. Islanders are full of warmth for those who belong, but they keep their secrets well from those who do not. And—as Agatha Christie shows so memorably in Ten Little Indians—there is no locked room so grand as an island, even one where the mainland looks just a long step away on a clear summer afternoon; no place so perfectly made for a mystery.

Mystery is my subject here, and I am aware that many readers will feel cheated, even angry, by my failure to provide a solution to the one posed. Is it because I had no solution to give? The answer is no. Should I have set my wits to work (as Richard Adams puts it in his forenote to Shardik), I could likely have provided half a dozen, three good, two a-country fair, and one fine as paint. I suspect many of you who have read the case know what some or all of them are. But in this one case—this very hard case, if I may be allowed a small pun on the imprint under whose cover the tale lies—I’m really not interested in the solution but in the mystery. Because it was the mystery that kept bringing me back to the story, day after day.

Did I care about those two old geezers, gnawing ceaselessly away at the case in their spare time even as the years went by and they grew ever more geezerly? Yes, I did. Did I care about Stephanie, who’s clearly undergoing a kind of test, and being judged by kind but hard judges? Yes—I wanted her to pass. Was I happy with each little discovery, each small ray of light shed? Of course. But mostly what drew me on was the thought of the Colorado Kid, propped there against that trash barrel and looking out at the ocean, an anomaly that stretched even the most flexible credulity to the absolute snapping point. Maybe even a little beyond. In the end, I didn’t care how he got there; like a nightingale glimpsed in the desert, it just took my breath away that he was.

And, of course, I wanted to see how my characters coped with the fact of him. It turned out they did quite well. I was proud of them. Now I will wait for my mail, both e- and of the snail variety, and see how you guys do with him.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but before I leave you, I ask you to consider the fact that we live in a web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being reality. Where do we come from? Where were we before we were here? Don’t know. Where are we going? Don’t know. A lot of churches have what they assure us are the answers, but most of us have a sneaking suspicion all that might be a con-job laid down to fill the collection plates. In the meantime, we’re in a kind of compulsory dodgeball game as we free-fall from Wherever to Ain’t Got A Clue. Sometimes bombs go off and sometimes the planes land okay and sometimes the blood tests come back clean and sometimes the biopsies come back positive. Most times the bad telephone call doesn’t come in the middle of the night but sometimes it does, and either way we know we’re going to drive pedal-to-the-metal into the mystery eventually.

It’s crazy to be able to live with that and stay sane, but it’s also beautiful. I write to find out what I think, and what I found out writing The Colorado Kid was that maybe—I just say maybe—it’s the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition-derby world. We always want to reach for the lights in the sky, and we always want to know where the Colorado Kid (the world is full of Colorado Kids) came from. Wanting might be better than knowing. I don’t say that for sure; I only suggest it. But if you tell me I fell down on the job and didn’t tell all of this story there was to tell, I say you’re all wrong.

On that I am sure.

Stephen King
January 31, 2005

The Dark Half

AFTERWORD

The name Alexis Machine is not original to me. Readers of Dead City, by Shane Stevens, will recognize it as the name of the fictional hoodlum boss in that novel. The name so perfectly summed up the character of George Stark and his own fictional crime boss that I adopted it for the work you have just read . . . but I also did it as an hommage to Mr. Stevens, whose other novels include Rat Pack, By Reason of Insanity, and The Anvil Chorus. These works, where the so-called “criminal mind” and a condition of irredeemable psychosis interweave to create their own closed system of perfect evil, are three of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream. They are, in their own way, as striking as Frank Norris’s McTeague or Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. I recommend them unreservedly . . . but only readers with strong stomachs and stronger nerves need apply.

S.K.

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.

S.K.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Author’s Note

Some of these stories have been previously published, but that doesn’t mean they were done then, or even that they’re done now. Until a writer either retires or dies, the work is not finished; it can always use another polish and a few more revisions. There’s also a bunch of new ones. Something else I want you to know: how glad I am, Constant Reader, that we’re both still here. Cool, isn’t it?

—SK

The Little Sisters of Eluria

Author’s Note: The Dark Tower books begin with Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger in an exhausted world that has “moved on,” pursuing a magician in a black robe. Roland has been chasing Walter for a very long time. In the first book of the cycle, he finally catches up. This story, however, takes place while Roland is still casting about for Walter’s trail. S. K.

Hearts in Atlantis

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is a University of Maine in Orono, of course. I know because I went there from 1966 to 1970. The characters in this story are completely fictional, however, and a good deal of the campus geography I have described never existed. Harwich is similarly fictional, and although Bridgeport is real, my version of it is not. Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.

I’ve also taken chronological liberties, the most noticeable being my use of “The Prisoner” two years before it actually telecast in the United States—but I have tried to remain true to the spirit of the age. Is that really possible? I don’t know, but I have tried.

An earlier and very different version of “Blind Willie” appeared in the magazine Antaeus. It was published in 1994.

