Scary! Stephen King and Peter Straub's lost interview

I Couldn't Throw It Out, Season 2, Episode 26
Scary! Stephen King and Peter Straub's lost interview

Michael Small:
In this episode of I Couldn't Throw It Out.... we get a peek into a deep and rare friendship between two guys who worked together for years and still loved each other, and still loved to tell stories together, like this one:

[Recorded interview starts]

Stephen King:
You should have seen Peter doing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He stands up and he starts going, RRRRRR!

[Recorded interview ends]

They also collaborated on the #1 bestselling book of 1984. To find out more, keep listening. 

[Song excerpt begins]

I couldn't throw it out
I had to scream and shout
Before I turned to dust I've got to throw it out

[Song excerpt ends]

Michael Small:
Hello, Sally Libby.

Sally Libby:
Hello, Michael Small.

Michael Small:
I think this may be the scariest episode yet of I Couldn't Throw It Out. And do you have any thoughts why?

Sally Libby:
I think it's because we're a month behind with this podcast and we're on the verge of forgetting how to use all this equipment.

Michael Small:
That's probably true. But the scariest thing of all, well, you know what it is. What did I discover in my boxes of saved treasures?

Sally Libby:
You discovered your interview with Stephen King and his co-writer Peter Straub.

Michael Small:
The two masters of horror from 1984. I was assigned to interview them for an article in People Magazine about a book they wrote together called The Talisman. So now, 40 years later, I have to decide, is this tape valuable? Should I keep it or not? We're going to listen to the interview, which should help us decide. But before we get to that, I have a question for you, Sally.

Sally Libby:
Yes?

Michael Small:
If I asked you which was more popular, Stephen King's The Shining or The Talisman, which would you say?

Sally Libby:
I would guess The Shining.

Michael Small:
That's the surprise. The answer is about the same. They estimate that The Talisman sold 880 ,000 copies in hardcover.

Sally Libby:
Wow.

Michael Small:
That's extremely rare. It was a record breaker at the time. And then it sold another four million in paperback. Publishers Weekly said it was the number one top book of 1984.

Sally Libby:
I'm surprised that I really don't recall hearing about it.

Michael Small:
Well, I'm sure you heard a lot about Stephen King. He started in 1974 when he published Carrie, which was his first book. And then in the next 10 years, he published 10 novels that were all bestsellers. What are some of the titles you can think of?

Sally Libby:
Salem's Lot. Pet Sematary.

Michael Small:
The Shining, The Stand, Kujo, Firestarter, The Dead Zone.

Sally Libby:
My God. Unbelievable.

Michael Small:
Plus, he published many short stories and four other novels with the pen name Richard Bachman, all in his first 10 years. And that's kind of scary too.

Sally Libby:
Yeah, really. How can someone be so prolific, clever, imaginative?
Michael Small:
Now, what about Peter Straub? Did you know about Peter Straub before you read The Talisman?

Sally Libby:
I had never heard of him.

Michael Small:
The interesting thing is this was his eighth novel, and his sixth horror novel. His first two novels were not about horror. And he was best known for Ghost Story, which came out in 1979. They estimate the book sold a million copies. It was made into a movie in '81. It had all these old timers, Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in it. But the reviews were not good. The Talisman was the first collaboration for both King and Straub. And later on, after I met them, they had a few other collaborations. In 2001, they published a sequel to The Talisman. It was called Black House and it was also a hit. But when I interviewed them, Stephen King was so sick of publicity for his books. He would only do one day of promotion for this book. They gave a few short interviews to a couple of newspapers. They were on one TV show, Good Morning America. And then they gave just one long magazine interview.

Sally Libby:
And you got it?

Michael Small:
Yeah.

Sally Libby:
So how did you get the interview?

Michael Small:
Well, I got it because of Peter Straub. Unfortunately, Peter is not around for me to thank him. In 2022, he was 79. He fell and he injured his hip and he died from complications of that injury. He was such a great guy. He was incredibly smart. I first met him right out of college in my very first job because I was at a publishing house and they published Ghost Story that year. Four years later, when I was a reporter at People Magazine, there was all this hoopla about his book Floating Dragon. So I pitched it as a story. And a year after it came out in People, I saw that he was publishing a novel with Stephen King. So I asked for another interview and Peter convinced Steve to go for it. And that's how I did it.

Sally Libby:
What were they like?

Michael Small:
Well, superficially, they were totally different. Peter was into jazz and opera and classical, and Stephen King was into rock and roll. Peter used to wear three-piece suits. Steve wore t-shirts. Peter was bald. Steve had all this hair everywhere. Peter had sort of a scholarly way of talking, and Steve liked to tell dirty jokes. While I was with him, he talked about diarrhea, masturbation, his underwear.

Sally Libby:
Wow, you covered a lot.

Michael Small:
Yeah, and Peter would be embarrassed, and he would giggle, and Steve would laugh like these hearty laughs, like belly laughs. To show their differences, they even modeled their socks for me. Steve had on kind of wild for the time striped socks, and Peter had those like businessman socks on. But that was all superficial. They actually had a lot in common. First of all, they both loved horror and fantasy, but they both were really into poetry.

Sally Libby:
How did you get this interview to get going and flow?

Michael Small:
I met them really early in the morning in the green room of Good Morning America, and I took copious notes on every time they moved. A woman came up to them and said, it's funny, you two don't look scary. And Steve always had a retort. He said, "It looks that way on the outside, but there's darkness within."  After the TV show, the publishing house sent a limo. We got in and we're driving somewhere where we were supposed to get breakfast. The limousine windows steamed up. We were talking so much, maybe. I wrote down that Steve drew a smiling face in the steam and then he was playing the whole time with the electric window going up and down, trying to see how he could erase the smiling face. I absolutely remember that now, but I never would have remembered it if I hadn't taken those notes. We ended up at McDonald's for breakfast. Peter ate an Egg McMuffin. I took a note on that. Here I am with these two guys who write about horror. And while we're eating breakfast, Steve starts going into this graphic description of a time when he was drunk and he sliced his finger open on a glass decoration on a wall in a hotel. All about the blood. And then he got so excited about that he told us he reached into a suitcase once and sliced his palm across a loose razor and cut his hand open and was bleeding. They were just trying to gross me out, I don't know.

Sally Libby:
That was his idea of fun, maybe.

Michael Small:
Exactly. Peter told a story of a friend who worked in a bar and was wiping the glass and cracked his hand open. So there was a lot of blood discussion. At the photo shoot, they posed with skulls on a sort of Halloween type set. Steve balanced the skull on top of his head. And you know, Peter's bald. So he said, I can't do that. I don't have any protection. And then Steve attempted to put the skull in his pants and Peter was laughing.

Sally Libby:
They sound like two cutups.

Michael Small:
Sort of like Laurel and Hardy, because of the difference between them. They played off of that.

Sally Libby:
Right.

Michael Small:
That's all about them. Then we got to the point where we needed to talk about the book. Now, this is a book that you have read, Sally. So what did you think of it?

Sally Libby:
Well, here comes the Mea Culpa. My bad. You see, I get something called pre -TSD. I was in the Talisman. I was at page 180. I looked ahead to see the book ends at page 670. That's a difference of what, 490 pages? And I was traumatized, which is why I've never picked up War and Peace. 

Michael Small:
So you're telling me you didn't finish?

Sally Libby:
I didn't. Shame on me.

Michael Small:
Well, I guess it's my job now to tell you some of what you missed.

Sally Libby:
OK, go for it.

