That's it for me. Mike will be here at the top of the hour
with more news.
Now on BBC News, it's HARDtalk with Stephen Sackur.
Welcome to HARDtalk.
I'm Stephen Sackur.
Millions of readers all over the world are drawn to fiction
that explores our fears.
Horror sells, and no-one does it better or more prolifically
than my guest today, Stephen King.
He's written more than 60 books, sold close
to 400 million copies.
He is the master manipulator of dark places and the paranormal.
If you're not a reader, you may have seen The Shining,
Carrie, Stand By me - all films based on his stories.
He's been writing for half a century.
How has our appetite for fear evolved?
Stephen King in Florida, welcome to HARDtalk.
Thank you very much.
It's nice to be here.
I wish we could do it in person.
Me too.
But nonetheless, it is a pleasure to
see you on my screen.
And let me begin by asking you about the threat
that we all, all over the world - in Florida, in the UK,
all over the world - are living with, and that is
Covid-19.
Has that invisible threat of the virus in any way
dimmed your enthusiasm for writing fiction
about dark places?
I would have to say actually not, because I've been
in quarantine, sheltering in place for part of the time.
Things have eased up a little bit, and I've managed
to get my two vaccinations - yay, me!
I'm not entirely protected yet and I think that we all have to
continue to take precautions.
But one of the things that all of this solitude and sort
of being in one place has done is freed my imagination.
It's a place to go, a place to forget about what's
going on in the world and think about anything from vampires
to curses to kids who talk to dead people -
to any of that stuff.
So it's been good for me, in a way.
And I think you're going to see a great flood of novels
from writers who no longer have an excuse not to sit
down at their machines.
But that is very interesting that the, the pervasive anxiety
of the society around you certainly hasn't
put you off from sort of delving into the macabre,
the, the dark, the difficult and the twisted in your
fiction, as you've done for more than 50 years.
Yeah, well, I think that a lot of people enjoy horror stories
because it allows them to express their anxieties
in ways that don't have anything to do with the real
world, if you see what I mean.
It gives them a chance to experience emotions, maybe,
that are not allowed in polite society - like aggression,
fear, anger...
All those things are great.
And when you see a monster movie or when you read a scary
book, it allows you to sort of test-drive those emotions,
which is a good thing, I think.
I think it's good to get those things out.
It's a kind of catharsis.
But, of course, I WOULD say that.
Yeah, you would say that.
You're sort of pro-scaring people.
And I guess you feel that, that scaring people when they're
already scared is a choice, and that many people
still make that choice.
I think that it's almost like the old-time days
when people would draw blood.
This way, it sort of draws anxiety -
at least I like to think so.
I hope so.
There are a lot of psychological reasons to enjoy
fiction that's fearful.
And in particular, when you deal with some
of the supernatural elements or the monsters and
that sort of thing, we understand it's not real.
Yeah.
So we feel that it's safe enough to go there.
Whereas when you have something like coronavirus,
that's very, very real.
And one of the things that interests me is how many books
came out right around the time of the coronavirus that dealt
with that particular issue.
There's a really good one called The End Of October
which deals with a pandemic that's eerily like what we're
going through now.
But that's not the same thing that we're talking about,
because that's very, very close to
the real anxieties.
You wrote your own book about a contagious, highly
infectious, dangerous disease, didn't you, back
in the late 1970s?
Have you revisited that to look at the degree to which you got
stuff right about the way in which societies react
to that sort of invisible but pervasive health threat?
Yes, I revisited it quite a lot because The Stand
is a miniseries over here on TV, and I think that it
will eventually show in England, if it hasn't already.
And it's very eerie to see scenes where people are wearing
masks and dumping bodies into mass graves.
We saw too much footage over here of refrigerated trucks,
particularly at the height of the pandemic, in places
like Los Angeles and New York, where there was just a backlog
of bodies and they were being stored.
And that really brought me back to the story that I wrote.
Are you going to write another virus novel?
