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Anyway, my means of time travel is old books and magazines. Actually, magazines are the best! A book stays focused on its subject, but a magazine gives you a full flavor of the time.
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So, via my Stephen King / Peter Straub edition of the Twilight Zone Magazine, I'm headed back to 1985. Come on, this is fun. Besides, I know half of you are at work right now anyway, and this has got to be a better trip than what your boss thinks you're doing.
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Advertizing Defines The Times
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Ads really define the times. No one in 1985 was begging you to visit their website, but there are a lot of book clubs to join.
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There is an ad for L. Ron Hubbard's new book, Battlefield Earth.
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Also there is an ad for Robert McCammon's Usher's Passing. Headline, "King, Straub, and now Robert McCammon." The text reads, "Wildly enthusiastic reviews greeted Robert R. McCammon's recent bestseller, Mystery walk. Now, in this new novel, Usher's Passing, McCammon's dazzling imagination tracest he descendants of the infamous family of Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher.". . . it sold hardcover for 14:95.
The back cover sports a full page, color ad for John Carpenters STARMAN. "In 1977 voyager II was launched into space, inviting all life forms int he universe to visit our planet. Get ready. Company's coming." Opens December 14 at a theater near you.
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By the way, there is a lot of hype in this magazine for the movie 2010. Even a full color article.
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Stories include:
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Nostalgia: "OLD DARK HOUSE FOR REND" by Ron Goulart. Did you see the movie of this? Old Dark House is a classic from 1932, directed by none other than James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein.
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"Changing Of The Guard" by Anne Serling, adapted from the teleplay by Rod Serling. I saw this episode! Oh yeah. . . I've seen them all.
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"The Time Wife" by Thomas Tolnay. "She looked exactly as his wife had looked twenty years ago. How could any man resist?" Here's a good line from the story, "I couldn't possibly tell my wife that there were two of her in the world." ha! that would be a problem.
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"Twisted Shadow" by Robert F. Funkley. "The garden was a cozy English world of serenity and peace -- all except a certain shadow that pointed the wrong way." This line here is pretty good: "She is being buried -- heaven protect her! Alive!"
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"Laughs! Thrills! Romance!!" by Ron Wolfe. "he had missed his chance for all of them -- and now it was too late."
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"Legacy" by Leigh Essex. "A daughter inherits many things from her mother. . . and love may be the least of them."
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The Quest For The Talisman
The cover article, "Stephen King, Peter Straub & the Quest for The Talisman" was written by Douglas E. Winter. It closely mirrors his chapter in The Art Of Darkness.
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Winter is excited that the work was exchanged "electronically" by "telephone modem communication between their respective word processors." Today, we would go. . . "yah!" But I guess passing information electronically was high tech stuff in 1985. But actually, this information was being sent back and forth in 1982!
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On Thanksgiving of 1982 Kign and Straub met in Boston. Late that night they undertook the "great Thanksgiving putsch" and gave the book its finished structure.
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King notes that he read everything Mark Twain wrote. Everything! Of course, King says that a lot of what he wrote he did to pay for his house, so it wasn't all good. There are a lot of references to "Reagan's America" and the nuclear threat. It was seen, at the time, as a dark period.
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Winters explains that the book has some pretty raw sex in it because the authors wanted to be sure they did not write a juvenile, Walt Disney book.
Here are some quotes from King and Straub. Quotes make up the meat of the article, which were probably the notes Winter built his chapter from.
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STRAUB: "It was totally at random. When one of us took it, usually he went on until he reached a point at which he was comfortable dropping it. So we pretty much ignored our assignments and went on until a natural break. By and large, we started off writing it rigidly, and ended up doing it instinctively, which was by far the better of the two ways."
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KING: "It was a little bit like playing tennis. He would send what he had done and then I would work for three or four weeks and send the stuff back to him. And I really enjoyed the process -- partly because writers are so lazy. It was wonderful; the book would grow without me doing anything. But it was also a little bit like the old days, when I got the Saturday Evening Post with its serial stories. When Peter said he was going to send me something, and I would get excited because I was going to get to read some more of the story."
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STRAUB: [about editing each others work] "I think we both must have been a little touchy about that. Anyway, we accepted whatever the other guy did until the book was done. Then, in the final editing, we each took a free hand with the other's stuff. and there were times when I wished we could have done the whole book like that, becasue it was a wonderful and profound experience, and something very few writers ever get the chance to have. It's like having an X ray of someones mind when you review his material that way."
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KING: "The problems with The Talisman were always problems of length. The book had been conceived as a 'get it and bring it back' story, as opposed to The Lord of the Rings, which is a 'take it and get rid of it' story. But we began to realize that we had only mapped out half of the book -- that is to say, we had mapped about to the point where Jack gets it, and we had left bringing it back to another planning session. Except that by November of 1982, we already had something like six hundred pages of copy. So, we're sitting and looking at each other saying, 'We've got to do something.' We kicked around a lot of ideas, because there were lots of incidents we had planned for the way out that we hadn't got to yet, and we started realizing that this was going to be long."
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STRAUB: "It would have been a four-thousand page novel, and Steve and I would both be dead, if we were still trying to write that thing."
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KING: "It's a very mythic book. to me, the most wonderful thing about it is how eighteenth and nineteenth century the book is in terms of storytelling, and also in terms of the effort to create large archetypes.
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We were interested in the concept of the hero in literature. we talked about the hero in terms of the quest, the mythicization of the hero, and the return of the hero to a lesser being when the quest is completed. Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel that doesn't have a specific object for its quest, so we focused instead on things like the story of Jesus, the story of King Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We talked about those things, and when we wrote the book, it filtered down like sediment."
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STRAUB: "Twain was on our minds at the start, but the finished book suggests that our efforts were more conscious than they really were. I do know that we had Tom Sawyer in mind when we named Jack; but we really didn't have Twain on our minds during the whole term of the book."
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KING: "It's about children who have power."
Also there is an ad for Robert McCammon's Usher's Passing. Headline, "King, Straub, and now Robert McCammon." The text reads, "Wildly enthusiastic reviews greeted Robert R. McCammon's recent bestseller, Mystery walk. Now, in this new novel, Usher's Passing, McCammon's dazzling imagination tracest he descendants of the infamous family of Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher.". . . it sold hardcover for 14:95
