I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? You don’t do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be. The rest is just side effects.
3
I hope you’ll like this book, Constant Reader. I suspect you won’t like it as well as you would a novel, because most of you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story. Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of Creepshow, and going mostly by car because of my fear of flying coupled with the air traffic controllers’ strike and Mr. Reagan’s subsequent firing of the strikers (Reagan, it appears, is really only an ardent unionist if the unions in question are in Poland). I had a reading of The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and for a space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an affair with that novel; I felt married to it (my favorite part was when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours).
A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.
Writing short stories hasn’t gotten easier for me over the years; it’s gotten harder. The time to do them has shrunk, for one thing. They keep wanting to bloat, for another (I have a real problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies diet). And it seems harder to find the voice for these tales—all too often the I-Guy just floats away.
The thing to do is to keep trying, I think. It’s better to keep kissing and get your face slapped a few times than it is to give up altogether.
4
All right; that’s just about it from this end. Can I thank a few people (you can skip this part if you want to)?
Thanks to Bill Thompson for getting this going. He and I put Night Shift, the first book of short stories, together, and it was his idea to do this one. He’s moved on to Arbor House since, but I love him just as well there as anywhere else. If there really is a gentleman left in the gentleman’s profession of book publishing, it’s this guy. God bless yer Irish heart, Bill.
Thanks to Phyllis Grann at Putnam for taking up the slack.
Thanks to Kirby McCauley, my agent, another Irishman, who sold most of these, and who pulled the longest of them, “The Mist,” out of me with a chain fall.
This is starting to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, but fuck it.
Thanks are due to magazine editors, as well—Kathy Sagan at Redbook, Alice Turner at Playboy, Nye Willden at Cavalier, the folks at Yankee, to Ed Ferman—my man!—at Fantasy & Science Fiction.
I owe just about everybody, and I could name them, but I won’t bore you with any more. Most thanks are to you, Constant Reader, just like always—because it all goes out to you in the end. Without you, it’s a dead circuit. If any of these do it for you, take you away, get you over the boring lunch hour, the plane ride, or the hour in detention hall for throwing spitballs, that’s the payback.
5
Okay—commercial’s over. Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it’s no big deal; it’s only because you are my love.
Now listen:
April 15th, 1984
Bangor, Maine
The Mist
I. The Coming of the Storm
This is what happened. On the night that the worst heat wave in northern New England history finally broke—the night of July 19—the entire western Maine region was lashed with the most vicious thunderstorms I have ever seen.
We lived on Long Lake, and we saw the first of the storms beating its way across the water toward us just before