No, I think not.
I think that people have seen enough of that.
The interesting thing for me is how novelists are going
to deal with the current situation, where everybody
is masking-up and everybody's trying to maintain social
distancing.
Let me at this point invite you to travel
back in time with me, because you've talked about why
horror and the genre that you write appeals to readers -
because you say it allows them to confront their deepest fears
in a controlled environment.
But I'm interested in not the reader,
but the writer - that is you.
And I'm interested in why, as a very young person, even
as a kid, you were attracted to the very dark places.
In your childhood writing, and then as a young
man in your 20s.
Your first book, of course, that was a great success
was Carrie, which, you know, delved into the paranormal and
was pretty dark in its own way.
Why?
What was it that took you there?
Well, you know, a lot of times when I'm doing interviews
or when I'm doing appearances where there are questions
afterwards, somebody will ask, "What were you like as a kid?"
And the subtext to that question is, what messed you up
so badly that you got twisted and you wrote all these
horrible stories?
Yeah, people want to know whether you are a bit
of a sicko or whether there was something very dark
in your childhood that took you in the direction you went.
Well, that's very Freudian.
And I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!
I'm just kidding, I think.
You know, the thing is, I was born with a big imagination.
And as a kid, it kind of made my life uncomfortable
in a lot of ways.
I was afraid of the dark.
I was afraid of noises in the house.
I had nightmares.
I could imagine all sorts of awful things happening to me.
And little by little, I was able to turn that
in another direction and harness what had
terrified me, what had scared me as a kid, and start
to write stories that would scare other people.
You know, in a way, this is the best of all possible
worlds, because there are people who go to
psychiatrists with their fears and they pay them a certain
amount of money to get an hour.
It's not even a full hour.
It's a 50-minute hour.
And what I do is, I bring these fears out and people
pay me to read them.
But, you know, there is no good, clear answer
to your question.
It's a mystery.
Uh...
But it doesn't strike me that you...
Sorry to interrupt, Stephen, but it does intrigue me that
you write a lot about kids - kids who are often quite
lonesome, but they do have special powers.
They see things, including ghostly and paranormal things,
which adults simply cannot see.
I've just finished reading your latest crime book, Later,
which is all about a kid who has that precise
talent, that gift.
Did you ever, as a kid, feel you could somehow see things?
You had a gift that adults around you simply
couldn't understand?
Oh, yeah, I could see things.
And they were very clear and I wrote them down.
And one of the ways that you tell somebody who's
intensely creative...
And as a kid, I was intensely creative, and I still am now
but I have better control over it now than I did as a child.
So, you know, the thing is, you grow up and you learn
how to harness that.
And childhood was vivid for me, and I enjoy revisiting that.
And one of the things that I like about it is that kids
have a wider perspective and they're more apt
to take into account the paranormal or the strange.
I mean, kids believe in Santa Claus, kids
believe in the tooth fairy.
So it's very easy for them to believe that
a house might be haunted.
Talking of beliefs, does Stephen King believe in God?
The jury's out on that, but as somebody famous said,
if you don't believe and there is one,
you're losing out.
It doesn't hurt to believe in God.
And so I choose to believe in a power greater than myself.
Why not?
It seems to help.
And so, yeah.
The reason that, the reason I'm intrigued is partly
because your books, you know, are in many ways
about good and evil.
You know, there are good people in your books
and there are some really atrociously bad
people in your books.
I don't know if you yourself use the word evil,
but if you do, where do you think evil comes from?
Well, evil is a tough one.
I was raised a Methodist and I had a very traditional
Protestant religious upbringing and I carried a lot
of that to my fiction.
And a lot of it is about good and evil.
And one of the things that interests me the most
about the stories that I write is - how do good people
behave when they're faced with difficult circumstances?
So I try to work on that as much as I can.
But when you talk about evil, the question is -
is there such a thing as outside evil?
That is to say, is possession, demonic possession,
really a possible thing, or is it a psychological
aberration?
