Interview With Bev Vincent part 1

Do you read Cemetery Dance?  I do!  And the first place I turn is to Bev Vincnt's column.  Even when there's a Stephen King story.  I was absolutely thrilled when Mr. Vincen allowed me the opportunity to ask him a series of interview questions.  This was really a gift of time on his part and I am supremely thankful.

On a personal note, this was exciting for me for two reasons.  First, Mr. Vincent is one of my favorite authors about Stephen King.  I've been using his book The Road to the Dark Tower as I read through the series again and have found it very helpful.  His book The Stephen King Companion is all out fun!

Second, this gave me an opportunity to ask some questions about the Dark Tower and the Stephen King Universe that I've thinking about ever since I read The Dark Tower 7.

Bev Vincent's The Stephen King Illustrated Companion was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award as well as  the 2009 Bram Stoker Award.

THE INTERVIEW

Talk Stephen King: Tell me a little about yourself. Do you focus primarily on King, or do you also write fiction? 

Bev Vincent: I’m originally from eastern Canada, though I’ve been living in Texas since 1989. In 2012, I became a dual citizen.

I write just about everything: non-fiction, book reviews, essays, blogs, short stories and novels. After a long hiatus from writing, I started working on short stories in 1999 and had my first one published the following year. In 2001, Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance asked me if I would consider writing the Stephen King news column that appears in each issue of the magazine, and I’ve been doing that ever since. I’ve written three books to date and edited one (The Stephen King Illustrated Trivia Book). I’ve published over 70 short stories, hundreds of book reviews and dozens of essays.

Talk Stephen King: You have a doctorate in chemistry – which suggests you do a lot more than just write books about Stephen King! What else do you do?

Bev Vincent: I have a Ph. D. in chemistry from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. My specialty is a type of analysis known as X-ray diffraction—specifically, X-ray crystallography. We shoot X-ray beams at crystals and analyze the scattering pattern to determine the molecular structure of the compound and how the molecules pack together to make the crystal. This type of analysis has many uses, and may practitioners have won Nobel Prizes for determining the structures of biologically interesting molecules using the method. The company I work for manufactures and sells the equipment and software used for a wide range of X-ray analysis techniques. That’s my so-called day job. I’ve worked for the same company for 23 years.

Talk Stephen King: I’ve been reading The Road to the Dark Tower as I read through the Dark Tower novels. I saw you have a new companion book to the Dark Tower coming out (The Dark Tower Companion). How is it different from The Road to the Dark Tower?

Bev Vincent: When King published an eighth Dark Tower novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole, people asked me if I was going to update The Road to the Dark Tower to incorporate the new volume. I thought that sounded like a good idea, but my agent suggested that a completely new book would be even better. The Road to the Dark Tower is intended for people who have read (or are reading) the series. It looks at the series as a whole and explores it in detail. I liken my role to that of a tour guide escorting someone through the series, pointing out all the links, details, connections and references that a casual reader might otherwise have missed, especially on a first reading. The spoilers come early—only Chapter 1 is spoiler free. That was the only way I could see to do it at the time. You can’t talk about what happens at the Way Station after Jake and Roland leave, for example, without referring forward to Wolves of the Calla.

The impetus for The Dark Tower Companion was the news of a possible film adaptation of the series, together with the Marvel graphic novel adaptations. It seemed to me that there might be people who came to the series from sources outside the series books themselves. People who’ve read Insomnia or Hearts in Atlantis, too, who might be curious about who the Crimson King is, or what Breakers are. The new book is less analytical in some ways, although there are several chapters at the end where I wax philosophical about what it all means.

However, it starts off generally. What is Mid-World? What is the Dark Tower? Who is Roland? What is the nature of his quest? Questions of that sort. The chapters on the individual books are more self-contained, without much by way of forward-reaching spoilers.

The book has a comprehensive glossary of people, places and things, separated by those that are part of “our world” and those from Mid-World. It isn’t a Concordance (like Robin Furth’s). It doesn’t tell you on what pages you can find every mention of a character, although it does list the books in which a character (or place or thing) appears. The glossary tells you everything you might want to know about these entries, though.

This is the first book to address the Marvel adaptations and their place in the canon (or not). I look at each graphic novel series and underline the places where it provides new scenes or material, and the places where it diverges from or contradicts King’s novels. I also provide summaries of the extra material found in each issue for people who haven’t read the graphic novels.

I interviewed a lot of people for the book. Stephen King told me a few things about the series that he’s never said before. Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman explained in detail how they plan to adapt the books to film and television if they can find a partner willing to fund the project. Brian Stark discusses the Discordia interactive game on King’s website. I also interviewed Robin Furth about the Marvel adaptation, as well as most of the major artistic contributors: illustrator Jae Lee, colorist Richard Isanove, scripter Peter David and several artists who stepped in after Jae Lee left the project.

