Tim Adams: Explain the motivation behind the Richard Bachmann books.

SK: I wanted to see what was in the name, but I also wanted to publish those books. They thought I would clog the market. They weren't really Stephen King books as it was then understood, they were short for a start.

TA: Do you worry that there is an element of chance in your success?

SK: Not worried, but curious. Curious to know whether there's something in me, or whether I just won the publishing lottery. And I guess its both. But primarily a lot of things came together for me at around the time of Carrie. The book, and the film that was successful. But even then I was not the blue-eyed boy of the season. Peter Benchley was. And where is he now?

TA: Did you feel a pressure to repeat the success, after your career took off?

SK: No it was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.

TA: Did the alcohol ever get in the way?

SK: With alcohol I was just an alcoholic personality. But it was a slow growing thing, compared to the drugs, that is I drank x amount in 1975 and in 1976 it was maybe x plus 20.

TA: And always beer?

SK: Well, beer was what I wanted, but if I couldn't get beer, I'd drink anything else really. The drugs were different. With cocaine, one snort, and it just owned me body and soul. Something in my system wanted that, and once cocaine was there it was like the missing link: click. Like when you turn on lights it's on or off, there's no half way. Cocaine was like my 'on' switch. I started in 79 I guess. Did it for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II. [Laughs] And that's how it felt a lot of the time. I didn't really hide my drinking, but I hid my drugs because I knew right away it was a problem. Nobody lives one day at a time like a drug addict. You don't think yesterday or tomorrow. You just think now, where is it. I was high much of the eighties, and I'm not a very reflective person, so it never crossed my mind that it was an existential thing, or that it was wasteful or anything else. It was just what I was doing that day

TA: In your book you talk about the effect drinking had on the books. What effect did it have on family?

SK: It's tough to say. I hid it pretty well, in that they never really knew what was distorting my mood. The tide goes in, the tide goes out and if you don't know that its the moon pulling those tides you still know when its safe to go to the beach.

TA: Were you lucid most of the time?

SK: My wife has told me since that I was hungover every mornng until about two in the afternoon, and from five until midnight I was drunk out of my mind. So she says there was this period of about three hours when she could talk to me like a rational human being...

TA: That must have been pretty tough on her and the kids?

SK: Well, I suppose it must have had an effect. I was never the guy who said 'lets have a gin and tonic before dinner.' I'd have to have like twelve gin and tonics and then I'd have to say 'fuck dinner' and have twelve more. So I guess that was difficult to live with from time to time.

TA: Why did she stay with you?

SK: Well she stuck. But she made it clear that she wouldn't stick if I didn't clean up my act... But that was after maybe twenty years. I mean the first time we ever went out I got loaded.

TA: What kind of a drunk were you. Was Jack Torrance [of The Shining] for example, ever close to home?

SK: It never about swinging from the chandeliers or throwing people through the window, or getting laid, or partying. I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it. The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn't beat up on them. Basically I don't think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.

TA: Well, maybe a little different...

SK: There's a story I loved about this big blizzard in 76, much worse than the perfect storm, it paralysed everything. The outside world looked like fucking Venus or something: no houses, just snow. Boston was shut down for 12 days and the commuter trains were stranded, and the commuters were taken to school gymnasiums. And that night, the police were forced to break into liquor stores, no word of a lie, because these businessmen were getting delirium tremors, they were scaring the children, because they were not used to life where they couldn't get a shot of whiskey at five or six o'clock. So its a fairly oiled society. And I wasn't much more out of control than anyone else.

TA: What about your health... have their been lasting effects?

SK: I like to think my coke addiction was a blessing in disguise, because I think without coke, I'd have gone on drinking until about the age of fifty-five and it would have been in the New York Times, 'writer Steven King dies of stroke'. Once you add the coke, you eventiually tip over, because I know from experience that stuff eats you from the inside out...

TA: When that point came, when your wife emptied all your empties and crap on floor in 1987, did you clean up straight away?

SK: Not really... At that time I was this very successful author, and that kind of success does not really lead you humbly to say 'yeah, I guess you're right. I'm an asshole.' It rather leads you to say 'who the fuck are you to tell me to settle down. Don't you understand? I'm king of the fucking universe, you know. So it took me about a year to get my shit together, get back on track. The worst of it was 87 to 88 when I was looking for a detente, a way I could live with booze and drugs without giving them up altogether. Needless to say I was not successful in this.

