Just got word that Realms of Fantasy posted a long interview with me on their new website.  You can find it here.

And BenBella Books also has a new website for its Smart Pop books. They’ve featured an essay by me on their site.  You only have until tomorrow (Tuesday) to catch this one for free, so hurry on over. Here’s the link.

I’m reading his latest collection of short stories (some will appear in next month’s recommended reading), and it got me thinking about the books (and stories) of his that I’ve enjoyed in the past.  I wrote an entire editorial about one of them for F&SF 12 years ago.  (12 years!  Wow!)

Here’s the editorial.  What’s dated?  Not a lot.  In fact, the last line is prescient.  I still think King is one of our very best writers.  But let’s see…it’s no longer possible to buy the book in pieces.  (Unless you go to a used bookstore.)  And of course, I’m not editing. But other than that….

Editorial

By the time you read this, the frenzy will be over.  The excitement has already died down as I write this editorial in September of 1996.  But since I have just written a series that discusses the problems with publishing, I feel I should discuss one of its successes.

Stephen King’s The Green Mile.

I’ve always had great admiration for King.  He is arguably our best storyteller, one of our best stylists (when he choses to be), and  in some ways, the man who can tap into our national subconscious.  Given his tremendous success at such a young age, he could have stopped writing altogether, or continued writing tried and true horror novels in the vein of Carrie or The Shining.  Instead, each book has taken risks.  Sometimes the risks work.  Sometimes they don’t.

The Green Mile works.

As I write this, King has six books on the bestseller list, and an article in yesterday’s newspaper claims he will have eight on the list by week’s end, a record that, as the newspaper says, “no one is disputing.”

Those six books are all sections of The Green Mile.

For those of you who managed to avoid bookstores, airports, and grocery checkout lines since April, The Green Mile is a novel published in six parts.  It is a well-plotted meditation on death, dying, and survival set in part in two prisons: Cold Mountain Penitentiary during the thirties, and a nursing home in 1996.  The narrator, one Paul Edgecombe, is witness to magical happenings on Death Row in Cold Mountain, the place where men wait before they walk “the green mile” to the electric chair.  Edgecombe, who writes of the events of the past as memoir from his room in the nursing home, has a reason for writing now.  And that reason King wisely refuses to reveal until Part Six.

I suspect The Green Mile will work well as a single volume novel, but I feel sad for those of you who waited to read the book all at once.  You’ve missed something.  As King says in his introduction to the whole series:

…in a story which is published in installments, the writer gains an ascendancy over the reader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy: simply put, Constant Reader, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.

You also cannot stay up all night to finish the book.  That was my frustration.  I picked up The Two Dead Girls, the first installment of The Green Mile, on the day it came out partly because I was intrigued, and partly because I am a big King fan.  I liked the idea of the experiment, and I expected a Perils of Pauline cliff-hanger novel that would leave Our Hero on the brink of some disaster at the end of part one.

Instead I read a subtle cliff-hanger, one based on characterization and the promise of suspense to come.  I found that I couldn’t shake the story during that month (which is just amazing considering how much I read), and I felt deep frustration at my inability to finish the book on my schedule.  At the end of April, I was in our local bookstore on the day Part Two, The Mouse on the Mile, arrived.  I read that section within two hours, and was alternately frustrated and pleased that I was enjoying the series so much.

I’ve spoken to other readers who’ve had the same experience, and we all agree that part of the joy of the series was the loss of control, the forced savoring of the novel, the willingness to read at someone else’s pace.  Had The Green Mile been bad or even mediocre, the experiment would have failed.  Because it was so good, it worked beyond all expectations.

The publisher, Signet, expected this series to be a gimmick, a loss leader for King’s future books.  The novel sold (and continues to sell) beyond expectation.  I know other novels in installments will follow: John Saul has just signed up to do one.  But a serialized novel is, as King says, a precarious balancing act, a chance for critics to beat you up (or praise you) six times for the same work.  It is, in my opinion, something only our best storytellers, our best stylists, can pull off with any degree of success.

My hat’s off to Stephen King.  He walked the wire with flare and panache.

And gave me a most marvelous reading experience, one that I will savour for years to come.

But the theory in here–getting kids excited about reading–encourages them to read in the future. That remains true.

Editorial (August, 1995)

Last week, I was scouting the aisles at the local Barnes and Noble when I heard a young boy’s voice speaking loudly.

“…and I wanna get the first one and the second one and the third one because I liked all of them that I got so far. Have you read any? They’re really good. And I’m going to collect all of them, every one of them, and I won’t lend them out because I did that once and the kid didn’t give them back….”

I crept around the Bargain Books until I reached the cash registers. There, a harried looking woman wrote a check while her young son clutched three R.L. Stine books to his chest. A stack of five R.L. Stine’s sat on the counter, and the boy kept touching them as he spoke. No one was really listening to him except me. He was clearly very excited, but his mother and the sales clerk were busy with the purchase.