There’s a chapter on the history of Mid-World and another on its geography. I tried my hand at creating a map of the parts of Mid-World that we know from the books, and I was surprised at how neatly it came together. Information from The Wind Through the Keyhole helped place a lot of it in context (the relative location of Gilead, for example) and, despite some contradictions within the text and the variable nature of direction and distance in Mid-World, it all came together nicely. I’m nobody’s cartographer, but I think people will be interested by the map. I also created a Dark Tower tour guide to Manhattan, which points out as many of the places in the city that are mentioned in the series as I could, along with a second map.

The book is 50% longer than The Road to the Dark Tower and, unlike the first book, is completely footnote-free! And it’s all new text.

Talk Stephen King: My favorite Stephen King companion book is The Stephen King Illustrated Companion. Not only is the text great, but it is full of reproductions of first drafts and early copies of the manuscripts. How did that book come together?

Bev Vincent: That was a fascinating and fun project that came to me out of the blue.  The book chain Barnes & Noble had published reader’s companions to Poe and Jane Austen and decided they wanted to do one on King. They reached out to the same book packager who had done the previous books, a company called becker&mayer! that specializes in design-heavy books. Their editor contacted me on the strength of The Road to the Dark Tower and asked if I would be interested in writing the book’s text.

The challenge was to write something meaningful that combined the concepts of biography and light literary analysis. Given the limited page count, I clearly couldn’t cover King’s entire bibliography (nor would I have wanted to—that would be a person’s life work!). I worked from a few governing principles: I wanted to focus on books that almost everyone has heard of, even if they aren’t King fans. I needed to pick books that spanned his writing career to that point (otherwise I could have gotten bogged down with the famous books from the 1970s and never made it to the 2000s). And I wanted books that either had a significant autobiographical or semi-autobiographical aspect to them, or ones that were written when there was something interesting going on in King’s life.

Once I chose the books and had my outline approved by the editor and Barnes & Noble, it was simply a matter of writing the text, which took about six weeks. I finished ahead of schedule, which meant that the documents specialist had the full text to work from when selecting the photographs and other accompanying materials that are a hallmark of their reader’s companions. These books aren’t simply read—they’re experienced. You can spend hours with one and never read a word of the text! We obtained King’s permission to search his archives at the University of Maine and reproduce anything we wanted. King had veto power, but he never employed it. He also provided access to a personal photo album. The book became a real treasure trove of never-before-seen material. The fact that it was so handsomely produced and inexpensive means that it was available to anyone who wanted it. It sold so well, there was a second printing within about a year. Sadly, it’s now out of print, but I have hopes that B&N will bring it back out again in the future.

One interesting spin-off from the book is that I was interviewed extensively for an updated version of the King profile for the Biography Channel. The person who interviewed me for it drew a lot of material from the book. Her copy was full of post-it notes and book marks. This version is only available internationally—it never airs in the US.

Talk Stephen King: Do you have some favorite non-King writers?
Bev Vincent: Indeed I have many. So many that my mind freezes whenever I’m asked the question. I read a lot of crime fiction by authors like Ian Rankin, Jonathan Kellerman, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, Kate Atkinson, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane. I read Alexander McCall Smith’s novels to my wife, along with the humorous essays of fellow Canadian Stuart McLean. I don’t read a lot of horror and very little science fiction and fantasy these days, though I once did.

I’ll read anything Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, Ian McEwen and Graham Joyce publish. I’ve lately become fond of foreign crime writers like Jo Nesbo, Steig Larsson, Natsuo Kirino and Keigo Higashino. I’m currently reading NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, and I really liked Owen King’s debut novel, Double Feature, which will be out in April. I’ve been enjoying Justin Cronin’s trilogy, am a fan of Stephen R. Donaldson’s fantasy series, and am challenged by the novels of Umberto Eco. To get an idea of what I’ve read over the past several years, check out my review page: www.onyxreviews.com

Talk Stephen King: Do you have a favorite Dark Tower book? 
Bev Vincent: I have a hard time making top ten lists or picking favorites. My mind doesn’t work that way. However, that said, I would have to choose The Gunslinger as my favorite.

Talk Stephen King: Why?
Bev Vincent: I know that wouldn’t be the obvious choice—a lot of people haven’t gotten into the Dark Tower series because that can be a difficult book—but I love it for the overall mood it casts. I first read it in 1984 and for a number of years it was the only Dark Tower book. I’ve read it many times over the years. It’s compact and dense, the protagonist isn’t terribly likable, but it has this haunting aura that charmed me.