Michael Small:
First of all, for those who haven't read the book, which is probably most people listening, it's the story of a teenage boy who travels across America. He also goes across a parallel universe, traveling in both places at the same time and he's searching for a magical object that is going to save his mother from a deadly illness. Along the way, he makes this great friendship with a werewolf and he battles an evil televangelist. And most of all, he fights a very scary kind of megalomaniac who wants to rule both worlds. I think I'm going to tell you what was good about the book a little bit and what was not as good about the book.

Sally Libby:
All right. Start with the good, Mike.

Michael Small:
The good thing about this book is when you read it, you know they were having fun. The writers enjoyed themselves. One of the things that I loved about this book and was surprised by is that they're incredibly vivid descriptions. There are passages that are just beautiful. And I'm going to read you a little one here just to hear the language. "A silvery nimbus seemed to play around the old man for an instant. A little aureole of light which disappeared as soon as Jack blinked." That's so nice. I mean, it's like such sweet language. They love words. There were all these words you would never hear. A few I wrote down: coruscated, gantry thin, spatulate. And the last thing I would say on the positive side is that I think it's a book about writing. Do you know why I say that?

Sally Libby:
No, I don't know.

Michael Small:
Because when you write, you go into a parallel universe. You're seeking something and you're trying to solve something. That's what fiction writers do. They go into other worlds and they sometimes come back with something that's valuable in the real world.

Sally Libby:
Interesting.

Michael Small:
That's what I loved about the book. But I would say that I sort of understand the people who put the book down. Not you, because you're never forgiven for that. But let me ask you a question. Do you think he's going to get the talisman?

Sally Libby:
I'm going to say yes.

Michael Small:
I think that's the problem with the book. You feel at the beginning like it's going to happen.

Sally Libby:
Yeah, this has to happen.

Michael Small:
The suspense isn't there. But I don't want you to take my word for it. So I wanted to get somebody who could tell us more about the book. To figure that out, I went on chat.gpt and I said, who is the greatest expert on the book, The Talisman. And without any pause, it said Bev Vincent. So I went to BevVincent.com. I saw that in 2022, he wrote a book called Stephen King, a complete exploration of his work, life and influences, which would be important reading for anybody who's into Stephen King. In 2019, he edited a book called Flight or Fright, short stories about fear of flying, and he edited it with Stephen King. They worked on that together. He also wrote several books about the novels in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. And by the way, he's also written 140 published short stories of his own. So he is quite an expert and you know, because we talked with him.

Sally Libby:
Right.

Michael Small:
So here we go. Here's Bev Vinson talking with us about the Talisman, why it's so important after all these years, and sharing his thoughts about the value of my tapes.

Sally Libby:
Take it away, Bev.

[Brief theme song excerpt]

Bev Vincent:
It's hard for me to tell people what they should read, but I would say it's definitely an experience worth living. I think it surprised King and Straub as they were working on it, because while they were familiar with each other's work, they had to come up with a meeting of the minds that allowed them to create a voice that was neither King nor Straub, but some blend of the two. It's a very smooth read through to the point where King said, I think maybe even in the interview with you, that when he read the galleys, he wasn't sure who had written which part of certain passages.

Sally Libby:
Do you know how long it took to write The Talisman?

Bev Vincent:
It wasn't a contiguous process in the beginning because they wrote this big outline in 1981 and it wasn't until 1982 that they actually got together to write the opening chapters, which they worked on together. And then they started passing it back and forth over the course of 1982, probably into 83. So I guess it would probably be about a year and a half.

Sally Libby:
I think they said that they overproduced it. It was like over the top with plot and characters, and they really had to scale back. And they both agreed about that.

Bev Vincent:
They didn't make it halfway through their outline. They got to a point where they said, If we keep going on this, it's going to be a 3000 page book. So what they decided to do, Jack Sawyer ends up in California and he has to get back to the East Coast. So they said, let's just put him in a limousine and send him home. And so they cut through that whole second half of their outline.

Sally Libby:
That's a shortcut.

Michael Small:
I do feel that the writing is extremely specific and vivid. When they describe a scene, you see the scene.

Bev Vincent:
Yeah. I mean, the two things, that specificity and the depth of the characters. You feel like you know these people so well. It's definitely a skill both Steve and Peter have of being able to generate people that you just like spending time with.

Michael Small:
Would you say there is some way in which this book is different from the books they wrote on their own?

Bev Vincent:
It's definitely different than what Peter wrote generally. Peter did not write much that I would call fantasy. And this novel is really a quest fantasy. And they were mapping it out. They were inspired by the Lord of the Rings. And they said rather than taking something a great distance to destroy it, their idea was to go a great distance to find something to bring back. So that was their sort of through line. And Peter has not really written fantasies with strange characters and alternate universes to that extent where King has. So in some ways it feels a little bit more like a King book, but it's something unique unto itself, I would say. Something different from both of them.

Sally Libby:
Didn't Peter start out as a poet?

Bev Vincent:
Yes, and so did Steve, in fact. Steve's earliest writings, some of them, he took a lot of poetry in college and he published many poems in the campus literary magazines. Every now and then a poem will show up in one of his short story collections and I wrote an essay for the Poetry Foundation about his poetry a few years ago. When I was researching it I was astonished to discover how much poetry is in his novels, how many of his characters are poets themselves, even Carrie. Carrie had written a poem. So poetry is very important to both of them, which I think is reflected in the way they create sentences. There is a poetic-ness to both of their writing, which is not fully appreciated until you really go back at it and say, yeah, there's a poet at the heart behind this. And a love of language. Definitely. And there was an impression that Steve became a more literary writer when he moved to Scribner in the late 1990s. And that's when he started getting real critical acclaim because he'd been sort of written off as a hack and all that in the early 80s. But if you go back and read some of his earliest things, like read The Body from Different Seasons, which is the story that became the movie Stand By Me. That is a beautifully written poetic coming of age novella. It's always been there. I just think people woke up to it.

Michael Small:
They clearly are fans of what we would call literary poetry and fiction. The Dark Tower was inspired by Robert Browning's poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Bev Vincent:
Yes. And his recent book, Holly, there's an elderly character who is a poetry professor and she takes on a young mentee from high school. And there's some wonderful scenes where this elderly poet sits down and explains the importance of poetry to everybody's life. And it's just a wonderful peek inside King's mind, how he thinks about poetry.

Michael Small:
In terms of literary influences on The Talisman, obviously Huck Finn.

Bev Vincent:
Yes.

Michael Small:
The Wizard of Oz.

Bev Vincent:
Yes.

Michael Small:
Are there any other ones that come to mind for you?

Bev Vincent:
Lord of the Rings from the quest aspect. Although it's a more solitary journey than what Frodo and his fellowship went on.

Michael Small:
We have to remember that this was sort of revolutionary the way they wrote this book because computers were pretty new in the early 80s. They used a modem. Is that it? They were sending the chapters to each other, not in the mail, but electronically. Is that right?

Bev Vincent:
And what baffles me is that they had completely different word processors. They were not the same technology. So the fact that they could even send a file that would be readable on the other system is just amazing.

Michael Small:
Was it done over phone lines?

Bev Vincent:
Over phone lines. Yeah. You take a phone and put it in a little thing was called a modem and it would make a squeaking noise for a few seconds while they connected. And then you would transmit the file down the phone line. It's email before there was email.

Michael Small:
And didn't it take hours and hours and hours for it to get through if they're writing hundreds of pages?

