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INTERVIEWER
What do you think it is that we’re afraid of?
KING
I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But
if you mean, What are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re
afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that is what I’m interested
in. I mean, there are a lot of people whose writing I really love—one of them
is the American poet Philip Booth—who write about ordinary life straight up, but I just can't do that.
I once wrote a short novel called “The Mist.” It’s about this mist that rolls in
and covers a town, and the story follows a number of people who are trapped
in a supermarket. There’s a woman in the checkout line who’s got this box of
mushrooms. When she walks to the window to see the mist coming in, the
manager takes them from her. And she tells him, “Give me back my mushies.”
We’re terrified of disruption. We’re afraid that somebody’s going to steal
our mushrooms in the checkout line.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say then that this fear is the main subject of your fiction?
KING
I’d say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the
books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class
American life as it’s lived at the time that particular book was written.
In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s
inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank
phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals
living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is
an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it.
What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and
the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and
ghouls and ghosts.
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