斯蒂芬·金重访魔符世界：与彼得·斯特劳布的跨时空告别与终章

Gilbert Cruz: There's Gilbert. Gilbert.

Stephen King: Hello. Are you talking about Molly?

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Can we see Molly?

Stephen King: There's Molly.

Gilbert Cruz: She's so great. Molly is the only reason I'd ever want to get a corgi. The queen never sold me, but you have sold me on corgis. I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review for the New York Times. Our guest today is none other than Stephen King, best-selling horror author and owner of the adorable 10-year-old corgi that you just heard named Molly. To quote the main character of Muriel Sparks novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. Well, Stephen King got me and I think many of us at an impressionable age. I was around 10 or 11 when I read his sprawling novel, It, and it kicked off a lifelong love of horror as a genre and of King as a writer. I've since read many of his 70s some odd books more than once. There's something wrong with me. One of those books is The Talisman. Back in the early 1980s, in the midst of an astoundingly productive period, King co-wrote with his friend and fellow author Peter Straoud, The Talisman, a story about a 12-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer, whose mother, a be movie actress, is dying. Jack discovers that he is able to flip back and forth between our reality and a parallel world called the territories until he goes on a quest to find that mystical item of the title in order to heal his mother. The book was a massive success and 17 years later in 2001, the writing duo published a sequel called Blackhouse that picked up with Jack as an adult. King and Stra had always planned to write a third and final book to the series, but Peter Stra died in 2022 before they were able to begin work on it. That didn't stop Stephen King, however, because he is finally publishing with Straoud down as co-author that book. It's titled Other Worlds Than these. In it, Jack Sawyer is much older, and the new book, Like Blackhouse Before It, incorporates King's sprawling Dark Tower epic series. Part of the story is also inspired by the crimes of the 1950s mass murderer, Charles Starkweather. Steve, welcome back.

Stephen King: Thank you very much, Gilbert. It's good to be here.

Gilbert Cruz: You and Peter first came up with this character, Jack Sawyer, and this concept of the territories in the early 1980s. You revisited both years later in Blackhouse. Tell me about any conversations that you had had with Peter to write a third one.

Stephen King: Well, Peter and I started with the talisman because he had read a book called The Hero's Journey, and there was certain ideas in there that he really liked. I came up with the idea of a young guy who was going to go on a quest to find an object which was the talisman. And so we wrote the book. We had modems back in the day when you had this kind of weird chirping noise going back and forth. And we always had designs on a second book which turned out to be Blackhouse. And it was published one day after 911. It kind of got overshadowed by that event as indeed it it should have been and and would have been. It was like publishing a book after Pearl Harbor. So we had always thought that we would write a third volume of the talisman. It was a natural. And so things went on. Peter had his work. I had my work. We kept putting it off and putting it off. And finally Peter wrote me a letter and he said, "We really ought to do this." and he sent me a book called Redheaded Peckerwood and it was about Charles Starkweather, but it was a book of photographs. There were no people. It was just found objects from that period and that time when Charles Starkweather went on the first modern killing spree, if you will, Peter said, "This would be a great idea for a book." book and he wrote me a letter about it. I didn't find it until after Other Worlds and Thes was actually written. Time went by and Peter got sick and then he passed away and I had this idea for the third book and I just chneled him like crazy. He was with me in the course of writing this book. So, it finally turned out to be Stephen King and Peter Stra. We got the band back together, so to speak.

Gilbert Cruz: What does it mean to channel Peter Stra? I know that the two of you have been friends for such a long time. You'd written two previous books together, but when you're sitting down, you're like, "All right, this is I'm going to do Peter here." What does that look like? Well, I read Ghost Story and some of his short fiction before I started to try and get his voice. It's like a kind of literary forgery. When we wrote Blackhouse, Peter said to me before we started, I'm going to write like you and you're going to write like me and nobody will be able to figure out who wrote what. Because in the first book, The Talisman, people had no problem picking out things that Peter did and things that I did.

