KING on KING
The following text is taken from Eric Norden´s interview with King in June 1983.
Mette Weisberg: Stephen Kings American Nightmare - An Intro. (Forlaget Lee, 1991)
NORDEN: Why Do You Write That Stuff?
KING: That's one question that always comes up. The reason is because I'm warped, of course.
A lot of people are afraid to say that, but I'm not.
I have a friend named Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel Psycho, on which Hitchcock's film was based, and he would always say in answer to that question, "Actually, I have the heart of a small boy.
I keep it in a jar on my desk."
Another reason that I've always written horror is because it's a kind of psychological protection.
It's like drawing a magic circle around my family and myself. My mother always used to say, "If you think the worst, it can't come true."
I know that's only a superstition, but I've always believed that if you think the very worst, then, no matter how bad things get (and in my heart I've always been convinced that they can get pretty bad), they'll never get as bad as that.
If you write a novel where the bogeyman gets somebody else's children, maybe they'll never get your own children ( ...)
The other thing is, I really like to scare people. I really enjoy that ...
The trick is to be able to get the reader's confidence. I'm not really interested in killing somebody in the first paragraph of a novel. I want to be your friend. I want to come up to you and put my arm around you and say, "Hey, you want to see something? It's great! Wait till you see it! You'll really like this thing." Then I get them really interested" and lead them up the street and take 'em around the corner and into the alley where there's this awful thing, and keep them there until they're screaming!
It's just fun. I know how sadistic that must sound, but you have to tell the truth.
Writing is necessary for my sanity.
As a writer, I can externalize my fears and insecurities and night terrors on paper, which is what people pay shrinks a small fortune to do. In my case, they pay me for psychoanalyzing myself in print.
And in the process, "I'm able to write myself sane," as that fine poet Anne Sexton put it. It's an old technique of therapists, you know: get the patient to write out his demons. A Freudian exorcism. But all the violent energies I have - and there are a lot of them - I can vomit out onto paper. All the rage and hate and frustration, all that's dangerous and sick and foul within me, I'm able to spew into my work. There are guys in padded cells all around the world who aren't so lucky.