Bev Vincent:
Yeah, probably a few minutes, but it was new technology for Steve, especially. Peter had written part of a previous novel on the word processor. Steve said he felt a little bit like he was almost enslaved to this thing and afraid of it to the extent that he ultimately wrote a short story called The Word Processor of the Gods in which the writer discovers that if he deletes something out of the story, it disappears from reality. It's funny. He's able to get rid of his wife that he doesn't like so much and create somebody new and create this harmonious family out of this word processor.

Michael Small:
Here's where we get to something that was a very awkward memory that came back to me.

Michael Small (19:34.478)
I did this interview with Stephen King and Peter Straub, and a few months later, there was the end of the year issue, and People Magazine put The Talisman on the list of the 10 worst books of the year. Sometimes writers or people you interview don't understand that there's this independence of the reviewing staff. And I remember going to the head of the reviews and just looking at him, pleadingly like, come on, you can't do this. And he had this sort of ironic grin and looked at me and was like, we're not a publicity machine. We say what we think. So I guess I was too afraid to call Peter and Stephen. I must have called their publicist to just say, look, it's not me. I didn't do this. If Stephen King was damaged by this, I want him to know that I tried to fight it. In any case, The Talisman got very mixed reviews. One of the worst was from the New York Times. I just want to read a little excerpt from it. The New York Times wrote, "The Talisman has inherited the worst traits of both its parents. Let's not fawn over the result of their union. The child is not beautiful. On the other hand, it isn't very smart." Playing off of that, you know, usually you say the child is not beautiful, but at least it's smart. I have to read you a little bit more. "It takes forever to develop its smallest plot complications. It telegraphs its clues with the subtlety of falling telephone poles. It stoops to outrageous sentimentality over its boy hero. And it repeats and repeats onto silliness." That was what the New York Times had to say and that was already out when I talked to them. And just adding one more thing on Peter's website, obviously they saw some humor in this. There was a scathing review from someone named Putney Tyson Ridge, Department of Popular Culture, Popham College, Popham, Ohio. And it basically was arguing that Peter wrote all the bad parts of the book. Here's a little bit of what this person had to write. "One stumbles over a slow moving passage bearing the Straubian thumb prints of piled up dependent clauses, pompous diction, a self -conscious and nearly ironic use of slang, and the pointless elaboration of unnecessary details as if the fellow imagined that distinguishing the exact shade of gray on the underside of a leaf could bring the scene to life."

Bev Vincent:
So do you know who that person is?

Michael Small:
No.

Bev Vincent:
That's Peter Straub.

Sally Libby:
My God!

Bev Vincent:
Peter adopted this character named Putney Tyson Ridge, PTR Peter, and had a whole raft of scathing criticism of Straub's work on his website, all written by Putney Tyson Ridge.

Sally Libby:
What a trickster.

Michael Small:
And I fell for it. That's great. You know, by the way, he also wrote the fact that King continues to pretend that Peter played a significant role in the creation of this novel, is testimony to his loyalty and generosity, to say nothing of his compassion.

Sally Libby:
That's fantastic.

Bev Vincent:
Peter was one of the funniest guys I've ever met. I spent some wonderful hours with him.

Michael Small:
That New York Times review was real. What do you have to say? Were the reviews partially on target? Was there a reason why people reacted in this way?

Bev Vincent:
I think any time something becomes so huge out of the gate, like this book was, you know, straight to number one, records set for number of copies moved. It makes it an obvious target. And perhaps it comes to the scrutiny of people who aren't typical readers, maybe, of that genre, or of those two authors in general. There's the Harold Bloom effect. Harold Bloom published a collection of critical essays of King's work. Harold Bloom hated Stephen King. Writing. Hated his writing. Admitted as much in the introduction to that collection. Said that he could only force himself to read a few paragraphs of King's work. But, by the way, I want to make a book about criticism of his work. And some of the criticism was very flattering, you know, it was an evenly balanced collection. But the literary establishment at that point in time really had their knives out for King as much as possible. And Steve didn't help himself because he was very self -deprecating. And he'd say things like, "You know, I'm the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." I don't know the context of that conversation. That was probably one throwaway line in a half hour interview or something. But that one lived on and haunted them for decades thereafter.

Sally Libby:
So we're talking about the mid eighties, right?

Bev Vincent:
Yes, because King was everywhere in those days. Movies all over the place, books every year. He'd really sort of reached number one bestsellerdom by default. If a book came out, it was going to be a number one bestseller. And so that makes them a target. But fantasy is not everybody's preference. They might have preferred something that was more horror, especially with those two writers. You know, you sort of go into it expecting it to be Ghost Story meets Salem's Lot and it's not. So there's the expectations that aren't met when you have a big book like this. King still gets negative reviews on his books. It's all fair game. It's always a single person's opinion.

Michael Small:
Do you think the popularity of this book has grown? In 2022, Esquire did a list of all of Stephen King's books, 75 books, and they put the Talisman at number seven out of 75, which is really high.

Bev Vincent:
It is.

Michael Small:
Yeah. Is it getting reevaluated?

Bev Vincent:
I'm not sure I would put it in my Top 10. Admittedly, it's been quite a while since I've read it, but I remember the experience of reading it the first time in 1984 and just being swept away by it.

Michael Small:
Do you think it's possible that both Stephen King and Peter Straub will get reevaluated? Dickens was pop culture and probably considered kind of low culture when it came out. Now we read him in English lit classes. Do you see people reading this as sort of representing our time?

Bev Vincent:
Yeah, definitely. Steve is already being taught in university. There are courses completely about his work. There has been a fair amount of critical work written about both of them. There's a wonderful book called At the Foot of the Story Tree by Bill Sheehan, which looks at Peter Straub's work, which was a little bit my model for when I first conceived of the Stephen King Illustrated Companion. But I knew I could never do that because the Sheehan book is probably 400 pages and it only has to deal with 10 or 11 books, where, you know, to look at 75 plus books of King's would be like an encyclopedia collection. One of the interesting things I think about Holly, the recent book, it's a pandemic novel. I think one of the reasons he did that was because he wants people to remember what it was like to be alive during this time. And 20, 30, 40 years from now when COVID is hopefully just a distant memory, people will have a way of looking back at America in particular in 2020, 2021, and say, this is the way things were. As a chronicler of America from the 1970s through the 2020s, he certainly will be an important voice, I believe.

Michael Small:
For me, the biggest surprise as I reread The Talisman is that their view of America is scarier than their view of the territories, this alternative universe, which is supposed to be scary. Every place they go on this voyage is grim, ugly, frightening. They meet unappealing people. There may be exceptions, but it's a pretty dark view of our country, like going to a bar where the people are literally monstrous. Does he usually have such a dark view of America? Is it this way in all his books? Do you know where that comes from?

Bev Vincent:
He understands, I think, the way people behave when put under pressure. And there are the occasional people who rise to the occasion. And then there are the ones who try to take advantage of it. It's interesting that one of the nicest characters in The Talisman is a werewolf.

Michael Small:
Yeah. There's also, talking about our culture, the ugliness of the throwaway garbage, the chewing gum, the malls, the smelly popcorn. Everything's kind of cheap and ugly. Is there any biographical detail that points this? I know that his childhood was challenging, right? He had a single mother and they were not well off.

Bev Vincent:
Yeah, it's hard to say where that worldview came from because in general he likes people and he's very gregarious and he's created some wonderfully captivating characters. When they were working on Black House, here's the evil side of Steve. They created a lovely, wonderful character who everybody was going to fall in love with specifically so they could kill him off. There are a couple things from the past. His mother died pretty young, 59 of cancer.