Stephen King: So I said, "Okay, we'll do that." We tried as much as we could in Blackhouse so that I wrote like him and he wrote like me. And when I read Ghost Story and the short fiction that he did, I sat down and the first thing that I did was I wrote here and now as an old friend used to say, which was a very strobian line, you know,

Gilbert Cruz: in terms of rhythm or syntax or

Stephen King: in terms of syntax and there was a way that Peter wrote, I can't explain it any better than that. Yeah,

Stephen King: but I've always been a literary forger. If I read a lot of HB Lovecraft, I would write about Tenibbrous Unknown Horrors. You know, Peter has a very clear style. He's got a poetic sensibility combined with a narrative ability. I don't think anybody else has it. Maybe James Dicki a little bit in Deliverance and To the White Sea. Maybe a little bit of Cormick McCarthy, but he never got floored like McCarthy did. He always seemed to come back to the basic story. And I love that about Peter. I always did. Peter was special. I'm sure you guys would poke each other as friends and longtime collaborators would. What would he say was your style?

Stephen King: Oh man, you know, it's like trying to describe what you see in the mirror when it's yourself. It's very hard for me to say.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Stephen King: I'm all about story primarily. And as time has gone by, I have a tendency to see the whole frame.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, I am curious. You're embarking on the release of this book. You are aware, you know, just like we're having this conversation that you're going to have to talk about your friend a lot, think about him a lot. Is that something that fills you with dread? Is that something you're you're looking forward to remembering Peter? I love Peter and he was one of a kind. There were things that we did not agree on. Music was one thing. He was totally into jazz and I was a rock and roll guy. Yeah.

Stephen King: And so he was into Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and people like that. I always felt like I had a lowgrade fever when I was listening to his kind of music. He had they they seemed to have no beat and no rhythm. And uh he felt the same way about rock and roll. And I guess what I'm saying is that

Stephen King: he had a certain style. I don't know. We clicked somehow and I can't really describe it.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. I guess one thing I'm curious about, and I'm lucky enough to not have experienced the loss of many of my friends yet.

Gilbert Cruz: I will one day, but at the point in my life when that comes, I'm wondering with my own emotional state of mind or being, to engage with an act of creation and you have to sort of engage with the idea of of Peter who's no longer with me.

Stephen King: I welcomed him in.

Stephen King: I did. I welcomed him in and I am not going to get all woo woo and seance.

Stephen King: But I will say that I am where I was when I started to write other worlds and these. I was sitting at this desk and I said to myself, "Peter, come in. If you're around, come in and give me a hand." And I don't mean a ghost here. I'm talking about summoning the idea of Peter Straout. Mhm.

Stephen King: I had an image that I wanted to start with of Jack Sawyer standing on a ballastrade looking down at a city on paint territories and I had an idea of him looking down on that and it was a town called Hertford and Charles Starkweather had lived in a place like that. And speaking of Starkweather, I remembered that this was something that you had talked about before. Mhm.

Gilbert Cruz: In a 1997 60 Minutes interview, you were talking to Leslie Stall, who's still on 60 Minutes. God bless her 30 years later. She asked you about a scrapbook that you kept as a child in which you had clippings about Charles Starkweather's murders. All these years later, not only do you still remember him, you incorporate him directly as a major element in Other Worlds Than these. What was it about this character? Why is he someone who persists?

Stephen King: Yeah, I I kept a scrapbook. I I kept articles about him while he was on this killing spree, starting in uh Nebraska and ending up in Wyoming. The thing was, I really admired his look. He had a kind of a James Dean look with the duck tail and the denim jacket with the collar turned up and the cigarette dangling out of his face and in normal people there was nobody like him. It was the face of evil. There was a kind of a vacancy in his eyes

Stephen King: that you know I thought to myself this is an interesting person but not a person that you want to chum with or be close to. This is a kind of disease. it. You don't want to catch it. So, yeah. Yeah. I I He was interesting and he was the first of the young serial killers.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm. Yeah. There's there's a way to your point in which the ordinariness of him, you know, his James Dean looks aside is frightening of himself. It's sort of like the guy down the street could be Charles Starkweather. You see that someone who looks so plain could be so,

Stephen King: you know,

Gilbert Cruz: capable of such evil.

