This story was originally published in the Toronto Star on Oct. 5, 1980.

BANGOR, ME.—The house sits a little back from the road, old and dark red, the colour of drying blood. In one corner is a tower with long windows from which a pale, anxious face might peer.

In the lawn behind the house sits a chair carved out of rock; it looks like a tombstone. The house seems to creak under the lowering September clouds.

It is the perfect setting for a horror story.

Two of them are taking place in the house right now, to the accompaniment of raucous rock music and the murmur of an electric typewriter.

They are being created by Stephen King, a thick-spectacled, thick-stubbled, thickly built man who has scared more people than the Mafia in the past 10 years.

A master of fantasy, a millionaire storyteller, King has written Carrie, The Stand, Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, The Shining, The Dead Zone and Firestarter, currently the number-one best-selling hard-cover book in North America.

His readers shiver deliciously as the ordinary becomes evil, gentle children inexplicably assume strange powers and small New England towns — towns like Bangor, Me. — confront his monstrosities.

He’s sitting on his porch this particular afternoon, chatting amiably, drinking Budweiser from a can, smoking a chain of cigarettes and playing a game with Star Wars figures with his three-year-old son, Owen.

His two other children, Naomi, 10, and Joe, 8, are indoors wrapping gifts for their father, whose 33rd birthday is but three days away.

Owen wins the Star Wars game easily and goes off to play with a horde of neighbourhood kids who are fighting World War II behind the house.

“I write about ‘what if …?’” King says. “Literary writers, the highbrows, say ‘what next?’ I’m not interested in that. I’m a what if …? writer.

“What if there’s something there? What if it can take control? What if it’s mad?”

King allows that he still makes a point of sleeping with his feet under the covers because he’s afraid something will reach up from under the bed and clutch his ankle.

“Not someONE,” he stresses. “SomeTHING.”

He puts his beer can in his lap and points with his index and little fingers at some birds on the lawn and makes whistling bullet noises.

“Blackbirds,” he says. “Give ‘em the evil eye.”

There are a lot of blackbirds in Bangor, Me. and King makes the same gesture whenever he sees one.

It’s natural that he should try to appear a little weird, like his books, but in fact he’s very plain and very jolly, an affectionate husband, doting father and friendly fellow who likes to crack a few beers, as he puts it, and sit around and chat.

But he has the stern self-discipline that’s almost as important to a writer as talent.

“I’m up at 6:30 every morning and get breakfast for the kids and get them off to school,” he says. “Then I just walk around for about four miles, sort of sniffing at this book in my mind.

“I get back at 9:30 and write to 11:30. Every day I write 1,500 words. In the afternoon I read and sort of gibber around.”

He churns out words like a machine, rock music blaring from his stereo. By the time he’s finished his daily stint, he knows what he’ll be writing about the next day. When he sits down at his typewriter at 9:30 every morning (weekends included), the words flow as smoothly as the Bud he’s drinking on his porch.

The “gibbering” in the afternoon often includes rewriting another novel that’s in the works.

Right now in the mornings, he’s writing the first draft of a novel to be titled It (one character, a librarian, is improbably named Michael Hanlon).

It’s about a group of people who face a horror as children and face it again 25 years later as adults.

In the afternoon he’s rewriting another novel, the next to be published, named Cujo, a twisted tale about a boy and his dog.

“I’m not as facile as I used to be,” King says. “I wrote The Shining in two months.”

The Shining came about almost by accident. “I’d been writing about New England so much, I wanted to write about somewhere different. So I got a map and told me wife, Tabitha, to close her eyes and point.

“She pointed at Boulder, Colorado. So we went there and lived in a tract house in a subdivision. That would be in 1974 and 1975.

“I’m sure the book would have been entirely different if we’d gone somewhere else.”

The Shining was set in a rambling hotel in the mountains of Colorado. But it was while he was living in Boulder that King got the idea for It, which is set in Bangor, renamed Derry for the novel.

“I had to go and pick up the car from the garage; the transmission was shot or something,” King says. “Tabi offered to drive me in the other car but I said no, I’ll walk.

“It was dusk and I had to walk over this little bridge and I thought to myself … what if there was a troll living under this bridge?”

King says he likes to live in the place he’s writing about, which is why the King family last month moved back to Bangor in the 15-room rambling house that King says is “kinda creepy.”

“We stole this house,” King says. “We got it for a ridiculous price.”

It’s 130 years old, the oldest house on a street of huge elegant houses that once belonged to the timber barons of Bangor.

“One hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars,” Tabi King says.

She grew up in Old Town, about ten miles away and both have lived in Bangor before. She has French-Canadian forebears whose name was Pinette but they changed it to Spruce at the beginning of the century when the local Ku Klux Klan was hunting down Catholics, she says.

“The literal translation was Little Pine but they would have been exchanging a French Catholic name for an Insian one, so they settled for Spruce,” she says. “The name change was a social device.”

When the Kings were in Bangor before, Steve worked for a local laundry for $60 a week. Now he sends the laundry for his shirts to clean. “That’s the sweetest thing of all,” he says.

