Fame & Fortune: Stephen King
A Halloween visit with the king of all things scary |
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Bankrate: You haven't been this playful with language in a while.
King: If ever. To some degree, the book is about language. It's about a writer. It's about this guy coming into this woman's life and saying in effect, "Let's make our own world. Let's remake the world inside our own relationship." And it just seems to me that to some degree that's what marriage is, it's remaking a world inside the real world and that's where people exist, inside their own little bio-dome. They have their own language and people outside don't understand it and that's fine. They exist there. And they have their own places they go, and writers have their own places they go. I think a lot of writers escape either the humdrum or things that are very, very unhappy in their own lives by going to those other places.
Bankrate: Do you think Tabitha has felt that her career has struggled in the shadow of yours?
King: I think that, to some degree, she and everybody else in the family feels a little bit overshadowed because they all write. But that's the sort of thing that, what can I do? I'm just there. But they're very generous and very great about it.
Bankrate: Lisey and her sisters aren't exactly on the best of terms.
King: Well, some of the sisters here don't like each other either. That's the difference between brothers and sisters. I think brothers, a lot of times, do fall right out of contact with each other if they don't get along. But sisters seem to stay together; they have better socialization skills than guys do. Some of it is drawn from Tabby's sisters and some of it is drawn from stories my mother told. You get stuff from everywhere. You know how writers are, you're just a junky -- everything comes in and you hold on to the stuff you need.
Bankrate: Based on your Entertainment Weekly column and your Web picks, you have a fairly eclectic taste in movies, music and fiction.
King: I try to get across a wide range of stuff. I don't want to stick to one particular flavor because there isn't that much time. I'm aware of that, and I'm also aware of the dangers of becoming a one-note person. I feel like, for a popular novelist, I've got one real great thing going for me, and that is that I did have a liberal arts education. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm proud of it. I didn't get educated, obviously, at an Ivy League school. I'm not sure that makes a real difference really, if you're dedicated and you're willing to do the reading. There are places where I'm deficient, but I continue to try to remedy that and get as much as I can because that all comes in handy.
Bankrate: As a fiction writer, do you feel marginalized by the media, trapped by the whole "King of Horror" label?
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