Stephen King: He seemed like a a nice young man. He called

Gilbert Cruz: That's what they say about serial killers. Oh, he just seemed like a nice young man.

Stephen King: I know. But he talked to people Mr. So and so, Miss So and So, Mrs. so and so. He was polite and uh at the same time he was going around bashing mailboxes. There were two sides to it.

Gilbert Cruz: So this is the third in a trilogy.

Gilbert Cruz: However, it's also very intertwined with your grand dark tower saga. There have been eight books and this is an epic that follows the adventures of a man named Roland. He's the last gunslinger in this world called midworld. You connected those worlds in Black House and you make that connection even more plain in other worlds than these. What I'm wondering is did you know that those worlds were connected when you guys first wrote the Talisman or is that something that came around with Black House where you said, "Oh man, it would be cool if we connect these things." Because once you connect them like you did with Black House, then they're connected forever.

Stephen King: Mhm. Well, we had to because we had a deadline and Peter and I were just kind of like, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to end this thing? And I said, well,

Stephen King: it's obvious that the territories are midworld and midworld are the territories and the two things are, you know, a child will keep things separate on their plate. They mustn't touch, you know, that thing, but we were facing a deadline and we knew how to do the work. You have to keep in mind that we rewrote each other like crazy on Blackhouse

Stephen King: because we knew each other, but we were just getting acquainted when we wrote the Talisman because

Stephen King: it seemed like a really good idea. Peter had had a big success with Ghost Story and I had had some successes and we thought we'd make a lot of money and we'd have a bestseller guaranteed almost and we did as it turned out. But we didn't really know each other. For me, I respected the hell out of Peter because I thought he was a much better writer than I was. He was a better stylist. He understood people better, but he had this kind of poetic sensibility to his work. And I was just, man, I was in awe of what he could do with pros. I never would have suggested that he changed lines or or dialogue or anything because like I say, I was in awe. I want to run an idea by you. You by the time you published the talisman with Peter, you had already published the gunslinger and the eyes of the dragon. You had done your first version of the stand. You had published the dead zone and the fire starter, which to me are as much science fiction as they are anything else. And I'm wondering if at the time or even when you look back, you start to think of what you were doing then as so much more complex than what everyone else thought you were doing. You you had been pegged as the king of horror and yet you were already writing fantasy, you were already writing science fiction, you were really working in a cross genre way even though you had earned this amazing reputation by that point. Do you think about that time in a different way when you really understand, man, I was doing more than horror that whole time?

Stephen King: You know, there was one point where I had an idea for a detective novel. Mhm.

Stephen King: about an old detective named Bill Hodes. And uh I I thought to myself, I can write a story about this guy and a serial killer, a dangerous guy named Brady Hartzfield, and we'll have him up front. We we'll we'll show who who the bad guy is. It won't be a mystery novel. It'll be more like a Patricia Highmith kind of thing.

Stephen King: Mhm. But then I thought to myself one day while I was walking on this deserted road in in Florida, well, you have a reputation as a horror writer, a fantasy writer, um somebody who specializes in make believe. Maybe this kind of thing, your fans won't like it.

Stephen King: And I wanted to be liked, you know. I I do. Then I thought to myself, now wait a minute. The kids are grown up. They're on their own. You've got a a lot of money in the bank. What are you worried about? Are you worried about your reputation? Are you worried about whether or not fans will like this thing that you really want to write? You really want to write this? Are you gonna not write it because you're worried about your reputation as a the master of horror, the boogeyman, uh the king of horror?