I want to thank Chuck Verrill, Susan Moldow, and Nan Graham for helping me find the courage to write this book. I also want to thank my wife. Without her, I never would have gotten over.

S.K.
December 22, 1998

Nightmares & Dreamscapes

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Screenplay abbreviations are simple and exist, in this author’s opinion, mostly to make those who write screenplays feel like lodge brothers. In any case, you should be aware that CU means close-up; ECU means extreme close-up; INT. means interior; EXT means exterior; B.G. means background; POV means point of view. Probably most of you knew all that stuff to begin with, right?

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: Head Down

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am breaking in here, Constant Reader, to make you aware that this is not a story but an essay—almost a diary. It originally appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 1990.

S.K.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: The Beggar and the Diamond

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This little story—a Hindu parable in its original form—was first told to me by Mr. Surendra Patel, of Scarsdale, New York. I have adapted it freely and apologize to those who know it in its true form, where Lord Shiva and his wife, Parvati, are the major characters.

Bag of Bones

AUTHOR’S NOTE

To some extent, this novel deals with the legal aspects of child custody in the State of Maine. I asked for help in understanding this subject from my friend Warren Silver, who is a fine attorney. Warren guided me carefully, and along the way he also told me about a quaint old device called the Stenomask, which I immediately appropriated for my own fell purposes. If I’ve made procedural mistakes in the story which follows, blame me, not my legal resource. Warren also asked me—rather plaintively—if I could maybe put a “good” lawyer in my book. All I can say is that I did my best in that regard.

Thanks to my son Owen for technical support in Woodstock, New York, and to my friend (and fellow Rock Bottom Remainder) Ridley Pearson for technical support in Ketchum, Idaho. Thanks to Pam Dorman for her sympathetic and perceptive reading of the first draft. Thanks to Chuck Verrill for a monumental editing job—your personal best, Chuck. Thanks to Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, Jack Romanos, and Carolyn Reidy at Scribner for care and feeding. And thanks to Tabby, who was there for me again when things got hard. I love you, hon.

S.K.

The Dead Zone

Author’s Note

What follows is a work of fiction. All of the major characters are made up. Because it plays against the historical backdrop of the last decade, the reader may recognize certain actual figures who played their parts in the 1970s. It is my hope that none of these figures has been misrepresented. There is no third congressional district in New Hampshire and no town of Castle Rock in Maine. Chuck Chatsworth’s reading lesson is drawn from Fire Brain, by Max Brand, originally published by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.

Doctor Sleep

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My first book with Scribner was Bag of Bones, in 1998. Anxious to please my new partners, I went out on tour for that novel. At one of the autographing sessions, some guy asked, “Hey, any idea what happened to the kid from The Shining?”

This was a question I’d often asked myself about that old book—along with another: What would have happened to Danny’s troubled father if he had found Alcoholics Anonymous instead of trying to get by with what people in AA call “white-knuckle sobriety”?

As with Under the Dome and 11/22/63, this was an idea that never quite left my mind. Every now and then—while taking a shower, watching a TV show, or making a long turnpike drive—I would find myself calculating Danny Torrance’s age, and wondering where he was. Not to mention his mother, one more basically good human being left in Jack Torrance’s destructive wake. Wendy and Danny were, in the current parlance, codependents, people bound by ties of love and responsibility to an addicted family member. At some point in 2009, one of my recovering alcoholic friends told me a one-liner that goes like this: “When a codependent is drowning, somebody else’s life flashes before his eyes.” That struck me as too true to be funny, and I think it was at that point that Doctor Sleep became inevitable. I had to know.

Did I approach the book with trepidation? You better believe it. The Shining is one of those novels people always mention (along with ’Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, and It) when they talk about which of my books really scared the bejeezus out of them. Plus, of course, there was Stanley Kubrick’s movie, which many seem to remember—for reasons I have never quite understood—as one of the scariest films they have ever seen. (If you have seen the movie but not read the novel, you should note that Doctor Sleep follows the latter, which is, in my opinion, the True History of the Torrance Family.)

I like to think I’m still pretty good at what I do, but nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare, and I mean nothing, especially if administered to one who is young and impressionable. There has been at least one brilliant sequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Mick Garris’s Psycho IV, with Anthony Perkins reprising his role as Norman Bates), but people who’ve seen that—or any of the others—will only shake their heads and say no, no, not as good. They remember the first time they experienced Janet Leigh, and no remake or sequel can top that moment when the curtain is pulled back and the knife starts to do its work.

And people change. The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story. I enjoyed finding Danny Torrance again and following his adventures. I hope you did, too. If that’s the case, Constant Reader, we’re all good.

Before letting you go, let me thank the people who need to be thanked, okay?

Nan Graham edited the book. Righteously. Thanks, Nan.

Chuck Verrill, my agent, sold the book. That’s important, but he also took all my phone calls and fed me spoonfuls of soothing syrup. Those things are indispensable.

Russ Dorr did the research, but for what’s wrong, blame me for misunderstanding. He’s a great physician’s assistant and a Nordic monster of inspiration and good cheer.

