Everything's Eventual

prompted by Ralph Vicinanza and asked if I had anything I'd like to try in the electronic marketplace. I sent her 'Bullet,' and the three of us— Susan, Scribner, and I—made a little bit of publishing history. Several hundred thousand people downloaded the story, and I ended up making an embarrassing amount of money. (Except that's a fucking lie, I wasn't embarrassed a bit.) Even the audio rights went for over a hundred thousand dollars, a comically huge price.

   Am I bragging here? Boasting my narrow whiteboy ass off? In a way I am. But I'm also here to tell you that 'Riding the Bullet' made me absolutely crazy. Usually, if I'm in one of those fancy-schamncy airport lounges, I'm ignored by the rest of the clientele; they're busy babbling into phones or making deals at the bar. Which is fine with me. Every now and then one of them will drop by and ask me to sign a cocktail napkin for the wife. The wife, these handsomely suited, briefcase-toting fellows usually want me to know, has read all my books. They, on the other hand, have read none. They want me to know that, too. Just too busy. Read The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, read Who Moved My Cheese?, read The Prayer of Jabez, and that's pretty much it. Gotta hurry, gotta rush-rush, I got a heart attack due in about four years, and I want to be sure that I'm there to meet it with my 401(k) all in order when it shows up.

   After 'Bullet' was published as an e-book (cover, Scribner colophon, and all), that changed. I was mobbed in the airport lounges. I was even mobbed in the Boston Amtrak lounge. I was buttonholed on the street. For a little while there, I was turning down the chance to appear on a giddy three talk- shows a day (I was holding out for Springer, but Jerry never called). I even got on the cover of Time, and The New York Times pontificated at some length over the perceived success of 'Riding the Bullet' and the perceived failure of its cybersuccessor, The Plant. Dear God, I was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. I had inadvertently become a mogul.

   And what was driving me crazy? What made it all seem so pointless? Why, that nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even asked about the story, and do you know what? It's a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done. If it got you to turn off the TV, as far as I'm concerned, it (or any of the stories in the collection which follows) is a total success.

   But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys in ties wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart? Was it succeeding there? Failing? Getting through to the nerve-endings? Causing that little frisson which is the spooky story's raison d'etre? I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction. There is something weirdly decadent about appearing on the cover of a major magazine simply because you used an alternate route into the marketplace. There is something weirder about realizing that all those readers might have been a lot more interested in the novelty of the electronic package than they were in what was inside the package. Do I want to know how many of the readers who downloaded 'Riding the Bullet' actually read 'Riding the Bullet'? I do not. I think I might be extremely disappointed.

   E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler's fart, believe me. For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involved in the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.

   This book will probably end up on the best-seller lists for awhile; I've been very lucky that way. But if you see it there, you might ask yourself how many other books of short stories end up on the bestseller lists in the course of any given year, and how long publishers can be expected to publish books of a type that doesn't interest readers very much. Yet for me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.

   Writing them is not so pleasurable. I can only think of two in the current collection—the title story and 'L.T.'s Theory of Pets'— which were written without an amount of effort far greater than the relatively slight result. And yet I think I have succeeded in keeping my craft new, at least to myself, mostly because I refuse to let a year go by without writing at least one or two of them. Not for money, not even precisely for love, but as a kind of dues-paying. Because if you want to write short stories, you have to do more than think about writing short stories. It is not like riding a bicycle but more like working out in the gym: your choice is use it or lose it.

   To see them collected here like this is a great pleasure for me. I hope it will be for you, as well. You can let me know at www.stephenking.com, and you can do something else for me (and yourself), as well: if these stories work for you, buy another collection. Sam the Cat by Matthew Klam, for instance, or The Hotel Eden by Ron Carlson, These are only two of the good writers doing good work out there, and although it's now officially the twenty-first century, they're doing it in the same old way, one word at a time. The format in which they eventually appear doesn't change that. If you care, support them. The best method of support really hasn't changed much: read their stories.

   I'd like to thank a few of the people who've read mine: Bill Buford, at The New Yorker; Susan Moldow, at Scribner; Chuck Verrill, who has edited so much of my work across such a span of years; Ralph Vicinanza, Arthur Greene, Gordon Van Gelder, and Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Nye Willden at Cavalier; and the late Robert A. W. Lowndes, who bought that first short story back in '68. Also—most important—my wife, Tabitha, who remains my favorite Constant Reader. These are all people who have worked and are still working to keep the short story from becoming a lost art. So am I. And, by what you buy (and thus choose to subsidize) and by what you read, so are you. You most of all, Constant Reader. Always you.

Stephen King

Bangor, Maine

December 11, 2001

Autopsy Room Four

It's so dark that for awhile—just how long I don't know—I think I'm still unconscious. Then, slowly, it comes to me that unconscious people don't have a sensation of movement through the dark, accompanied by a faint, rhythmic sound that can only be a squeaky wheel. And I can feel contact, from the top of my head to the balls of my heels. I can smell something that might be rubber or vinyl. This is not unconsciousness, and there is something too . . . too what? Too rational about these sensations for it to be a dream.

   Then what is it?

   Who am I?

   And what's happening to me?

   The squeaky wheel quits its stupid rhythm and I stop moving. There is a crackle around me from the rubber- smelling stuff.

   A voice: 'Which one did they say?'

   A pause.

   Second voice: 'Four, I think. Yeah, four.'

   We start to move again, but more slowly. I can hear the faint scuff of feet now, probably in soft-soled shoes, maybe sneakers. The owners of the voices are the owners of the shoes. They stop me again. There's a thump followed by a faint whoosh. It is, I think, the sound of a door with a pneumatic hinge being opened.