“I bet R.L. Stine can afford to send his children to college,” the mother said as she handed the check to the sales clerk.

The sales clerk nodded. The boy asked again if he could have the remaining five books, and his mother explained the concept of lay away to him in a tone that showed she had explained this before. Then they left, the boy still nattering happily about all the R.L. Stine books he was going to collect.

I started toward the counter when a black, blue and white streak nearly knocked me over. Another little boy, about the same age as the first, stood on his tiptoes and slapped an R.L. Stine book on the counter. He handed the clerk a crumpled five dollar bill. As she gave him the change, she tried to engage him in conversation. But he said nothing; he was already reading as he ran out the door.

As I walked toward the counter, I remembered the last time I had seen a young boy and R.L. Stine books. A month before, I had been in Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon (a city block of books!) and the boy ahead of me in line was balancing about fifty very thin books between his chin and his hands. His mother had her credit card out and was grinning as she said to the clerk, “I told him he could buy as many as he could carry.”

With that memory in mind, I decided to start an investigation into R.L. Stine. I don’t have children. I am often oblivious to the latest hot thing. I asked the sales clerk if I had just witnessed a fluke or a fad. She looked at me as if I had just climbed out of an isolation chamber.

“We ordered 76 copies of the latest in the Goosebumps Series,” she said, “and sold out in a week. We just got our reorder of 50 and those will be gone by tomorrow.”

Her statistics are not a fluke. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the Goosebumps series (which is aimed at the 9-12 year old age group) accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback front list spots on the children’s bestseller lists in 1994. (It also accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback backlist spots.) Since the series debuted in 1993, it has sold 13,880,000 copies (or over 500,000 copies per novel).

Children are reading. Goosebumps appeals to both boys and girls in the target age group, and for older children, Stine has another series called Fear Street. It’s not quite the same phenomenon — only 4 million copies sold to date — but the numbers are impressive enough to make R.L. Stine the hottest writer in America today. He’s hotter than John Grisham, Stephen King, and Danielle Steele.

But the important point is that R.L. Stine writes genre fiction. His genre happens to be the same as ours. His novels range from horror to dark fantasy to suspense.

The informative sales clerk also told me that “it’s too bad kids are reading Stine. They don’t learn anything from the books.”

I was intrigued enough by the children’s enthusiasm and by the clerk’s comments to buy a pile of R.L. Stine books myself. Last Saturday — a blustery rainy day — I had a cold (the annoying version that saps energy and makes me long for chicken soup). I figured I couldn’t get any closer to feeling like a kid (except, of course, when I do something exceedingly fun like cannon balls off a high dive), so I stretched out on the couch, pulled up a blanket, and read R.L. Stine.

I had several shocks. First, I enjoyed myself. The books read quickly and scared me in a number of places. Second, I found myself wanting to read more. And third, Stine did things I didn’t expect — he kidnapped parents (the kids rescued them, of course); he killed a dog (but it became a zombie so it was still mobile); he menaced kids at a deserted house (and let one teenager die!). The blood and violence were off-stage, however. The ghosts, zombies, phantoms and witches I encountered were tough and scary — and all defeated by the ingenuity of the protagonists. (Stine writes most of the novels in comfy first person to provide a subconscious reassurance that the narrator will live.)

I would give R.L. Stine novels to my children. True, the books are horror, but they contain fears I remember from my childhood. Welcome to Dead House, the first book in Goosebumps, deals with the terrors of moving to a new place. Missing, a Fear Street novel, focusses on parents who mysteriously disappear. The events in Phantom of the Auditorium, a recent Goosebumps novel, would never have happened if the grown-ups had listened to the kids. Stine is in touch and in tune with that child part of himself, and he explores it with gusto.

The endings are all upbeat: the kids get to move back to their old home; the parents get rescued by their children; and the poor phantom gets laid to rest. The books make kids examine the boogeymen hidden in the closet and then turn on the light as reassurance.

I spoke with a few parents and some children’s book writers about Stine. The parents complained about the cost of the books ($3.50 per month takes a bite out of the allowance), and the book writers complained that Stine’s novels make no sense. (In Welcome to Dead House, the zombies go around in the daytime in the front half of the book and at the end are killed because they cannot go out into the sunlight.) The parents are dealing with the money situation: lay away, making the children pay from their allowances, or having the child buy as many books as he can carry. The fact that parts of the novels make no sense should bother me on an editorial basis, but it doesn’t. The stories are rollicking good fun, scary in a non-threatening way, and different enough so that I didn’t feel as if I were reading the same book over and over again.

