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In a previous —and very enjoyable—professional incarnation, I was the first-tier Canadian correspondent for Fangoria, the international horror film magazine of record, during the last 17 years of what I believe were the glory days of horror film “set visit” journalism, when the writer was invited for a day to roam the film set for the purposes of a 2000+-word article on the production.
For nearly two decades, my beat was interviewing the actors, directors, producers, writers, and FX teams of nearly every horror film that was shot in Toronto at a time when print media was still the gold standard in genre film coverage. The work occasionally took me across Canada, even to Europe. In retrospect, it was a halcyon time. Horror journalism was a smaller, more collegial field in those days. More often than not you were working with friends and close colleagues, often for low pay, all of you united by your love of the horror genre. Print was king, and being a Fangoria writer was the best gig around.
When my editor, Tony Timpone, called me from New York in the summer of 1998 to tell me that Stephen King’s Storm of the Century was shooting north of Toronto and asked if I would I be interested in interviewing King and covering the film for Fangoria, I didn’t even have to check my calendar.
Whatever was on the deadline docket would either be re-arranged or cancelled. That it was filming up the highway was a boon, though I probably would have hired a plane if needed.
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Like many of us who love King’s work, my love affair has been a lifelong one.
I read Carrie in hardcover in 1974 when my family was living in Geneva, Switzerland, where my father, a diplomat, had been assigned to the Canadian Permanent Mission to the United Nations. We lived in a rambling old villa built on the ruins of a Roman centurion’s house deep in the countryside outside Geneva.
My glamorous American babysitter, Nancy, sneaked it to me one evening when my parents were out. To her, Carrie had been a sophisticated novel about the cruelty of girls, fractured love, and telekinesis.
To me, it was about a bit more. I was certainly not the first queer kid growing up in the seventies, facing that the daily barrier of bullying, who felt an immediate kinship with Carrie White. King had written “my” book. I thought his name was pronounced “Stefan,” and I bragged about my new favourite author to anyone who’d listen.
In 1976, I discovered the paperback of Salem’s Lot in a venerable bookstore on the Rue de Budé, near the Hotel Intercontinental Genève, that sold British and American books and magazines to the expat community.
Writing this now, I can still smell the bookshop—faint pipe tobacco from the glass cases, the attar of books and paper, faint perfume, maybe Shalimar, from a matron browsing nearby.
She was no fan of horror novels, but she was proud of my and my brother’s voracious appetite for books.
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I stood there, barely breathing, reading the back jacket text, which referred to “the high, sweet laughter of a child…and the sucking sounds.” I scarcely dared to believe that my Stefan King had written a vampire novel. Reverently I caressed the embossed cover image of the androgynous longhaired child with the drop of blood seeping between its closed lips. I asked mother if she would buy it for me and she agreed. She was no fan of horror novels, but she was proud of my and my brother’s voracious appetite for books and firmly believed that reading anything—even Stefan King—was better than not reading.
That night, I read Salem’s Lot by flashlight into the early hours of the morning, throwing the odd fearful glance at the rain falling against my window, hoping not to see a face peering back at me. Lost in a town in Maine, with new friends, alive, dead, and somewhere in between, the dawn seemed a very long way off.
The love affair with Stephen King’s work continued throughout my teenage years, and grew with every new publication.
I can actually pinpoint the moment I decided I wanted to be a horror writer someday—a Sunday in February 1979 at boarding school. I’d been gated that weekend, but a kind friend had left me his paperback copy of Night Shift, which I hadn’t yet read. As the afternoon wore on, an epic blizzard gathered outside. Sitting in a cracked leather armchair in the school library, isolated and seduced by Night Shift, cocooned in the silence of the storm, I lost myself in stories like “Jerusalem’s Lot” and “Strawberry Spring,” and particularly “One For The Road,” which took me back to my beloved Salem’s Lot. For me, that was the moment—whatever magic Stephen King was working, that’s what I wanted to do when I grew up. Whatever country this was, it was where I wanted to someday settle and live my life.