Michael Small:
I was wondering if maybe that affected this book. And also, Peter Straub was hit by a car at age seven. He was out of school for a year. He had to learn to walk again. It left him with a stutter. This fantasy book does reflect some sort of awareness and closeness to childhood trauma. Do you agree that there might be a personal element in this book?

Bev Vincent:
Certainly the sort of the fundamental concept that this young boy's mother is dying of cancer. Steve wasn't young when his mother died. Carrie was just about to be published. Hadn't quite been published yet, but she'd been ill for a while. But she did have to work hard all her life to support Steve and his brother. He remembers one of the happiest moments he got to spend with her after he got the sale of Carrie to paperback where he made a huge amount of money. It was like $200,000 he was going to get from that. He and his brother were able to go visit his mother at work and say, "You don't have to do this anymore. You can go home and your life can be comfortable." Because I think she was sick even at that point, but she was still working. So she didn't get to see everything that happened thereafter and reap the benefits of that. But he at least got to help some final days, I think a little bit easier. Steve always sort of bristles at the question of people come up and say, you know, what was your childhood like? Like you write such twisted things. It wasn't an easy childhood necessarily. He hasn't talked very much about his own particular experience in high school except to say he doesn't trust anybody who says that they enjoyed their high school years.

Sally Libby:
Michael, Michael loved his high school years.

Michael Small:
I think that's because nobody threw a bucket of blood on me.

Bev Vincent:
Carrie was drawn from two people that he knew in high school who had miserable, bullied public lives and really bad home lives. I think he's seen some bad things, I guess.

Sally Libby:
Could we speak briefly about his own accident?

Bev Vincent:
He was hit by a car. He was hit by a van. The accident happened in June of 1999. He's always been a habitual walker. He used to walk five miles a day on his doctor's advice, even in the 80s. And in rural Western Maine, this guy came along and he was distracted by his dogs in the back seat and he turned around and the van hit him. They said his leg was like a bag of marbles and he punctured a lung and he had head injuries. And it came back a number of years later. Around about 2005, he was getting the Medal of Merit from the National Book Association and the punctured lung gave him a pneumonia incident and he had to go back into the hospital again for another six weeks. He almost died from that one too. So yeah, it's had a long reaching impact. He still probably has hip issues. Walking was very painful for him even after he got off the cane.

Sally Libby:
How long was he out of commission?

Bev Vincent:
I guess for less time than one might think considering how badly he was injured. He started writing again fairly soon thereafter. He wrote Dreamcatcher, which he wrote entirely by hand, which came out in 2000. And then he and Peter started working on Black House again in 2000, which came out in 2001. But everything that he wrote after that has some reflection of his pain in it. It impacted everything. I mean, he wrote it into the Dark Tower series, his personal actions. Stephen King is in there as a person who might die that day.

Michael Small:
Both Peter and Stephen had the same experience at different points in their life.

Bev Vincent:
Yeah.

Michael Small:
After Peter died, Stephen wrote on Twitter, I think working with him was one of the great joys in my creative life. Has he said more about that? Does that bring a bell with you?

Bev Vincent:
It does. From listening to your interview from 1984, they talked about how well they got along together and how easy the collaboration was and how there were no disputes. In 2001, Peter remembers that a little bit differently. He says their collaboration on Black House was much easier because they were lower testosterone, they were less inclined to try to impress one another. And Peter said that there were some things that came up during the work on The Talisman that sort of bent his nose out of joint a little bit. He was a little bit defensive about some of the suggestions or changes or something that he said made him feel angrier at the time than he should have. But he said that's all gone by the wayside. Those two guys got to know each other in a way that men in particular often don't get to know your friends at that level, where you're cheek by jowl working on something for well over a year or two. That creative level of friendship is something precious, I think, to both of them. I think it was a magical friendship.

Michael Small:
It can be very painful for me to go back and listen to the interviews that I did. Here I was with Stephen King and Peter Straub. I didn't ask a lot of questions I could have asked. And I was just insistent on always asking them about the collaboration, which they did not want to reveal. They did not want to say who wrote what. Bearing that in mind, is the interview valuable at all, or is it just an exercise in a person asking questions over and over that are not getting answered?

Bev Vincent:
I think it's a fascinating insight that people rarely get into those two men. We get the packaged interviews after everything's been, you know, snippets have been taken out and the quotes have been made. But to hear them bouncing off each other, to hear them pushing back on some of your questions, you don't often see that in an interview where the interview subjects are, you know, "we don't want to talk about that." Very interesting, very insightful. And just to hear Peter again. Gosh, I miss Peter, to hear him talking the way Peter does in full ornate sentences that have 15 words and it's all carefully constructed just the way his writing is. I love listening to it. I really enjoy it.

Michael Small:
Thank you so much. That makes me feel better. I guess that helps us, Sally, with the decision. I'm not going to throw it out. I wonder if there's something I should do with it or somebody who would want it if you have any suggestions.

Sally Libby:
Well, someday there might be a Stephen King museum.

Bev Vincent:
He has the archives, which used to be at the University of Maine and are now in what used to be his residence in Bangor. That's now been set up as a writer's retreat and as his archives. I don't know if they have digital archives for audio, but certainly that's something that they might be interested in.

Michael Small:
Okay. We've got to look into that. Now, looking to the future, they've been talking for decades about making either a movie or a TV series based on The Talisman. Do you have any insight or update about what might happen with that?

Bev Vincent:
It's come and gone so many times over the years. Currently, the Duffer Brothers, who are the creative people behind Stranger Things, are the people who claim that they're going to do it. They still have one more season of Stranger Things to finish, which they're working on now. In a lot of ways, they seem like the ideal people to do this because Stranger Things is a love letter to Stephen King and to horror of the 1980s and to fantasy, to alternate worlds. It's got everything going for it that you would want to see in The Talisman. I would love to see what they do with it. I'm not buying the popcorn quite yet because I've been disappointed many times, but I'm optimistic.

Michael Small:
Apparently a character in Stranger Things is reading or reads The Talisman.

Bev Vincent:
That's at the very very end of season four and people looked at that as an Easter egg reflecting the fact that the Duffer Brothers were going to do The Talisman.

Michael Small:
And if the Duffer Brothers don't get to it is there anything else coming up for fans of this book?

Bev Vincent:
There is a possibility that we will get a third book set in that universe. King and Straub talked a lot about a third book. Peter always said in interviews that a fantasy series has to be a trilogy. They kept saying, we're going to start working on it next year, we're going to start working on it next year. Recently in an interview, Stephen had said that he has a long letter that Peter Straub wrote him that sort of lays out the foundation of a third book. Of course, Peter died in 2022, so it will not be a collaboration in that sense. But King said that he had reread The Talisman and he was about to reread Black House and a third book is on his active list. He said it would be a really long book. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see Jack Sawyer again.

[Brief theme song excerpt]

Michael Small:
And Sally, that's the insider's view from Bev Vincent.

Sally Libby:
That was so helpful. Chat GPT was right. He really is the greatest source we could have found.

Michael Small:
I agree. And now we're ready to hear the authors finally. I just have to tell you one thing about this tape. I was using an old Walkman recorder in the room between two different people speaking and Stephen King's voice was so low at times that it might be hard to tell what he's saying but I didn't want to cut it because it really gave you a sense of Stephen King. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop in to clarify what he's saying sometimes before he says it so that when he says it, you'll know what he's saying. There's also a transcript on our website if you want to read along as you listen, that's at throwitoutpodcast .com. So here we go. My 1984 interview about The Talisman.

[Brief theme song excerpt]

Michael Small:
Why did you want to collaborate?

Stephen King:
I thought Peter would make me look good for one thing.

