In an interview on Horror

Tell me about Misery by Stephen King.

Misery is probably not the most obvious choice for one of King’s books. People normally go for something like The Shining. But it’s the one that means the most to me and actually I like it – not particularly as a horror novel, although it is a pretty good suspense thriller. It’s a great book about being a novelist. It’s one of the few works of fiction that actually explains how you write a novel but also what this strange disjuncture is between what goes on in your head when you write something and what a reader might take away from what you have written. You might actually be irrelevant as a writer to the reader. What they are interested in is the work. I saw the film of this with another novelist, Lisa Tuttle. When we came out of it, we were the only people in the audience who found the bit where she makes him burn the only copy of the book he has just finished more upsetting than the bit where she breaks his foot. And she doesn’t just destroy it; she makes him destroy it. I think that all writers just cringe inside in that scene!

Your next collection of stories has had many spin-offs including an album. Can you describe the original?

Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the title given to the Edgar Allan Poe collection. It’s not quite his complete short stories and it doesn’t include his poetry. But it does have The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat, The Premature Burial and many of his other greats. And these stories still have a strong hook. Poe was a really interesting writer in that he managed to affect a kind of carelessness. There was a sort of feeling of dementia and frothing insanity and a stream of consciousness. But, actually, I think his works are extraordinarily well thought through, because he was a poet as well. He could think of things with really elaborate metres and internal rhymes. He’s great to read aloud. It’s no wonder that when he couldn’t get money writing he could go round getting personal appearances reading his work. Even today there’s many a Hallowe’en gathering where people dress up as Poe and read his works out.