good morning and welcome back to the show my next guest is a best-selling author who
has written such Thrillers as Carrie The Shining and the dead zone and his new book
which is entitled The Fire Starter ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Stephen King
how are you I'm fine how are you fine you don't uh you don't look like a guy who would be filled with
frightening thoughts neither did Norman Bates Norman Bates is a frightening fellow himself
um what what makes people frightened and uh how do you get it down on paper well I think people
are frightened of almost anything you know as far as the unknown anything unexpected anything that's
going to jump out of them at them in the dark you know I remember the final scene in Cary where
the hand comes up out of the grave and grabs Amy Irving if you can get people with their defenses
down and get them in the open you can grab them and do a job on them and that's what I like to do
what um did you always have these thoughts inside of you or did you just see it as as a way to to
make money as a writer now um really I didn't go to the market the market came to me um as
far back as I can remember I've been interested in ghosts and goblins and Things That Go Bump in the
night and in the early 70s I was writing stories for those magazines where if you hold them up by
the side a picture falls out you don't show your mother that kind of thing and getting anywhere
from 100 to 200 to 300 for stories my wife and I were just married I was working in a laundry and
she would say hurry up and think of a monster whenever the bills came due so I did the best
I could um has there ever ever been anything that frightened you in real life that's made it into a
story anything out of your childhood that turned up as a book yeah there are a lot of things and I
suppose the one thing that uh scares all little kids is the Boogeyman the thing in the closet
and uh you know I can remember Bill Cosby's rap about covers covers a magic yeah you know that
there's nothing under the bed and you know that if you keep your feet under the covers it will
never grab you anyway and uh even as a grown-up I think that as children we fear these things and
we let our fears out we tell people because we're unsophisticated and as we get older we still have
the fears we just sublimate them you know and we don't tell people but still most people when
they're alone in the dark things that you would laugh at in the daylight begin to seem a little
bit like Technicolor there's always a period for me when uh between the time you get in bed and the
time you fall asleep where stuff doesn't make correct sense and I remember as a kid thinking
that I was uh wake up in a real cold sweat out of that gray period pain thinking that the bed was
covered with snakes and when you get to examining it of course it was covered with snakes it was an
ugly joke that my parents played with me but it would just be lumps and folds of the uh yeah of
the thing uh why do people like to be scared like that why do you what is your kind of thing sell
so well well on the simplest level I think people like to be scared about the same as the old joke
about the guy who beat his head against a Wong and somebody said well why do you keep doing
that he said it feels good when I stop and I think that if you're being scared out of your
wits when the scare ends when the lights go up or when the book ends you know you say to yourself I
thought things were bad for me but at least I'm not in that position you know I'm not stuck in
the haunted hotel or I'm not uh you know trapped with a telekinetic girl or whatever it happens
to be yeah do you ever get the communication from other people who say uh you think what you wrote
about was frightening here is my personal I get a lot of letters like that and sometimes you'll
get a letter from a genuine ding dong I mean most of the people who write to me are straight ahead
you know and they say things that make sense they're good letters we try to answer them as
much as we can but every now and then you get a letter from a guy who wants to come up with his
Polaroid camera and photograph all your ancestors standing behind you you know on a straight line
back to Adam or something like that or they will tell you about the time that the ghost got them
or whatever it happens to be and they'll seize on you as though you were a kindred spirit you know
these things yourself do you find that annoying when they do that no I love it yeah you live in
Maine what part of Maine we live in Western Maine I'm not a Seacoast boy most people when they think
of Maine they think of the Seacoast but as far as I've ever been concerned Lobster pots are to make
coffee tables out of uh is it scary up there it's scary at night in the woods in the dark with loons
on the lake now we're getting somewhere Stephen King this morning uh his most recent work is uh
the fire starter and there's a picture of someone who looks a little like you but that's not true
it's a guy who looks like an author you had to take this picture for yeah that's that's severe
that's Mr Hyde you got Jekyll this morning what about uh uh Jack Nicholson in The Shining were
you pleased with the with that I thought he did a wonderful job yeah shining I did very much how
did you feel about the movie itself well I feel both ways or I got to see it four times because
of commitments one place and another and there are an awful lot of things about that movie that
I think are flawless and beautiful and uh just marvelous and then there are other times when
I feel as though uh I'd given Stanley Kubrick a live grenade knee heroically threw his body on it
um when when you sell something to a Motion Picture company I guess there'd be several
thousand different kinds of deals but how much control do you have of what actually gets on
on the screen well I've never asked for a lot of control I'm working with a guy named George Romero
now who did Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead a couple of Nursery tales for younger
people you know yes and uh I'll be working on the screenplay with him and uh there I would expect
to exercise some control as part of the film company but as for actually selling a book to
the movies you send it off the way you'd send a child off to school and you hope it will do well
and well will be done by it but I've never asked for control then you're in a perfect situation
if they do a great job you can say that's my book and if they do a lousy job you can
say I had no control right right I was pirated yeah uh what about the you have children three
now uh well uh how what are the ages I've got a daughter who's 10 and a little boy who's eight
and another little guy who's three and a half do the older kids read your Works they've seen uh
Salem's Lot which was made into a TV movie and uh they've seen excuse me the TV version
of Carrie but as far as reading the things they've never been forbidden but my daughter
is the great reader right now and she's really involved with horses and things like that she's
not into vampires yet uh what kind of things do you read everything I can get my hands on really
um I don't read really widely in the horror field if it's something that I really want to
read I do but I like General novels uh any kind of non-fiction that looks interesting kind of
interested in uh Dillinger and someday I like to write a book about Dillinger and those bad
guys former fellow Hoosier I believe yeah from Indiana yeah uh has this tell me the difference
between just a horror film and a science fiction film they both are kind of overlapping yeah they
do and uh you know fans argue about this back and forth for hours but my idea of what a horror film
is is it's something that comes out of nothing that's totally inexplicable and in a science
fiction movie you say well we have this now so that maybe in uh 20 years or 30 years we
really will be able to clone Ronald Reagan if we want to you know that sort of thing
so I see that as the difference yeah yeah uh I guess the like Star Wars the first one that
was all fabrication because they said a thousand Generations ago yeah so I see that as a fantasy
though David really um basically what they're saying is let's remake Buck Rogers Flash Gordon
or all the things that we remember it has some science fiction trappings this spaceship Zoom
around but they're just saying they're there let's not worry about why they're there what uh can you
tell me quickly this is your new book are you now working on the next one I'm starting to play
around with an idea on paper you know the ideas come and they stay for a while and then if they
don't go away you kind of hope that they will because most writers are pretty lazy and if it
won't go away finally you have to pick it up and do something with it so do you think of a great
scary scene and then write a book to it or does it happen the other way around usually what happens
is if you're writing a horror book and this thing that I'm working on should turn out to be a real
screamer if it goes the way that I want it to you get an idea for something that's really nasty yeah
yeah terrific it's called the fire starters his latest work and Stephen King thank you very much
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