Peter Straub:
It didn't happen. Instead I was besmirched.

Stephen King:
And I'd never done it before and I was positive in my mind that I could get along with Peter and that we could do it and have a good experience.

Michael Small:
And why did you accept the offer?

Peter Straub:
Well, I felt flattered to be asked. I'd never really worked with anybody at anything and never thought I would want to. It sounded like kind of a lark. It sounded like an adventure. And then I also liked the feeling that I would really have to be good to hold my head up and to hold up my end and carry my weight. You know, a little challenge like that is good for the soul.

Stephen King:
I wanted to see what would come out. I was intensely curious to see what would come out. We did it. It's like that ad, you got chocolate on my peanut butter. You got peanut butter on my chocolate. Hey, this tastes pretty good.

Michael Small:
Did one of you want it to be darker than it turned out? Was there any disagreement over the amount of horror?

Stephen King:
No, I think we assumed that it would be very dark.

Peter Straub:
In fact, I remember that every now and then we put something in deliberately that was rough or crude or shocking just so that the book would not be a juvenile. So it wouldn't be too honeyed.

Michael Small:
On the other hand, you've pretty much left out the sex.

Peter Straub:
Well, our boy is almost raped once and that's not leaving out sex and that also is not childish.

Peter Straub:
It's a book essentially without women and in a sense if it deals with sex I think that it's a book that has something to say about homosexuality. When we started to talk about Huckleberry Finn and that sort of thing. It was something the critics have said is pretentious but what the hell.

Michael Small:
Okay, here's my first clarification. Here's what Stephen is about to say:  And the critics didn't like Huckleberry Finn when it came out. Very much on my mind was this Leslie Fiedler essay called Come Back to the Raft Huck Honey. He talks about the fact that this is a novel about latent homosexuality. There are a lot of people who argue that Fiedler got male bonding mixed up with latent homosexuality, but it sure was fun to play with the idea.

Stephen King:
And the critics didn't like Huckleberry Finn when it came out. Very much on my mind was this Leslie Fiedler essay called Come Back to the Raft Huck Honey. He talks about the fact that this is a novel about latent homosexuality. There are a lot of people who argue that Fiedler got male bonding mixed up with latent homosexuality, but it sure was fun to play with the idea.

Peter Straub:
Yeah, because after all this is a boy who is just on the brink of puberty, one assumes. And I think we did that deliberately so that he would have certain specific qualities in a boy, like the boy that age has. And also so that he hasn't yet entered that ripe confusion that characterizes puberty.

Stephen King:
Yeah, that's right. So that he would be more focused and clear about things. In a boy's life, and I think it's probably true of girls as well, it's a time that you remember as like the last moment of spring. That is when boys were who I went camping with, boys were who I went to the movies with.

Michael Small:
Is there some message about friendship or whatever in there?

Stephen King:
I think the message is that male bonding is often mistaken for homosexuality. That's what I think.

Peter Straub:
I'm glad you said that because I was curious what the message was going to be. There is a lot of friendship in the book.

Sally Libby:
And love.

Michael Small:
What has been your reaction to the critics? Do you have any answers to any reviews that you've gotten?

Stephen King:
Well, no, I mean, the Washington Post liked the book, the Publishers Weekly, Advanced liked the book, Kirkus liked the book, the Daily News here in New York liked the book. There have been a lot of favorable reviews. Right. In the case of a book that's as big commercially, the Joyce Carol Oats piece said that this is not a book so much as a business merger. That attitude is something that you just simply have to cope with.

Peter Straub:
Though it ought to be pointed out in case somebody in the world doesn't know it that the attitude that this is a kind of super film deal and the attitude that it has more to do with business than with writing is really wide of the mark. Since none of this actually occurred to us when we were writing the book. We were at pains to do our jobs with as much energy, intelligence, and passion as we could.

Stephen King:
Let me just add to that and say that there's a critical myth that best sellers are written for the movies, that is every bit as fallacious as the idea that masturbation makes you foolish or that it makes hair grow on your palms. If somebody will just sit down and stop and think, why would anybody who's done as well writing books as Peter and I ever stoop to the idea of creating a scenario to make a movie?

Peter Straub:
And this does gall of us, since anybody who knew either one of us during the writing of this could testify that that is a lie. It's a falsehood, you know? There's something mingy in it. There's something kind of mean -spirited.

Stephen King:
It's mean -spirited and it's carping and it's jealous, but most of all, it's a statement of people who don't understand how the two concurrent businesses work. Movie never crossed our lips while we wrote the book. I assume that both of us thought it would be wonderful if we were made a movie, but frankly, I never thought of it at all.

Michael Small:
Didn't you pretty much know, I mean you can't say you didn't know it wouldn't be number one on the bestseller list automatically.

Peter Straub:
No, we didn't know that. I mean we thought it would be nice I guess and we thought we could probably look forward to a healthy sale. But actually after we delivered the book, then the publishers went crazy. Let us print half a million of these initially.

Michael Small:
Were you pretty confident when you turned it in?

Peter Straub:
Pretty confident, though we knew I think that they had some editing that they might, but you know, we've been working on this thing for a long time and thinking about it for a long time. We were reasonably pleased with most of it, I think.

Stephen King:
I knew we had written well.

Michael Small:
What about the cutting process?

Peter Straub:
Our families met at Thanksgiving at the Marriott Long Wharf Hotel in Boston. And Steve and I got together every night. Was that in 83 or 82? I don't remember.

Stephen King:
I think it was 1982. I think it was 82.

Peter Straub:
When we went there, we had been writing for quite a while and we had a big pile of pages and we were had advanced only a small way into the outline. One night quite late, Steve said, look, let us just cut off the back half of the book. That will cut down what we have to do by half. Half an hour later, Steve said, wait a second, there's something else we can do to bring down to manageable proportions. That was an initial editing act that saved us many and many a year. Then we put together a new outline. When it was all done, for about three or four days, we virtually went through the book page by page, if not line by line, saying, I think this ought to go off. Unless s omebody says, no, no, I want to keep this.

Michael Small:
Were whole pages cut out?

Peter Straub:
Many whole pages were cut out. A lot of it was line cuts. Steve, I think, is impatient with line cuts. I'm crazy about line cuts. I love them. Because I like the idea of tightening everything up. But then after that, Steve's secretary put all these changes onto the disks. This is one reason why this stuff is so, this technology is so helpful, and then created two new copies of the manuscript. And Steve and I went through those manuscripts individually and apart and took out anything we felt like they were gonna change, everything we felt like changing.

Michael Small:
Was that still a lot?

Peter Straub:
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Small:
So you edited each other with the final thing you did.

Peter Straub:
And the unspoken agreement was nobody shrieks, you know, nobody can bitch.  Nobody cries. Nobody moans, right?

Michael Small:
But you could talk each other out. You could say, I want to make...

Stephen King:
No. No. It's a point where discussion becomes ridiculous. That's opening the door to all sorts of contention. I trust the man, or I wouldn't have gone into the project in the first place.

Michael Small:
Sure. OK, but now that it's all over, was there anything that he cut that you didn't want him to cut?

Peter Straub:
No, not at all.

Michael Small:
Was there anything that he cut that you didn't want him to cut?

Stephen King:
No.

Michael Small:
Nothing?

Stephen King:
Look, I don't even remember who wrote the parts of the book. That's right. And I'm not, that's not hype or anything like that. The parts I don't remember, I can remember reading over galleys and being pretty sure I wrote certain parts of it. And then picking up a telltale phrase or something. But even looking over the last draft of the manuscript, the only way I could tell for sure is that Peter will space around his dashes. That's right. You know, we're talking about typewriter signature. You spelled it Uzi with two Zs.

