Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

Wonderfully gruesome Dont turn your back on this book!

The New York Times Book Review

Wildly imaginative, delightfully diabolical, a masterful writer King once again proves to be the consummate storyteller.

Associated Press

Stephen King at his best!

The Denver Post

Stunning, ingenious Stephen King at the very top of his talent!

New York Sunday News

King has the talent to lift adults blinders to horror, and thats why his fans cant get enough of him Its also what makes his stories as deliciously frightening as they are.

The Cincinnati Enquirer

Stephen King lands you in a hurry and then leans back, chortling, while you shiver on his hook!

Playboy

Stephen King

is the prevailing master of horror.

Time

is unstoppable Fans will sweep down on this book like a swarm of locusts!

The Charlotte Observer

takes the reader by the hand and leads him slowly to the haunted house, then shoves him inside and locks the door.

Playboy

is first-rate He lifts the reader off the page into a world that only King could have created.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal

is compelling Too good to miss!

The Charleston News & Courier

is electrifying Hes sure to scare the socks off every fan!

Reading Eagle

has written a well-crafted book full of marvelously understated fear and horror King knows how to wring a full measure of suspense out of curious incidents.

The Sacramento Bee

makes your flesh crawl Hes written an excellent bookfilled with the kind of imagination and verbal dexterity that enables the reader to re-create the scene and the action vividly enough for him to feel the twinge of terror that thrills and entertains.

Bestsellers

Wait just a few minutes. I want to talk to you and then I am going to kiss you. Wait

1

Heres some more short stories, if you want them. They span a long period of my life. The oldest, The Reapers Image, was written when I was eighteen, in the summer before I started college. I thought of the idea, as a matter of fact, when I was out in the back yard of our house in West Durham, Maine, shooting baskets with my brother, and reading it over again made me feel a little sad for those old times. The most recent, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, was finished in November of 1983. That is a span of seventeen years, and does not count as much, I suppose, if put in comparison with such long and rich careers as those enjoyed by writers as diverse as Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, and Eudora Welty, but it is a longer time than Stephen Crane had, and about the same length as the span of H. P. Lovecrafts career.

A friend of mine asked me a year or two ago why I still bother. My novels, he pointed out, were making very good money, while the short stories were actually losers.

How do you figure that? I asked.

He tapped the then-current issue of Playboy, which had occasioned this discussion. I had a story in it (Word Processor of the Gods, which youll find in here someplace), and had pointed it out to him with what I thought was justifiable pride.

Well, Ill show you, he said, if you dont mind telling me how much you got for the piece.

I dont mind, I said. I got two thousand dollars. Not exactly chicken-dirt, Wyatt.

(His name isnt really Wyatt, but I dont want to embarrass him, if you can dig that.) No, you didnt get two thousand, Wyatt said.

I didnt? Have you been looking at my bankbook?

Nope. But I know you got eighteen hundred dollars for it, because your agent gets ten percent.

Damn right, I said. He deserves it. He got me in Playboy. Ive always wanted to have a story in Playboy. So it was eighteen hundred bucks instead of two thousand, big deal.

No, you got $1,710.

What?

Well, didnt you tell me your business manager gets five percent of the net?

Well, okay eighteen hundred less ninety bucks. I still think $1,710 is not bad for

Except it wasnt, this sadist pushed on. It was really a measly $855.

What?

You want to tell me youre not in a fifty-percent tax bracket, Steve-O?

I was silent. He knew I was.

And, he said gently, it was really just about $769.50, wasnt it?

I nodded reluctantly. Maine has an income tax which requires residents in my bracket to pay ten percent of their federal taxes to the state. Ten percent of $855 is $85.50.

How long did it take you to write this story? Wyatt persisted.

About a week, I said ungraciously. It was really more like two, with a couple of rewrites added in, but I wasnt going to tell Wyatt that.

So you made $769.50 that week, he said. You know how much a plumber makes per week in New York, Steve-O?

No, I said. I hate people who call me Steve-O. And neither do you.

Sure I do, he said. About $769.50, after taxes. And so, far as I can see, what you got there is a dead loss. He laughed like hell and then asked if I had any more beer in the fridge. I said no.

Im going to send goodbuddy Wyatt a copy of this book with a little note. The note will say: I am not going to tell you how much I was paid for this book, but Ill tell you this, Wyatt: my total take on Word Processor of the Gods net is now just over twenty-three hundred dollars, not even counting the $769.50 you hee-hawed so over at my house at the lake. I will sign the note Steve-O and add a PS: There really was more beer in the fridge, and I drank it myself after you were gone that day.

That ought to fix him.

2

Except its not the money. Ill admit I was bowled over to be paid $2,000 for Word Processor of the Gods, but I was equally as bowled over to be paid $40 for The Reapers Image when it was published in Startling Mystery Stories or to be sent twelve contributors copies when Here There Be Tygers was published in Ubris, the University of Maine college literary magazine (I am of a kindly nature and have always assumed that Ubris was a cockney way of spelling Hubris).

I mean, youre glad of the money; let us not descend into total fantasy here (or at least not yet). When I began to publish short fiction in mens magazines such as Cavalier, Dude, and Adam with some regularity, I was twenty-five and my wife was twenty-three. We had one child and another was on the way. I was working fifty or sixty hours a week in a laundry and making $1.75 an hour. Budget is not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on; it was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March. The checks for those stories (on publication, never on acceptance) always seemed to come just in time to buy antibiotics for the babys ear infection or to keep the telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking month. Money is, let us face it, very handy and very heady. As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straubs line, not mine), You can never be too thin or too rich. And if you dont believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.

All the same, you dont do it for money, or youre a monkey. You dont think of the bottom line, or youre a monkey. You dont think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or youre a monkey. In the end you dont even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide. And while that is tough, there are compensations I could never tell Wyatt about, because he is not that kind of guy.