Chris Lotts supplied Italian when Italian was needed. Yo, Chris.

Rocky Wood was my go-to guy for all things Shining, providing me with names and dates I had either forgotten or plain got wrong. He also provided reams of info on every recreational vehicle and camper under the sun (the coolest was Rose’s EarthCruiser). The Rock knows my work better than I do myself. Look him up on the Web sometime. He’s got it going on.

My son Owen read the book and suggested valuable changes. Chief among them was his insistence that we see Dan reach what recovered alcoholics call “the bottom.”

My wife also read Doctor Sleep and helped to make it better. I love you, Tabitha.

Thanks to you guys and girls who read my stuff, too. May you have long days and pleasant nights.

Let me close with a word of caution: when you’re on the turnpikes and freeways of America, watch out for those Winnebagos and Bounders.

You never know who might be inside. Or what.

Bangor, Maine

Dreamcatcher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I was never so grateful to be writing as during my time of work (November 16, 1999–May 29, 2000) on Dreamcatcher. I was in a lot of physical discomfort during those six and a half months, and the book took me away. The reader will see that pieces of that physical discomfort followed me into the story, but what I remember most is the sublime release we find in vivid dreams.

A good many people helped me. One was my wife, Tabitha, who simply refused to call this novel by its original title, which was Cancer. She considered it both ugly and an invitation to bad luck and trouble. Eventually I came around to her way of thinking, and she no longer refers to it as “that book” or “the one about the shit-weasels.”

I’m also indebted to Bill Pula, who took me four-wheeling at the Quabbin Reservoir, and to his cohorts, Peter Baldracci, Terry Campbell, and Joe McGinn. Another group of people, who would perhaps prefer not to be named, took me out behind the Air National Guard base in a Humvee, and foolishly let me drive, assuring me I couldn’t get the beast stuck. I didn’t, but it was close. I came back mudsplattered and happy. They would also want me to tell you that Hummers are better in mud than in snow; I have fictionalized their capabilities in that regard to suit the course of my fiction.

Thanks are also in order to Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner, to Chuck Verrill, who edited the book, and to Arthur Greene, who agented it. And I mustn’t forget Ralph Vicinanza, my foreign rights agent, who found at least six ways to say “There is no infection here” in French.

One final note. This book was written with the world’s finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen. To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven’t been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored.

And to those of you who have come so far, thank you for reading my story.

Stephen King

End of Watch

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thanks to Nan Graham, who edited this book, and to all my other friends at Scribner, including—but not limited to—­Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Roz Lippel, and Katie Monaghan. Thanks to Chuck Verrill, my longtime agent (important) and longtime friend (more important). Thanks to Chris Lotts, who sells the foreign rights to my books. Thanks to Mark Levenfus, who oversees such business affairs as I have, and keeps an eye on the Haven Foundation, which helps freelance artists down on their luck, and the King Foundation, which helps schools, libraries, and small-town fire departments. Thanks to ­Marsha DeFilippo, my able personal assistant, and to Julie Eugley, who does everything Marsha doesn’t. I’d be lost without them. Thanks to my son Owen King, who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. Thanks to my wife, Tabitha, who also made valuable suggestions . . . including what turned out to be the right title.

Special thanks to Russ Dorr, who has traded in his career as a physician’s assistant to become my research guru. He went the extra mile on this book, patiently tutoring me on how computer programs are written, how they can be rewritten, and how they can be disseminated. Without Russ, End of Watch would have been a lesser book. I should add that in some cases I deliberately changed various computer protocols to serve my fiction. Tech-savvy individuals will see that, which is fine. Just don’t blame Russ.

One last thing. End of Watch is fiction, but the high rate of suicides—both in the United States and in many other countries where my books are read—is all too real. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline number given in this book is also real. It’s 1-800-273-TALK. If you are feeling poopy (as Holly Gibney would say), give them a call. Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.

Stephen King

Finders Keepers

AUTHOR’S NOTE

You write a book in a room by yourself, that’s just how it’s done. I wrote the first draft of this one in Florida, looking out at palm trees. I rewrote it in Maine, looking out at pine trees sloping down to a beautiful lake where the loons converse at sunset. But I wasn’t entirely alone in either place; few writers are. When I needed help, help was there.

NAN GRAHAM edited the book. SUSAN MOLDOW and ROZ LIPPEL also work for Scribner, and I couldn’t get along without them. Those women are invaluable.

CHUCK VERRILL agented the book. He’s been my go-to guy for thirty years, smart, funny, and fearless. No yes-man he; when my shit’s not right, he never hesitates to tell me.

RUSS DORR does research, and he’s gotten better and better at the job as the years pass. Like a good first assist PA in the OR, he’s ready with the next instrument I need before I even call for it. His contributions to this book are on almost every page. Literally: Russ gave me the title when I was stumped for one.

OWEN KING and KELLY BRAFFET, both excellent novelists, read the first draft and sharpened it considerably. Their contributions are also on just about every page.

