King of the Thrill

Stephen King is getting the royal treatment. As midmorning descends upon Los Angeles, he’s being ushered through a sound stage at Warner Hollywood Studios, where his 1996 serial novel, “The Green Mile,” is in production, starring Tom Hanks as a prison guard for whom justice is about to take a supernatural turn.

Although the film is already more than a week behind schedule, King’s appearance precipitates a low-level buzzing that abates only when director Frank Darabont begins shooting Hanks in the corridor of what looks like a 1930s Southern jailhouse, where much of the story’s action takes place. Even then, people keep throwing surreptitious glances at the 51-year-old author, and when the scene is finished, Hanks himself drifts out to say hello. Together, they wander to another part of the set, where King gleefully allows himself to be strapped into “Old Sparky,” an astonishingly realistic electric chair, after which he and Hanks pose together for a few publicity stills.

Even without the electric chair, King looks like a character in one of his novels. Six-foot-3 and skeletally thin, he has the pale, bluish coloring of a cadaver, and the skin of his jaw is stretched so tight it gives his face the quality of a grinning skull.

Unlike most of the haunts that inhabit his imagination, however, he is friendly and open, stopping to talk with each person who comes to shake his hand.

This morning, that includes nearly everybody.

As he slowly negotiates the tangle of wires and electric cables at the sound stage’s perimeter, members of the cast and crew appear, in ones and twos, bearing a steady stream of books for him to sign. One actor asks for advice about his character, while another introduces King to a friend who’s visiting that day.

For a few minutes, King strolls slowly through the prison set, examining the worn brick walls and vintage props, each so detailed, so vividly re-created, that standing here is like taking a journey back in time. When someone asks whether all this looks the way he imagined, he smiles and says, “Exactly. It’s like walking inside my own head.”

Freeing the Creatures Inside His Brain

For the last 24 years, the inside of King’s head has been among the most fertile locations on the literary landscape, the source of an apparently unending series of novels, short stories and films. From his first book, ‘Carrie,” which appeared in 1974, to his most recent, the newly issued “Bag of Bones” (Scribner), King has produced at a rate that seems almost compulsive, sometimes cranking out two or three titles in a year. In 1988, he astonished even himself by publishing five books, and as recently as 1996, he followed the six monthly installments of “The Green Mile” with the one-two punch of ‘Desperation” and “The Regulators,” a pair of simultaneously released novels that reflect off each other like fun house mirrors, using a common set of themes and characters to very different ends.

It’s a daunting degree of prolificacy, but through it all, King has always seemed less like a workaholic than someone for whom writing is simply fun.

As Mike Noonan, the writer protagonist of “Bag of Bones” explains, in what could stand as King’s own epitaph, “Work had always been my drug of choice, even better than booze or the Mellaril I still kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Or maybe work was only the delivery system, the hypo with all the dreamy dreams inside.” Either way, King admits, ideas come to him like water through an open faucet--even when he’s not trying to write them down.

“I’ve taken off two months, three months at a time,” he recalls, “and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed. It’s as though something in there is running all the time. And if it doesn’t get an outlet on the page, it comes out in the dreams.”

“Bag of Bones” is not the first King book to revolve around a writer. As early as 1977, with “The Shining,” he was invoking the literary life as peculiarly suited to the exigencies of horror fiction, since, as he suggests in the new novel, “a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.” In King’s universe, however, writers are often beset as much by personal as supernatural demons, tortured by self-doubt, worried over how their work will be perceived. ‘Misery,” for instance--perhaps King’s finest effort--deals with a romance novelist who wants nothing more than to pursue literary aspirations, while ‘The Dark Half” features another writer hunted down by a pseudonym who has horrifically, psychotically, come to life.

King’s standard explanation is that writing is an easy subject; “I write about writers,” he notes, “for the same reason Dick Francis writes about jockeys--because I know the playing field.” Yet when pressed, he acknowledges another agenda, which has to do with his sense of having been overlooked by the critical establishment, and his own issues about the nature of what he does.

“I think,” King says, “that, to some degree, the conflicts we have as young people do echo up. They’re unresolved, and there’s this continuing effort to resolve them in art. Art is supposed to be the butterfly suture that brings the edges of the wound together, and in a lot of my fiction, I’ve dealt with a couple of questions again and again. Is what I’m doing literature? Is there any possibility that it can be literature? Is there any possibility that it will last? I’m not just in it for the money, or I wouldn’t still be in it. And you say to yourself finally that there has to be more than just story to make something really good.”

The Horrors Within vs. the Goblins

If such a statement sounds a bit defensive, King admits he sometimes feels that way. From the start of his career, he’s had to fight the constraints of the genre ghetto, as well as the general perception that anyone who publishes as much, and as successfully, as he does can’t be up to anything more than disposable entertainment with little substance inside. Even the critics who acknowledge him often question his reliance on otherworldly terrors when more natural ones might work as well.

This is one of the basic issues facing any horror writer: whether it’s more frightening to confront a supernatural danger or one that emanates from the depths of the human soul. With King, though, what often gets overlooked is that, for the most part, the ghosts and demons are manifestations of his characters’ personalities, connected to, and even created by, the turmoil of their inner lives.

In “Bag of Bones,” the spirits that pursue Mike Noonan are drawn by his own inclinations, his particular fascinations and desires.

“Every monster,” King explains, “every horrific situation, every supernatural situation can be taken in a metaphoric way, if you have an interest in normal human life. Or even abnormal human life. The ghosts in ‘Bag of Bones’ are bad conscience. Everybody has that. We all have a secret. And a secret is a ghost, as far as I’m concerned, because they get up and walk around at night when you can’t sleep.”