We know about inside evil.
Whether or not there's outside evil is a question for fiction.
And I've written about it many times.
One of the things that has always struck me
about very evil people - serial killers like Ted Bundy,
the Moors murders, if you will, in England -
these are terrible, terrible things, but if we put
those people to death...
..the evil doesn't care, the evil just flies
away into someone else.
And then they - you - are faced with other terrible
things because we have those elements, that evil
is in all of us.
So that, that's interesting.
That is the perennial question, isn't it?
I mean, it's raised in your books, but it's also
raised in world history.
What are we, all of us, you, me, actually capable
of when it comes to the idea that we all have very dark
and bad stuff within us that we must control?
We do, and maybe we go to a horror movie like Saw
or Salem's Lot or The Stand and we get rid of some of those
feelings, we find a place to put them that's safe.
We almost have to do that because we all
have violent impulses.
It's part of our genetic make-up, if you will.
So in that way, I like to think that I'm serving
the public interest.
Well, and we thank you for it.
But if I may, let me get personal with you,
because you come across as a man who's done a lot
of deep thinking about your own psyche and the psyche
of all of us in the human race.
Why was there a period in your life where you clearly found
real issues with substance abuse and with control
and addiction?
What, what went wrong for you?
Well, nothing went wrong with me.
I was an alcoholic and a drug addict from
the beginning, and...
Really?
From...
Oh, God, from the time I had my first drink,
I just said, "Give me some more of that."
And the time that I first snorted cocaine, I thought
to myself, "I've found God."
I can remember very well...
I had an accident in 1999.
Guy hit me with a van and I ended up in the hospital
with broken bones and broken ribs and a concussion
and...a mess.
My leg was basically pencil shavings from the knee
on down on the right side.
I'm lucky to be alive.
And when I finally came out of it, three days
later, the doctor said, "How's your pain level?
"Is it...?
One to ten?"
I said, "It's like 20.
"It's like 25."
And he said, "Well, we have a wonderful new drug
"that's called OxyContin.
"And I think you're going to find "that it
controls the pain."
And the first time I took one of those pills,
I said to myself, "This is my new addiction."
And I was...
I used that stuff for the next four or five years.
But that's also like imagination.
It's something that's hard-wired, I think,
into the system.
It's a disease.
And I control it on a day-by-day basis.
And I don't drink.
I don't use.
I haven't for 32 years.
So this is a better way to live.
But I am still an active alcoholic, there's
no doubt about it.
Well, I'm not active, but I'm in remission.
Yeah.
Let me ask you how you feel American culture has evolved
over the last half-century, because that's the span
of your writing career.
It strikes me that when you began in the '60s,
you were writing in a very different context from the one
that we see young people growing up in today.
You know, the digital revolution, the impact
of the information flows that come with the internet,
social media - it's, it's changed culture so profoundly.
Do you think it is changing the tastes of what people want
to read and what you therefore need to write?
Well, it's been a very good thing for creative people,
for artistic people.
For years, writers, screenwriters, novelists...
..we were in what you'd call a seller's market, but now,
thanks to all the different streaming platforms
and to audio books and to Kindle books -
you know, books that you read on a screen -
everything is exploding so that we're now in a...
We're basically in a seller's market.
There's all sorts of call for creative...
For people who can write stories and make
things up, basically.
It's everywhere.
And the question of whether or not it has changed the way
that people consume - I would have to say that people
are a little more jaded now than they were in the old days.
When I started, in 1974, you had some very simple things.
You had books that were hard covers, then
they became paperbacks.
If you were very, very lucky, they might become a movie,
but that was pretty much the end of it right there.
And now the choices are very wide.
And I think, yeah, I have to say people
are a little bit jaded.
But do you think that they're jaded in a different sense?
A sense that, thanks to the phone they have
and the laptop and the tablet, they can access the most
extraordinary and often horrifying graphic images
and graphic stories at the click of a mouse or a button.