My concern comes from two places. First, the assumption of the sales clerk angered me. When she mentioned that children “don’t learn anything” from these books, I snapped at her (in a voice loud enough to turn the heads of nearby customers), “I think children learn a lot from Stine. They learn to enjoy reading.” She tried to argue with me that children should learn more than that until I reminded her that much of the population in this country is functionally illiterate. What children are reading matters less than the fact that they are reading and enjoying what they read. They will continue to read in adulthood, if they can continue to find books they like.

That’s where I come in. I have to find a way to lure these readers to F&SF. Not gear the contents toward children, but to have stories here that these Stine fans will like when they are ready to move on. My colleagues at the publishing houses and the other fiction magazines need to do the same.

Does that mean we should buy horror exclusively? Of course not. It means we have to remember that a rollicking good story is twice as important as learning something from the text. Fiction is about adventure, excitement, and exploring ourselves. R.L. Stine has captured those elements. It’s time we — the editors and writers — follow his lead.

Today someone asked me the last time I got excited about a series of books. I would have had trouble answering the question a week ago. I had no trouble now. As I answered the question, I found myself gushing like the little boy in Barnes and Noble — about R.L. Stine.

Oh. And the power goes out here too. Regularly.

Editorial

Every winter, I travel with ten other writers to Rockaway Beach on the Oregon Coast. We each write a short story in a weekend, which sounds like a lot of work — and it is — but it also gives us time to walk on the beach, bake cookies, and have great conversations around the fire.

Rockaway Beach in January is difficult to get to, and not very populated. The tourists go to other beachfront cities, like Seaside or Canon Beach. In the mornings, I would wander to the beach alone, and as I jogged in the sand, the only footprints in front of me would be the tiny three-pronged stick footprints that belonged to gulls. If I turned my back on the beach-front houses, all I saw was the ocean, frothing and moving with its own life. Each morning was sunny, and the ocean was blue and white, unusual this far north. The constant rumble of the waves was a soothing counterpoint to the silence of the town.

I felt as if I had reached the edge of the world.

And yet —

If I turned around, houses faced me. Some were closed against the morning, abandoned by the summer people who come for only one season. In another, a woman sat in a rocking chair, doing a crossword puzzle. In yet another, an elderly man held a steaming coffee mug and stared at the sea.
I was not alone, and I really didn’t want to be.

That end-of-the-world alone feeling intensified when the power went out on Saturday night. In an unfamiliar house, with no phone, and only thin walls protecting us from the frosty night air, the veneer of civilization seemed thin. Dean Wesley Smith and I went into a nearby town for candles and firewood, and I was relieved to see the lights of the Safeway casting a glow across the parking lot.

I am not a pioneer. I prefer to walk ancient roads worn by many feet. I like the convenience of electric power and the ability to buy meat prepackaged at a grocery store. Yet, living in the American West, I am faced with pioneer memories all the time. Stories told by friends who can remember when the only north-south road in Idaho would be closed during bad weather, friends whose grandparents snowshoed across country. Houses litter the Cascade Range near the roads, but just off the highway lies open country as far as the eye can see. Markers record the stops on the Oregon Trail. If I half close my eyes, I can imagine what that would have looked like to travelers — hills and valleys and treacherous climbs that seemed to go on forever.

Last year, traveling in a sudden snowstorm in Nevada’s high mountain desert, our headlights caught a sign marking that empty countryside as part of the short-lived Pony Express Route. There, just for a second, shimmering outside my car window, was the terror a Pony Express rider felt when a sudden snowstorm caught him alone in that wide open country.

Sometimes, too, when I sit in my house in Oregon’s Coastal Mountain Range, I wonder if a Native American stood in this spot, overlooking the valley, as the whites encroached. This house stands on an old logging road, played out so long ago that the gravel road exists beneath a two-inch layer of dirt. But below that is the dirt that supported Native American camps, and gave them protection from life in the marshy Willamette Valley, the place they called the Valley of Sickness.

Ancient roads. History layered with geology, stories written on top of stories. Yet when I stared at the ocean in Rockaway Beach, I felt as if the ocean had a life of its own, as if it were the end of roads and the beginning of a frontier. Stanislaw Lem wrote about the ocean as a sentient being in Solaris, a book I read long before I sat on an Oregon beachfront. I think of that novel each time I stand on the beach, each time I hear the shush-shush of the waves. I wonder what stories the ocean has, and what secrets it hides, and what its quiet voice is trying to tell us.

Sometimes I think it odd that science fiction stories come to mind when I stare at the ocean. But then I realize it is no more odd than the pieces of history I choose to see when I stand on a patch of ground. Each time, it is a way of affirming to myself that I am not alone. Others have stood before the ocean and wondered at its majesty. People have crossed snow-covered high mountain deserts and survived. Despite any sudden darkness I may find myself in, whether in Rockaway or in life, I find reassurance in stories — be they history or fiction — that somewhere down the road a store is open, a well-lit store with candles and firewood, where someone else has already gone to escape the gloom.