As it happened life had other plans for me, and my route to becoming a fiction writer was circuitous. There were many detours, but they were terrific detours—newspaper writing, magazine journalism, literary nonfiction. All of these were adventures and steps along the way.
But none of those allowed me to work inside the protected circle of borderless imagination I’d felt as a teenager on that February afternoon in 1979 like Fangoria did, which is why I still call it the best job I ever had.
And that’s how I came to meet Stephen King in a trailer next to an empty silo in the middle of a field in Oshawa, Ontario on a blistering day in early June 1998, to talk about a film about the worst winter storm of the century and the evil magic beating at its frozen white heart.
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King’s characters have included battered women, abortion activists, depressed widowers, stifled artists, blocked writers, obsessed fans and recovering alcoholics. They have been fat, humiliated teenage boys; cops on power trips; senior citizens suffering from insomnia. The iconic, old-fashioned hero who struggles to do the right thing is also germane to King’s work. They’re all people we know, or people we could imagine knowing.
In many ways Stephen King’s Storm of the Century is a quintessential Stephen King story—a small isolated town in Maine (in this case, Little Tall Island, which also features in Dolores Claiborne) is faced with a supernatural menace that comes from the outer world, this time in the form of an ageless entity (Colm Feore) who extracts a terrible tribute. One good man (in this case, the town sheriff, played with Gary Cooperish muscularity by Tim Daly) is all that stands between the town and its utter annihilation. The payment required for saving it from that annihilation is unthinkable—one of the town’s children must be offered up to the entity, to be raised as its own. It’s a strong, character-driven story with moral ambiguity aplenty and an emotionally gutting ending that leaves the reader (or viewer) shaking, or in tears.
Inside the empty silo, the production had constructed what was at that time the largest indoor film set in the history of television—an entire snow-covered New England town square, complete with a post office, a church, and a town meeting hall.
Occasionally, gigantic fans whipped up clouds of some shredded hard plastic material meant to replicate snow. The contrast between the blistering heat outside and the artificial winter landscape inside the silo was striking.
For their part, the extras in their holding area outside had heard rumours that King was somewhere on set today. The crew, walking the beat with walkie-talkies and headsets, told them that King was “in a meeting,” though that could have been just a line to throw off the curious already clutching Instamatics and autograph books in hands that were sweaty from more than the muggy afternoon.
On any film set of consequence, there are strict protocols where extras are concerned: where they can go, what they can do, what they can say. Generally an affable lot, they gamely play the waiting game for hours. They read, they knit, they play cards, and they chat. While usually delighted to catch a glimpse of a famous film star, they roll serenely and professionally with the flow and don’t generally make a fuss. For talent on the lowest rung of the hierarchical film set totem pole, they tend to be surprisingly sanguine about the entire thing.
Except, apparently, where Stephen King is concerned.
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Meeting your idols can be a tricky business. When it goes well, it can be a contact high like no other, one that becomes a treasured lifelong memory. When it goes badly, it’s can be like being dropped straight down an elevator shaft, headfirst, and impaling your heart on twisted metal along the way.
King had flown up from Maine that afternoon to see how his story was being transformed into drama. In addition to watching the dailies and inspecting the enormous set, he had to meet with director Craig Baxley, Tim Daly, and two American journalists. He hadn’t slept much in the past 24 hours, and it showed a bit. In spite of that, his voice was light and strong, belying his obvious exhaustion.
…he listened to it as though he were hearing it for the first time…
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He greeted me as we sat down to our dinner interview in a trailer the production had kindly set aside for that purpose, and listened gamely to my pre-interview paean to what his work had meant to me over the years. King had doubtless heard hundreds of versions of the same spiel from others, particularly those of us working in the horror field in one capacity or another, but he listened to it as though he were hearing it for the first time, and thanked me warmly.
His voice was familiar from the countless television and radio interviews I’d seen and heard, though it was softer than I expected. He knew the magazine well and asked after Tony Timpone as though they were old friends.
Over dinner, King and I discussed the genesis of Storm of the Century, the forthcoming publication of the screenplay, which King himself had written, by Pocket Books. The film’s executive producer Mark Carliner had told me, “Steve writes screenplays in a very novelistic form, so for someone who has never read a screenplay before, it’s a really fascinating read. We discussed the O. Henry Award he had won for “The Man in the Black Suit,” which had appeared in the October 31st 1994 issue of The New Yorker.
