The View from the Cheap Seats (13 page)

“And even now this”—he gestures, taking in the swimming pool, the guesthouse, the Florida key and all the many McMansions—“is all very strange to me, even though it's only three months of the year. Where we live in Maine is one of the poorest counties. A lot of the people we see and hang with cut wood for a living, drive trash, that sort of thing. I don't want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use.

“Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for three fucking hours, you know, and people will have drinks before, wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this crap. To me my idea of what's good is to drive here and go to Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and a waffle. When I see the first Waffle House, I know I'm in the South. That's good.

“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “for something that I would do for free.”

STEPHEN KING'S FATHER
went out for cigarettes when King was four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is finishing his third novel. Owen's first novel is coming out in 2013.

I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012?

“It is definitely harder. When I wrote
Carrie
and
'Salem's Lot,
I was one step away from manual labor. But it's like also true—Joe is going to find out this is true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time.

“But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little twelve-year-old girl in
Doctor Sleep
than it ever was for me to talk about five-year-old Danny Torrance because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don't mean that Joe has the shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here's the bottom line: if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in
American Gods,
and if I can imagine magic doors and everything, then surely I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I imagine it's like to work a ten-hour day in a blue-collar job.”

We're doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft, about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a vocation. His next book,
The Wind Through the Keyhole,
is a
Dark Tower
novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years to finish, and he only finished spurred on by his assistants, Marsha and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the story would be completed.

Now he's finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King
is a character in the fifth and sixth
Dark Tower
books, and Stephen King the nonfictional author is wondering whether to take him out in the next draft.

I told him about the peculiarity of researching the story I was working on, that everything I needed, fictionally, was waiting for me when I went looking for it. He nods in agreement.

“Absolutely—you reach out and it's there. The time that it happened the clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me, ‘This is a bit crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a serialized novel like Dickens used to do?,' and I had a story that was sort of struggling for air. That was
The Green Mile
. And I knew if I did this I had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because . . .” He hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn't sound foolish. “. . . Every time I needed something that something was right there to hand. When John Coffey goes to jail—he was going to be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn't do it, but I didn't know that the guy who did do it was going to be there, didn't know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before.

“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me lowballing my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have an unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at night. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there . . .”

King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. “I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything
is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hard copy.”

I START TO
tell King my theory, that when people in the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973 and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there, behind the monsters and the night, making them more real.

King is sanguine. “You know what, you can't tell what is going to last, what's not going to last. There's a Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. MacDonald saying, ‘Two hundred years from now, when people want to know what the twentieth century was like they'll go to John D. MacDonald,' but I'm not sure that's true—it seems like he's almost been forgotten. But I try and reread a John D. MacDonald novel whenever I come down here.”

Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King. And, I realize, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions.

“You know what's bizarre? I did the Savannah book fair last week . . . This is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing ovation from all these people, and it's like a creepy thing . . . either you've become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that you are not dead yet.”

I tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a tryout tour of
Victor/Victoria
. It was not very good, but she got a standing ovation for being Julie Andrews.

“That's so dangerous though, for us. I want people to like the work, not me.”

And the lifetime achievement awards?

“It makes them happy to give them to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don't know that.”

Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time for dinner, and she adds that back at the big house the gargantuan African spurred tortoise has just been discovered trying to rape a rock.

This interview originally ran in edited form in the UK
Sunday Times,
April 8, 2012.

S
ome people change. Kids you knew at school become investment bankers or bankruptcy specialists (failed). They fatten and they bald and somewhere you get the sense that they must have devoured the child they once were, eaten themselves bit by bit, mouthful by mouthful, until nothing is left of the smart, optimistic dreamer you knew when you were both young.

On a bad day, I worry that it's happening to me.

And then I see Geoff Notkin, and everything's all right.

True, sometimes, when he looks in the right direction, I see his father, Sam Notkin, a man so cool we used to talk obscure 1940s American science fiction authors together. But mostly I see Geoff, and he hasn't changed.

Geoffrey Notkin in 1976 was impetuous, brilliant, obsessed, really funny, easily angered but someone who would just as quickly forget that he'd ever been angry. We were both outsiders at school, Geoff because he was semi-American, me because I lived in books, and we bonded over music and comics. I took Geoff to a Lou Reed concert at the New Victoria, and we started a punk garage band, literally in his garage. Geoff was a terrific and passionate drummer.

We drew comics together, in the back of classes that bored us. Most classes bored us. We were smart kids who ignored most of school (we both liked the art rooms, I liked the school library)
and taught ourselves, because that seemed like more fun. We liked being disliked by the teachers, and neither of us actually got around to graduating.

We were friends. We dated the same girls (although never at the same time). We read the same comics and listened to the same music (often at the same time) and even dyed our hair blond, or tried to. Geoff's parents did not mind that he had dyed his hair blond. My father minded that I had dyed my hair a straw orange, and made me dye it black, which was even stranger. We signed to a record label as young punks, and none of our music is around anywhere except possibly tapes somewhere in Geoff's storage lockers, and I like to think that as long as I get him this introduction on deadline any tapes will stay there. Geoff put me into the ambulance when I needed to get my faced stitched up after a grumpy punter expressed his dislike of our band by throwing an (unopened) beer can at me . . .

