Different Seasons(192)

Depressing.

Once upon a time (he mourned) there really was a market for such tales—there were magical magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and The American Mercury. Fiction—fiction both short and long—was a staple of these and others. And, if the story was too long for a single issue, it was serialized in three parts, or five, or nine. The poisonous idea of “condensing” or “excerpting” novels was as yet unknown (both Playboy and Cosmopolitan have honed this particular obscenity to a noxious science: you can now read an entire novel in twenty minutes!), the tale was given the space it demanded, and I doubt if I’m the only one who can remember waiting for the mailman all day long because the new Post was due and a new short story by Ray Bradbury had been promised, or perhaps because the final episode of the latest Clarence Buddington Kelland serial was due.

(My anxiety made me a particularly easy mark. When the postman finally did show up, walking briskly with his leather bag over his shoulder, dressed in his summer-issue shorts and wearing his summer-issue sun helmet, I’d meet him at the end of the walk, dancing from one foot to the other as if I badly needed to go to the bathroom; my heart in my throat. Grinning rather cruelly, he’d hand me an electric bill. Nothing but that. Heart plummets into my shoes. Finally he relents and gives me the Post after all: grinning Eisenhower on the cover, painted by Norman Rockwell: an article on Sophia Loren by Pete Martin; “I Say He’s a Wonderful Guy” by Pat Nixon, concerning—yeah, you guessed it—her husband, Richard; and, of course, stories. Long ones, short ones, and the last chapter of the Kelland serial. Praise God!)

And this didn’t happen just once in a while; this happened every f**king week! The day that the Post came, I guess I was the happiest kid on the whole eastern seaboard.

There are still magazines that publish long fiction—Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker are two which have been particularly sympathetic to the publication problems of a writer who has delivered (we won’t say “gotten”; that’s too close to “misbegotten”) a 30,000-word novella. But neither of these magazines has been particularly receptive to my stuff, which is fairly plain, not very literary, and sometimes (although it hurts like hell to admit it) downright clumsy.

To some degree or other, I would guess that those very qualities—unadmirable though they may be—have been responsible for the success of my novels. Most of them have been plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s. I am able to recognize elegant prose and to respond to it, but have found it difficult or impossible to write it myself (most of my idols as a maturing writer were muscular novelists with prose styles which ranged from the horrible to the nonexistent: cats like Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris). Subtract elegance from the novelist’s craft and one finds himself left with only one strong leg to stand on, and that leg is good weight. As a result, I’ve tried as hard as I can, always, to give good weight. Put another way, if you find out you can’t run like a thoroughbred, you can still pull your brains out (a voice rises from the balcony: “What brains, King?” Ha-ha, very funny, fella, you can leave now).

The result of all this is that, when it came to the novellas you’ve just read, I found myself in a puzzling position. I had gotten to a place with my novels where people were saying King could publish his laundry list if he wanted to (and there are critics who claim that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last eight years or so), but I couldn’t publish these tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long. If you see what I mean.

“Sí, señor, I see! Take off your shoes! Have some cheap rum! Soon thee Medicore Revolución Steel Band iss gonna come along and play some bad calypso! You like eet preety-good-fine, I theenk! And you got time, señor! You got time because I theenk your story ees gonna—”

—be here a long time, yeah, yeah, great, why don’t you go somewhere and overthrow a puppet imperialist democracy?

So I finally decided to see if Viking, my hardcover publisher, and New American Library, my paperback publisher, would want to do a book with stories in it about an off-beat prison-break, an old man and a young boy locked up in a gruesome relationship based on mutual parasitism, a quartet of country boys on a journey of discovery, and an off-the-wall horror story about a young woman determined to give birth to her child no matter what (or maybe the story is actually about that odd club that isn’t a club). The publishers said okay. And that is how I managed to break these four long stories out of the banana republic of the novella.

I hope you like them preety-good-fine, muchachos and muchachas.

Oh, one other thing about type-casting before I call it a day.

Was talking to my editor—not Bill Thompson, this is my new editor, a real nice guy named Alan Williams, smart, witty, able, but usually on jury duty somewhere deep in the bowels of New Jersey—about a year ago.

“Loved Cujo,” Alan says (the editorial work on that novel, a real shaggy-dog story, had just been completed). “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”

Déjà vu sets in. I have had this conversation before.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “I have given it some thought—”

“Lay it on me.”

“What would you think about a book of four novellas? Most or all of them just sort of ordinary stories? What would you think about that?”