I asked him what it felt like to be finally embraced by the literary establishment that had shunned him for so long. He laughed, and offered a wry, lopsided smile.
“I couldn’t believe it, in a way,” he told me. “Just to get the story published in The New Yorker was something. I sold another story to them [“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What it is in French,” June 22, 1998 issue], which was, I guess, a horror story or a supernatural. And there is some of that feeling—” King thumped the crook of his right arm with the forearm of his left, and flipped the middle finger of his right hand—“Oh yeah, take that!” We both laughed.
Thinking back, I remember how easy it was to interview him—maybe easier than any interview I had done before, or have done since. King answered questions thoughtfully and gracefully, entirely without the guile, or guardedness, or the hauteur to which a writer of stature might have been entitled. Something I would learn later, when writing the piece, was that while his conversation appeared to be colloquial and folksy during the course of the interview, when I transcribed it from the tape I realized that he had spoken in exquisite sentences—even entire paragraphs—with all the punctuation and paragraphing in place.
“I come from a small town,” he told me. “And I still go out in the community.”
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We talked about his famous groundedness—the importance of ordinary people in his life and work, and how important it has been to him to not isolate himself from the workaday world. “I come from a small town,” he told me. “And I still go out in the community. [Success] is not about withdrawing from the ordinary world. You know, being rich, being successful, being in the media, is like having a big ugly birthmark on your face. It’s a birthmark a lot of people would love to have. Some people with a birthmark may have a tendency to withdraw it, and hide it, and powder it, but if you just continue to interact with people—if you are nice to them—they don’t see it anymore.”
We talked about horror movies, the industry, the then-recent publication of Bag of Bones, which outsold Kenneth Starr’s report by three to one, an oddly fitting tribute to a writer who has never once deviated from the notion that he is a world- class populist of relevant social and moral issues.
We talked about goodness, including the good men he wrote about in The Stand and, later, in Storm of the Century. “In a movie where we see people beset by evil, it’s easy to belittle good, and make it seem very banal or not worth fighting for,” King said. “To my mind, until Storm of the Century, the best reading any actor ever gave a line I wrote was when Gary Sinise was being taken away in Part One of The Stand, and he says, ‘Country don’t mean dumb.’ And he’s just perfect. You say to yourself, that’s real.”
We talked for a little over an hour before an assistant director knocked on the trailer door and announced the “Mr. King” was needed on set, which was my cue to wrap up the interview. King asked me if I got everything I needed. I assured him that I had, and thanked him for his time.
I realized that for the past hour I’d stopped thinking of him as “Mr. King,” which was a generous gift on his part—the guileless grace expended by him to erase the barriers between us as interviewer and interviewee, maintaining professional decorum during an extensive interview while simultaneously acknowledging the boy I had twenty years before—one of millions—who’d loved his books far too much to be entirely impartial as an interviewer.
We stepped out of the trailer into the dusk. In the waning light, Stephen King looked even more exhausted than he had inside. His eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and there were shadows underneath them.
There was a profound stirring from the extras. They surged out of their holding areas, unable to resist, forwarding the film in their Instamatics, reaching for their ballpoints and autograph books, running on pure love.
A couple of assistants half-stepped forward to intervene, thinking perhaps to shield him from the crowd that really shouldn’t even be there at all.
King shook his head almost imperceptibly at the assistants, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the crowd. He proceeded to sign what I estimated were thirty-odd autographs—copies of his novels, bit of paper, autograph books. He posed for snapshots and shook hands. Then, just as quickly, he was whisked away, leaving a radiant multitude in his wake.
As I waited off set for my ride to pick me and drive me back into Toronto, a car pulled up beside me and woman leaned her head out.
“Hiiii!” she said. The woman’s voice was unpleasantly high and reedy. “Are you with the film?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m just a reporter.”
“I heard Stephen King is in there!” she trilled. “I just love Stephen King! Do you know where he is? I just wanna meet him and get him to sign some books.”