Stephen King: And I thought to myself, you're talking about a writer's hell where you just start to phone it in. Uh you become a formula writer. And so I said, you know, I don't care if people don't like this. I like it and maybe if I like it other people will like it as well. And so I wrote the book and in the course of it I really stumbled across this woman named Holly Gibney and she has become one of my favorite characters and if I hadn't written that first book Mr. Mercedes I never would have found her and she has become very important to me. She's almost my alter ego, my feminine half. I don't want to be one thing necessarily. I just want to, you know, Holly Gibney has this saying. She says, "I have to chase the case." And for me, I have to chase the story. Yeah.

Stephen King: Now, I can remember going to my next door neighbor who was a retired surgeon and saying to him, "How long could a person live if they were cannibalizing themselves just starting with their fingers and then maybe their hands? How long could a person live?" And there was a guy in on an island who was a had a background as a surgeon. Survivor type.

Stephen King: Yeah, survivor type. Anyway, the doctor got interested in these things and he said a person could dine on themselves. That was the phrase he used, dine on themselves. I loved that.

Gilbert Cruz: Very classy.

Stephen King: For for quite a while, he said he would have to spit out the fingernails.

Gilbert Cruz: That is

Stephen King: that was a detail that I I left out. Good.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm glad you did. After the break, Steve discusses his thoughts on mixing magic and science. We'll be right back. I mean, one of the amazing things about your Dark Tower books and now this Talisman trilogy is that cross-pollination. It it is very rare to me and maybe I'm just not well read enough to see a story or series of stories that combine western fantasy, sci-fi, horror elements even in this books or some detective fiction elements. You you're just you've gotten to the point where you're able to sort of like move between all those modes in such a very seamless way. But but see what you're talking about is you can't let parts of the meal touch on the plate. And

Stephen King: you're right.

Stephen King: I was that kind of kid. I was that kind of kid.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm sure that you were. And and I I was to a certain degree. I I had bad ideas about food

Stephen King: cuz rice to me looked like maggots, you know. My brother said, "Yeah, Stevie, they're really maggots." you know, and uh my brother would say things like, "That's the bugs popping out of the bacon when you hear it popping in the pan." So, I had bad ideas about food, but one idea about food that I never had was that you could mix flavors. M

Stephen King: the idea of the western the science fiction because they're all in the dark tower books and they're all in other worlds than these. Have you read that yet?

Gilbert Cruz: I I sure have. Yeah. There is speaking of other worlds and these. You reference directly in this book a very famous Arthur C. Clark quote that anyone who cares about speculative fiction I feel like knows and is memorized at this point almost. The quote is from from your book. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It crosses his mind that if you swapped technology and magic in that little bone m you'd have a pretty good description of life as he's found it in Midworld. the decision to make something magic or make something technology in these stories. Is that something that is fun to play around with? Because it really as you're reading them, you never know what side something is going to fall on.

Stephen King: You know, Raymond Chandler once said, "When you don't know what happens next, bring on the man with the gun." And I think that I've kind of written myself into a corner here. What is the solution? Well, the solution is that if the floor is covered with wet paint and you're in the corner, you have to spread your wings and fly over that mess. So that I would bring in magic when magic was required. I mean, the talisman is magic.

Stephen King: It's it's always been magic. One of the things that I hope will happen is that maybe there are people who have avoided the Dark Tower books that will come to them as a natural thing from this. And you know, the editor Nan Graham in this book said to me, "There's so much backstory that you don't talk about. The Talisman and Blackhouse, why don't you do something that will kind of clue readers in about the backstory?" And I said, 'Well, what if Jack had written a book for his late wife that has to do with all his adventures in in Midworld. So, I did that and I'm not really crazy about it. It feels a little bit like uh you know in Robinson Crusoe where you know he's just got this ship that's floundering on the reef that he can go out and resupply at any time. It felt kind of like fortuitous a little bit Gilbert. I hate in books where you see the hand of the writer

Stephen King: moving the characters around. I hate that.

Stephen King: And so that felt a little bit like this. But Nan was insistent that I needed to get more of the backstory in there about Wolf in particular. So I did it. I I hope that people will realize that other worlds than these stands alone.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. I think it can be read without the other two.