Do you feel that, when you sit in your writing room
and conjure up imaginings for a new story, you have to go
further in terms of the, the graphic element -
the violence, the horror, the fear-inducing stuff?
Do you have to push the envelope further
than ever before?
No, I don't need to do that because I'm not
interested in horror, per se.
I'm interested in people and what people do.
What I would like for readers, for you, Stephen, to feel
when they read one of my books is, I would like you to fall
in love with the characters and want the best in
the world for them.
In other words, yes, I'm a horror writer,
I won't disagree with that.
But what I really want to do is to engage your positive
emotions as much as I can so that, when terrible things
happen, you don't want to see somebody's head come off.
I think that, in a way, the Friday The 13th movies
were almost like snuff movies.
You didn't go to see the campers at Crystal Lake get
away, you wanted to see them killed with arrows and
buzz-saws and chainsaws and God knows what.
You know, I was in a supermarket down here
in Florida, and I came around a corner and there was a woman
coming the other way, and she pointed at me.
She said, "I know who you are.
"You're Stephen King.
"You write all those horrible things.
"And that's OK.
"That's all right.
"But I like uplifting things, "like that movie
Shawshank Redemption."
And I said, "I wrote that."
And she said, "No, you didn't, no..."
But interestingly, when you talk about what
really matters to you - that is connecting with
characters, generating love from reader to character
- you could...
You know, Shakespeare would have said that,
Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, all of the great writers
would say just the same thing.
Do you really resent the fact that you get put
in this box of the highly commercial-thriller guy?
You're not really seen as a literary writer,
a guy who actually has an enormous, immense
gift with words.
Does that stick in your throat?
I'm too old now for it to stick in my throat,
but there was a time when I resented it very much.
And there was also a time when I believed,
as a younger man, more naive, that there was a way
to build a bridge between, let's say, the literary and...
..and the popular.
That there was a way to actually have both
things at the same time.
And I think there was a time when that did happen,
although even at the height of his popularity
Charles Dickens was loved by the multitude, by the people
in the cheap seats, if you will.
They crowded the docks at Baltimore when the latest
edition, the latest chapter of Little Dorrit came in,
and the dock actually collapsed and people drowned
because they were so anxious to see what happened next.
And the literary critics of that day felt that
that was just below them.
Because there is this sort of elitist attitude, isn't there?
That if too many people like it, it really
can't be very good.
Final thought.
And it brings me to the present day.
You have 6.5 million Twitter followers.
You use your platform, often, to air your political views,
which are, I think it's fair to say, liberal, and have
been very anti-Trump over the last few years.
But it strikes me that Donald Trump has one gift,
which is to use fear as an extraordinarily
effective political weapon.
His famous inauguration speech, January 2017, the one
that we sort of call the American Carnage speech,
was all about using fear as a means to rally political
support.
I'm just wondering whether you're interested
in that and whether you, Stephen King, are considering
writing a novel about where America is today,
weaving politics and fear together?
Well, I did, in a way - I wrote a book called The Dead Zone.
It had a character in it named Greg Stillson, who goes
from being a door-to-door Bible salesman to a candidate for
President of the United States.
And he's a terrible person.
And at the same time, he's very much like Donald Trump.
And I was so distressed by George Bush's Iraq war,
I wrote a book called Under The Dome.
And I had a character in that book, named Jim Rennie,
who is the worst person in charge of a crisis,
a disaster situation, that you could possibly imagine.
And I wasn't thinking about Bush so much as I was
thinking about Cheney.
You know, everything that I write has a certain
subtext because, man, I think that anybody
who writes a long book, they have to be thinking
about something other than story, there has to be
some concern that has to do with their own life.
So I try to keep Twitter, the political stuff on Twitter,
but in the books, that subtext is there.
Yeah.
It's all, it's all in there somewhere.
Stephen King, it has been a great pleasure
having you on HARDtalk.
Thank you very much.
It's been wonderful. Thank you.