1A: Stephen King

Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview

The horror master looks back on his four-decade career

By Andy Greene | October 31, 2014

Stephen King's office building sits on a particularly dreary dead-end road on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, just down the street from a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership and, appropriately enough, an old cemetery. From the outside, the anonymous building looks like a new branch of Dunder Mifflin, a very deliberate choice meant to keep King and his tiny staff safe. "We can't be on a main road because people would find us," says one of his assistants. "And it's not people you want to find you. He draws some weird people."

Once buzzed in, a visitor enters a sort of Stephen King nirvana – rooms decorated with fan-created artwork populated with characters from his novels, a Stephen King Simpsons action figure, a freakish bobble-head doll of the demented clown from his 1986 book IT, and piles and piles of books. He keeps an old Gothic house (complete with spiderwebs and bats on the front gate) just a few miles away that draws bus loads of tourists, but he's virtually never there. Most of the year, he lives two and a half hours away in Lovell, Maine, and now with his three kids grown, he and his wife, Tabitha, head down to Sarasota, Florida, at the height of winter.

King himself only comes into the office about once a month, but today he stopped by and, as usual, he's juggling a lot of projects at once. He just polished off a final draft of his upcoming serial-killer book Finders Keepers (a sequel to his recent work Mr. Mercedes), a pretty astonishing feat considering he will also release two books this year, write a screenplay for the new Joan Allen/Anthony LaPaglia film A Good Marriage and continue to fine-tune Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a musical he wrote with John Mellencamp.

But right now, the 67-year-old is hunched over an easy chair in his office, chomping on a doughnut that's leaving a growing pile of powdered sugar on his black turtleneck shirt. He's excited about the upcoming publication of Revival, a modern-day Frankenstein story about a preacher who's obsessed with the healing powers of electricity and his 50-year relationship with a drug-addled rock guitarist. It's basically guaranteed to land at Number One on The New York Times bestseller list.

Since 1974, when Carrie hit shelves, King has sold an estimated 350 million books, and he's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. John Grisham and Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James may outsell him these days, but it's hardly a problem. "He's not competitive," says his longtime agent Chuck Verrill. "The only guy he ever cared about was Tom Clancy. They were both at Penguin once, and it was made clear to King that he was seen as the second banana to Clancy. He didn't like that, but he's very content where he is right now." 

King hasn't done many recent in-depth print interviews since a van accident nearly killed him 15 years ago, but he decided to sit down with Rolling Stone to discuss his life and career.

The vast majority of your books deal with either horror or the supernatural. What drew you toward those subjects?It's built in. That's all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated. I can't explain it. My wife and kids drink coffee. But I don't. I like tea. My wife and kids won't touch a pizza with anchovies on it. But I like anchovies. The stuff I was drawn to was built in as part of my equipment.

Did you ever feel shame about that?No. I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there. And I cut my teeth on horror comics like The Crypt of Terror.

By writing horror novels, you entered one of the least respected genres of fiction.Yeah. It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck . . . Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre.

Few would argue with that.It's more respected now. I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. I'm not trying to be conceited or anything. Raymond Chandler elevated the detective genre. People who have done wonderful work really blur the line.

A lot of critics were pretty brutal to you when you were starting out.

Early in my career, The Village Voice did a caricature of me that hurts even today when I think about it. It was a picture of me eating money. I had this big, bloated face. It was this assumption that if fiction was selling a lot of copies, it was bad. If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. And that's elitist. I don't buy it.

But that attitude continues to this day. Literary critic Harold Bloom viciously ripped into you when you won the National Book Award about 10 years ago.Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess. He might be able to say that Mark Twain is a great writer, but it's impossible for him to say that there's a direct line of descent from, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jim Thompson because he doesn't read guys like Thompson. He just thinks, "I never read him, but I know he's terrible." Michiko Kakutani, who writes reviews for The New York Times, is the same way. She'll review a book like David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, which is one of the best novels of the year. It's as good as Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, has the same kind of deep literary resonance. But because it has elements of fantasy and science fiction, Kakutani doesn't want to understand it. In that sense, Bloom and Kakutani and a number of gray eminences in literary criticism are like children who say, "I can't possibly eat this meal because the different kinds of food are touching on the plate!"

Film critics can look at a popular movie like Jaws and heap praise upon it, then in another section of the paper, the critics will bash you for The Stand.

By its very nature, film is supposed to be an accessible medium to everybody. Let's face it, you can take a fucking illiterate to Jaws and he can understand what's going on. I don't know who the Harold Bloom of the film world is, but if you found someone like that and said to him, "Compare Jaws with 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut," he'd just laugh and say, "Well, Jaws is a piece of crappy, popular entertainment, but 400 Blows is cinema." It's the same elitism.

Switching gears, your new book Revival talks a lot about religion. Specifically, one of the two main characters is a reverend that turns on God when his family dies but also delivers a sermon about why religion is a complete fraud. How much of that sermon mirrors your own beliefs?My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people. I grew up in a Methodist church, and we went to services every Sunday and to Bible school in the summer. We didn't have a choice. We just did it. So all that stuff about childhood religion in Revival is basically autobiographical. But as a kid, I had doubts. When I went to Methodist youth fellowship, we were taught that the Catholics were all going to go to hell because they worship idols. So right there, I'm saying to myself, "Catholics are going to go to hell, but my aunt Molly married a Catholic and she converted and she's got 11 kids and they're all pretty nice and one of them's my good friend – they're all going to go to hell?" I'm thinking to myself, "This is bullshit." And if that's bullshit, how much of the rest of it is bullshit?

Did you relay any of your doubts to your mother?Jesus, no! I loved her. I never would have done that. Once I got through high school, that was it for me. When you see somebody like Jimmy Swaggart and he's supposed to be this great minister touched by God, and he's paying whores because he wants to look up their dresses, it's just all hypocrisy.

All that said, you've made it clear over the years that you still believe in God.Yeah. I choose to believe in God because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength. I don't ask myself, "Well, does God exist or does God not exist?" I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, "God, I can't do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today." And that works fine for me.

Do you believe in the afterlife?I don't know. I'm totally agnostic on that one. Let's put it this way, I would like to believe that there is some sort of an afterlife. I do believe that when we're in the process of dying, that all these emergency circuits in the brain take over. I base what I'm saying not on any empirical evidence. I think it's very possible that when you're dying, these circuits open up, which would explain this whole white-light phenomena – when people clinically die and they see their relatives and stuff and say, "Hello, it's great to see you."

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