Gilbert Cruz: I think it can, but I think those sections are helpful. Even though I can understand why you as the author would find them a little too insistent. I want to ask you about technology. without giving away anything that happens in the book, there is sort of an element having to deal with artificial intelligence. And and it made me think of this thing. If you've only ever seen sort of the new Dune movies and you've never read the book, you actually don't have this context that happens in the book, which is these events take place thousands of years after humans have risen up against artificial intelligence and smashed all the computers because they were worried about the fact that computers and artificial intelligence were going to take over and possibly destroy humanity. We're at this moment. you you're reading the headlines same as I am in in which this conversation is literally happening in society right now and there is a reference to the idea of artificial intelligence at some point in this book I won't say more than that I'm I'm curious how you're tracking these conversations and how you see it a as as sitting sort of alongside this

Stephen King: well I think that as a writer you have to be very careful with chat GBT or whatever it is or Claude or any of these things, you have to be very very careful.

Stephen King: Now, I published a story about Chattanooga Chuchu.

Stephen King: That's that song Chattanooga Chuchu. I got really sort of interested in that and uh some of the rhymes in that really interested me. And at one point the editor said he picked out a line and said, "This sounds like artificial intelligence."

Gilbert Cruz: Wait, what editor accused you of using AI in your writing? I can't believe that.

Stephen King: Um, they just pointed it out. There was something about neither nor or something, you know, some construction. It's it's a sore point with a lot of writers and I'm really not one because I do my work and uh everything else goes the way it goes. I I you know what I do is I listen to news articles from the New York Times and from the Washington Post that are read by automated voices. Now, they sound like human beings, but they're not. They're not.

Gilbert Cruz: There's a lot of scary stuff about this.

Stephen King: Amen.

Stephen King: So, you have to be careful.

Gilbert Cruz: You've I I would argue have long been in a phase of your career where all the criticism that you got in the early parts of your career have sort of flattened out because you have a generation of editors like me perhaps or fellow authors like Coulson Whitehead or all these people that

Stephen King: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: create movies and TV shows who who grew up on you or like this this guy sparked my imagination. You know, you could sit on those laurels. You could be like, I did it. I reached the phase of my career where like I'm a bestseller. Everyone respects me. I influenced an entire generation of people who are writing their own books and making their own movies and you're still publishing books. What do you have left to tackle?

Stephen King: Man, I I never want to phone it in. And uh when I get done, I'm going to be done because I don't want to be in a situation where uh people just kind of shake their heads and say, "I remember when he used to be good." You know, I don't want to get into that. You know, what I have tried to do my entire career is to build a bridge between what's popular and what's literary, if you will. There has to be some kind of connection between those two things. It's not fair for people to say, "If everybody likes this book, it must be shit." Okay? But it's not fair for people to say, "This book is very, very difficult, so it must be great." Somewhere there has to be a middle ground. and I've tried to provide that to some degree.

Gilbert Cruz: So, uh, as we depart here, Steve, you've talked a lot about your friend and collaborator Peter Stra. I feel like a many people are aware of Ghost Story, which is a wonderful novel. If you had one or two other recommendations for books that people should check out by Peter Stra that maybe they haven't gotten to yet, what are they? My favorite book of his is a long novel called Floating Dragon.

Stephen King: And uh it has the best line that I've ever read about reincarnation where he says reincarnation is bigger than pro- football. I love that. The Vietnam books are are really good. Uh his short fiction is really good. Um, I love all that. I I love Peter. Like I say, to read somebody as good as he is, as literary as he is, who still has that narrative drive, it's incredible. I mean, Ghost Story is is the best, but the other ones are are terrific, too. And like I say, Floating Dragon is my favorite. Stephen King, co-author with Peter Stra of the new book Other Worlds Thanes. Thank you for making time. Thank you very much for letting me get a peak of Molly there. Uh I hope she and you and everyone in the house there is doing well.

Stephen King: Yeah, thank you very much, Gilbert. Just wonderful to be here.

Gilbert Cruz: The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Subaran, and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Aliciaup. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at the bookreview@nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.