MARSHA DeFILIPPO and JULIE EUGLEY run my office in Maine, and keep me tethered to the real world. BARBARA MacINTYRE runs the office in Florida and does the same. SHIRLEY SONDEREGGER is emeritus.

TABITHA KING is my best critic and one true love.

And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you’re still there after all these years. If you’re having fun, I am, too.

From a Buick 8

Author’s Note

I’ve had ideas fall into my lap from time to time—I suppose this is true of any writer—but From a Buick 8 was almost comically the reverse: a case of me falling into the lap of an idea. That’s worth a note, I think.

My wife and I spent the winter of 1999 on Longboat Key in Florida, where I tinkered at the final draft of a short novel (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and wrote little else of note. Nor did I have plans to write anything in the spring of that year.

In late March, Tabby flew back to Maine from Florida. I drove. I hate to fly, love to drive, and besides, I had a truckload of furnishings, books, guitars, computer components, clothes, and paper. My second or third day on the road found me in western Pennsylvania. I needed gas and got off the turnpike at a rural exit. Near the ramp I found a Conoco station. There was an actual attendant who actually pumped the gas. He even threw in a few words of tolerably pleasant conversation at no extra charge.

I left him doing his thing and went to the restroom to do mine. When I finished, I walked around to the back of the station. Here I found a rather steep slope littered with auto parts and a brawling stream at the foot. There was still a fair amount of snow on the ground, in dirty strips and runners. I walked a little way down the slope to get a better look at the water, and my feet went out from beneath me. I slid about ten feet before grabbing a rusty something-or-other and bringing myself to a stop. Had I missed it, I might well have gone into the water. And then? All bets are off, as they say.

I paid the attendant (so far as I know, he had no idea of my misadventure) and got back on the highway. I mused about my slip as I drove, wondering about what would have happened if I’d gone into the stream (which, with all that spring runoff, was at least temporarily a small river). How long would my truckload of Florida furnishings and our bright Florida clothes have stood at the pumps before the gas-jockey got nervous? Whom would he have called? How long before they’d have found me if I had drowned?

This little incident happened around ten in the morning. By afternoon I was in New York. And by then I had the story you’ve just read pretty much set in my mind. I have said in my book about the craft of writing that first drafts are only about story; if there is meaning, it should come later, and arise naturally from the tale itself. This story became—I suppose—a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life’s events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them. The first draft was written in two months. By then I realized I had made myself a whole host of problems by writing of two things I knew nothing about: western Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State Police. Before I could address either of these concerns, I suffered my own road-accident and my life changed radically. I came out of the summer of ’99 lucky to have any life at all, in fact. It was over a year before I even thought of this story again, let alone worked on it.

The coincidence of having written a book filled with grisly vehicular mishaps shortly before suffering my own has not been lost on me, but I’ve tried not to make too much of it. Certainly I don’t think there was anything premonitory about the similarities between what happens to Curtis Wilcox in Buick 8 and what happened to me in real life (for one thing, I lived). I can testify at first hand, however, that I got most of it right from imagination: as with Curtis, the coins were stripped from my pockets and the watch from my wrist. The cap I was wearing was later found in the woods, at least twenty yards from the point of impact. But I changed nothing in the course of my story to reflect what happened to me; most of what I wanted was there in the completed first draft. The imagination is a powerful tool.

It never crossed my mind to re-set From a Buick 8 in Maine, although Maine is the place I know (and love) the best. I stopped at a gas station in Pennsylvania, went on my ass in Pennsylvania, got the idea in Pennsylvania. I thought the resulting tale should stay in Pennsylvania, in spite of the aggravations that presented. Not that there weren’t rewards, as well; for one thing, I got to set my fictional town of Statler just down the road apiece from Rocksburg, the town which serves as the locale for K. C. Constantine’s brilliant series of novels about small-town police chief Mario Balzic. If you’ve never read any of these stories, you ought to do yourself a favor. The continuing story of Chief Balzic and his family is like The Sopranos turned inside-out and told from a law enforcement point of view. Also, western Pennsylvania is the home of the Amish, whose way of life I wanted to explore a little more fully.

This book could never have been finished without the help of Trooper Lucien Southard of the Pennsylvania State Police. Lou read the manuscript, managed not to laugh too hard at its many howlers, and wrote me eight pages of notes and corrections that could be printed in any writer’s handbook without a blush (for one thing, Trooper Southard has been taught to print in large, easy-to-read block letters). He took me to several PSP barracks, introduced me to three PCOs who were kind enough to show me what they do and how they do it (to begin with they ran the license plate of my Dodge pickup—it came back clean, I’m relieved to say, with no wants or warrants), and demonstrated all sorts of State Police equipment. The most informative and patient of these was PCO Theresa M. Maker—thank you, Theresa, for your kindness.

More important, Lou and some of his mates took me to lunch at a restaurant in Amish country, where we consumed huge sandwiches and drank pitchers of iced tea. They regaled me with an hour of stories of Trooper life. Some of these were funny, some of them were horrible, and some managed to be both at the same time. Not all of them made it into Buick 8, but a number of them did, in suitably fictionalized form. They treated me as a friend, and no one moved too fast, which was good. At that time, I was still hopping along on one crutch.