Talk Stephen King: A favorite non-Tower King book? 
Bev Vincent: When I’m asked this question, I almost always think of Bag of Bones, his first book with Scribner, and its bookend partner, Lisey’s Story. I consider them a matching set. The writer without his wife; the wife without the writer. There’s a lot going on in Bag of Bones that makes it feel like a highly personal novel. I was also impressed by the writing process—how King wove in a crucial subplot that wasn’t present in the first draft. It becomes one of the most important facets of the story, but King put it in like an artist painting highlights on a nearly finished works. Little daubs of paint here and there. It was a lesson in the craft of writing.

Talk Stephen King: Is there any Stephen King book you just don’t like or couldn’t make it through? 
Bev Vincent: None that I couldn’t make it through, but a few that I dislike. I enjoyed the opening section of The Tommyknockers. I liked Bobbi and Gard a lot and was frustrated when King abandoned them for hundreds of pages to tell us about all these other people about whom I cared not a whit. I kept wanting to get back to Bobbi and Gard, which made it feel like I was just flipping pages. King thinks people missed the point on Needful Things, but my problem with the book is that it was missing the key element present in the rest of his work: likable characters. I hardly liked anyone in that book. And the wonky pseudoscience in Cell wrecked the book for me. It’s fine to have wibbly wobbly bits in a book so long as the story doesn’t rely on them. The whole “save to disk and reboot” concept didn’t hold water, so I couldn’t enjoy the book.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

PART TWO WILL POST JANUARY 2, 2013

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Check out Bev Vincent's website at www.bevvincent.com

Twilight Zone Magazine February 1985

I like to time travel. Maybe it's just time surfing. Captain Kirk is able to time travel by sling shotting his space ship around the sun. I do not have a space ship. Of course, Marty McFly had a car that could leap through time. Geez that movie was fun! Stephen King's next novel is about time travel, but I'm not real clear yet on the means by which movement through time is actually accomplished.

.

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.

.

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.

.

Advertizing Defines The Times

.
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.

.

There is an ad for L. Ron Hubbard's new book, Battlefield Earth.

.

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.

.

By the way, there is a lot of hype in this magazine for the movie 2010. Even a full color article.

.

Stories include:

.

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.

.

"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.
.

"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.

.

"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!"

.
"Laughs! Thrills! Romance!!" by Ron Wolfe. "he had missed his chance for all of them -- and now it was too late."

.

"Legacy" by Leigh Essex. "A daughter inherits many things from her mother. . . and love may be the least of them."

.

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.

.

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!

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

SELECTED QUOTES:

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.

.

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."

.

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."

.

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."

.

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."

.

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."

.

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.

.

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."

.

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."

.

KING: "It's about children who have power."

Eyes Of The Dragon Journal 3

Photo: Beth drooling over Stu's copy of Eyes of the Dragon limited http://www.flickr.com/photos/diannewood/212653413/sizes/l/in/photostream/

.

Just finishing up Eyes of the Dragon . . . as I wait patiently for The Stand cd's to arrive. So patiently. . . so patiently . . . MAN THE MAIL IS SLOW!

.

As I've already noted, the narration is awesomely energetic. King often pauses to speak directly to the reader, something I really like.

.

Plot:

.

The Stephen King Universe says that this novel could easily be seen as "a segment of the Dark Tower series, and just as important, if not more so, than such other linked works as The Stand, Insomnia, and Salem's Lot." p.63

.

The story is straight forward and not complicated by a lot of sub-plots. King stays focused on his primary story an avoids the temptation to ramble. He does preach every now and then, sharing with us that Thomas isn't a "bad boy" exactly. In fact, he spends quite a while developing Thomas' character. And the bluntness from King is appreciated.

.

The novel really speeds up toward the end. In fact, it moves like an LA freeway. . . from slow crawl to 85 mph. This is really aided by the audio recording, which is played "straight" throughout, until the end. Flagg seethes throughout, but the reader all out screams in echoing terror. Bronson Pinchot did a great job. I'm thrilled Viking put several of King's older work to audio.

.

Once Peter is locked up in the Needle, the novel focuses almost completely on Thomas' reign as King and Peter's plan to escape. Of course, the question is: how do you get out of a tower with only a window? well, I'm not going to tell you, but the answer is brilliant.

.

Characters:

.

The dedication reads, "This story is for my great friend BEN STRAUB, and for my daughter, NAOMI KING." So it is no surprise that we discover Ben and Naomi are Peter's loyal subjects who are faithful to the end.

.

Flagg: He is the court magician who used Dragon Sand to kill King Roland. He framed Peter for the murder. He used to be Delain's chief executioner. He is also known as Flagg the hooded and The Dark Man.

.