What’s interesting about King’s comments is that they reveal not only an appreciation of the potential of popular fiction, but also a sense of how its conventions can be tweaked to yield something literary and profound. This has been one of his intentions since he was a student at the University of Maine in the late 1960s, and it continues to motivate a great deal of his work.

“The Shining,” for instance, was initially conceived as “a Shakespearean tragedy, a kind of inside-out ‘King Lear,’ where Lear is this young guy who has a son instead of daughters.” The first draft was divided into acts and scenes instead of chapters and parts, although King opted for a more traditional structure in the end.

With “Desperation,” he decided to push the envelope even further, invoking God as a character to create a moral universe where good and evil face off against each other for stakes much higher than an individual life. Neither of these novels comes without its risks, especially “Desperation,” which alienated a number of King’s longtime readers who didn’t want to deal with God as a serious subject, an active supernatural force.

“In so many horror books and movies,” King says, “God is the equivalent of kryptonite. But I wanted God to be a character, because if you’re going to talk about the power of evil, you have to talk about the power of God, the power of good, to combat evil. By doing that, you make the evil a lot more real.”

Of course, presenting God as some kind of paranormal hit man may seem like narrative manipulation, a literal deus ex machina, as it were. But King is after something far more substantial--to articulate a moral vision of the world. Such a notion has always been essential to his writing, and the universe he evokes continues to be one in which evil lingers, and the sins of the fathers are repaid by their sons. Thus, the deity of “Desperation” is no translucent specter, but the full-bore God of Abraham, dispensing rage and retribution with a harsh, unsparing hand.

“Bag of Bones” operates from a similar sensibility, as the ghosts plaguing Mike Noonan turn out to be instruments of vengeance for a small town’s ancient crime.

“It’s an Old Testament idea,” King explains, “and not very palatable to us in Western culture, but generally speaking, evil does not die, and evil acts are visited on generation after generation, so that a child who’s beaten grows up to be a beater, and a child who’s abused grows up to be an abuser. Then, there’s the whole idea of sacrifice in ‘Bag of Bones,’ the sacrifice of the innocents in order to expiate guilt. That goes back to the Old Testament as well.”

Ultimately, all this makes for a complicated ethical landscape, where even the smallest act has resonances, and every moment is informed by the past. In such a world, King suggests, “it’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost. And people can decide to do the right thing, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be painful, that they won’t continue to have their doubts.”

Plagued With Doubt, He Writes It Down

The subject of doubt is one with which King has wrestled a lot lately, to the point of weaving it throughout “Bag of Bones.”

As Mike declares in the novel’s final pages, “Murder is the worst kind of pornography. . . . Have you set up a moral dilemma you don’t know how to solve?” King, for his part, is compelled by this issue, if also taken off-guard.

“The ending of ‘Bag of Bones’ surprised me,” he admits, “in the way the questions came up so baldly. It seemed to me that I had told the story, and it was a story I was pleased with, and then this voice inside said, ‘Well, wait a minute. What kind of story is it? And what kind of writer are you? You spread blood from 1974 all the way to 1998. A wide trail of blood behind you.’ So I had to look back.”

Making the process more urgent is the fact that King’s early novel “Rage” has been implicated in several recent school shootings, including one in which “the guy who did it had the book in his locker with passages underlined.”

Although he rejects the idea that his work in any way caused these incidents--”People are responsible for their own acts,” he says--King has withdrawn “Rage” from publication, acknowledging that “it may have acted on some of these kids as an accelerant, that they read this story about a kid holding his class hostage and shooting his teacher, and decided to act it out.”

In the wake of this, he now wonders “how long I want to walk a tightrope between what I consider to be necessary to the plot, and the idea of the Grand Guignol. When Mike Noonan says he’s lost his taste for spooks, that’s not literally true of me. But I’ve certainly developed a lot of questions about my love for violence.”

For all that, though, when it comes to creativity, King believes the matter of conscious intention may be largely moot.

“I get an idea for a story,” he says, “and sometimes it will lead me into a place where there are supernatural happenings, and sometimes it won’t.” The process is mysterious, subterranean, in which for the most part, King jokes, he functions as a receiver, as if there were “a big magnetic piece of rock buried inside my head.”

A Deserted Street Populates a Book

The genesis of “Desperation” is a perfect illustration of how this works, involving an idea that percolated deep within the author’s subconscious until the right circumstances raised it to the surface of his mind.

“I was bringing my daughter’s car back from Reed College,” King remembers, “driving it from Portland, Ore., back to Maine. It was this real overcast day, and I go through this little town. And there was nobody on Main Street. Main Street was totally deserted. There are a couple of cars in the slant parking spaces, but otherwise nobody on the sidewalk, and I’m thinking, where are they all? And right away, the voice in the back of my mind, that’s been waiting, says, ‘All dead.’ And I go, ‘Oh, are they? Why are they all dead?’ And the voice says, ‘Sheriff killed them. Sheriff went crazy and killed everybody in town.’ I’m going, ‘Couldn’t kill everybody,’ and the voice says, ‘He did.’ So I go, ‘How did he do it? And the voice says, ‘Write it down. You’ll know.’ ”

As King recounts this story, his own voice starts to change its timber, and his face grows animated, like every detail he’s describing is being played out on the inside of his skin. It’s a revealing moment, one that highlights the depth of connection between himself and his stories, the shape and texture they possess within his head. There’s something private, almost intimate, about the telling, as if for King, storytelling were as essential a mechanism as breathing, and it brings to mind a passage in “Bag of Bones,” in which he catalogs all the processes by which we make it through our lives.

“This,” he writes, “is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogs, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T.; We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall: We say yes, I agree that clouds look like other things--fish and unicorns and men on horseback--but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”