Thanks, Lou—and thanks to all the Troopers who work out of the Butler barracks—for helping me keep my Pennsylvania book in Pennsylvania. Much more important, thanks for helping me understand exactly what it is that State Troopers do, and the price they pay to do it well.

Susan Moldow and Nan Graham, the Dynamic Duo at Scribner, would not let me close this note without pointing out that certain—ahem!—liberties have been taken with the Buick on the book jacket. GM-ophiles will likely notice that Eight’s cover-girl is several years older than the Buick in the story. I was asked if this little cheat bothered me, and I said absolutely not. What bothers me, especially when it’s late and I can’t sleep, is that sneermouth grille. Looks almost ready to gobble someone up, doesn’t it? Maybe me. Or maybe you, my dear Constant Reader.

Maybe you.

Stephen King
May 29, 2002

Joyland

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Carny purists (I’m sure there are such) are even now preparing to write and inform me, with varying degrees of outrage, that much of what I call “the Talk” doesn’t exist: that rubes were never called conies, for instance, and that pretty girls were never called points. Such purists would be correct, but they can save their letters and emails. Folks, that’s why they call it fiction.

And anyway, most of the terms here really are carnival lingo, an argot both rich and humorous. The Ferris wheel was known as the chump-hoister or the simp-hoister; kiddie rides were known as zamp rides; leaving town in a hurry was indeed called burning the lot. These are just a few examples. I am indebted to The Dictionary of Carny, Circus, Sideshow & Vaudeville Lingo, by Wayne N. Keyser. It’s posted on the internet. You can go there and check out a thousand other terms. Maybe more. You can also order his book, On the Midway.

Charles Ardai edited this book. Thanks, man.

Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

While there is indeed such a thing as “stealing the peek” (as in PKE), it would be impossible to do so with any of the cars identified in the book, including the Mercedes-Benz SL500s made during the passive keyless entry age. SL500s, like all Benzes, are high-performance cars with high-performance security features.

Thanks are due to Russ Dorr and Dave Higgins, who provided research assistance. Also to my wife, Tabitha, who knows more about cell phones than I do, and to my son, the novelist Joe Hill, who helped me solve the problems Tabby pointed out. If I got it right, thank my support crew. If I got it wrong, chalk it up to my failure to understand.

Nan Graham of Scribner did her usual sterling editorial job, and my son Owen followed up with a valuable second pass. My agent, Chuck Verrill, is a Yankees fan, but I love him anyway.

Pet Sematary

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Special thanks are in order to Russ Dorr and Steve Wentworth of Bridgeton, Maine. Russ provided medical information and Steve provided information on American funeral and burial customs and some insight into the nature of grief.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things:

John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolph Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X.

Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person . . . or, more properly, as a Person.

Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did . . . and what they saw:

The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs.

Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Revival

Author’s Note

CHUCK VERRILL is my agent. He sold the book, and provided aid and comfort along the way.

NAN GRAHAM edited the book with a sharp eye and an even sharper blue pencil.

RUSS DORR, my tireless researcher, provided information when information was needed. If I screwed something up, it was because I failed to understand. In such cases blame me, not him.

SUSAN MOLDOW took all my calls, even when I was being a pain in the ass, and urged me ever onward.

MARSHA DeFILIPPO and JULIE EUGLEY mind my real-world affairs so I can live in my imagination.

TABITHA KING, my wife and best critic, pointed out the soft places and urged me to fix them. Which I did, to the best of my ability. I love her a bunch.

Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to THE ROCK BOTTOM REMAINDERS, who taught me you’re never too old to rock and roll and have kept me high-stepping to “In the Midnight Hour” since 1992. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.

—Bangor, Maine

The Stand

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Stand is a work of fiction, as its subject matter makes perfectly clear. Many of the events occur in real places—such as Ogunquit, Maine; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Boulder, Colorado—and with these places I have taken the liberty of changing them to whatever degree best suited the course of my fiction. I hope that those readers who live in these and the other real places that are mentioned in this novel will not be too upset by my “monstrous impertinence,” to quote Dorothy Sayers, who indulged freely in the same sort of thing.

Other places, such as Arnette, Texas, and Shoyo, Arkansas, are as fictional as the plot itself.

Special thanks are due to Russell Dorr (P.A.) and Dr. Richard Herman, both of the Bridgton Family Medical Center, who answered my questions about the nature of the flu, and its peculiar way of mutating every two years or so, and to Susan Artz Manning of Castine, who proofed the original manuscript.

Most thanks of all to Bill Thompson and Betty Prashker, who made this book happen in the best way.

S.K.

Under the Dome

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I first tried to write Under the Dome in 1976, and crept away from it with my tail between my legs after two weeks’ work that amounted to about seventy-five pages. That manuscript was long lost on the day in 2007 when I sat down to start again, but I remembered the opening section—“The Airplane and the Woodchuck”—well enough to re-create it almost exactly.

