Bare bones : conversations on terror with Stephen King by King Stephen 1947-;Underwood Tim;Miller Chuck 1952- & Underwood Tim & Miller Chuck 1952-

Author:King, Stephen, 1947-;Underwood, Tim;Miller, Chuck, 1952- & Underwood, Tim & Miller, Chuck, 1952-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: King, Stephen, 1947-, Novelists, American, Horror tales
Publisher: New York : Warner Books
Published: 1989-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

104 . BARE BONES

that any boy would like to be, the kind of boy any boy fantasizes himself to be: he can get out of knots. He's very brave. He's intent on revenging his parents, death, this and that. So for me, he was just sort of a dream figure. He pleased me very much, that boy; I like the way he turned out. He's a bigger-than-life archetypal eleven-year-old boy. And a lot of the kid characters in the books are strong and good. But I think kids are strong. They are good, generally speaking. Unless they've been warped in some way, I've never met a kid I thought was genuinely mean—although I'm not saying there aren't any. I just haven't met one. Q: No Bad Seeds. KING: No, I never met a Bad Seed.

Q: In 'Salem's Lot the teacher had a heart attack, and the kid went to sleep in ten minutes. It seemed like you were saying something about the qualities of childhood.

KING: One of the things I've always played around with in the books, in my mind, is that you're dealing with the unbelievable in a lot of these cases, like with vampires coming back. I've been trying all through my career not to shy away from the idea that I'm dealing with the unbelievable, but instead to play into it and observe people's reactions.

It's a little bit like, if you looked at your typewriter right now and there was a flower growing out of it. Well, if you saw it and you could feel it and smell it, and other people saw it too, then you'd have to agree it was really a flower. But your reaction would interest me a lot more than the flower itself. It would just be something that had happened. I don't know how else to put it. I think kids deal with that sort of thing better than adults. I think a kid'd come around and say, "There's a flower growing out of your typewriter."

Q: Most of the characters are pretty ordinary people who have managed to persevere.

KING: The overall thing, too, is the concept of reality. We understand what we understand by comparison and contrast. If we say Mark Petrie goes to sleep ten minutes after repulsing a vampire, while the teacher, Matt Burke, has a heart attack, then we're saying something about the ability to assimilate reality. It suggests something about the tunnel of per ception that we see things in. If kids have wider tunnels of perception well, then, why is that, and what happens to narrow it as we grow up, to make the strange and unusual so hard to take?

What is it about kids that they can look at the most outrageous thing

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