Peter Straub:
I spelled Uzi with two Z's.

Stephen King:
That's right. Uzi.

Michael Small:
You wrote the first and last chapters together?

Stephen King:
It wasn't exactly like that. I think that what we wrote together, actually because of editorial changes and everything, became like the first three chapters.

Peter Straub:
Yeah, that's right.

Michael Small:
Did you decide, you write this chapter, I'll write this chapter? Was it one chapter than the other? How did you divide it up?

Stephen King:
For the majority of the work, we took the outline and literally I said, I'll do this chunk and I draw a line where I was going to end and Peter said, I'll do down to the part where Jack actually starts to travel. And I said, good, because I don't want to handle him telling his mother, you handle that. And later on, Peter said, I don't want to do the part about the knights, would you do that part? And I said, yes. So we divided it up arbitrarily. Once Peter said to me that he had to go somewhere, like on a tour or something, would I take over the end of his piece? And I said, sure, because earlier he'd done a piece for me. So in that sense, we were like doctors trading out casework.

Peter Straub:
And it wasn't chapter by chapter. It was narrative segment by narrative segment. So sometimes it went on for a chapter and a half. Sometimes it went on for four or five chapters.

Michael Small:
Did you do the boarding school stuff?

Peter Straub:
We're never going to answer those questions.

Michael Small:
Okay.

Stephen King:
But I can tell you that in most cases where people guess they're wrong. Let me put it to you this way. So far all of the critical marks that I've seen where people said it's very obvious that Straub wrote this, but it's very clear that King of that. It's not been right.

Michael Small:
Couldn't you say that by not telling them what you do is you turn it into a puzzle and people spend their whole time going... 

Peter Straub:
No, because we don't want people to think about that. That's a useless exercise.

Stephen King:
I think that Peter and I are enough professionals so that what actually happened was that a style was created somewhere in the middle. And the earlier reviews, the advanced reviews, all say the book transcends anything in either of us. And I think there's something to that as far as don't you create a puzzle when you say...
Who didn't write what? It's true. You do create some kind of a lingering puzzle. I would rather have that puzzle than have the book carved up like a Christmas turkey.

Michael Small:
The sections that you wrote together, so you were actually in the same room?

Stephen King:
Right. I think that I sat down first and actually wrote a section because what I wrote ultimately got cut.

Peter Straub:
And some of it was combined with what I wrote.

Stephen King:
That's right.

Peter Straub:
So that many of those chapters at the beginning of the book, the first 40, 50 pages, have many sentences written by both of us in them. And so nobody can tell that.

Stephen King:
As I remember, Peter put on some jazz music in his office when we started. And I wrote for a while, and Peter read magazines.

Peter Straub:
Yeah, and then I'd wander around every now and then when I'd see what he wrote, and I'd say, boy, that's great. 

Stephen King:
When I was done, I would say, there, I'm done. But I'd write for a while, and he, you know, pushed the button and went back to page one to read everything that I did, and just picked it up. And that's the way we ended the book, but it was not practical to work that way all through it.

Michael Small:
During the writing of this book were you imitating each other's styles at all?

Stephen King:
I suspect we probably were.

Peter Straub:
I think there's an element of that in there. In fact I'm quite sure there's an element of that in there and it was part of the point of that was to confuse the issue of who wrote what I think. And there are many little things that look like giveaways as to who wrote it but those are not.

Stephen King:
And some of them have been picked up by the critics and they're very wrong.

Michael Small:
Well, if you were going to try to do something to imitate Peter Straub, what would you do?

Stephen King:
I've read everything that Peter has written, including his two books of poetry. And yes, there's a diction that's graspable on some level.

Michael Small:
One thing I noticed, there's rock and roll mentioned in a lot of places and jazz mentioned in a lot of other places.

Peter Straub:
That's a perfect example of the kind of thing I mean, as dead giveaways which are really false leads. Sometimes the person who was supposed to like that kind of stuff actually put it in, but many times it was the other person.

Stephen King:
There are many places in that book where I see Peter saying hello to me. Yeah. You know, there are many places in the book where I try to say hello to him.

Michael Small:
Can you give any examples at all?

No, I can't. No.

Michael Small:
You can't.

Peter Straub:
We promised.

Michael Small:
You promised?

Stephen King:
We promised each other.

Michael Small:
That you wouldn't...

Peter Straub:
That we wouldn't say who wrote what and that if we were really forced the wall, we'd lie.

Stephen King:
I think of it as the guy in the sweatshop. I'm not the guy who wrote that book. Some guy in the sweatshop or something.

Michael Small:
And here's how Steve describes the guy he imagined to have written The Talisman other than the two of them. He goes around all the time smoking Lucky Strikes and he's got a crew cut and he wears strappy undershirts and a lot of chino pants with a discolored crotch because he never gets the last drop off.

Stephen King:
That's a guy who goes around all the time smoking Lucky Strikes and he's got a crew cut, wears strappy undershirts and he's got a lot of chino pants with discolored crotches, you know, because he never gets the last drop off. Right. Yeah, and that's the guy who writes those books. It's ugly nasty work, basically. And I don't want to talk about it. The book is what matters. This process of the writing and everything is a dead letter.

Michael Small:
But it's never been done before, has it?

Stephen King:
Of course it has been many times. There have been many. Ellery Queen was a collaboration.

Peter Straub:
And the Conrad and the Ford.

Michael Small:
And here's Stephen quoting Samuel Johnson and his comment about women, preachers and dancing dogs. What Johnson said is, you don't expect to see it done well. It's a wonder to see it done at all.

Stephen King:
Basically, you have to realize my problem with this line of discussion. The whole thing tends in the direction, it's like Samuel Johnson's comment on women preachers and dancing dogs. He said, you don't expect to see it done well. It's a wonder to see it done at all. What we're discussing now is something on the level of dancing dogs and women preachers. And frankly, I'm too sore from the criticism of the book. It seems so unwarranted to me to discuss the collaboration as something new and different.

Michael Small:
In a collaboration like this, it is interesting to hear at least one teeny example of some sort of disagreement, or it can be a funny thing, but something that went between that where if sparks didn't fly, then at least you went, god, that Peter Straub or that Stephen King, even with best friends.

Peter Straub:
Well, people warned us not to do it. Bill Thompson, who's a great guy and is a great editor, used to sidle up to me at parties before Steve and I started working. He said, you know what?  Haven't you had second thoughts about that now? And I said, why would I have second thoughts? And he said, you want to stay friends with Steve, don't you? I know that's important. And I said, why would this interfere with our friendship? But many and many people told us that it would, absolutely, that the book wouldn't work first. And secondly, that we would wind up loathing each other. And maybe that is what happens most often in collaboration. But this time, I'm happy to say, we were sufficiently adults in control of ourselves. Not to be pissy and to withhold whatever criticism we had until the end when everything was aired and we cleared it up.

Michael Small:
How much were you seeing each other while writing the book?

Peter Straub:
We talked on the phone a couple times a week.

Stephen King:
We saw each other frequently.

Peter Straub:
But we're going to Steve's house on Thanksgiving. All our families will be together and our families will like each other.

Michael Small:
One clarification here. Steven Spielberg bought the rights for the book, which I believe he still owns even though a movie or TV show has not been made yet... You brought up the Spielberg stuff before and I don't really understand.  Was this something that was arranged recently or a while ago?

K
Our deal was made six months ago.