I think it was after the beer can incident that I stopped dreaming of being a rock star.

I would see Geoff every few years, our lives strobing: the last time I saw his parents, introducing them to my infant daughter Holly, and finding that I had been forgiven for the unfortunate events of the night of Geoff's party; the all-consuming envy of Geoff for inking Will Eisner at the School of Visual Arts, of knowing Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman, people who were the gods and demigods of a twenty-four-year-old journalist in London who dreamed of one day doing comics; Geoff Notkin rocking-man-about-town as I started stumbling into New York as someone who made his living writing comics; and then the e-mails from Geoff, in which he was going off to Siberia to look for meteorites . . .

Truthfully, it had never occurred to me that anyone actually ever looked for meteorites. I assumed that you noticed them when they hit your house or your car, or landed, green
and pulsing, in your meadow before they transformed you into something monstrous. I did not think that people went out and looked for them with rare-earth magnets and madness.

I watched
Meteorite Men
because Geoff was on it, and I was delighted to observe that Geoff is still, so obviously that it comes through the television screen, impetuous, brilliant, obsessed, truly funny, and capable of losing his temper really entertainingly whenever he's frustrated and of forgetting and forgiving almost instantly. But I kept watching it because I was hooked: Geoff has an autodidact's love of knowledge. He does not stop marveling at the universe, and, for Geoffrey Notkin, the quickest way to touch the rest of the universe is to find something that came from another part of it and landed here, like a meteorite.

He gave me a meteorite of my own for my fiftieth birthday. It has a hole in it.

And in my head, it's still 1977 somewhere, and Geoff Notkin and I have taken the afternoon off school to hit the secondhand book stores, and some record stores that have the real American punk imports that Geoff loved and the Velvet Underground bootlegs I dreamed about, and Geoff is standing on the side of the road shouting, “We mean it, mannnnnnn,” at the cars going by, and we are kids in school uniforms and it's also now, thirty-five years later, and nothing's changed.

He still means it, every word.

This was my introduction to Geoff's memoir
Rock Star: Adventures of a Meteorite Man,
2012.

I
t was October 1983, I think, and I was twenty-two, and it was the room upstairs in the Royal Connaught pub in Holborn, and the British Fantasy Society was having one of its dos. It was the first of the dos I'd attended. BFS Social Nights are occasional events, where authors and fans and critics and people from the twilight worlds of publishing and movies get together and drink too much and talk a lot. There's no agenda, no speeches, nothing more organized than an occasional raffle.

Someone—probably editor and journalist Jo Fletcher—introduced me to a man wearing a white hat and a crisp black suit. He had a handlebar moustache and a pocket watch on an honest-to-goodness watch chain across his waistcoat. He was drinking a white wine spritzer and had total self-assurance. He was twenty-three, but came across somehow as much older. He looked like he should be carrying a swordstick, although, for reasons I was not to discover for some time, he wasn't.

Kim and I were both young and we were both quite full of ourselves—in hindsight we were probably insufferable. We compared credentials: he'd just had a story accepted by
Interzone
(it was, if memory serves, “Patricia's Profession”) and I'd
just had a story rejected by
Interzone
and accepted by
Imagine
magazine. (And his story is in this collection, and is pretty damn good, and I just reread mine and decided not to include it in a collection of my short fiction because it was pretty terrible.) We were both young, although with me it showed, and with Kim it didn't, and we were both hungry.

And then the conversation lurched around to books we were going to write. Kim started telling me about a book he had planned called
The Set
. It was going to be about giant badgers going around England eating people. And I told Kim that I thought I'd quite like to do a book of science fiction quotations.

“That sounds like a good idea,” said Kim. “You can do the books bit. I'll write the film section.” Kim was a film reviewer and critic, writing for
City Limits
and the
British Film Institute Journal
. He'd already written a book called
Nightmare Movies,
which had yet to be published by a soon-to-be-bankrupt and rather dodgy publisher (and which would eventually be revised and updated and become the definitive reference work on post-Hammer horror).

That's what I remember, anyway. That was how Kim entered my life. So we wrote an outline for our proposed book of quotations, and knowing Kim, and knowing me, he finished his half of the outline before I started to write mine. We sent the outline for
Ghastly Beyond Belief
out to a few publishers, and Arrow bought it, and my collaboration with Kim Newman had officially begun.

It lasted for about five years.

Kim was always the senior member of the partnership. He had a credit card and savoir faire. He had an electric typewriter. He was also the powerhouse—our work habits were very different: I have always tended to wait for deadlines, while Kim invariably does things way before deadlines, and then does something else in the time left over.

He got his half of the book finished a couple of months ahead
of deadline. I got my half delivered the month after the deadline. It was pretty much the pattern of what was to come.

In the biographies at the beginning of
Ghastly Beyond Belief,
our editor, the lovely and talented Faith Brooker, described us both as “aspiring novelists.” I don't think we were. We were young writers with the unshakable (and unshaken) confidence that amongst the things we'd probably wind up writing would be novels. But we were looking forward to writing everything.

