by Stephen King
FOREWORDFOREWORD
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 unravelling with shocking suddenness.
At night, when I go to bed, I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are
under the blanket after the lights go out.
I'm not a child any more 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.
Sometimes I speak before groups of people who are interested in writing or in
literature, and before the question-and-answer period is over, someone always
rises and asks this question: Why do you choose to write about such gruesome
subjects?
I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a
choice?
Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of Occupation. All of us seem to come
equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters having
differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through
yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to
have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our
respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort
of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may
collect coins. The schoolteacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The
sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through,
frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have
an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions 'hobbies.'
Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that
he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the
schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the
lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and
remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by
pursuing his hobby; but because 'hobby' is such a bumpy, comon-sounding little
word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional
hobbies 'the arts.'
Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical
instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects
alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to
agree upon about them is this: that those who practise these arts honestly would
continue to practise them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if
their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or
death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional
behaviour. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call
'the arts'; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading you WILL TAKE MY GUN
ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston,
housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furore often
sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY
CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons.
Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely
wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully
in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them
after midnight.
We seem to be wandering away from the subject of fear, but we really haven't
wandered very far. The sludge that catches in the mesh of my drain is often the
stuff of fear. My obsession is with the macabre. I didn't write any of the
stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines
before they appeared here and I never once returned a cheque uncashed. I may be
obsessional but I'm not crazy. Yet I repeat: I didn't write them for money; I
wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable
obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are
not SO lucky
I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write. So each day I
sift the sludge anew, going through the cast-off bits and pieces of observation,
of memory, of speculation, trying to make something out of the stuff that didn't
go through the filter and down the drain into the subconscious.
Louis L'Amour, the Western writer, and I might both stand at the edge of a small
pond in Colorado, and we both might have an idea at exactly the same time. We
might both feel the urge to sit down and try to work it out in words. His story
might be about water rights in a dry season, my story would more likely be about
some dreadful, hulking thing rising out of the still waters to carry off sheep .
. . and horses . . . and finally people. Louis L'Amour's 'obsession' centres on
the history of the Amen-can West; I tend more towards things that slither by
starlight. He writes Westerns; I write fearsomes. We're both a little bit nuts.
The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the
mind. In some cases - Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart
Craine a
nd Sylvia Plath - the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding
it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign -creative people tend to live a
long time - sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because
you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge
carefully. . . because some of that stuff may not be dead.
After the why do you write that stuff question has been disposed of, the
companion question comes up: Why do people read that stuff? What makes it sell?
This question carries a hidden assumption with it, and the assumption is that
the story about fear, the story about horror, is an unhealthy taste. People who
write me often begin by saying, 'I suppose you will think I'm strange, but I
really liked 'Salem's Lot,' or 'Probably I'm morbid, but I enjoyed every page of
The Shining . .
I think the key to this may lie in a line of movie criticism from Newsweek
magazine. The review was of a horror film, not a very good one, and it went
something like this:'. . . a wonderful movie for people who like to slow down
and look at car accidents.' It's a good snappy line, but when you stop and think
about it, it applies to all horror films and stories. The Night of the Living
Dead, with its gruesome scenes of human Cannibalism and matricide, was certainly
a film for people who like to slow down and look at car accidents; and how about
that little girl puking pea soup all over the priest in The Exorcist? Bram
Stoker's Dracula, often a basis of comparison for the modern horror story (as it
should be; it is the first with unabashedly psycho-Freudian overtones), features
a maniac named Renfeld who gobbles flies, spiders, and finally a bird. He
regurgitates the bird, having eaten it feathers and all. The novel also features
the impalement - the ritual penetration, one could say - of a young and lovely
female vampire and the murder of a baby and the baby's mother.
The great literature of the supernatural often contains the same 'let's slow
down and look at the accident' syndrome: Beowulf slaughtering Grendel's mother;
the narrator of 'The Tell-Tale Heart' dismembering his cataract-stricken
benefactor and putting the pieces under the floorboards; the Hobbit Sam's grim
battle with Shelob the spider in the final book of Tolkien's Rings trilogy.
There will be some who will object strenuously to this line of thought, saying
that Henry James is not showing us a car accident in The Turn of the Screw; they
will claim that Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories of the macabre, such as 'Young
Goodman Brown' and 'The Minister's Black Veil', are also rather more tasteful
than Dracula. It's a nonsensical idea. They are still showing us the car
accident; the bodies have been removed but we can still see the twisted wreckage
and observe the blood on the upholstery. In some ways the delicacy, the lack of
melodrama, the low and studied tone of rationality that pervades a story like
'The Minister's Black Veil' is even more terrible than Lovecraft's batrachian
monstrosities or the auto-da-fe of Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum'.