I was overwhelmed not by the large cast of characters—I like novels with generous populations—but by the technical problems the story presented, especially the ecological and meteorological consequences of the Dome. The fact that those very concerns made the book seem important to me made me feel like a coward—and lazy—but I was terrified of screwing it up. So I went on to something else, but the idea of the Dome never left my mind.

In the years since, my good friend Russ Dorr, a physician’s assistant from Bridgeton, Maine, has helped me with the medical details in many books, most notably The Stand. In the late summer of 2007, I asked him if he would be willing to take on a much larger role, as head researcher on a long novel called Under the Dome. He agreed, and thanks to Russ, I think most of the technical details here are right. It was Russ who researched computer-guided missiles, jet stream patterns, methamphetamine recipes, portable generators, radiation, possible advances in cell phone technology, and a hundred other things. It was also Russ who invented Rusty Everett’s homemade radiation suit and who realized people could breathe from tires, at least for a while. Have we made mistakes? Sure. But most will turn out to be mine, either because I misunderstood or misinterpreted some of his answers.

My first two readers were my wife, Tabitha, and Leanora Legrand, my daughter-in-law. Both were tough, humane, and helpful.

Nan Graham edited the book down from the original dinosaur to a beast of slightly more manageable size; every page of the manuscript was marked with her changes. I owe her a great debt of thanks for all the mornings when she got up at six AM and took her pencil in her hand. I tried to write a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal. Nan understood that, and whenever I weakened, she jammed her foot down on top of mine and yelled (in the margins, as editors are wont to do), “Faster, Steve! Faster!”

Surendra Patel, to whom the book is dedicated, was a friend and an unfailing source of comfort for thirty years. In June of 2008, I got the news that he had died of a heart attack. I sat on the steps of my office and cried. When that part was over, I went back to work. It was what he would have expected.

And you, Constant Reader. Thanks for reading this story. If you had as much fun as I did, we’re both well off.

S. K.

The Institute

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A few words if you please, Constant Reader, about Russ Dorr.

I met him over forty years ago— well over— in the town of Bridgton, Maine, where he was the single physicians' assistant in the three-doc medical center. He saw to most of my family's minor medical problems, everything from stomach flu to the kids' ear infections. His standard witticism for fever was clear liquids— “just gin and vodka.” He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I wrote novels and short stories, mostly scary ones about psychic phenomena, vampires, and other assorted monsters. “Sorry, I don't read stuff like that,” he said, neither of us knowing that he would eventually read everything I wrote, usually in manuscript and often while various works were in progress. Other than my wife, he was the only one who saw my fiction before it was fully dressed and ready for its close-up.

I began to ask him questions, first about medical matters. Russ was the one who told me about how the flu changes from year to year, making each new vaccine obsolete (that was for The Stand). He gave me a list of exercises to keep the muscles of comatose patients from wasting away (that was for The Dead Zone). He patiently explained how animals contracted rabies, and how the disease progressed (for Cujo).

His remit gradually expanded, and when he retired from medicine, he became my full-time research assistant. We visited the Texas School Book Depository together for 11/22/63 — a book I literally could not have written without him — and while I absorbed the gestalt of the place (looking for ghosts ... and finding them), Russ took pictures and made measurements. When we went to the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, it was Russ who asked what was playing that day (a double feature consisting of Cry of Battle and War is Hell).

On Under the Dome he gathered reams of information about the micro ecosystem I was trying to create, from the capacity of electricity generators to how long food supplies might last, but the thing he was most proud of came when I asked if he could think of an air supply for my characters— something like SCUBA tanks— that would last for five minutes or so. It was for the climax of the book, and I was stumped. So was Russ, until he was stuck in traffic one day, and took a good look at the cars all around him.

“Tires,” he told me. “Tires have air in them. It would be stale and nasty-tasting, but it would be breathable.” And so, dear readers, tires it was.

Russ's fingerprints are all over the book you have just read, from the BDNF tests for newborns (yes, it's a real thing, only a bit fictionalized), to how poison gas could be created from common household products (don't try this at home, kids). He vetted every line and fact, helping me toward what has always been my goal: making the impossible plausible. He was a big, blond, broad-shouldered man who loved a joke and a beer and shooting off bottle rockets on the Fourth of July. He raised two wonderful daughters and saw his wife through her final lingering illness. We worked together, but he was also my friend. We were simpatico. Never had a single argument.

Russ died of kidney failure in the fall of 2018, and I miss him like hell. Sure, when I need information (lately it's been elevators and first-generation iPhones), but a lot more when I forget he's gone and think, “Hey, I should give Russ a call or drop him an email, ask what's going on.” This book is dedicated to my grandsons, because it's mostly about kids, but it's Russ I'm thinking about as I put it to bed. It's very hard to let old friends go.

I miss you, buddy.