Through the side window of her car, I saw that she had a cardboard box overflowing with Stephen King novels. Not a small box either. A large one. I saw Carrie, I saw Salem’s Lot. I saw a couple of copies of Firestarter and The Stand. I counted at least three of Cujo. And so on, and so on.
I thought of the exhausted man who had visited two film sets in one day, who had given me a generous and fulsome interview for Fangoria, then signed more than thirty impromptu autographs for extras on the film, autographs he was neither expected or required to sign, but which he signed because he was that most archaic of relics: a gentleman. A good man. Or, at the very least, a kind one who appreciated his readers,
“Is he in there?” she said again, a bit more sharply this time. She glared at me, and I swear to Christ she was baring her teeth.
Jesus, I thought. It’s Annie Wilkes. “No, I’m sorry,” I said, smiling politely. “He’s gone home to Maine.”
With an oath, the woman slammed her foot on the accelerator and spun the car around, kicking up gravel in her wake and peeling off in the direction of Oshawa.
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In 1998 I was 36 years old. Writing this in 2017, on the eve of Halloween, I realize that, at 55, I am now four years older than Stephen King was when we sat down for that interview.
I stopped writing for Fangoria several years ago. It was like breaking up with a lover after a 17-year relationship, and I admit I wept during my conversation with Tony Timpone. It wasn’t just the end of my favourite job in the world, it was the closing bracket on a significant part of my late youth and young manhood. There was no fissure, I just needed to become a novelist. I needed to stop writing about other people’s creations and create some of my own.
While interviewing celebrities was only a part of my work, I learned a great deal about character from observing them.
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While I don’t miss journalism most of the time, I realize what a gift it was to enter people’s lives, however briefly, over the hundreds of interviews I did during that part of my career. While interviewing celebrities was only a part of my work, I learned a great deal about character from observing them. Specifically, what it looks like, and what it doesn’t look like.
When I compare the still-vivid image of Stephen King signing those thirty autographs he didn’t have to sign to others I remember—for instance, the image of me standing in winter rain outside the trailer of a petulant movie star who wasn’t sure he was ready to be interviewed, but who wanted me ready; or the image of the television star who had be interview him sitting on the floor, looking up at him like a supplicant; or the actress who treated the extras and crew so vilely that the entire production cheered after the final take of her death scene; or the novelist who complained bitterly about the lineup around the block at their book signing—it’s instructive. It’s how a good man of fame behaves when he doesn’t have to.
Stephen King has chronicled the second half of the 20th century and the first decade and a half of the 21st as no other writer. For those of us who’ve grown up with and loved his novels, and the films based on those novels, he has literally been part of our lives since childhood, and he’s touched and indelibly marked those lives. Over the course of our lifetimes we’ve also accrued a cache of memories related to how we discovered those stories, as well as who we were when we did.
Halloween just always seems to bring it all into much sharper focus.
And in spite of the autumn chill, my mind invariably drifts back to that hot summer day in 1998 when I was lucky enough to meet the man who started it all, and to discover that he was at least as decent as I’d hoped he would be.
In September, I went alone to an after-midnight showing of IT.
The film is based on one of my favourite of King’s novels, the end of I mourned the way you mourn the loss of friends who have moved away. I enjoyed the yearlong buildup—the glimpses of Pennywise’s new “look,” the teaser trailers, and then, finally, the full trailers.
I wanted to see it alone, preferably in silence. I wanted to be a boy again for 90 minutes, just this once, to let the grand, garish storytelling I loved wash over me the way it used to. I wanted to be thrilled, to be horrified, to be moved. I wanted to laugh and cry, and I wanted to feel a genuine scream build, then swallow it.
There were only six other people in the theatre, and we reverenced the experience together. It was perfect. There’s no other word for it.
And when it was over, I was momentarily saddened—and surprised at the sharpness of that sadness—to realize that I would never again be the boy who had just discovered Stephen King.
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Michael Rowe is the author of the novels Enter, Night, Wild Fell, and October. An award-winning nonfiction writer and former journalist, he welcomes readers at www.michaelrowe.com
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