TA: But the writng stayed constant throughout this time?

SK: There were nine months when I was out of gas, depressed. And despite what some people say depression is not conducive to good writing or to bad writing. But then it came back. When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been.

TA: After the accident were you tempted to back to drinking?

SK: Nah never. If that guy had hit me in 1986 he'd have killed me on the spot because my body was already fucked then, but I was in pretty good shape when he hit me, I exercised a lot. You come out of something like that and you don't think about alcohol. You think about how you hurt like a bastard all the time.

TA: When you are fit I understand you plan to take it out on the truck that hit you. Do you feel the same way about its driver?

SK: Well, this is a guy who only has a little bit of brains. I can't blame the guy. If he'd hit me on purpose sure. I mean I sometimes have fantasies about confronting the guy. But Brian Smith is like Gertrude Stein said about LA: 'There's no there, there'.

TA: It almost seemed scripted, the whole accident in a grim kind of way. Has it changed your ideas of fate?

SK: That a big question, Tim. I don't know. I lean more toward the idea that some force is running things than not. Call it fate, call it god. There are so many things: if I'd left the house five minutes later, or if Tabby had come along as she often did, and maybe I'm then walking a little further out on the shoulder; you go on with the variables. So what you're left with is this guy who hits me on an empty road when say NASA can't get a missile to land on Mars with all the brains and technology in the world, then maybe you think there's something going on. Or maybe NASA should just hire Brian Smith.

TA: Has the accident given you a new subject?

SK: It's given me new things to write about, sure. Gruesome though it is to say. you have to put it to work for you. Otherwise it doesn't mean anything. And jeez I could probably walk a mile wihtout the crutch. So that's OK. I'm fine.

TA: You must feel differently about death too?

SK: In a way you sort of feel like you have a free pass. the number next to yours came up. You missed the draft.

[Break. King goes to next door office to answer phone]

TA: What made you want to publish yourself on the internet?

SK: I did it once before with 'Riding the Bullet'. That had 500,000 hits but in some cases they gave the thing away, trying to pump e-book readers. It was encrypted, but it broke down under the weight of the encryption. It was like a fucking dinosaur. And that drove me crazy. But the publisher loved that part. They say, like a rallying cry, "Don't get napstered". Don't let the fruits of your artistic endeavour, ie our money, get stolen. You know as well as I do that publishers, music publishers, studio heads, they could not give a shit for the writer, the creator. They care about their bankbooks and that's about all they care about.

TA: Have you been frustrated over the years with the way you have been published?

SK: Ohhh. The short answer is no. I've tried in a polite way to work against that. If I see the red gels and the underlighting come out when someone comes to photograph me, I walk out these days. All that shit to make me look spooky. I ask them if when they are photographing a black writer they bring a watermelon and a barrel for him to sit on, you know. It's degrading to be treated as someone who's one dimensional. But you've got to be careful if you go down that route. Once they decide you're a whore, they want to put you in a skirt don't they?'

TA: So The Plant was a response to that?

SK: I thought I'd just put it out on the website. Marsha [his assistant] is coming along in a moment to help me put the first chapter on just now. Can you steal it? Yes. Do you have to lie to steal it? Yes. So if you feel good about cheating me out of a buck go ahead. I'm as nervous as I was before we did the serial novel The Green Mile... Its been a headache and a hassle for me because there's a lot of people on the publishing side who hope I will fail.

TA: Do you see the era of the book coming to an end?

SK: I like books, and I think publishing is vital and that books will continue to be the most important cultural touchstone of our society for years. There's all these guys, these Kingsley Amis kind of guys, who for years have been saying, you know: 'books are dead, society going down hill, blah blah, cultural wasteland, idiots, idiots, TV, pop music, degradation' and then something comes along like Harry Potter, fucking thing is 734 pages long, and it sells five million copies in twelve hours. That's up there with Britney Spears and Eminem. So the only recourse these people have is to say [Kingsley again...] 'well, JK Rowlings or Stephen King is not Literature.' Well, I'm sorry! It may not be Literature in their terms but it's sure as hell a few rungs up from 'The Real Slim Shady', and that's from someone who loves that Eminem album... The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write... There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he?