The fact is - and most of us know this in our hearts - that very few of us can
forgo an uneasy peek at the wreckage bracketed by police cars and road flares on
the turnpike at night. Senior citizens pick up the paper in the morning and
immediately turn to the obituary column so they can see who they outlived. All
of us are uneasily transfixed for a moment when we hear that a Dan Blocker has
died, a Freddy Prinze, a Janis Joplin. We feel terror mixed with an odd sort of
glee when we hear Paul Harvey on the radio telling us that a woman walked into a
propeller blade during a rain squall at a small country airport or that a man in
a giant industrial blender was vaporized immediately when a co-worker stumbled
against the controls. No need to belabour the obvious; life is full of horrors
small and large, but because the small ones are the ones we can comprehend, they
are the ones that smack home with all the force of mortality.
Our interest in these pocket horrors is undeniable, but so is our own revulsion.
The two of them mix uneasily, and the by-product of the mix seems to be guilt. .
. a guilt which seems not much different from the guilt that used to accompany
sexual awakening.
It is not my business to tell you not to feel guilty, any more than it is my
business to justify my novels or the short stories which follow. But an
interesting parallel between sex and fear can be observed. As we become capable
of having sexual relationships, our interest in those relationships awakens; the
interest, unless perverted some-how, tends naturally towards copulation and the
continuance of the species. As we become aware unavoidable termination, we
become aware of the fear-emotion. And I think that, as copulation tends towards
self-preservation, all fear tends towards a comprehension of the final ending.
There is an old fable about seven blind men who grabbed seven different parts of
an elephant. One of them thought he had a snake, one of them thought he had a
giant palm leaf, one of them thought he was touching a stone pillar. When they
got together, they decided they had an elephant.
Fear is the emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're
afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a
knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it
first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is
over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in mid-air. We're
afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water,
the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now
quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we
sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute
telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a
stealthy ruin of the thinking process.
The infant is a fearless creature only until the first time the mother isn't
there to pop the nipple into his mouth when he cries. The toddler quickly
discovers the blunt and painful truths of the slamming door, the hot burner, the
fever that goes with the croup or the measles. Children learn fear quickly; they
pick it up off the mother's or father's face when the parent comes into the
bathroom and sees them with the bottle of pills or the safety razor.
Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiosity of
self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hudred parts, like the blind men
with their elephant.
We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn as adults.
The shape is there, and most of us come to realise what it is sooner or later:
it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear,
all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear.
We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of
horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own
deaths.
The field has never been highly regard
ed; for a long time the only friends that
Poe and Lovecraft had were the French, who have somehow come to an arrangement
with both sex and death, an arrangement that Poe and Love-craft's fellow
Americans certainly had no patience with. The Americans were busy building
railroads, and Poe and Lovecraft died broke. Tolkien's Middle-Earth fantasy went
kicking around for twenty years before it became an aboveground success, and
Kurt Vonnegut, whose books so often deal with the death-rehearsal idea, has
faced a steady wind of criticism, much of it mounting to hysterical pitch.
It may be because the horror writer always brings bad news: you're going to die,
he says; he's telling you to never mind Oral Roberts and his 'something good is
going to happen to you', because something bad is also going to happen to you,
and it may be cancer and it may be a stroke, and it may be a car accident, but
it's going to happen. And he takes your hand and he enfolds it in his own and he
takes you into the room and he puts your hands on the shape under the sheet. . .
and tells you to touch it here. . . here ... and here...
Of course, the subjects of death and fear are not the horror writer's exclusive
province. Plenty of so-called 'mainstream' writers have dealt with these themes,
and in a variety of different ways - from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and
Punishment to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Ross MacDonald's
Lew Archer stories. Fear has always been big. Death has always been big. They
are two of the human constants. But only the writer of horror and the
supernatural gives the reader such an opportunity for total identification and
catharsis. Those working in the gentre with even the faintest understanding of
what they are doing know that the entire field of horror and the supernatural is
a kind of filter screen between the conscious and the subconscious; horror
fiction is like a central subway station in the human psyche between the blue
line of what we can safely internalize and the red line of what we need to get
rid of in some way or another.
When you read horror, you don't really believe what you read. You don't believe
in vampires, werewolves, trucks that suddenly start up and drive themselves. The
horrors that we all do believe in are of the sort that Dostoyevsky and Albee and