Peter Straub:
Eight months ago. But a long time before that Steve and I flew to Hollywood and met there.

Stephen King:
That was the only time I regretted the collaboration.  Because the essential collaboration meant that we were bringing in a guy who manages Peter's financial affairs and a guy who manages my financial affairs.

Peter Straub:Different lawyers, different accountants, and they couldn't agree on anything.

Stephen King:
Peter and I were caught in the middle. And i think probably worse than that the situation for us was the situation for the agents.

Peter Straub:
For our poor agents who had to moderate all these snarling dog packs.

Michael Small:
Forgetting the book are there ways that are just totally obvious in which you feel that you are similar or different?

Stephen King:
I think we're entirely different in almost every way. We share a common interest in fantasy. We're both writers. I really love Peter's ass, you know, he's a great guy. We wouldn't go to the same clubs.

Peter Straub:
I don't know, we would go to them out of friendship for each other, not because of shared tastes. On the other hand, our lifestyles are not too dissimilar. And in fact, I think the great is crucial. It's that Steve and I live by our imagination. And we live by making things up. And people who do that have more in common with each other than they do with anybody else.

Michael Small:
Can you get specific though about some of the things you're saying? Like you would go to the Hard Rock Cafe and you would go to the Blue Note?

Stephen King:
Yeah, but Peter played all this jazz and after a while I started liking some of it. Some of it seemed like it was pretty good. And so Peter got me some records. So some of it's real good and I listen to it more and more.

Michael Small:
But you'll never get him to listen to rock'n'roll.

Stephen King:
Peter knows a lot about rock'n'roll.

Peter Straub:
I don't listen to it as much.  And I don't listen to it much anymore.  But I owned a lot of rock'n'roll records.

Michael Small:
The typical thing that you read in the reviews it that you're more toward pop culture and you're more toward literary tradition. Is that baloney, or not?... Here's what Steve says about Peter Straub being more literary. He says, I don't think it's wrong. I think it's probably the truth. I would certainly like to be more literary than I am. It's just that I don't seem to be capable of it.

Stephen King:
I don't think it is wrong. I think it's probably the truth. I would certainly like to be more literary than I am. It's just that I don't seem to be capable of it.

Peter Straub:
I think Steve is a literary as he has to be. And at this point I'm fed up with these representations of myself as a kind of embalmed mandarin... Who always speaks in poly -syllabic, slightly orotund  sentences. If I was that guy, nobody would buy my books. These things are like cartoon versions of much more complicated reality. And I honestly don't think they should be taken very seriously.

Stephen King:
He's got a good sense of humor too, you know. He really wipes me out. Some of his stuff he says really wipes me out. Peter makes me laugh harder than anybody else. Because I don't...

Peter Straub:
That's because you are twisted, Steve.

Stephen King:
No, no, no.   You should see Peter doing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you don't even remember that you did that. You thought I made it up. That's how shitfaced you were.

Peter Straub:
Well, probably.It's in a motel in Baltimore.

Stephen King:
It was these old ladies were sitting at the bar. It was the World Fantasy Con.

Michael Small:
The World Fantasy Convention.

Stephen King:
And there were all these weirdos around. And Peter always dressed like three piece suit with a tie. And all this stuff. And these two old ladies went to the bar to get old lady drinks, like the side cars and Singapore Slings. They were really frightened by what was going on.  And Peter was talking about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He stand up and goes RRRRRRRR!  They split.  

Michael Small:
What about how you met and how you got to know each other?

Stephen King:
I know that I read Peter's earlier books. In fact, they had been sent to me for quote. I was a total fan and then he wrote me a letter and then we went to England and that's where you got to pick it up because I don't remember how we got together. 

Peter Straub:
I have a vague memory of this. I knew that there was this guy named Stephen King who was perceptive and generous about my books. So I walked into a good bookstore in London and I saw a copy of Salem's Lot and I thought that's Stephen King. I thought, this is that guy who was so nice. So I thought Jesus I'll be loyal I'll buy this book. So I bought the book and I couldn't believe how good it was. I was just blown away. So I wrote and then Steve wrote back and said by the way we're coming to England. So at some point he called up and we had a whole series of comic failures at meetings. You know it rained or something. And finally one day he called up and he said look let's meet at Brown's Hotel which is right in Piccadilly. It's a nice little hotel. We'll just meet and have a drink. So I walked in the Browns Hotel, I looked all around, it's really Agatha Christie land. It's retired colonels and little old ladies in tweed suits and funny hats and people with canes and antimacassars and down the hall comes this huge lumbering character with a beer in one hand. I believe and he said, Peter! So I knew who he was. And then we went in the bar.

Michael Small:
You first started talking about the collaboration about 1980?

Stephen King:
The very first time that we got together after that.

Peter Straub:
Yeah, almost the first time Steve, I think the first time, maybe the second time Steve came to my house.

Michael Small:
It was probably still like 78 or so.

Peter Straub:
Yeah, that was a long time ago. And he said, he said, let's do this. And I said, great. But I just signed a contract for two books and I know it's going to take me four years. And Steve said, great, I have four years too that are all filled out. So let's make a date for 1982.

Stephen King:
And you can find out what day that was we started to talk about that because we had this dinner that Susie made and I really didn't like any of it but I ate it all.

Michael Small:
Was it some kind of exotic food or something?

Peter Straub:
No, the first time the Kings came to my house or our house I know I had been enraptured with these kinds of Greek appetizers. So we had hummus and we had taramasalata. And I guess Steve and Cathy don't like either one of those because..

Stephen King:
The hummus was great.

Peter Straub:
I think I was still calling it hummus at this point, which caused laughter among all my friends.

Michael Small:
What about the audience for the book? Will this book have a slightly different audience at all?

Stephen King:
There's a bigger one than any audience I have, even with Pet Sematary.

Peter Straub:
I think that is the good part about this book. I mean, it's one of the exciting things. I think what's happening is that people who've hardly ever bought a hardback book in their lives are going out and buying this book. That's the only way to explain the quantity, a sale of anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 hardbacks is a spectacular success. So now we're talking about 10 times that. And what must be happening is that, for example, 16 year old boys are saving up their money. Now they can say what they like, you know, but this is this is good. This is unambiguously good. If you can get people who don't walk in the bookstores to walk in the bookstores and take money out of their pockets and buy something you read, then we're all a little better off.

Michael Small:
Why are these books of this type or this particular book so popular?... And here's what Stephen says. It's adventure, and it's escape from a world where a lot of times people are frightened and bored. Beyond that, I think there's a really age-old pull to the idea of exercising your imagination.

Stephen King:
It's adventure and it's escape from a world where a lot of times people are frightened and bored. Beyond that, I think there's a really age -old pull to the idea of exercising your imagination.

Michael Small:
I'm a little surprised in that, I mean, two things. One, it's a tremendously long book. And second of all, it's not simple. I mean, it's complex. You have to pay attention or you can't figure, you have to really read it.

Stephen King:
Well, it's a pretty cheerful book.

Peter Straub:
And there are a lot of exciting things that happen along the way. And if you enter the world of the book, then you really care. The clarity that Steve eventually managed to wrestle out of this kind of foggy material helped the plot.

Stephen King:
I'll tell you one funny story. The one clear continuity drop. One of us wrote a section near the end where Jack goes out on a rubber raft and he kicks off his shoes. And later on, he's walking along the corridor in his sneakers. Nobody picked that one up.

Peter Straub:
Right.

