Stephen King Reflects on his Iconic Career

50 years ago, a 26-year-old rural Maine school teacher wrote a horror novel titled Carrie. That man, Stephen King, has gone on to write more than 60 books since. They’ve sold between four to 500 million copies worldwide and have been turned into films like The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and many more. King invited our senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown to his Maine home to talk about his latest book of short stories called You Like It Darker and the long arc of his career. It’s part of our arts and culture series Canvas.

In his new collection, Stephen King writes of the eerie, the unsettling, the otherworldly raising its head in this one. He calls it You Like It Darker, and he clearly does.

Darker means spooky, it means scary, it means let’s exercise are unpleasant emotions for a while. Because I think that people like the idea of opening the door and saying, “I want it darker. Do you want it darker? Okay, we’re in agreement and now let’s go into the woods together.”

Millions of readers have taken that dark walk with King, but we had our own lighter one with the now 76-year-old.

I feel a little bit like if I was a car, I’d trade.

Trade. Near his woods in Maine, a state where so many of his tales have been set.

I love Maine. I love the country. I’m not much of a city kid. I know the people and I think that they are stand-ins for people everywhere. I want to write about regular people, ordinary people in the best way that I know how.

In the best way, even in their dark moments?

I’m interested in what happens when regular people are suddenly confronted with something that’s totally out of their wheelhouse, something that’s entirely different. I think that, “Literature,” is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, and what I do are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

King himself grew up mostly in working-class, rural Maine. His mother raising him and his brother after his parents divorced. He began writing columns for his high school newspaper and then stories and more at the University of Maine, where he met Tabitha, another young writer, now his wife of 53 years. Early on, the young couple took on a variety of jobs to make ends meet.

I just wanted to support my family, to be able to say, “I’m doing work.” My wife also worked, she worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. She would come home smelling like a cruller and she looked so cute.

Carrie, the 1974 horror novel and two years later, a Brian De Palma directed film, changed everything. With Sissy Spacek as a shy, bullied high school girl with telekinetic powers, unforgettable revenge ensues. In his 2000 book On Writing, King tells of battling his own demons, early on with alcohol and drugs, later, after a van hit him on one of his local walks leading to years of pain and physical difficulties felt to this day. Can one write darker without having a kind of darkness himself?

Basically, I’m a perfectly nice fellow, good family man, good husband, good father. And all of this stuff that’s on the dark side, it comes out in the stories. And so it doesn’t have to come out in life. I used to think to myself, I could have been a very bad person except for the stories that I tell takes off a lot of the pressure.

Maybe that’s how his stories work for all of us. Whatever it is, Stephen King is as much a cultural icon as any American writer today. So we got all these movie posters from your… Especially when you consider the number of films and series made from his stories, around 100.

My first editor, Bill Thompson, used to say, “Steve has a movie camera in his head.”

Oh, really? You see the story?

Yeah. The stories are very visual. I grew up the first generation with movies and TV and they made a big impression on me, so I have a tendency to see things. And that’s part of the pleasure is the seeing.

More pleasure has come at times from rock and roll. The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band King formed in the ’90s with other writers including Dave Barry and Amy Tan. For all his success, King admits he wasn’t always happy with the critical reception he got.

There was a time when I felt like nobody will ever take me seriously as a writer’s writer, just as somebody who makes money. And it did make me angry because it seemed to me that there was an underlying assumption about popular fiction that if everybody reads it, it can’t be very good. I’ve never felt that way. I’ve felt that people can read and enjoy on many different levels.

But you got over worrying about that at some point clearly?

I got old. And I think that probably a lot of the critics who didn’t like my stuff are now dead, so (beep) them. I know you can’t-

Bleep them.

Yeah, bleep them.

You also wrote in your book, On Writing, you wrote about not only being the story’s creator, but its first reader. You want to feel the suspense of the story yourself?

Not only do I want to feel the suspense of the story, I want to relish the good parts.

You want to enjoy the good parts?

Every now and then you’ll say to yourself, “I wrote a really good line there. Oh boy, that’s really cool.”

But how does he do it? And how generates so many ideas?

I can’t explain it.

Try to explain it.

That’s the beautiful thing about what I do. It’s just like being belted by an idea.

He cites the example of the story, Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream in the new collection.

I was getting out of bed one day and I thought to myself, what if an ordinary guy had a psychic vision in a dream about where a body was buried and actually went out there and found that body? Would anybody believe that he had that vision or would they think that he did it?

All right. But wait a minute, you just woke up thinking that?

Yeah. No, I didn’t wake up thinking that, I was putting on my pants when I had this idea. And I put them on one leg at a time and I had one leg in my pants and I had this idea, and by the time I got the other leg in, I had almost the whole story. See, and who wouldn’t want to do something like that? I mean, that’s so trippy. But it is just the way that my mind works.

Trippy, dark, and clearly having a hell of a writing life.

I’m very fortunate to be able to do what I do. I love to tell stories and in a way I get paid for something that, in the words of the late John D. MacDonald, “I would do for free.” Okay, that’s good.

Coming soon in the Stephen King Universe, several new film and TV adaptations of his work. From the darker side in Western Maine, I’m Jeffrey Brown for the PBS NewsHour

And online we have more from Stephen King, including what he watches and reads when he’s not writing. That’s on our YouTube channel.