The room Kim rented in a Muswell Hill flat was tiny. It was filled to bursting point with books and videos and magazines; stills from strange movies were Blu-Tacked to the walls. There was a bed, a small table with an electric typewriter (his typewriter had a name, but that's Kim's story, not mine), a chair, a television, a VCR.

Kim could watch, and not just watch but enjoy, the most awful movies. He had and doubtless still has a pretty photographic memory: plots and actors and trivia, high culture and low. He knows everything.

Kim was a great reviewer, and a fine critic. (Reviewers tell you whether or not a film's the kind of thing you'd like if you like that kind of thing. Critics, good ones anyway, tell you what you've seen.) He seemed to spend much of his life (when he wasn't writing, or watching old videos) in film screenings.

I started going to screenings too. I was very hungry, very young, and was amazed that if I wrote something about the films, or even meant to write something about them one day, I could see films without paying—and they gave you chicken legs and sausages and glasses of white wine. And because I was going to screenings with Kim, I wound up accumulating a couple of film columns.

All through the eighties we wrote together, mostly humor. Quite a lot of it was even funny. Once—and only once—we tried to write straight fiction together, three hundred words each on a turnabout basis. It was a story about a vampire girl
picking someone up in a nightclub. It was terrible, and we never attempted it again.

Not like that, anyway.

Together, and later, as part of the somewhat amorphous entity known as the Peace and Love Corporation we wrote many hundreds of articles for dozens of publications. We told the world who Jack the Ripper really was. We blew the whistle on computer dating. We wrote what was perhaps the definitive guide to becoming a Mad Scientist (and Ruling the World).

It's more fun to look back on the things we didn't do: I remember plotting a computer game, the object of which was to find out who you were before your head exploded. We did it on spec, for a man who claimed to have invented the Swear Box. (It was a box that sat on your desk and said
fuck
or
shit
when you pressed a button.)

We plotted four cheap movies for a cheap movie director who wanted plots for cheap films. Kim later turned some of the plots into novels. They were probably better novels than they would have been low-budget movies.

Of course, by that time, we were part of the aforementioned Peace and Love Corporation.

The Peace and Love Corporation, which was never a corporation, although it was a bank account, and had nothing really to do with either Peace or Love, although I think on the whole we were pretty much in favor of both of them, was formed, more or less, during a party. We weren't at the party—it was being held in Kim's flat by his landlord. But we—Kim, Stefan Jaworczyn, Eugene Byrne and myself—were on sleeping bags in Kim's room, listening to the party going on down the hall. Kim had the bed.

The party was long and loud and the partygoers (old hippies to a man) were playing old hippy music.

We started talking about hippies, lying in the darkness. And we began to rant about commune life and going to San Fran
cisco and putting flour in our hair. It was a kind of free-form improvised stand-up routine, only we were lying on the floor.

The next day we wrote down what we could remember of the rant, added a plot of sorts, called it “Peace and Love and All That Stuff” and sent it off to a magazine, and became the Peace and Love Corporation.

Clive Barker was fascinated by the Peace and Love Corporation. At one point he announced that he was going to write a story called “Threshold,” in which Kim, Stefan and I would be creatures from a far-future world beyond the boundaries of pleasure and pain, come to the here and now to hunt down a fugitive. When he finally wrote it it was called
The Hellbound Heart,
and was later filmed as
Hellraiser
. Which may mean that Kim Newman was the original inspiration for Pinhead. They are, after all, both snappy dressers.

Gradually Kim and I became successful. It was a slow, odd process. We'd paid our dues, I suppose, and it was our time. Kim wrote novels under his own name, and, emulating the American pulp writers he admires, he would write cheerfully subversive novels and short stories under his Jack Yeovil pseudonym, in a week or less.

We stopped collaborating. The markets that we'd been writing for had dried up, or died, and we were both too busy—Kim wrote more novels and short stories, reviewed movies on breakfast television, and became a star, and I was off mostly writing comic books. The eighties were over, and the Peace and Love Corporation bank account was formally closed.

It's a time I still don't feel I have a handle on: one cannot exactly peer through rose-colored spectacles at those lost halcyon days of the mideighties. There is little nostalgia for that era, except in the most general terms, remembering the hustling, the fun of a time when we had little more than confidence, hubris, and the terrifying certainty that we were destined for interesting things to keep us going.

Over ten years later Kim is still an advocate of cultural fusion and unself-conscious postmodernism—the references and correlations and nods between high and low culture in the stories in this book, and in the rest of Kim's oeuvre, aren't there to impress; they're there because that's how Kim is and what he's made of. He knows, as it were, his shit. His stories are a wild ride that will take you places you've never been. Sit back and enjoy yourself. It is to be assumed that you will miss some of the jokes, some of the references, some of the fleeting images in the collage of movie stills and videos and old books, of half-forgotten actors and almost wholly forgotten TV serials. Don't worry about it.

Of course you'll miss something. You're not Kim Newman.

Who is urbane, brilliant, unique, and once carried a swordstick.

Neil Gaiman.
Somewhere in America. Three months late.

The introduction to
The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories
by Kim Newman, 1994.