At the end of The Stand you will remember that Flagg appears at a tribal village -- apparently having somehow escaped nuclear annihilation. Delain fairs better than our world (via the Stand), but Flagg is a slippery dude to get your hands on. Is this the same Flagg we meet in The Stand -- or just a favorite bad guy name? I think it's the same dude, Satan himself. In fact, he's flat out called a demon in Eyes of the Dragon.

.

The Stephen King Universe notes, "The gunslinger recalls that he saw the creature called Flagg near the end of the chaos that destroyed the realm of his birth, and that Dennis and Thomas were in pursuit of him. This is the first indication that the Dark Tower saga and Eyes are closely linked." p.61

.

Flagg also makes appearances in:

The Stand, (both editions. But more so in the revised.)

The Dark Tower series

Hearts in Atlantis. By the way, in Hearts in Atlantis, the villian is Raymond Fiegler (RF -- Randall Flagg.)

.

Delane and The Dark Tower:

The Kingdom of Delane is not part of our world. Does it stand alone in the S.K. unvierse? It does not! It is actually part of the Gunslingers world. (One connected to ours in many ways, most literally by a series of doors on the beach!)

.

In volume 7 of The Dark Tower, King reveals that Delane is Flagg's hometown. More is revealed in The Little Sisters of Eluria. In that short Dark Tower novella, Roland encounters a boy from Delane which is a kingdom Roland is aware of and expects to pass through on his quest. This gives unmistakable evidence that Delane is part of Roland's world.

.

George Beahm writes in his book The Stephen King Companion, "In the Wastelands King makes those connections explicit. While in the city of Lud, Roland and Jake hear the story of a dark magician who had passed through long before, pursued by two young men named Thomas and Dennis. The closing pages of the eyes of the dragon show a repentant Thomas relinquishing the throne in favor of the rightful king, thus restoring true order. With his friend Dennis he starts on a quest to find Flagg in his world or others -- and take vengeance on the magician; the narrator assures readers in the final paragraphs that 'Peter ruled long and well, and that Thomas and Dennis had many strange adventures, and that they did see Flagg again, and confronted him." p.247

.

Thomas: Peter's little brother. King's real skill as a writer pops up when dealing with Thomas. He is a person who does unlovely things, though he personally is not a bad character. He's a weak person. Tormented because he lives with the pain of the past. He grew up with a father who showered favor on his brother and did not appear to love him deeply.

.

Thomas is not a natural leader, so he allows others to push him around -- most notably, Flagg. He imposes high taxes on the people, causing discontented people to leave and threatening open civil war. This reminds me of Rehoboam -- Solomon's son who raised taxes and saw the kingdom divide. (1 Kings 12)

.

Peter: The true King of Delain. He has a King's heart. Peter is a natural leader, comfortable in the role of making difficult decisions. He is smart, patient and upbeat. His one sign of immaturity is weeping at the wrong moment (in one scene). Peter is like his mother Sasha.

.

Roland: Called "Roland the good", his is the King of Delain during a period of relative prosperity. Not a great leader, Roland is constantly pulled between his two advisers. We discover, by looking through the eyes of the dragon, that he is much more like Thomas than Peter.

.

Important Stuff:

• Dragon Sand
• Two headed parrot
• The eyes of the dragon
• Royal Napkins
• Dollhouse
• Miniature Sewing machine

Like a children's book:

.

One Amazon reviewer wrote: "plot line is really weak, more like a children's book." Genius. King wrote the book because he said his pre-teen daughter Naomi had read many books -- none of them his!

.

Illustrations

.

The book is nicely illustrated with pencil drawings by David Palladini.

.

Connection to Lovecraft:

.

The Stephen King Universe gives us the following note: "In Eyes of the Dragon, Flagg reads from a book of darkest magic, bound in human skin, which was written by a madman named Alhazred on the Plain of Leng. this is an obvious nod to horror grandmaster H.P. Lovecraft, whose own book of darkest magic, the Nercronomicon, was also supposedly written by a madman named Alhazred." p.60

.

Self Published:

The Stephen King Companion (original, not revised) had an interesting note on the publication of this book. King originally self published the book. This was because his publishing schedule was full through 1988 and a trade edition was not a viable option. It also allowed him to give it away as a Christmas gift that year (instead of The Plant).

.

Beahm notes, "Because the Eyes of the Dragon was published by King's own Philtrum Press, it, more than any other King book, reflects the author in every stage of publication." p.210

/

Of course, the book would sell out immediately, so how to distribute the book in a fair manner was an issue. A lottery was held and a thousand names were drawn. The cost: $127. ($120 for the book, $7 for the shipping.) If you're a collector, finding a copy of this would be a dream come true.