Before I quit, Constant Reader, I should thank the usual suspects: Chuck Verrill, my agent; Chris Lotts, who deals with foreign rights and found a dozen different ways to say Do you hear me; Rand Holsten, who does movie deals (lately there's been a lot of them); and Katie Monaghan, who handles publicity for Scribner. And a huge thank-you to Nan Graham, who edited a book that's full of many moving parts, parallel timelines, and dozens of characters. She made it a better book. I also need to thank Marsha DeFilippo, Julie Eugley, and Barbara MacIntyre, who take the calls, make the appointments, and give me those vital hours I use each day to write.

Last but hardly least, thanks to my kids— Naomi, Joe, and Owen— and to my wife. If I may borrow from George R. R. Martin, she is my sun and stars.

February 17, 2019

The Importance of Being Bachman by Stephen King

This is my second introduction to the so-called Bachman Books—a phrase which has come to mean (in my mind, at least) the first few novels published with the Richard Bachman name, the ones which appeared as unheralded paperback originals under the Signet imprint. My first introduction wasn’t very good; to me it reads like a textbook case of author obfuscation. But that is not surprising. When it was written, Bachman’s alter ego (me, in other words) wasn’t in what I’d call a contemplative or analytical mood; I was, in fact, feeling robbed. Bachman was never created as a short-term alias; he was supposed to be there for the long haul, and when my name came out in connection with his, I was surprised, upset, and pissed off. That’s not a state conducive to good essay-writing. This time I may do a little better.

Probably the most important thing I can say about Richard Bachman is that he became real. Not entirely, of course (he said with a nervous smile); I am not writing this in a delusive state. Except . . . well . . . maybe I am. Delusion is, after all, something writers of fiction try to encourage in their readers, at least during the time that the book or story is open before them, and the writer is hardly immune from this state of . . . what shall I call it? How does “directed delusion” sound?

At any rate, Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early works which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer’s imagination so frequently do. I began to imagine his life as a dairy farmer . . . his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman . . . his solitary New Hampshire mornings, spent milking the cows, getting in the wood, and thinking about his stories . . . his evenings spent writing, always with a glass of whiskey beside his Olivetti typewriter. I once knew a writer who would say his current story or novel was “putting on weight” if it was going well. In much the same way, my pen-name began to put on weight.

Then, when his cover was blown, Richard Bachman died. I made light of this in the few interviews I felt required to give on the subject, saying that he’d died of cancer of the pseudonym, but it was actually shock that killed him: the realization that sometimes people just won’t let you alone. To put it in more fulsome (but not at all inaccurate) terms, Bachman was the vampire side of my existence, killed by the sunlight of disclosure. My feelings about all this were confused enough (and fertile enough) to bring on a book (a Stephen King book, that is), The Dark Half. It was about a writer whose pseudonym, George Stark, actually comes to life. It’s a novel my wife has always detested, perhaps because, for Thad Beaumont, the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man; for Thad, delusive thinking overtakes rationality completely, with horrific consequences.

I didn’t have that problem, though. Really. I put Bachman aside, and although I was sorry that he had to die, I would be lying if I didn’t say I felt some relief as well.

The books in this omnibus were written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and deeply infatuated with the art and craft of writing. They weren’t written as Bachman books per se (Bachman hadn’t been invented yet, after all), but in a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair. Ben Richards, the scrawny, pre-tubercular protagonist of The Running Man (he is about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get), crashes his hijacked plane into the Network Games skyscraper, killing himself but taking hundreds (maybe thousands) of Free-Vee executives with him; this is the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending. The conclusions of the other Bachman novels are even more grim. Stephen King has always understood that the good guys don’t always win (see Cujo, Pet Sematary, and—perhaps—Christine), but he has also understood that mostly they do. Every day, in real life, the good guys win. Mostly these victories go unheralded (MAN ARRIVES HOME SAFE FROM WORK YET AGAIN wouldn’t sell many papers), but they are nonetheless real for all that . . . and fiction should reflect reality.

And yet . . .

In the first draft of The Dark Half, I had Thad Beaumont quote Donald E. Westlake, a very funny writer who has penned a series of very grim crime novels under the name Richard Stark. Once asked to explain the dichotomy between Westlake and Stark, the writer in question said, “I write Westlake stories on sunny days. When it rains, I’m Stark.” I don’t think that made it into the final version of The Dark Half, but I have always loved it (and related to it, as it has become fashionable to say). Bachman—a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his byline—was a rainy-day sort of guy if ever there was one.

The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 X 2. But I know something else as well: there’s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives.

In Thinner, Bachman spoke for the first time on his own—it was the only one of the early Bachman novels that had his name on the first draft instead of mine—and it struck me as really unfair that, just as he was starting to talk with his own voice, he should have been mistaken for me. And a mistake was just what it felt like, because by then Bachman had become a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn’t, and the thought of him out there on his New Hampshire dairy farm—not a best-selling writer who gets his name in some stupid Forbes list of entertainers too rich for their own good or his face on the Today show or doing cameos in movies—quietly writing his books gave him permission to think in ways I could not think and speak in ways I could not speak. And then these news stories came out saying “Bachman is really King,” and there was no one—not even me—to defend the dead man, or to point out the obvious: that King was also really Bachman, at least some of the time.