Michael Small:
Did you have a specific tradition in mind? For this particular book, obviously, Mark Twain, is there anybody else that should be brought up? ... This is what Steve says next. "It's not wrong to think of things like the Holy Grail, The Wizard of Oz, or Tom and Jerry. It's about going down the road. In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the vehicle of travel was the Mississippi River. And it seemed to us that if there is a Mississippi in terms of American culture today, it's the interstate highway system."

Stephen King:
It's not wrong to think of things like the Holy Grail or the Wizard of Oz or Tom and Jerry. It's about going down the road. And Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, the vehicle that travels the Mississippi River, which sort of bisects the country. And it seemed to us that if there is a Mississippi in terms of American culture today, it's probably the interstate road system.

Michael Small:
Do you have anything you can talk about coming up for you?

Stephen King:
Viking is gonna do a novel called It.  Critics will probably call it Shit.

Peter Straub:
It's a great book. Let me say now.

Michael Small:
Is it already written?

Stephen King:
Yes. It's done in first draft and it's now about one eighth done in second draft.

Peter Straub:
I think it's wonderful. I think it is a terrific book. It's really hot.

Michael Small:
Is there a vague anything of what it's about?

Stephen King:
It's about kids who do something when they're kids. It's not quite done right and then they have to come back as adults and try to do it again and finish it.

Michael Small:
Haven't you written like four books in the past year or something? You have, haven't you?

Stephen King:
No.

Michael Small:
Only two or three?

Stephen King:
Only one.

Michael Small:
It's very hard to hear what he says next, but I didn't want to cut it because it's so interesting to hear his perspective on the books he had written at the time. He said, it's this novel, Misery. The unwanted pregnancy that I had this summer. It's done. I just stuck it in a drawer. There's no place for it on my publishing schedule.

Stephen King:
It's like this novel Misery, the unwanted pregnancy that I had this summer. It actually gets done. It's done. I just stuck it in a drawer. There's no place for it on my publishing schedule.

Michael Small:
Do you get along as well with everybody as you get along with each other?

Peter Straub:
In general, I'm an affable sort of person. But the difference between my general affability and my relationship with Steve is that I don't have to work at it. And we know each other pretty well by now.

Stephen King:
Peter's a friend of mine. I only have about three.  I'm serious. I'm serious.

Peter Straub:
It gets more difficult when you get older.

Stephen King:
And also I can joke and get along with people but I'm pretty private. Most of the time when I drink I drink alone. In a sense I'm not very comfortable with people.

Peter Straub:
Look we work alone in a room. That's our life.

Michael Small:
Are your work habits pretty similar?

Stephen King:
I don't think so.

Peter Straub:
As far as I know Steve works on one thing all day and another thing all night and I just work on one thing for most of the day. And then I work all night in the last 200 pages of a book, that's all I can think of.

Michael Small:
So you work on a couple projects at once.

Stephen King:
If I have something that I promised, either by contract or by deadline or something like that, I'll work on it in the morning. Because that's when I feel freshest. That's when I feel awake and alive.

Michael Small:
Here's what Steve says next. At night, if I have a little idea that I want to play with, I play with it at night. That's like having a mistress.

Stephen King:
Here's what Steve says next. At night, if I have a little idea that I want to play with, I play with it at night. That's like having a mistress.

Michael Small:
Now, how many hours a day do you usually work?

Stephen King:
Three hours.

Michael Small:
Well, how do you get morning and night out of three?

Stephen King:
One and a half, one and a half.

Michael Small:
And how about you?

Peter Straub:
Five or six.

Michael Small:
And then when you're getting closer to the end of the book, it gets longer?

Peter Straub:
That might be more like ten. Yeah. I did learn that when we worked together that Steve has very immediate access to his imagination and can get right down inside the well of concentration that you must get inside to do it very quickly. And it takes me quite a while groping around before the music starts to happen.

Michael Small:
And here's what Steve says next. Peter, I was noticing, had this really interesting style. At first he would be punching these keys and then after a while he would be able to speed up and be much faster. It takes me about five minutes to be in the story, but a lot of times what comes out is shit.

Stephen King:
Peter, I was noticing, had this really interesting style. At first he would be punching these keys and then after a while he would be able to speed up and be much faster. It takes me about five minutes to be in the story, but a lot of times what comes out is shit.

Michael Small:
Is there something else that you do during the other hours of the day?

Stephen King:
I walk five miles a day now because it's supposed to be good for my liver and my body.  I try to spend as much time with the kids as I can.  I've become more acutely aware everyday that they're not gonna be kids forever.

Michael Small:
Is there anything that you think you learned from this particular project from working with somebody else? Is there anything new that came out of it for you?

Peter Straub:
As far as that concerned, I'm pretty sure that I learned that I never want to do another collaboration with anybody unless it's with Steve. But I did learn that collaborations are difficult. But I feel as though the main thing that I walked away from The Talisman with, besides an even greater respect and affection for Steve, was the feeling that I might have been made a slightly better storyteller in the process of doing this because I could see sometimes when we were making decisions as to where it would go that Steve had a real lightning rod off him as to what direction the book ought to go. And some of that stuck, you know, because I was around, it stuck to me. And I feel as though I might be strengthened a bit as a writer.

[short theme song excerpt]

Michael Small:
And there you have it, Stephen King and Peter Straub, gabbing with Me back in 1984. And now that we've reminded everyone about The Talisman, if anyone out there should find it on your shelf, grab it and read it. And maybe Sally will go back to it too.

Sally Libby:
There's always hope.

Michael Small:
But don't even try to hope that I'm throwing away my interview tape because I'm not. I'm keeping it, which seems to be okay with you, Sally, right?

Michael Small:
Yes.

Michael Small:
And if we've aroused your craving for more info about Stephen King and Peter Straub, you're in luck. There's a podcast called The Loser's Club, which has released an episode about King and his writing every week since 2017. Including -- in April 2018 -- a three-hour-and-thirty-eight minute discussion of The Talisman. Or if you just want more from our favorite horror expert Bev Vincent, he has written a column about Stephen King for more than 20 years in Cemetery Dance magazine.  We'll have a link to his writing -- and links to many other impressive sources about King and Straub -- on our website at throwitoutpodcast.com.  And, last of all, if you want to talk with other fans about Stephen King, there are many Facebook groups that are active every single day.  A couple of favorites are the Stephen King Constant Readers Fan Club and Steven King Lovers (SKL). That group has been going strong since 2012 and is now the largest Stephen King group on Facebook with more than 195,000 members. And that's all I've got about Stephen King and Peter Straub. Thank you, Sally, for bursting out of your summer haze to join me today.

Sally Libby:
I loved every creepy minute of it. Bye, Mike.

Michael Small:
Bye, Sally.

[Theme song begins]

I Couldn't Throw It Out theme song
Performed by Don Rauf, Boots Kamp and Jen Ayers
Written by Don Rauf and Michael Small
Produced and arranged by Boots Kamp

Look up that stairway
To my big attic
Am I a hoarder
Or am I a fanatic?

Decades of stories
Memories stacked
There is a redolence
Of some irrelevant facts

Well, I couldn't throw it out
I had to scream and shout
It all seems so unjust
But still I know I must
Before I turn to dust
I've got to throw it out
Before I turn to dust
I've got to throw it out

Well I couldn't throw it out
Oh, I couldn't throw it out

I'll sort through my possessions
In these painful sessions
I guess this is what it's about
The poems, cards and papers
The moldy musty vapors
I just gotta sort it out

Well I couldn't throw it out
Well I couldn't throw it out
Oh, I couldn't throw it out
I couldn't throw it out

[Theme song ends]

END TRANSCRIPT