A Good Marriage (33 page)
—
USA Today
And be sure to read
UNDER THE DOME
Stephen King’s #1
New York Times
bestseller . . . his boldest novel since
The Stand
“It has the scope and flavor of literary Americana, even if King’s particular patch of American turf is located smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone.”
—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times
“Seven words: the best yet from the best ever. America’s greatest living novelist delivers his masterpiece.”
—Lee Child
“A clever blend of
Lord of the Flies,
Malthus, Machiavelli, and
Lost
. . . . Wildly entertaining.”
—
People
(3
1
/
2
stars)
“King readers will rejoice.”
—
Library Journal
“One of his most powerful novels ever . . . and our stock of literature in the great American Gothic tradition is brilliantly replenished because of it.”
—
The Washington Post
“Impressive.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Irresistibly compelling. . . . A nonstop thrill ride as well as a disturbing, moving meditation on our capacity for good and evil.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Moves so fast and grips the reader so tightly that it’s practically incapacitating.”
—
Newsday
(NY)
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
GALLERY BOOKS PRESENTS
A NEW STORY FROM
STEPHEN KING...
I’ve been having this bad dream for a week now, but it must be one of the lucid ones, because I’m always able to back out before it turns into a nightmare. Only this time it seems to have followed me, because Ellen and I aren’t alone. There’s something under the bed. I can hear it chewing.
You know how it is when you’re really scared, right? Your heart seems to stop, your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth, your skin goes cold and goose bumps rise up all over your body. Instead of meshing, the cogs in your head just spin and the whole engine heats up. I almost scream, I really do. I think,
It’s the thing I don’t want to look at. It’s the thing in the window seat
.
Then I see the fan overhead, the blades turning at their slowest speed. I see a crack of early morning light running down the middle of the pulled drapes. I see the graying milkweed fluff of Ellen’s hair on the other side of the bed. I’m here on the Upper East Side, fifth floor, and everything’s
okay. The dream was just a dream. As for what’s under the bed—
I toss back the covers and slide out onto my knees, like a man who means to pray. But instead of that, I lift the flounce and peer under the bed. I only see a dark shape at first. Then the shape’s head turns and two eyes gleam at me. It’s Lady. She’s not supposed to be under there, and I guess she knows it (hard to tell what a dog knows and what it doesn’t), but I must have left the door open when I came to bed. Or maybe it didn’t quite latch and she pushed it open with her snout. She must have brought one of her toys with her from the basket in the hall. At least it wasn’t the blue bone or the red rat. Those have squeakers in them, and would have wakened Ellen for sure. And Ellen needs her rest. She’s been under the weather.
“Lady,” I whisper. “Lady, come out of there.”
She only looks at me. She’s getting on in years and not so steady on her pins as she used to be, but—as the saying goes—she ain’t stupid. She’s under Ellen’s side, where I can’t reach her. If I raise my voice she’ll have to come, but she knows (I’m pretty sure she knows) that I won’t do that, because if I raise my voice, that will wake Ellen.
As if to prove this, Lady turns away from me and the chewing recommences.
Well, I can handle that. I’ve been living with
Lady for eleven years, nearly half my married life. There are three things that get her on her feet. One is the rattle of her leash and a call of “Elevator!” One is the thump of her food dish on the floor. The third—
I get up and walk down the short hall to the kitchen. From the cupboard I take the bag of Snackin’ Slices, making sure to rattle it. I don’t have to wait long for the muted clitter of cockerclaws. Five seconds and she’s right there. She doesn’t even bother to bring her toy.
I show her one of the little carrot shapes, then toss it into the living room. A little mean, maybe, and I know she didn’t mean to scare the life out of me, but she did. Besides, the fat old thing can use the exercise. She chases her treat. I linger long enough to start the coffeemaker, then go back into the bedroom. I’m careful to pull the door all the way shut.
Ellen’s still sleeping, and getting up early has one benefit: no need for the alarm. I turn it off. Let her sleep a little later. It’s a bronchial infection. I was scared for a while there, but now she’s on the mend.
I go into the bathroom and officially christen the day by brushing my teeth (I’ve read that in the morning a person’s mouth is as germicidally dead as it ever gets, but the habits we learn as children are hard to break). I turn on the shower, get it good and hot, and step in.
The shower’s where I do my best thinking, and this morning I think about the dream. Five nights in a row I’ve had it. (But who’s counting.) Nothing really awful happens, but in a way that’s the worst part. Because in the dream I know—absolutely
know
—that something awful
will
happen. If I let it.
I’m in an airplane, in business class. I’m in an aisle seat, which is where I prefer to be, so I don’t have to squeeze past anybody if I have to go to the toilet. My tray table is down. On it is a bag of peanuts and an orange drink that looks like a vodka sunrise, a drink I’ve never ordered in real life. The ride is smooth. If there are clouds, we’re above them. The cabin is filled with sunlight. Someone is sitting in the window seat, and I know if I look at him (or her, or possibly
it
), I’ll see something that will turn my bad dream into a nightmare. If I look into the face of my seatmate, I may lose my mind. It could crack open like an egg and all the darkness there is might pour out.
I give my soapy hair a quick rinse, step out, dry off. My clothes are folded on a chair in the bedroom. I take them and my shoes into the kitchen, which is now filling with the smell of coffee. Nice. Lady’s curled up by the stove, looking at me reproachfully.
“Don’t go giving me the stinkeye,” I tell her, and nod toward the closed bedroom door. “You know the rules.”
She puts her snout down on the floor between her paws.