The new novel, It, fits in Bangor because it’s a hard town, King says. “They busted a lot of people here during the Vietnam War. They won’t stand for much. It’s a hard-drinking, working man’s town.

“They’re just as likely to set fire to your hair in a bar if they don’t like the way you’re talking.”

King realized we’ve run out of Budweisers and he won’t drink the no-name beer from the supermarket so we walk down to the corner store for fresh supplies. King takes three empty cans with him to get back his deposit.

On the way back to the house, through a park where young teenagers are playing football, he suggests we “crack open a couple” from the six-pack and we sip from the can as we walk.

It’s small-town peaceful but, as King points his fingers at blackbirds overhead, you can almost sense a story brewing. Yet, plodding along in his scuffed running shoes, constantly hitching up the jeans that keep slipping off his bulky hips, he doesn’t look the man with the most lucrative and successful of fantastic imaginations.

“It’s not enough to have imagination,” he says later, back on the porch. “You have to be able to tap into it.

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“I taught school and you could see the kids losing their imagination right in front of your eyes. I don’t know whether it’s peer pressure of some sort of governor they have. But imagination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.

“I’ve never met anyone without a sense of humour but I’ve sure met people without any imagination at all.

“My books are successful because I’ve never assumed the job is half-done for me because the reader had a great imagination. I try to be logical when I’m telling a story.”

King believes much of his creativity is inherited. “I know little about my father — he left us when I was two — but I know he wrote science fiction. He had a lot of rejection slips.”

King has an adopted brother older than himself and he hasn’t seen his father since he deserted the family. “My mother tried to track him down a couple of times, just for support, but she never found him.

“I came home one day and my mother was absolutely white. ‘I think I’ve just seen your father on the news,’ she said. It was when there was all the fighting in the Congo in the Sixties and she thought he was one of a bunch of mercenaries. Maybe that’s how he ended up.”

Tabi — a short, round-faced smiling woman who seems as little affected by King’s riches as King is himself — sits beside him on the cane loveseat on the porch. Amber “the Maine shed-cat” jumps up on his lap.

King says he doesn’t know how much he’s worth, “somebody in New York looks after that.” He has a new three-book contract with New American Library that provides an advance of more than $2 million.

“But they're very cunning, you know — they spread it out.”

A producer has paid $1 million for the movie rights to Firestarter; Sydney Pollock — who made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The Way We Were and The Electric Horseman — has announced he’ll be making a move of The Dead Zone.

“I’m very lucky,” King says. “I’m what you call a name-brand writer. My stuff sells.”

One book his brand name may never be on is Pet Cemetery, the one he’s put away in a drawer because, he says, it’s too horrible.

“It’s a dreadful, terrible book — dark, miserable with no light in it at all. The good should be just as powerful as the evil. I haven’t got it in Pet Cemetery.

“There must be a lot of good people in the world. We’ve had the nuclear bomb for 35 years and we’re still here.”

“There’s such a thing as luck, you know, Steve,” Tabi says.

“Well, I’ll probably work Pet Cemetery up a bit but in the best of all possible worlds I’ll die before I finish it.”

King says he’s thinking of having some unpublished short stories privately printed to send to friends at Christmas.

“But what do I say, ‘Merry Christmas from the Great Me?”

“Why not? You don’t knit,” Tabi says.

They laugh a lot together, blow each other kisses and, Tabi says, “Steve tells the worst, oldest jokes.”

They had celebrated Firestarer’s number one position on the bestseller list at lunch time this day with two bottles of Perrier Jouet champagne.

This evening they’re going out for dinner. And when they get back at about 11 p.m. Steve goes into his office and writes some more.

And sure enough, he’s up early next morning, breakfasting with the kids, sitting at the kitchen table in a Chewbacca mask while three-year-old Owen wears a Yoda mask.

As Naomi and Steve leave for school, King sets out on his walk to sniff at the book. Tabi goes with him and they pass “the Bangor stand-pipe” — a hundred-year-old water tower that may one day appear in one of his stories.

They explore an 1870 bird bath in the middle of a common, pass a variety store that’s the setting for one of his short stories, amble down to a creek where he lets slip that Tabi has a book coming out, a fantasy naturally, called Small World, involving a doll’s house and the daughter of a U.S. president.

“It’s a remarkably good book,” King says after he and Tabi have blown kisses and she’s taken a shortcut back to the house. “It’s a fine book … She was the one at university who wrote the best poetry.”

When he gets back to the house he checks test papers that son Joe has brought home from school.

At almost 9:30, he picked up his iced water and his vitamin pills and goes into his office off the dining room.

While Tabi sits at the kitchen table sorting out cents-off coupons with King’s secretary, the name-brand writer puts on an album, sits before the electric typewriter with It in front of him and Cujo alongside, and as the ball-bearings in the plastic clock he’s made thump away the minutes, switches on and begins his daily 1,500 words, knowing where he’s going.

Margaret Trudeau’s favourite author (“she’s into fantasy, anyway,” Tabi says), spinning words and making a fortune by wondering … what if …?