I
find how authors come to the tale almost as interesting as the horror tale
itself. What were the inspirations for the author that lead up to the tale?
This fascination of mine holds for more than just Stephen King.
But,
I am on a bit of a Stephen King jag right now. And, while not one of King’s “Constant
Readers” myself, I do enjoy his work and respect his talent as a writer. He is
such an enormous figure in the genre that much ink has been spilled discussing
his motivations and inspirations as well as his thoughts on horror
fiction.
Q: Why do you think there’s such
large-scale interest these days in horror and fantasy?
King: Well, I think people are scared.
They’re scared of a lot of things: war, poverty, inflation, deflation, deficit,
arms race, whatever. And what you do when you’ve got a lot of things that
you’re really afraid of is you sublimate them into something that’s not real or
you find a place to escape—escape pure and simple. So you’re talking about
translating the real fears into symbolic fears so that you can deal with them
in another way. That’s one reason. The other reason is because we’ve become an
increasingly secular society and that means that we don’t have the traditional
outlets for contemplating our own mortality, and saying “Well, we’re surrounded
by forces, by an invisible world,” or else “we’re surrounded by nothing.” And
either one of those ideas is kind of . . . well, it’s bigger than all of us, I
guess.
[page 231]
Feast of Fear: Conversations with
Stephen King edited by Tim
Underwood and Chuck Miller, was first printed in 1989 as a limited edition with
a sale run of 550 and was published by Underwood–Miller Inc, a science fiction
and fantasy small press publishing house. It was a follow-up to their 1988
Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror With
Stephen King which began their collecting and reprinting of interviews from
throughout King’s career.
A
few years later, in 1992, a more traditional hardcover edition was published by
Carroll & Graf. And, it is from this edition that this post is based.
§
I
have not been able to find much biographical information on either Underwood or
Miller. Tim Underwood was born in Michigan Pennsylvania
in 1952 and passed away on 24 May 2015 in Pennsylvania California , and Miller (still in Pennsylvania
In
1994, after publishing dozens upon dozens of books spanning multiple genres,
Underwood and Miller decided to end their partnership. That same year (interestingly
enough), Underwood–Miller Inc won a World Fantasy Award for publishing.
Underwood
would open a new publishing house—Underwood Books—where in late 2007 he
actually published a further collection of interviews with Stephen King—the
extremely hard to find Stephen King
Spills the Beans.
This
would be the third such collection that he has published.
§
I
would like to mention a few general comments about the challenges inherent in a
collection of interviews such as Feast of
Fear. First off, the reader, by necessity, must wade through a great deal
of text in order to find or uncover any little gems, whether factual or
anecdotal. Second and closely connected to the above, an occupational hazard of
doing press interviews (and certainly a danger in reading a collection of them)
is that the interviews are frequently repetitive; covering the same ground over
and over.
Lastly
(and this is more a complaint regarding the format of this collection), the
Table of Contents organizes each chapter around a theme or topic; the
interviews in each chapter focusing along those lines.
The
only place that bibliographic detail on each interview is to be found is the
Acknowledgements in the front matter. Not in the Table of Contents. Not even in
the text of the chapter introducing each interview. This is important when one notices
the chapter’s thematic titles along with the number of interviews which make up
that chapter, as seen in the table above.
§
A
close examination of the interviews is very rewarding. It indicates their value
to King enthusiasts by subtly revealing the subtext behind his tales. Or the
concepts that lay behind his stories. I find this extremely interesting.
These
quotes exemplify the value of a collection like this. The quote that opens this
post is a perfect example of this. In answering the posed question, King
explains that fiction (horror in particular) offers a means of coping with this
world of fear, of anxiety. Horror is a window into the psyche of the time
written. By reflecting the anxiety of the times and expressing it in fiction,
Horror provides a means by which real fears are transformed into symbolic
fears. And as such, they can be more easily dealt with. King goes on to state
that modern society, by means of secularization, has lost its traditional
method of contemplating mortality, further exacerbating existential anxiety.
It
is true that much of the many interviews in this collection are highly
repetitive, almost rote. But every once in a while a little treasure manages to
squeak through. For example beginning on page 244, King expresses what he understands
to be magic and that it is equivalent to power. Yet whether magic or power is
wielded by good or evil, what King intends to highlight is the transformative
power of that magic.
Lastly,
with the quote found on page 267, it could be interpreted that King held a
positive outlook on human nature. And more significantly, that it influenced
his writing. He revealed that his fiction relied upon the inherent goodness of
people to play off against the evilness of the antagonist.
The above comments reflect
only a select few of the quotes that prove the value of collections such as Feast of Fear.
§
Why
are collections of interviews like this important? Through them, the thoughts
and mindset of the author, in this case Stephen King, are made known. These
interviews give the reader a peak behind the curtain of authorship, as it were.
And, despite not really looking forward to reading interview-transcripts, I was
pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the interviews and how much insight
I was able to garner.
A valuable resource for
this massive cultural icon’s “Constant Readers.”
Good
night.
References
Print
Resources
King, Stephen, Tim
Underwood, and Chuck Miller. Feast
of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King. New York
Digital
Resources
Online
Resources
~.
“Miller, Chuck.” The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction. 12 August 2018. Web. 16 July 2019. <http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/miller_chuck>
~.
“Underwood, Tim.” The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction. 12 August 2018. Web. 14 July 2019. <http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/underwood_tim>
~.
“Underwood-Miller Inc.” The Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction. 06 May 2012. Web. 16 July 2019. <http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/underwood-miller_inc>
Von Ruff, Al. “Publication: Feast of Fear: Conversations With Stephen
King.” The Internet Speculative
Fiction Database. ISFDB. Web. 14 July 2019. <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?358869>
Wikipedia contributors.
"Underwood–Miller." Wikipedia,
The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 01 June 2019. Web.
14 July 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwood%E2%80%93Miller>