Unfair I thought then and unfair I think now, but sometimes life bites you a little, that’s all. I determined to put Bachman out of my thoughts and my life, and so I did, for a number of years. Then, while I was writing a novel (a Stephen King novel) called Desperation, Richard Bachman suddenly appeared in my life again.

I was working on a Wang dedicated word processor at that time; it looked like the visiphone in an old Flash Gordon serial. This was paired with a marginally more state-of-the-art laser printer, and from time to time, when an idea occurred to me, I would write down a phrase or a putative title on a scrap of paper and Scotch-tape it to the side of the printer. As I neared the three-quarter mark on Desperation, I had a scrap with a single word printed on it: REGULATORS. I had had a great idea for a novel, something that had to do with toys, guns, TV, and suburbia. I didn’t know if I would ever write it—lots of those “printer notes” never came to anything—but it was certainly cool to think about.

Then, one rainy day (a Richard Stark sort of day), as I was pulling into my driveway, I had an idea. I don’t know where it came from; it was totally unconnected to any of the trivia tumbling through my head at the time. The idea was to take the characters from Desperation and put them into The Regulators. In some cases, I thought, they could play the same people; in others, they would change; in neither case would they do the same things or react in the same ways, because the different stories would dictate different courses of action. It would be, I thought, like the members of a repertory company acting in two different plays.

Then an even more exciting idea struck me. If I could use the rep company concept with the characters, I could use it with the plot itself as well—I could stack a good many of the Desperation elements in a brand-new configuration, and create a kind of mirror world. I knew even before setting out that plenty of critics would call this twinning a stunt . . . and they would not be wrong, exactly. But, I thought, it could be a good stunt. Maybe even an illuminating stunt, one which showcased the muscularity and versatility of story, its all but limitless ability to adapt a few basic elements into endlessly pleasing variations, its prankish charm.

But the two books couldn’t sound exactly the same, and they couldn’t mean the same, any more than an Edward Albee play and one by William Inge can sound and mean the same, even if they are performed on successive nights by the same company of actors. How could I possibly create a different voice?

At first I thought I couldn’t, and that it would be best to consign the idea to the Rube Goldberg bin I keep in the bottom of my mind—the one marked INTERESTING BUT UNWORKABLE CONTRAPTIONS. Then it occurred to me that I had had the answer all along: Richard Bachman could write The Regulators. His voice sounded superficially the same as mine, but underneath there was a world of difference—all the difference between sunshine and rain, let us say. And his view of people was always different from mine, simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted (Bart Dawes in Roadwork, my favorite of the early Bachman books, is an excellent example).

Of course Bachman was dead, I had announced that myself, but death is actually a minor problem for a novelist—just ask Paul Sheldon, who brought Misery Chastain back for Annie Wilkes, or Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought Sherlock Holmes back from Reichenbach Falls when fans all over the British Empire clamored for him. I didn’t actually bring Richard Bachman back from the dead, anyway; I just visualized a box of neglected manuscripts in his basement, with The Regulators on top. Then I transcribed the book Bachman had already written.

That transcription was a little tougher . . . but it was also immensely exhilarating. It was wonderful to hear Bachman’s voice again, and what I had hoped might happen did happen: a book rolled out that was a kind of fraternal twin to the one I had written under my own name (and the two books were quite literally written back-to-back, the King book finished on one day and the Bachman book commenced on the very next). They were no more alike than King and Bachman themselves. Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV. I guess that makes them both about higher powers, but very different ones just the same.

The importance of being Bachman was always the importance of finding a good voice and a valid point of view that were a little different from my own. Not really different; I am not schizo enough to believe that. But I do believe that there are tricks all of us use to change our perspectives and our perceptions—to see ourselves new by dressing up in different clothes and doing our hair in different styles—and that such tricks can be very useful, a way of revitalizing and refreshing old strategies for living life, observing life, and creating art. None of these comments are intended to suggest that I have done anything great in the Bachman books, and they are surely not made as arguments for artistic merit. But I love what I do too much to want to go stale if I can help it. Bachman has been one way in which I have tried to refresh my craft, and to keep from being too comfy and well-padded.

These early books show some progression of the Bachman persona, I hope, and I hope they also show the essence of that persona. Dark-toned, despairing even when he is laughing (despairing most when he’s laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn’t a fellow I’d want to be all the time, even if he were still alive . . . but it’s good to have that option, that window on the world, polarized though it may be. Still, as the reader works his or her way through these stories, he/she may discover that Dick Bachman has one thing in common with Thad Beaumont’s alter ego, George Stark: he’s not a very nice guy.

And I wonder if there are any other good manuscripts, at or near completion, in that box found by the widowed Mrs. Bachman in the cellar of their New Hampshire farmhouse.

Sometimes I wonder about that a lot.

—Stephen King

Lovell, Maine

April 16, 1996